On Saturday, October 2, the residency group gathered for our second session looking at the work of Marguerite Duras. To prepare, the group read texts on Duras’ biography, her thoughts on writing and theatre, as well as a seminal critical text written by French feminist theorist, Julia Kristeva, (The Pain of Sorrow in the Modern World: The Works of Marguerite Duras , 1987). Part 2 of our discussion on Duras focused on film, so we began the day in the Walker Cinema watching a slightly grainy VHS copy of Moderato Cantabile, a 1960 film directed by Peter Brook, based on the novel of the same name by Duras. Despite the VHS format (screening copies of films written or directed by Duras that contain English subtitles are actually hard to come by), Moderato Cantabile was a beautiful film to watch that presented many of the recurring themes in Duras’ work: the impossibility of love, the characters trying to learn love, the violence of love, the boredom of petit-bourgeois life, and invented memory, as well as the presence of water, gendered gazes and repetition.
Our post-screening conversation wound through these themes with assistance by Anne-Marie Gronhovd and Joelle Vitiello, the group’s resident scholars on French literature and cinema. Anne-Marie talked about the novel The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein (1964) and the persistence appearance of female characters in Duras’ work who display a definitive solitude; a lonliness that cannot be solved by marriage or domesticity. Joelle dove into Duras’ biography to speak about three key themes: childhood, politics, and love and death that appear repeatedly in the artist’s work.
The afternoon concluded with a brief conversation about the series of public programs Haegue is working on for the second phase of the residency in February: a staged reading of The Malady of Death (1988)and a series of four films directed by Duras. As more details about these programs are determined, information will be posted here.
To me this was one of the most successful sessions, because watching the film established a common text. And it was a rare privilige to see the film. At the same time, I wish we had done more with the Kristeva article on feminine melancholy, which was relevant to the film and sugestive in the context of Haegue’s choice of the word melancholy in the name of the central installation as well as her use of mirrors, repetition, and doubling/folding. I wonder if Haegue somewhat disapproves of psychoanalytical interpretation due to its transhistorical assumptions. I also wonder how Haegue feels about the kinds of generalizations Kristeva makes about gender. Does Haegue’s work have a gender? I think yes, that it is feminine in its resistance to the messianic and in its appreciation of detritus (fishing lures, crocheted chains, origami). Yet the melancholy of Yearning Melancholy Red is that of Marguerite Duras, not Haegue Yang (?). And Haegue’s work also resists the idea of “the feminine” in its formalism and detachment.