Joy: we believe: we don’t believe anymore
Translator’s Note
In the aftermath of May '68, Marguerite Duras grew increasingly disillusioned with the written word (“I can’t read novels at all anymore. Because of the sentences,” she griped) and chose instead to refocus her efforts on filmmaking. This shift coincided with the author's frustration with the French Communist Party and littérature engagée as a whole. However, the filmed content Duras would go on to produce over the next decades would amount to a hybrid creation, film-texts that ultimately allow for a deeper engagement with language. Le Camion, released before an infuriated audience at Cannes in 1977, is one such example. Claiming not to have found a suitable actress to play the film’s hitchhiking protagonist, Duras sits before a camera and describes her envisioned film to Gérard Depardieu. These scenes are interspersed with blue-toned, somnolent footage of a truck, piloted by an unseen driver, making its way across a bleak banlieue landscape. Duras speaks at turns of the hitchhiker's past — her family and motherhood, her social class and political engagement — and of the emptiness, the void she perceives beyond the limits of the truck's passenger cabin. Duras herself would write and speak increasingly about such themes — void, nothingness, the necessary return to tabula rasa — in her later works, and she enunciates her philosophical stance most forcefully in her films' press releases, one of which I've translated. In their introduction to a collection of Duras' promotional releases, Le cinéma que je fais: Écrits et entretiens (POL, 2021), editors François Bovier and Serge Margel characterize such writings as "fragments of a potential ciné-novel." I find it useful to think of this particular fragment, Joy: we believe: we don't believe anymore (released by Les Films Molière in 1977), as Duras' preamble to Le Camion, preferably to be read in direct conjunction with a screening of the film. Done this way, the text feels less like a pessimistic screed, presaging certain doom, and more like an argument for resignation, as it is only through the acceptance of doom that one can return to zero and begin to rebuild. Reading aloud from her script, Duras seems to invoke the primal waters' reclamation of civilized land: "She'd show him the sea. She’d say, 'Look, the end of the world. All the time, every second, everywhere, it extends.' She’d say, 'It's better. Yes. It was so difficult. So, so hard. So... it's better this way.'"
— Mia Ruf
Still from Le Camion (1977) dir. Maguerite Duras
It's pointless to keep serving us aspirationally socialist films. Or aspirationally capitalist films. Pointless to keep serving us films about justice to come — social, economic, or otherwise. Films about labor. About merit. Films about women. Youths. Portuguese. Malians. Intellectuals. Senegalese. Pointless to keep serving us films about fear. About revolution. About the dictatorship of the proletariat. About liberty. About your bogeymen. About love. Pointless.
Pointless to keep serving us films about films. We don't believe them anymore. We believe. Joy: we believe: not anymore. We don't believe anymore.
Pointless to make your films. Pointless. One ought to make films with an understanding of this: pointless.
That cinema may be doomed; this is the only cinema.
That the world may be doomed, that it is doomed; this is the only politics.
Cinema puts a stop to the text, strikes down its progeny: the imagination.
This is, in fact, its virtue: stoppage. Putting a stop to the imagination.
This termination, this process of shutting down, has a name: film. Good or bad, sublime or abysmal, film stands for this definitive ending. The cementing of a single representation, once and for all.
Cinema knows this: it was never able to replace the text.
Nevertheless, it seeks to replace it.
Cinema understands that text alone is the indefinite bearer of images. But it can never regain the text. It no longer knows how. It's forgotten its way through the forest, it can never regain the limitless potential of the text, its limitless proliferation of images.
Marguerite Duras
Cinema is panicked — it fights, flails, exhausts itself in search of a means other than speech by which to respond to the growing intelligence of its spectators, seeking to retain them and keep them packed into the theater, continually consuming the product.
It's obvious. Cinema already sees the cinematic desert laid out before it. Opulent, buoyed by billions, cinema attempts to use its financial resources, which rival those of the petroleum industry and electoral campaigns, to regain its spectator.
Still from Le Camion (1977) dir. Maguerite Duras
Films bask in the beauty of crime, bloodshed, slaughter, optimism, proletarian exoticism, Proust, Balzac, financial scandals, a peoples' forbearance, the flourishing of hunger.
In vain.
Cinema is no longer able to quench the spectator's growing thirst for knowledge.
What cinema doesn't know is this: that which happens beyond cinema catches up with that which happens within cinema.
That cinema cannot, despite its billions, undo the spectator's understanding of how it's made.
That the incredible discrepancy between the mechanism and the mission of cinema ultimately dooms the final product.
That these two are one and the same.
That the making of the film is the film itself.
Still from Le Camion (1977) dir. Maguerite Duras
This repudiation is becoming unified and total. The spectator frequents the movie theater less and less. He already knows that the product on offer is hewn to its billions — a bastard, tainted by the very conditions of its creation.
This repudiation is aware of itself as such, it has escaped the asphyxiation caused by militant regulation on all sides. It is liberated.
The spectator no longer breaks in through the window. He'd rather just stay outside.
That is all.
The sickly masses — stunned into tranquility, into a state of continuous digestion — can still be said to frequent the theaters, but they alone.
They endure the film, without consequence, without echo. A stone at the bottom of a well.
For some time now, many have renounced films.
Marguerite Duras
This is why we make them.
I don't know where The Truck is taking me. The woman in the truck, she doesn't know either. And neither of us care.
I didn't know who this woman was. I knew nothing. Except for this: I knew there was a woman at the road's bend — this was a road I came upon in La Manche, near La Hague — who was waiting for a truck and for me. This was several weeks ago. I didn't fuss over the text. I knew that the text, whatever it was, would be done away with during filming. That the woman would only begin existing within the film, at the same time as the film, and over the course of its unfolding.
What is more: the woman sought the film so as to begin existing. Prior to the film, I only perceived the anticipation of her. I know I love her. I am facing her. She, however, is facing the window, looking outside. She doesn't know that I love her, she doesn't know that she's loved, she is unaware of the love she can inspire. The woman, turned to face the beyond, gazes out. I am turned toward her, watching her. We are both telescoped in the direction of the outside. It's through her that I see. Through her that I access the outside, that I let it flow into me. I love her. She ignores me. She remains turned toward the outside. I shift my gaze. I watch what she watches: it becomes clearer and clearer. I don't see her, I still don't see her face. When the film ends, I still haven't seen her face. But what astounds me is what she saw: the film. //
Still from Le Camion (1977) dir. Maguerite Duras
Mia Ruf is a writer, translator, and script adaptor based in Queens, NY.
