FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact for Press: Tamar Fortgang, REDCAT publicity and promotions manager
fortgang@muse.calarts.edu / 661.253.7724 (Do Not Publish)

REDCAT Presents Legendary and Long-Unavailable Film of Marguerite Duras

View the event

October 12, Los Angeles--REDCAT, the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, presents the Los Angeles premiere revival of Marguerite Duras' India Song (120 min., 35mm), part of the Jack H. Skirball Screening Series curated by Steve Anker and Bérénice Reynaud. Directed in 1975 by novelist, playwright and film director Marguerite Duras, India Song is an audiovisual poem haunted by the intoxicating dream of decadent colonialism and impossible love.

The exemplary saga of India Song reflects Duras' obsessive creative process, in which repetitions, variations on a theme, ellipses and silences create a multi-layered tapestry of images, memories and longings. Appearing first in the novel Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964), the character of Anne-Marie-Stretter became a major trope in the oeuvre of Duras. She reappears in Le Vice-Consul (1965), as the consul's beautiful and melancholy wife who deceives her ennui by absent-mindedly taking a string of lovers. Around her, Duras creates two other outsiders disturbing the order of colonial society: the vice consul of Lahore and a beggar woman roaming the banks of the Ganges.

Revisiting the same characters, Duras wrote a play, India Song, in 1973. A year later, she transformed it into a sumptuous "radio poem" for the ORTF (French Public Radio)'s "Atelier de Création Radiophonique," mixing the voices of some of France's best stage and film actors with sound effects and haunting music (Beethoven's 14th Diabelli Variation and an original score by Carlos d'Alessio). To make India Song, her sixth film, she hired master cinematographer Bruno Nuytten while using, as an aural counterpoint, the original radio soundtrack that is pointedly out of sync with the images. The beggar woman remains invisible, party guests keep their lips closed, the aloof beauty of Anne-Marie Stretter's (Delphine Seyrig) is both alluring and ghostly, while the lovelorn vice consul (Michael Lonsdale) keeps howling "her Venice name in deserted Calcutta."

Duras reused the sound-track a third time, in the 1976 film, Son Nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert (Her Venice Name in Deserted Calcutta), as the camera tracks through the crumbling rooms of an abandoned mansion, only to catch, for a fleeting second, the reflection of Anne-Marie Stretter in a tarnished mirror.

Rejecting the illusion of unity ensured by classical editing, Duras allows the disparate filmic elements (images, voices, sounds, music, etc.) to fragment and pull apart, so that the interstices between them dominate. Her cinema is one of cadence and interval, a cinema structured -- as music is -- by silence and tension. --Literature Film Quarterly

REDCAT, CalArts' downtown center for innovative visual, performing and media arts, is located at the corner of W. 2nd St. and S. Hope St., inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex. Tickets are $8 for the general public, $6 for students with valid ID. Seating is general admission. Tickets may be purchased at the REDCAT box office-located at the corner of 2nd and Hope Streets, by calling 213.237.2800, or by clicking here.

This screening is made possible in part by the generous gifts from the Jack H. Skirball Foundation and The Herb Alpert Foundation. Special thanks to the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs for their support.

UPCOMING JACK H. SKIRBALL SCREENING SERIES, FALL 2005
Monday, October 24: Marguerite Duras: India Song
Monday, November 14: Pours Down Like Silver: Films by Phil Solomon
Monday, November 28: First-Person Africa: An Evening with Jean-Marie Teno
Monday, December 5: Ellen Bruno: Stories of Death and Survival
Monday, December 12: Joseph Cornell: Film Constructions and Fantasies

REDCAT benefits from an endowment created through the generosity of The Walt Disney Company; The Sharon D. Lund Foundation; Robert B. Egelston; Lee and Lawrence J. Ramer; and Dorothy R. Sherwood.

REDCAT's 2005-06 season programming is generously supported by The Herb Alpert Foundation; American Composers Forum of Los Angeles; The Annenberg Foundation; Anonymous; Argosy Foundation Contemporary Music Fund; California Community Foundation; The Capital Group Companies Charitable Foundation (Corporate matching gift); CEMAT (Centri Musicali Attrezzati, Rome); City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department; CONACULTA; Margit Sperling Cotsen and Lloyd Cotsen; Cultural Services of the French Embassy; Delphi Capital Management, Inc.; e-flux; Étant Donnés, The French-American Fund for the Visual Arts, a program of the French American Cultural Exchange; The French-American Fund for Contemporary Music, a program of FACE; French Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Harriett and Richard Gold; Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg; Elyse and Stanley Grinstein; Henson International Festival of Puppet Theater; IIC (Instituto Italiano di Cultura, Los Angeles); The Japan Foundation Performing Arts JAPAN; La Colección Jumex; kurimanzutto; L.A. Louver Gallery, Inc.; The Sharon D. Lund Foundation; Steve Martin; National Dance Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts; National Endowment for the Arts; E. Nakamichi Foundation; Phaedrus Foundation; Vicki Reynolds Pepper and Murray Pepper; The Puffin Foundation, Inc.; V. Joy Simmons; The Skirball Foundation; SONORA, in collaboration with Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Italy; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; and White Cube Gallery, London.

As CalArts' downtown center for innovative visual, media and performing arts, REDCAT, the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, introduces diverse audiences, students and artists to the most influential developments in the arts from around the world, and gives artists in the Los Angeles region the creative support they need to achieve national and international stature. REDCAT is a center for experimentation, discovery and charged civic discourse.

BIOGRAPHIES

Marguerite Duras (Gia Dinh, Indochina, 1914 - Paris, 1996), one of the towering figures of 20th century French literature, is associated both with the nouveau roman (new novel) and (feminine writing). She published her first novel, Les Impudents, in 1943. Her huge bibliography (73 books, including more than 40 novels) includes landmark texts such as Le Marin de Gibraltar (1952, The Sailor from Gibraltar, filmed by Tony Rchardson in 1966), Moderato cantabile (1958, filmed by Peter Brook in 1960), Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964), L'Amante anglaise (1967, The English Lover), Détruire, dit-elle (1969, Destroys, She Said), and Agatha (1981). She reached a large popular audience with her semi-autobiographical novel, (The Lover, 1984), based on her experiences as a young girl born in French Indochina -- that won the prestigious Goncourt literary price, sold 1.5 million copies, was translated into 40 languages and made into an English-speaking film by Jean-Jacques Annaud in 1992. In 1991, she published a slightly different book, L'Amant de la Chine du Nord (The North China Lover), then, in Yann Andrea Steiner (1992); she created a "Durasian" hero based upon the companion with whom shared her life since 1980.

She also wrote a number of plays and screenplays -- the most famous being (1959), directed by Alain Resnais.

She knew no borders between the novel, the theatre, the cinema and journalism. For example, she first wrote Des journées entières dans les arbres (Whole Days in the Trees) as a short story, (1954), and then a play (1968) and finally into a film (1976). In 1967, she made La Musica (1967, co-directed with Paul Seban), the first of the 19 films she directed till Les Enfants in 1984.

Selected filmography: Détruire, dit-elle (1969); La Femme du Gange (1976); Le Camion (1977); Le Navire Night (1978); L'Homme Atlantique (1981).

Delphine Seyrig (Beirut, Lebanon, 1932 - Paris, 1990) has graced European cinema since her alluring performance as the mysterious woman in Alain Resnais' L'année dernière à Marienbad (1961). She had actually started her career (under the monicker of "Beltiane") in Alfred Leslie's and Robert Frank's famous avant-garde film Pull My Daisy, shot in New York in 1959. Following Marienbad, Seyrig acted for the best French directors: Alain Resnais (Muriel ou Le Temps d'un retour, 1963), François Truffaut (Baisers voles, 1968), Jacques Demy (Peau d'Ane, 1970). She also worked with Luis Buñuel (La Voie Lactée, 1969; Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie, 1972) and was an exquisite Countess Bathori in the cult lesbian vampire film Daughters of Darkness (1971) by Dutch director Harry Kümel.

It is, however, with female directors that she developed a special bond. She made four films with Marguerite Duras (La Musica, 1967; India Song, 1975; Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta desert, 1976; , 1977) and three with the German avant-garde director Ulrike Ottinger (Freak Orlando, 1981; Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse, 1984; and Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia, 1989 -- her last screen appearance).

Her most noted collaboration was with Belgian-born director Chantal Akerman. She was unforgettable as the title role in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) -- a film that marked the 1970s as thoroughly as India Song did. She continued working with her in Letters Home (1986) and The Golden Eighties (AKA Window Shopping, 1986).

A dedicated feminist, Seyrig directed militant films, that are currently being restored by the Centre Simone de Beauvoir in Paris: Maso et Miso vont en bateau (1975, Maso and Miso Go Boating) Scum Manifesto (1976) and the documentary Sois belle et tais-toi (1981, Be Seen and Not Heard) in which she interviews actresses.

Back to the Press Room