Duras based the short feature L'Homme atlantique not on one of her written works but on her own film, Agatha, using outtakes from that film to push her image/sound experiment even further, and take the narrative with it. Gone from the screen is the sister, only the presence and voice of the brother (Yann Andréa) remain, "thereby suggesting, for the first time in her work, that 'the gap between image and sound is now aligned with the fissure of sexual difference itself'" (Leslie Hill, quoted by J. Quandt). Duras said, "I think the darkness is in all my films, buried, beneath the image...I have only tried to reach the film's deep flow, once having got rid of the permanence of the image....This darkness I have called 'the shadow within,' the historical shadow of every individual...(a) forever brilliant magma which 'makes' the living person whatever he/she is, in whatever society, throughout all time."