India Song (1975, Marguerite Duras)
Tuesday 7th of May, 7pm in the Richard Hoggart Building cinema
Join us on Tuesday 7th of May from 7pm (film starts at 7:15pm) for a screening of Marguerite Duras’ 1975 film India Song. The film is 115 minutes long so the screening will finish at 9:10pm.
Set in 1930s Calcutta, India Song is a strangely meditative, post-colonial achievement, one which strips the medium to bare sound, image and movement. Already established as one of the great figures of post-war feminist literature, Duras took the dense and sensual tableaus of memory, violence and perception in her writing and translated it into film to create more radical and tactile illustrations.
According to Ivone Margulies’s essay for the Criterion Collection release:
Upon its release in 1975, Duras’s tale of doomed passion defied conventional cinema with its antinaturalist aesthetic, anachronistic setting, and unrepentantly Romantic stance. With its glamorous and compact theatricality, Duras’s work shared with her contemporaries Jacques Rivette, Manoel de Oliveira, and Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet a disregard for generic borders. Distinguished by her incantatory dialogue and entrancing mise-en-scène, Duras’s radical experiment with cinematic voice remains unequaled.