Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 234: Tue Aug 27

Le Camion (Duras, 1977): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

This 35mm presentation is part of the excellent Marguerite Duras season at the ICA (full details here) and is also being screened on August 7th.

New Yorker review:
Marguerite Duras's control of film technique here suggests that she has become a master. But there's a joker in her mastery: though her moods and cadences and her rhythmic phrasing, with its emotional undertow, might seem ideally suited to the medium, they don't fulfill moviegoers' expectations. There are only two people in this film: Duras herself and G�rard Depardieu, and they sit at a round table in a room in her home, and never leave it. Serene, half-smiling, she reads aloud the script of a film in which Depardieu would act the role of a truck driver who picks up a woman hitchhiker. The film alternates between sequences in the room and sequences of a rolling truck, seen always at a distance. Each time Duras cuts from the room to the truck, we're drawn into the hypnotic flow of the road imagery--we half-dream our way into a "real" movie--and each time she pulls us back into the room we feel an emotional wrench, a rude awakening. Duras makes us aware of our mechanisms of response, and it's tonic and funny to feel the tensions she provokes. Her picture has been thought out with such supple discrimination between the values of sound and image that you could almost say it's perfectly made--an ornery, glimmering achievement.
Pauline Kael

Here (and above) are the opening credits.

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