Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 344: Tue Dec 10

India Song (Duras, 1975): Cine Lumiere, 7.45pm


This 35mm screening, part of the Delphine Seyrig season at Cine Lumiere, is introduced by noted film academic, Professor Richard Dyer of King’s College, London. There is another presentation of India Song at Cine Lumiere on Sunday December 8th. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
There's so little to the subjects in Marguerite Duras' films—here it's that old favorite, doomed love among the rotting aristocracy—that it's easy to think of her as the most perverse of minimalists. But Duras' thin dramas are perceived through layers upon layers of style—she's the Busby Berkeley of structuralism. In this 1974 film, she uses constantly shifting tenses, rigorous patterns of camera movement (and stillness), acting boiled down to broad isolated gestures, nonsynchronous dialogue (often between characters who don't appear in the visuals), and a dozen other radical devices. The result is a film that is extremely boring in rather fascinating ways, well worth seeing for those with a tolerance for stasis and a taste for French abstraction.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is an extract.

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