Le navire Night

“I started filming Le navire Night on Monday, July 31, 1978. I had made a shooting schedule. On Monday and Tuesday, I filmed the planned shots. On Tuesday night, I watched the raw footage. That day, I wrote in my diary: failed film.” M.D.

The first shoot didn't work out, and Le navire Night was almost not made. After a sleepless night, Duras decided to abandon the initial project and instead record the “disaster.” Filming the impossibility of filming is perhaps the most radical and provocative form of cinema. It is Marguerite Duras' territory.

“Little by little, the film emerged from death... we turned the camera around and filmed what came its way: night, air, spotlights, roads, and also faces.” M.D.

Le navire Night is a lost film and a love story adrift. It begins with a shot of the sky through a window; then, on a black screen, we recognize the voice of Marguerite Duras. She talks about the heat in Athens, so intense that it causes a deep silence, and that silence is frightening. In the images, we see Paris—filmed from afar and from above. It looks like Babylon. The screen goes black again. She changes course. She is going to tell the story that once happened to J.M., the young man from Gobelins. The title appears and the night journey begins. The music starts. The enchantment.

It is June 1973, almost summer. The camera wanders through a house, very slowly: mirrors, a table and chairs, projectors—the setting. Marguerite Duras and Benoît Jacquot are the narrators, disembodied voices. They introduce the characters. He is a 25-year-old man who works in a telecommunications department on the night shift. He is bored. He uses the unassigned telephone lines left over from the German occupation—an anonymous underworld of lonely voices, an abyss—and finds a woman.

She is 26 years old and has leukemia. Her name is F. They fall in love through their voices and words, they see each other when they close their eyes. It is a veiled love that feeds immense desire, jealousy, vigilance—a strange harbinger of our times.

The actors appear: Bulle Ogier, the sweet Dominique Sanda, and Mathieu Carrière. They are in that house, on the film set. They are bodies (almost) without a voice; they listen, look, think. They interpret nothing, or they interpret everything—it's the same thing. From time to time, music is heard. From time to time, the camera loses itself in beautiful outdoor reveries; the tracking shots through the Père-Lachaise Cemetery or the woods are mysterious.

The story lasts for months, three years. They talk, they fall silent, they sleep next to the phone—a pleasure without touch, without a face. They arrange meetings, but don't show up. This love thrives on the distance between bodies, the unfamiliarity of images, the ambiguity of words. And yet, when they describe each other, while the camera pans across the statues in the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, stone turns to skin and unleashes a primitive eroticism. The ship sails on into the darkness.

The documentary side of Duras' cinema, always so exuberant, reaches one of its most grandiose points in Le navire Night. In a devastating impetus, she turns everything inside out and offers us the interior, what happens before filming or remains off-screen. What we are shown is the prehistory of the film: projectors (lighting); a red dress (wardrobe); the actors being made up; the text written on blackboards (dialogues); the table and chairs, stairs, a piano, a telephone (set); a man playing the piano (music); location scouting in Paris. From destruction, a flower is born. In contrast, the exterior has been replaced by words; they are what engender the action or the possibility of action, they are Duras' cinematic material. The story we hear takes on an unprecedented sensuality; after all, we don't need the usual narrative images that are always the same, we can see with our eyes closed: his shirt—thin, almost transparent—an ambulance, the fountain in the garden of the house in Neuilly, the driver?

From its intense disaster, Le navire Night appeals to our innate intelligence: it encourages us to fulfill the first sentence of the film beyond its limits. It is necessary to see—to clearly see the living fire—to say yes to life and death; to love and madness.

“I find the film both beautiful and futile. I believe that people who dislike the film are virgins of their own desire and exercise their misery as a way of condemning those who are always ready to sink into that primordial state they share with beasts, madmen, the majority—the temptation of love.” M.D.