DESTROY, SHE SAID / LE NAVIRE NIGHT

ABOUT THE FILMS

DESTROY, SHE SAID (DÉTRUIRE DIT-ELLE), 1969, Editions Benoit Jacob, 100 min, France Dir: Marguerite Duras.  

Following an attempt by Joseph Losey to shoot her script, Marguerite Duras brought it to the screen herself and the writer-director’s gift for dialogue was rarely put to better use. Recuperating from a miscarriage, Catherine Sellers checks in to a remote French resort – or perhaps an asylum – where fellow residents Henri Garcin, Nicole Hiss and Michael Lonsdale (in his first of several Duras films) draw her into their company with strangely insinuating conversations. A brooding ennui hangs over the grounds’ tennis courts and chaise lounges in this spare B&W drama, whose surprising finish is equally ominous.

FORMAT: 35mm

LE NAVIRE NIGHT, 1979, Icarus Films, 90 min, France Dir: Marguerite Duras. 

With LE NAVIRE NIGHT, writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras explores the matrix of love, desire and language in her characteristically oblique and experimental style. The film’s lovers – played by Dominique Sanda and Mathieu Carrière – are never allowed to meet in person, instead carrying out their conversations over the phone, using unlisted phone lines leftover from the German occupation of Paris. Sequences play out in empty streets, nocturnal cityscapes and shadowy interiors, linked together only by the spectral presence of the character’s voices. “Elliptical yet ecstatic; as original as it is rare. [Duras] devises a new genre. A story about phone sex, which she transforms into an existential mystery and a gothic nightmare. Duras invents the conditional tense on film.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker.

FORMAT: 35mm