001: My Writing
On what writing can and can't do + Marguerite Duras's "My Cinema."
Welcome to My Writing, an essay newsletter. A bit about the format: At the bottom of each essay newsletter you’ll find a section with links to my recently published work + random links to cool stuff I want to share. Enjoy.
My Cinema is a 399–page compilation of Marguerite Duras’1 writing and interviews about her films and filmmaking in general. I started this year wanting read about film after capping off 2023 with more than 150+ first-time watches. The sickeningly voracious media consumer that I am was curious if my hunger for more words and more images could make me wide enough to take them both in at once: a book about a writer that doubles as a book about a filmmaker. A cliché cross-pollination that’s vexed writers and filmmaker since the dawn of the moving image.
Halfway through the book, I stopped caring about the difference between writing and cinema. Where Duras made distinctions between words and images, books and film; I found incontestable parallels. Like writing, “the fabrication of the film is the film.” Like film, writing imposes its “definitive arrest: the fixing of representation, once and for all. Forever.”
I can confess to a life-long and soul-deep reverence and admiration of all the marvelous things words and movies (and any other “art form”) can do. I admit I’m too easily transformed, transported, inspired and destroyed by even the shittiest works. But Duras’ attitude to her own body of work reminded me that books and movies are only alive in metaphor. We are the ones who create, interpret, understand, feel, share, love, hate, critique, remix and repeat.
Our literary cultures overestimate writing’s ability to affect change, move us to action, expose our insides and connect us to strangers. Any ability writing has to move or persuade us is a reflection our own abilities (or resistances, or refusals) to be moved or swayed. And yet, we insist on pushing onto things like writing or cinema all the powers and responsibilities we ourselves should assume.
“What must we, as writers, animate and set into motion in place of such language?,” such as the language of obfuscation and dishonesty, writes Christina Sharpe in a Yale Review essay I saw all over Twitter on its day of publication. It’s a timely question, but it’s also a frustrating one: Writing can’t “animated” or “set into motion” on the page. A writer who cares about the meaning of words should be doing everything they can off the page to give them their rightful meaning. At some point, it’s not about finding a better way to say… or a more truthful way to describe… The convenient over-reliance on the Power of Writing turns questions of moral responsibility into arguments about passive voice. As Fargo Tbakhi wrote last year: “Creative work readies us for material work, by offering a space to try out strategies, think through contradictions, remind us of our own agency.” But it’s not a substitute.
Words are tools, technologies no more noble than a hammer or a spoon. They are nothing more (and certainly nothing less) than a means to an end, the “definitive arrest” of a fixed representation. In “Weaponizing Storytelling,” Colin Dickey wrote for New Republic: “Stories limit interpretation, they exclude as outlying noise elements that may support counter narratives, and they create an emotional investment for a desired outcome.” At their most influential, words are instruments of meaning. On page 178 Duras realized how filmmaking and writing meet in a “fluid, elusive, and very solitary place” that is also “constantly mobile, from nothing that is embodied can leave.” Words can only breathe from the air inside their readers and writers. On the page, words are mummified. On the reel, performances become stills.
In an undated note she wrote while working on her 1975 film, India Song, Duras could barely contain her contempt for “political cinema.” She went in on those “pretentious” filmmakers who, thinking themselves the most “exemplary activists,” film Portuguese workers or people living in poverty to then string together some “hand-picked images” and expect the final product to affect any kind of change. Specifically, she took aim at how they approach what so many professional filmmakers and journalists today may callously refer to as material: “These are the daily pieces of information that are so intolerable,” she writes “so overwhelming, so atrocious, that in no capacity do we have the right to use them as we would an illustration.”
I relate to Duras’s embittered skepticism of any kind of representational power. It stems from an allergy, I assume we’d both share, to the kind of pretensions that encode into our languages words like capture, shoot, document, record, and all the other transitive verbs that demand passive objects. There is no escaping the realities these words echo, no amount of poetry or reclamation can eradicate the dynamics of extraction that exist beyond the page. “Our first political duty,” Duras wrote, “is to be conscious of that which we do not know, as of yet, how to show.” To be conscious of what our words can and can’t do.
“The written text,” Duras later wrote in 1981, “must deliver to the outside world that which is, by its very nature, intrinsically linked to a person which should accompany him or her to their death.” In her many contradictions and exaggerations, here, Duras betrayed a level of idealism incompatible with her earlier thoughts on political cinema. Here, she says writing must deliver to the world what is most internal to the writer. And she concluded, with a melodramatic flourish, that “the written word is snatched from death.” Perhaps writers can treat words like bait on a hook, luring away from death or ineffability whatever they can.
Duras once told Cinématographe magazine that Carl Theodor Dreyer2 was her favorite filmmaker because he was the only one, according to her, who was able to make “cinema in order to translate something that surpasses it.” The kind of writing that seems to possess near-magical powers only bears the thick traces of whatever was able to outgrow or surpass it. Because writing is “a definitive arrest” it can only ever aspire to hold the remains, a tiny trail of water following the bait that was snatched out of the sea.
In an interview on “Cinematographic Writing in India Song,” Duras explained that “when one writes, it is simply a matter of a story moving through the self, through oneself.” She said she worked in “a state of passionate crisis,” a phrase I wrote into my journal because of how well it described what it’s like for me to write about my “ardent attachments and manic mysticism.”3 My writing always moves from the inside out, it’s an expression in the same way coffee pushed through a machine is espresso.
I write to dig into myself or to become one (or several) with all I read, watch, and do. To add force to the life I try to live off the page. My writing undoes and reconfigures me, every time: splitting me open, laying every organ out onto an ice bowl and extracting an idea before putting everything back together differently. Only a line of evenly-spaced stitches — characters, text — will remain on the page, marking where and how I spilled my guts. “And only then,” in the breath of the reader, “does the meaning arrive and clothe it, dress it, fit it into the sentence into which it will embed itself, become immobilized, and die,” as Duras wrote in 1976.
But I do often ask myself if I hide behind my subjectivity, qualifying with a first-person adjective whatever I am too coward and unskilled to substantiate with something other than my own insides. At first, I judged Duras for doing the same when she said: “I have no general ideas about cinema. I can only talk to you about my cinema.” She sounds arrogant and insecure; like she’s protecting her ego from the Cinémathéque’s film bros. But then she acknowledged the “abominable, unbearable self-centeredness of writing,” because she was always aware of what writing can and can’t do. If the words come from within their writer then they will only ever be a writer’s small and smelly insides.
Duras was the rare kind of writer and filmmaker that isn’t too fanatically committed to either form and their respective cultures. The cover of My Cinema features the following quote: “I make films to fill my time. It is only because I have the strength to do nothing that I make films.” To her, film and writing were only alive and useful to her in the instances of their creation. In some interviews, she went as far to say she had started making films because she hated the adaptations of her novels while in others she said she just wanted to make money to leave to her “children” (she only ever had one child). In any case, she refused to express the kind of heart-and-soul commitment that immobilizes an art form. To Duras, film, like writing, was just a means to an end. Her ultimate goal always lay beyond the art.
In the promotional materials for her 1977 film Le Camion, Duras, once again, melodramatically declared: “Let cinema go to its ruin, that is the only cinema.” When she began work on her follow-up film, Le Navire Night, the project did in fact reach a point of ruin. The movie she set out to make refused to materialize on film, nothing worked and she had to accept her failure, which she then recast as a triumph: “I had earned this failure,” she wrote in her notes on the shoot. “I was luxuriating in a victory: that of having finally reached the inexpressible in film and in writing.” My favorite works of filmmaking and writing are those that fail spectacularly: Films that fail to capture, writing that fails to articulate. The ones that melt from the heat of their own failures, too charred and deformed to stand on any pedestal. But still, we often want writing to be what it’s not: So many of us rely on writing to tell us who we are and what to do; how to give meaning to the world and bond us to those we love. But there are better ways to live and better uses for words, these misshapen efforts, hot trails of gooey ambition, ruins. 💌
Updates: I interviewed the creators of Seeking Mavis Beacon for The Cut. I wrote a column for ArtReview about Internet Archive in the Anti-Information Age. I am also in the next print issue of Lux Magazine with an essay on the salesmen of the Manosphere.
Links of the month: Estonian Film Institute series via Eternal TV — these pot-holes stuffed with coconuts in PR —On Takedowns by Miriam Gordis — This intense Isabelle Huppert interview — the colorized version of Nosferatu (1922) free to watch on YouTube — this Venetian palace — savory ice cream and sorbet series on Instagram — that Barry Lyndon x 21 Savage edit.
I’m not an impassioned Duras fan, per-se. By the time I had started My Cinema, I knew more about Duras's films than her novels. I had only read The Lover but I had watched (and re-watched) Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and India Song (1975). I had also read (and highly recommend) Barbara Mollinard's short story collection, Panics, a work that would not have seen the light of day had it not been for the persistence of her own best friend, Duras.
Director of 1928’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and 1932’s Vampyr; follow the links to watch via Internet Archive.