Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 55: Tue Feb 24

Aurélia Steiner (Vancouver) & Aurélia Steiner (Melbourne) [Duras, 1979]:
Cine Lumiere, 6.45pm


This is an A Nos Amours film club presentation and here is their website article on tonight's Duras double-bill:
Marguerite Duras is a celebrated pillar of modernist French writing – above all perhaps for Moderato Cantabile, her superb novel of 1958, or L'amant (The Lover), her memoir of 1984. But she also made distinctive, experimental, intensely authored films, notably India Song of 1975. Her screenplay for Alain Resnais's masterpiece Hiroshima mon amour in 1959 earned her an Oscar nomination - astonishing for such a peerless exercise in rigorous high-brow intention. Duras - whether working with words, images or both together - is a screen poet, peerless at registering poignant, nuanced sadness. She disposes of the burden of the heavy furniture of naturalism, character and plot, aiming instead for purity, rhythm and clarity.

Cine Lumiere introduction:
Marguerite Duras is known best as a pillar of modernist French writing. But she also made distinctive experimental films, notably India Song in 1975, in which she detaches a voiced text from image, an effect that makes for a prayerful, meditative mood. She uses the same process in these two Aurelia Steiner films, blending her words to the images photographed by Pierre Lhomme, casting an incantatory spell, in which we experience a state of waking dream.

Here (and above) is an extract.

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