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Ce qui remplit le temps c’est vraiment de le perdre.
The best way to fill time is to waste it.
Marguerite Duras, Wasting Time, from Practicalities, 1987 (trans. 1990)
Born Marguerite Donnadieu in Saigon, 1914. French Indochina. Colonial Vietnam. Grew up poor, her mother struggling to keep a farm that kept flooding, losing everything to the Pacific and corrupt colonial officials.
The Lover. 1984. That’s the one everyone knows. Fifteen-year-old girl, older Chinese man. Affair in 1920s Saigon. Her family desperate for money, him from wealth. Sex and colonialism and poverty and desire all tangled up. She was seventy when she wrote it. Stripped it down, made it raw. Won the Prix Goncourt.
But that’s late. Before that, decades of writing. Novels, plays, screenplays. Hiroshima Mon Amour, 1959. Alain Resnais directed, she wrote it. A French actress and a Japanese architect. Memory, trauma, the bomb, impossible love. One of the greatest films ever made.
Resistance fighter during World War II. Communist Party member until they kicked her out in 1950 for being too difficult. Always too difficult.
Experimental writer. Minimalist. Repetitive. Obsessed with desire, memory, loss, silence. Her sentences stripped down like bones.
Alcoholic. Destroyed herself with it. Nearly died multiple times. Kept writing through it, about it.
Everything stripped away except what hurts.
Shot on infrared film in Cimetière du Montparnasse. Signed Limited Edition 11” x17” print of 10; stamped on verso. Professional black & white printing on Hahnemühle fibre-based Matt paper.