Metaphorically seeing: the place names of Marguerite Duras

摘要

This essay explores the use of sound–image disjunction in Marguerite Duras's India Song (1975) in relation to migration, bilingualism and cinema's metaphoric potential. Employing sound–image disjunction with unprecedented constancy, the cinema of Duras traces a sustained exploration of the creative possibilities of this formal strategy and its capacity to establish a signifying relation between otherwise irreconcilable elements. A key work in this respect, India Song evinces a desire to not only reconstruct memories of the filmmaker's past (in Indochina), but to bring these into relation with the present (in France), and to do so through the construction of a new and foundational bind between word and image; in short, to create a single, meaningful reality out of a linguistically and geographically disjoined experience. Striving towards this difficult goal, Duras focuses on the unification of word and image through what might best be termed the filmic equivalent of a metaphorical utterance or act. In so doing, she raises a number of questions with regard to the complex interactions between sound and image in the cinema, as well as the latter's relationship to language as such. This essay therefore aims to elucidate Duras's basic formal strategy, especially as evidenced in India Song, and to consider its broader implications for the relationship between language, migration and cinematic practice.