Marguerite Duras: The Seamless Past and Present

November 11–28, 2021

The celebrated French author and filmmaker Marguerite Duras is the focus of this trio of works, including the Bay Area premiere of Suzanna Andler. Also featured are Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour and a new restoration of Le navire Night.

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Hiroshima mon amour
Suzanna Andler
Le navire Night

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Hiroshima mon amour
- Thursday, November 11 7 PM
- Sunday, November 28 3 PM
Alain Resnais
France, Japan, 1959
Digital Restoration

Hiroshima mon amour depicts a brief affair between a French actress and a Japanese architect in the Hiroshima of 1959. The couple’s bliss is slowly eroded by the unavoidable memories of World War II.
Le navire Night
- Sunday, November 21 5 PM
Marguerite Duras
France, 1979
Digital Restoration

With Le navire Night, writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras explored the matrix of love, desire, and language in her characteristically oblique and experimental style. Shown in a new digital restoration.
Suzanna Andler
- Saturday, November 13 4 PM
- Thursday, November 18 7 PM
Benoît Jacquot
France, 2021
Bay Area Premiere!

Marguerite Duras’s portrait of a woman trapped in her marriage was originally written for the stage. Benoît Jacquot amplified the theme of circular entrapment in his screen adaptation.

Marguerite Duras: The Seamless Past and Present

November 11–28, 2021

French novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and experimental filmmaker Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) has always been better known as a writer than a filmmaker, but through the years, BAMPFA has often screened films she has been associated with. We take this opportunity to present the Bay Area premiere of Suzanna Andler (2021), directed by Duras’s longtime friend and collaborator Benoît Jacquot. Before her death, Duras gave Jacquot permission to adapt her play of the same name to the screen. The resulting work is both faithful to its source and made with conviction, drawing out Duras’s themes and using the language of cinema to add resonance to her work. To round out a trio of films, we also screen the recently restored Le navire Night (1979), an experiment in cinematic form directed by Duras and narrated by Duras and Jacquot, and the French New Wave classic Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Duras’s first...

Duras’s writing style changed over the years from a conventional approach to one that experimented with form and achieved a seamless integration of past and present. She was praised for writing poetic dialogue and was able to pare texts down to the point that she gave importance to what was not said. Her influence on art cinema remains significant, and for her many devoted followers, it is exciting that in 2021, a quarter century after her death, we can premiere a new film based on Suzanna Andler.

—Susan Oxtoby, Director of Film and Senior Film Curator

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Thanks to the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in San Francisco.

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Cultural Services of the French Embassy