Marguerite Duras’s entry into filmmaking was an unusual one. Unlike her post-1968 contemporaries – Agnès Varda, Chantal Akerman, Nelly Kaplan, and Claire Denis – Duras was already an astonishingly prolific writer by the time she turned her hand to film. Her first cinematic venture, La Musica (1967), staged her two-person play of the same name on-screen. The rest of her films followed suit, with her expansive body of literary works serving as the source material.

Born and raised in modern-day Ho Chi Minh City, Duras was interested in using the intersections of womanhood and colonialism as a lens to explore themes of transgression, trauma, and the extremes of desire, death, and decay. The resulting films unfold in disjointed, hypnotic sequences, her stories charged with a supernatural ennui.

Although Duras’s filmmaking career only spanned 19 years (from 1966 to 1985), her work would eventually evolve into increasingly avant-garde territory as she grew more comfortable with the medium. In the case of L’Homme Atlantique (1981), the film mostly consists of an empty black screen. It’s exactly this obliqueness and her refusal to conform to cinematic convention that make Duras such a compelling – if divisive – filmmaker. As she once said, “My cinema is not made for people who love cinema. I didn’t think about those people for a second.”

Duras’s work is so scantily distributed in the UK, but thankfully, a collaboration between the Institute for Contemporary Arts London and Another Gaze brings together a full retrospective of her shorts, features and televisual work this summer. Coinciding with the recent publication of Duras’s My Cinema, Let Cinema Go To Its Ruin: The Cinema of Marguerite Duras will include new restorations alongside imported prints of rarely seen works, as well as special guests, invited speakers and newly commissioned essays contextualising Duras’s work.

Ahead of the retrospective, AnOther recommends six of the auteur’s most defining works. 

Destroy, She Said (1969)

Duras’s directorial debut, adapted from her own play, unfolds in an isolated hotel nestled within a dense forest. Among the guests are a professor of future history, Max (Henri Garcin), and Alissa Thor (Nicole Hiss), a married couple, who befriend two newcomers, Elisabeth Alione (Daniel Gélin) and aspiring German novelist, Stein (Michael Lonsdale). Elisabeth, coping with a recent miscarriage, appears distant from her affluent husband, Bernard, while Stein becomes increasingly infatuated with Alissa. As the days go on, the quartet eventually descend into a collective madness.

While the group dynamic occasionally threatens to overshadow the individuality of its characters, nowhere is this idea of identity merging more evident than when Stein tells Alissa, “You’re part of me, Alissa. Your fragile body is mine.” Still, the film’s stylised, orgiastic quality makes for great viewing. Duras, after all, is a director more preoccupied with exploring liminality than she is with character development.

Nathalie Granger (1972)

Nathalie Granger offers an intimate exploration of feminised, domestic life in a picturesque countryside home. Isabelle Granger (Lucia Bosè) and another woman (Jeanne Moreau), share an ambiguous but close relationship. Against the backdrop of routine household tasks, tension mounts beneath the surface, exacerbated by Isabelle’s daughter Nathalie’s expulsion from school due to her violent tendencies and radio reports of nearby killers on the loose. Ordinary chores like dishwashing become charged with suspense. 

The arrival of a hapless travelling salesman, played by Gérard Depardieu in his first notable role, further disrupts the household’s delicate balance, leading to moments of dry wit and humour amidst the pervasive unease. Shot in an austere black and white, the film is characterised by sparse dialogue and rich sound cues. Through its portrayal of domestic rituals and the subtle dynamics between its characters, Duras crafts a world where the ordinary is queered and rendered strange, and suspense lurks beneath the surface of everyday life.

Woman of the Ganges (1974)

In Woman of the Ganges, a man (Depardieu) returns to a ghostly coastal town where he once had a passionate affair with a woman (Catherine Sellers), who has died today. So moved by her memory, he imagines she is still alive.

Woman of the Ganges is a surprising contender for one of Duras’s most beautiful films given that it is, literally, about empty spaces and the people that once filled them. Like her earlier works, spectrality and decay foreground Women of the Ganges: the death of empires, of humanity, and of our hearts.

Once again, Duras uses disembodied voices to narrate the film; they follow the man, recounting not only his lost loves but also their own and those of all who haunt the forsaken town. True to Duras’s directorial form, the past is liberated and stripped of personal biography, approached as both private and collective simultaneously.

India Song (1975)

The most well-known and celebrated of Duras’s cinematic oeuvre, India Song is a radical tale of decaying colonialism. Set at the end of India’s Western occupation, Anne-Marie Stretter (Seyrig) is engulfed in ennui as her marriage – and the empire – crumble. To escape her suicidal boredom, she has affairs and drives her husband to madness. 

Using crashing recitations and still-life compositions, India Song abandons cinematic tradition to create a ghostly portrait of postcolonial life. Duras sets her evocatively decadent visuals against a desynchronised chorus of disembodied voices, moving the film’s dialogue off-screen. The result is an eerily melancholic vision of an empire in decay and personal desolation. That India Song remains Duras’s most popular film is a testament to the director’s profound critique of colonial injustice and misuse of power, whether political or sexual, public or private.

Baxter, Vera Baxter (1977)

Like Duras’s earlier films, Baxter, Vera Baxter is a lucid study of domestic turmoil, desire, infidelity, gender and the supernatural. Ensconced in an empty villa, Vera Baxter (Claudine Gabay) languishes in an empty villa. Plagued by ennui, she is visited by apparitions of her lover (Depardieu), her husband’s mistress (Nathalie Nell), and a stranger (Seyrig). As Vera reveals several shocking stories about her marriage and her life, Duras fashions a quietly horrifying marital postmortem.

Brilliant visuals and performances aside, Baxter, Vera Baxter’s brilliance can largely be attributed to its soundtrack. Reuniting with India Song composer Carlos d’Alessio, the South American-inspired score relentlessly follows Vera throughout the film – unyielding, almost supernatural in its sound. “Prepare yourself for an hour and a half of pan flute,” wrote one Letterboxd user. “It’s payment in suffering for all the sins of man.”

The Children (1985)

Duras’s last film, The Children is as tender as it is melancholic. Seven-year-old Ernesto (played by Axel Bogousslavsky who, rather noticeably, was not a child at the time of filming) decides to skip school. After hearing his classmates’ discussion, he decides that he has all the knowledge he needs.

An astute commentary on France’s failing education system, Duras’s careful handling of absurdism stops The Children from falling into the one-joke trap. Through Ernesto’s adult-like comprehension of the world around him, Duras’s film offers a playful meditation on the authoritarianism inherent in schooling and the transformative power of experience. It’s certainly the funniest of Duras’s films, and by far the sweetest.

Let Cinema Go To Its Ruin: The Cinema of Marguerite Duras is screening at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London until 25 August 2024. My Cinema by Marguerite Duras is published by Another Gaze Editions, and is out now.