Green Eyes: Duras and Cinema, by Margaret Duras, translated by Lu Yichen, Houlang 丨 Democracy and Construction Press, January 2021.
The original author 丨 Lu Yichen
Excerpt from Xiao Shuyan
"Green Eyes" is undoubtedly the most forgotten small book in the process of "classicization" of Duras's works. The editorial board of the Film Handbook, which launched Green Eyes, itself implies important information about interpreting the work. The Film Handbook, which has made a special contribution to world cinema, is not a popular film and television book in the traditional sense, but a niche magazine with a consistent and highly personalized spiritual tradition at the artistic, aesthetic, political, ideological and other levels. Since Bazin, the Film Handbook's approach to reality and social commitment, as well as the aesthetic pursuit of emphasizing originality and exploration and rejecting rigidity and stagnation, have all coincided with Duras's films. Rather, Duras's films are typical of the subversive influences of film practice that the Film Handbook promotes.
But "Green Eyes" does not stop at movies, it is a transitional space and dark zone between Duras film and writing, and it is the murder scene of writing "murder" movies. This also explains its importance in understanding the irreducibility in Duras's work. First, in a way, Green Eyes reshaped the trajectory of Duras' film practice: from the writing of the screenplay to the experience of hand-directing, from the debut "Music" to the finale "Children", especially the controversial short films represented by the Aurelia Steiner series. She complains about budget constraints and the difficulties of producers, mocks critics for their short-sightedness and indifference, but makes no secret of her admiration and love for certain alternative filmmakers who resonate in her heart.
This trajectory of exploration, which spans nearly 20 years, follows a maverick evolutionary logic: gradually moving closer to the zero-degree expression of some kind of film, a kind of "sound" film that has recovered the residual "aura" of the silent film era. From the asynchronous and separation of sound and picture in early films to the black screen that dominates "The Atlantic", Duras gradually dissolves the overly "saturated" picture and narrative, aiming to present another kind of film that needs to be listened to, read, experienced, and imagined. Duras may have been the only filmmaker to write in Le Monde advising audiences not to watch her films, forcing them to participate unconditionally and immersed in the (re)creation of the film in an almost provocative way.
However, this extreme exploration eventually pushed Duras— even more violently— toward writing. In Green Eyes, Duras is a good illustration of the dichotomy between writing and film: "For me, the success of film is rooted in the collapse of writing. The main and decisive charm of the film lies in its massacre of writing", "I make films to gain creative experiences that destroy texts"... While Constantly updating the textual "reading" experience, Duras's films also touch on the limitations of the ontological sense of the film medium: the inevitable coexistence between "sound" and "painting". Duras's fantasy of "the ideal image—the image that claims to have murdered the film"—is nothing more than the image of "black film" in The Atlantic.
She finally took the writer's side, pointing out the immediacy and presentness of film practice, while reaffirming the transcendence of writing practice. She has confessed many times: "When transitioning from writing to the picture, in a way, it abandons the 'thousands of possibilities' of something or expression that Breton said. Film, while activating the text, also imprisons it in limited expression; and writing, especially in the sense of Brownshaw, which has a profound influence on Duras, is a rebirth: "When it all comes to an end, writing will remain ubiquitous on the dying gray earth." It's in the air, on the sea. ”
In a sense, Green Eyes is a tiny, private literary history, and Duras's readers can effortlessly find all the constants in Duras's self-written work: the childhood narrative hidden in the series of photographs, the notes of war that served as the origin of the "Pain" series, the Jewish metaphors as symbols of wandering, the countless cascading images of Russian matryoshka dolls from Anna-Marie Streit, Laur Va Steiner to Aurelia Steiner, and the "Writing and Film" that seamlessly combine writing and film. Margaret Duras' Territory's "Field of Passion"... Of course, there is also the "outside world", such as the constant concern for marginalized groups, and the "subjective" news anecdotes with a distinct Du's imprint. Perhaps we should take a more literary look at these seemingly casual reports of current affairs: seeing the oracle in Antelope, seeing the conversion to mystery; seeing the posture of always being in the midst of trial and danger in Montreuil's Tightrope...
In a footnote to Duras's complete works about Green Eyes, Robert Alvey mentions the reason for the book's name, referring to the color of the eyes of the heroine in some of Duras's novels, including Duras's mother. To borrow Duras herself, she wanted to "see the end of the world under the guise of the girl's green eyes." Obviously, the "eye" here is both a medium and a lens, the main line of the organization of fragments. The dozen or so illustrations in the book are female figures who are not looking directly at the camera, and Duras tries to construct an interactive space based on watching games in "Green Eyes", asking the reader to also have a pair of psychic eyes, to explore the deep truth in the staggered vision, about the movie, about writing, about the world, about the self.
Original author 丨 [Fa] Margaret Duras
Moviegoers
We should try to talk about the audience, the initial audience, the first audience. What can be called a naïve audience: an audience that goes to the theater to spend time, have fun, and stay on the level of entertainment.
It was he who made the old movies. He was the most educated of all audiences. In fact, when he was a teenager, people told him that he watched movies to relax, especially to forget. This audience, the earliest moviegoer, walked into the theater to escape the outside world, the streets, the crowds, the self. Let yourself enter another world: the world of movies. Banish the self trapped by work, study, marriage, relationships, and everyday life. Since childhood, his understanding of film has stayed at this level. Today, he is still like this, staying in the childhood of the movie. Perhaps in the theater, he found his own loneliness, which stemmed from the alienation of himself. When he walked into the screening hall, the film took over him, took control of him, and he left it at his disposal. There, he regained the unbridled sleep and play of his childhood. Of all the countries in the world, such an audience is undoubtedly the most numerous, the youngest, and the most stubborn. In his place, childhood remains the same: he wants to keep his old toys, his old movies, his fortress of emptiness. He kept them all.
This is the most ordinary, the most common audience, they are static and cannot be changed. They have lived through wars and right-wing governments, and they have traveled through the history of their own constitution without knowing anything about it. Similarly, they witnessed the film. But they remained silent, had no position, and never commented on the movies they had seen. They only make a choice: to see or not to see.
This audience includes almost all the working people who do manual work, but there are also many scientists, technicians and people responsible for high-intensity work. Scientists make up the majority: technicians, mathematicians, all managers, and real estate developers. From masons, engineers, plumbers, contractors to salesmen.
The government refers to them as "working young people", while others refer to them as "working population". In the cinema, educated people sit on an equal footing with uneducated people. The medical students, the physics students, the film students, the science and engineering students, and all those who have received orthodox and professional education sit together with those who have only studied technology or have learned nothing. There are also the vast majority of these critics, who affirm the choices of these audiences, criticize personalized films, and defend action movies that are favored by the masses. They are so disgusted with the author's films that from their attitudes we can clearly feel their suppressed anger, for a deeper reason than their excuses. For all of these people, going to the cinema is there to find something that makes them laugh or shudder. They spend time there. Movies are immutable childhood games with intense wars, killings, and fights. The film celebrates all forms of masculinity, fathers and mothers, in all its aspects. The movie is also full of clichés that mock women, ridicule the cruelty and wantonness in their boudoir. The only tragedy is about love or about power struggles. The films that these audiences enjoy are parallel and moving in one direction. They have the same expectations for how the story will unfold and how it will end.
If these audience members leave before the end of the movie, it must be because the movie they are watching requires them to adjust themselves and accept the demands of the movie like adults. However, they are only willing to watch the same movie repeatedly, rather than watching a movie in the true sense of the word. These audiences are far from us and from me. I can never cater to these audiences, nor will I cater to them. I know who they are. I know they can't change, can't touch. But we are also unattainable. We came face to face with them, completely separated. They will never be able to occupy the entire population.
We, the writers of texts, books, and films, are always there, albeit on the margins. We don't know how to call them audiences like that, how to name them, but we don't call them. Doesn't matter. Whatever name we give them, it doesn't matter. What is important is that in the city, in all the people of the city, we fall into two categories: they never come to me, and I do not go towards them. Our rights are equal, and my rights are consistent with theirs. We are on a par. Yes, we have the same right to exist in the city. Although we do not have an advantage in numbers, our existence, like theirs, is an inevitability that cannot be ignored. Over time, decades and decades later, will they finally realize that they are not the only audience? I don't think so. They were heavily influenced by mainstream ideologies in their childhood, both official and quasi-official. Now, how can they easily escape the cage and trap of the self? They are the ones who keep the city running. And we, we can't make anything work, we're just there, with them, in the city.
They use the word to refer to themselves: "we." "We young people" "We workers". And me, I just say "I," "I make movies, whether it's difficult or not." What I said was what I witnessed, what happened between them and me. Everything I am talking about at this point about the moviegoer is based on my reflections on the antagonistic relationship between each other. I am reluctant to make a self-perceived universal assessment of them. I can't talk about the original moviegoer from a theoretical or critical point of view. The space they occupy seems so far from reality, so empty, so lifeless. Separated from the concept of the individual, they collapsed. yes. Such a space resembles some kind of unrighteous place. If we insist on talking about this kind of film audience in the name of the public, then the starting point of our remarks can only be the same injustice.
I have between 15,000 and 40,000 "viewers." This figure comes from the sales record of my novel Le Ravissement de Lol v. Stein (1964) in the "White Series" of the Galima publishing house. The quantity is huge. The pocket edition of "The Robbery of Lauer" has reached 60,000 copies, but the number of readers should be the same as before, that is, 30,000 to 40,000. A lot of people buy books without reading them, or don't make an effort to get into fiction, just as they didn't make an effort to get into movies.
In my opinion, such sales figures are rare. For a book or a movie, these numbers are impressive. We must acknowledge that. Professional filmmakers count their audiences on the order of thousands. I've found that young filmmakers are often upset that they can't get more than 30,000 viewers. But we're also worried that they're box office-oriented and make movies that have more than 300,000 viewers. Once such a box office is reached, these numbers will be dizzying and will also ruin this group of young filmmakers. They, the high-grossing filmmakers and the moviegoers I mentioned earlier, are immersed in box office triumphs and can't help themselves. We are very different. What does it mean to win over these audiences? Nothing. While winning over the audience, everything we do will become meaningless to us. How we should talk to them. We don't understand their language, and they don't know our language. The difference between them and us is similar to the desert of history. Between them and us, there is a plague of history, especially political history, and its indelible aftermath. Yes, that's it. The desert between them and us, the place where we have tried to communicate and understand each other for a hundred years, but still can't cross. Here, everything is empty, only the wind that chases each other.
We can never force a child to read a book.
A child who is punished for reading comics may stop reading comics, but he will never follow instructions to read other books. Unless we instill these things in him. This is the worst outcome. Both Hitler-era Germany and Soviet-era Russia had only didactic films. These films are the worst. We need only look at the consequences of the unconditional obedience of the troops and party insiders: the equalization of intellect, the living of the walking dead. This also created young Nazis and Soviet believers, young soldiers in Prague and Kabul. We can never allow a man to see something he has not seen, and we can never allow a man to discover something he has never discovered before. Unless his eyesight is destroyed, no matter what he does with those eyes.
Such an audience, I think, should be allowed to free themselves. If they want to change, they will change. Like everyone else, it changes suddenly or slowly. A word they overheard on the road, a love they experienced, or a book they read, or an encounter, will change them. But they need to change alone, to fight change alone.
Make movies
I don't know if I found the movie. But I do movies. For professionals, the films I make don't exist. Losey praises my literature in the book, but criticizes my film as useless. He said he hated Destruction, She Said. But for me, all the films he made were far less than Doom, She Said. This shows that my films cannot cross the boundaries of professional fields. Similarly, their films couldn't make their way into my world.
At first, I watched their films, and then I made my own films. Since then, they have become less and less important. I think that film professionals are the copiers of films, like the copiers of paintings. In contrast to them are the authors of the films and the painters who create those paintings. The world of professionals is full of people who are chased and blocked, who are afraid that there will be no movies to make, and they are afraid that they will not be supported by millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars. For them, we are the bad guys who rob "them" of their money.
Recently there was a man (who exactly?). I don't know) indignantly said on television: "The result of giving Duras money to make Le Camion (1977) was to make the audience sick for 6 months." What a beautiful ode. Really, it makes me very happy. But this man got it wrong, and no one invested in Truck. In the field of literature, we can't say: I only need 220 million to write this book. If the book could not be written because of poor conditions, then this book should not have been written. If you really want to write a book, even in the worst and most lack of money, you can write a book. Excuses for not being able to write, such as not having time or being too busy, are basically fake. But the same necessity does not exist with filmmakers. They look for themes. This is also one of the most decisive differences. They look at stories. Someone recommended it to them, either a novel or a screenplay written by a professional screenwriter. Often. They evaluate the proposals and refine them: three crimes, a cancer, a love story, plus this or that actor. Expected box office : 700,000 visitors. Everything is as accurate as a computer calculation. They finished the movie. Actual viewers : 600,000. fail.
Box office directors who have had great successes (25 screening halls, 1.5 million viewers) miss our films. It was a film they had never been exposed to, and it was a film that didn't have to rely on profits and quantitative metrics to advertise itself: one theater, 10,000 viewers. They want to replace us at the same time, they want to replace our films with the ones they make, taking away 10,000 viewers who belong to us, as if they thought they could do it. But in any case, we don't want to replace them, and we can't. Just as we were born against the original moviegoers, we also live in symbiosis with them and have equal citizenship. Because we are symbols of business failure, college students are more inclined to study our cases in their doctoral dissertations than those box office directors.
Similarly, as with the Film Handbook, publications sometimes take us into account more. Although various daily newspapers tried to ignore us, we continued to make movies. Box office films can't stand the same situation. And we, we quickly left that behind. Yes, there is a strange nostalgia for failure today: failure equals freedom of choice. This nostalgia also represents some kind of progress for box office filmmakers, even if it means the anger and insults that are being unleashed by targeting us. Money is no longer the ultimate goal of making a movie, at least not exactly. Neither is the box office. A certain theory of the invalidity of film profits gradually began to appear in circles, even if it was still very distant. This theory of invalidity isolated film producers and discarded them from the date the film was generated. In addition, another concept also began to emerge, which was closely related to people, especially the sense of responsibility that he developed in the face of himself. Some young box office filmmakers have even stopped blaming us and saying bad things about us. They tried to move their films closer to the author's films, calling themselves authors, but at the same time they were popular and successful. Take, for example, bertrand tavernier.
Raymond · Raymond queneau once said that in France only a subset of readers, around 2,000 to 3,000 people, can decide the fate of a book. Whether these readers (the most demanding of all) can remember certain titles will determine whether these books can be recorded in the annals of French literature. Without this group of readers, we would have lost our audience. Even a large number of ordinary readers cannot take their place. For movies, we can say that it was the 10,000 spectators who made the movie. These viewers, unafraid of any risks and obstacles, have included some films in the category of films and excluded others altogether. Most box office directors have never had this audience of between 2,000 and 10,000. They can have 2 million moviegoers, but of those 2 million moviegoers, there are only 2,000 to 10,000 deciding audiences.
The above content and pictures are from the book "Green Eyes: Duras and Film", which has been abridged and modified from the original text, and has been authorized by the publisher to publish.
Original author 丨 [French] Margaret Duras, Lu Yichen
Edited by 丨Rodong
Source: Beijing News