Collection: Marguerite Duras

Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) was a French novelist, playwright and filmmaker whose work — from Un barrage contre le Pacifique (1950) to L’Amant (1984) — consistently tested the boundaries between memory, desire, image and text. As a filmmaker she developed a radical approach to the relationship between voice and image, most fully realised in India Song (1975), where she used still photographs by Édouard Boubat to stand in for a character physically absent from the film. Her preface to Boubat’s Boubat par Boubat (1979) extended that engagement: she understood in his photographs an ability to catch people at the point where identity begins to slip away.