“But with each return, when he tried to resolve the image, he obtained only a clearer perception of its variations.” — Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance
Has an author ever used the conditional tense as poignantly as Marguerite Duras? I mean, as the French author and ex-Communist Marguerite Duras? “It would have been a road by the sea,” begins Le camion (1977), her film about, yes, a truck, that’s also about the perilous possibilities of filmmaking, representation, and class-consciousness—revolution both political and aesthetic. “And then a truck would have arrived.” The screenplay, available in English for the first time as part of a collection called The Darkroom, is unexpectedly grammatical. The epigram quotes Maurice Grevisse’s literary grammar book Le Bon Usage on the conditional, comparing the “hypothetical future” this tense posits to the imagination games children play. In practice, as translators Alta Ifland and Eireene Nealand point out, this conditional tense often functions as the future anterior (“will have been”), the truck suggesting a kind of mental toy. Indeed, Duras deconstructs language with a child’s confidence. In her earlier films, she renegotiated the contract between the eye and ear, paring cinema down to its irreducible elements and doing away with superfluities (actors, plot, diegetic sound). In Le camion, Duras plays with the hauntedness of this hypothetical state, as if daring us to believe in anything at all. Apart from brief cuts to the truck and landscape, the would-be film about a male driver and the female hitchhiker he allows into his cabin unspools in her voice, in her house—she calls it The Darkroom—in dialogue with the actor Gérard Depardieu. Duras narrates “what the film would have been if it had been shot,” and from these ruins of cinematic convention a new narrative emerges—a paradox of motion (and motion pictures) in which transportation can exist sans transport.
“Is it a film?” asks Depardieu early on. “It would have been a film,” Duras replies. But the story she tells in her 1977 film Le camion is hypothetical: a would-be film cast in the conditional tense. And this film, like the dialogue between Duras and Depardieu—who invite comparisons, but by no means can be said to stand in for the hitchhiker and driver, respectively—appears to be either scripted or spontaneously rehearsed. The pair is filmed in two settings (at dusk and during the day) as Variations on a Theme by Diabelli—Beethoven’s cycle of 33 pieces on a melody by Anton Diabelli, commissioned both as an exercise in vanity and to raise funds for victims of the Napoleonic wars—plays intermittently. The certainty of a unifying theme gives way to permutation and contingency—instead of the resolved image, we find “only a clearer perception of its variations,” in Paul Virilio’s useful phrase. There will be no revolution, it seems to say, only revolutions; no love, only lovers. The Darkroom, translated by Alta Ifland and Eireene Nealand, presents the screenplay of Le camion in English for the first time. The sting of expectation is both acute and unbearable. “Thus she stands, somewhat obliterated, in a constant state of waiting, waiting for herself, in the hope of being everything at the same time,” writes Duras of the hitchhiker—and, the reader is led to believe, of herself. In despair, she finds an antidote to the messianic Marxism she has come to despise; nothing less, in her inversion of Viktor Frankl, than the “joy of existing without a search for meaning.”
“Before you’ve done a thing, how can you know it wasn’t worth doing?” Gérard Depardieu asks Duras in Le camion, her 1977 film about political aimlessness, fatalism, and the possibility of revolution. She smokes only Blue Gauloises; he smokes from a pack of some sleazy Eurotrash brand called Stuyvesant. Both read from scripts—or appear to—while seated in a dark room: The Darkroom, she calls it. It’s here that Duras conjures up a blue truck to challenge the tyranny of the image. The truck is a thirty-two-ton Saviem with a trailer, not a metaphor of a truck. And the film can take place, she suggests, in any marginal setting, any industrial zone: “La Beauce, maybe, toward Chartres. Or maybe the immigrant shantytowns of Yvelines.” The blue truck passes through an “uninterrupted succession of warehouses, supermarkets, billboards.” We are asked to confront barrenness sublime. “IDENTICAL, RECENTLY-BUILT BUILDINGS STREAM BY.” What Rem Koolhas called junk space. Duras describes the route traced by the truck as a kind of writing: “Indecipherable. And clear.” It is only when we give up hope and confront the end that something like light or intelligence can break through. “Let film meet its end,” Duras writes in the first of four cinematic propositions, “that’s the only cinema. Let the world meet its end, that’s the only politics.” The embrace of despair and contingency reminds one of Waiting for Godot. A Godot on wheels? “We’ve almost finished reading,” says Duras. “(Beat.) We’ll start again.” As Jean-Luc Nancy points out in the introduction to The Darkroom, a new translation of the screenplay and related texts by Alta Ifland and Eireene Nealand, Duras deploys the conditional to great effect. Yet this, too, descends from chance: If the actresses had been available and the weather hospitable, it is unlikely that Duras would have been able to turn adversity to her advantage: “I would narrate what the film would have been if it had been shot,” she insists. And so, it is at once the film it would have been, could have been, and somehow also very much the film it appears to be. One version of itself. “We are waiting for the accident that will populate the forest,” Duras says toward the end of the film, and one both knows and does not know what she means by it. Like in the opening of The Information, where Amis writes: “when he sighed you could hear the distant seagulls falling through his lungs.” Indecipherable? Perhaps. And yet, in its own way, absolutely transparent.
Is it true, as Marguerite Duras declares in the second of four propositions on cinema, that film both seeks to replace text and is conscious of its failure to do so? “Film can no longer satisfy its spectator’s growing thirst for knowledge,” she tells Michelle Porte in a dialogue that appears in The Darkroom, a new translation—by Alta Ifland and Eireene Nealand—of the screenplay for the author’s experimental film Le camion (1977), The Truck or The Lorry. Could Duras’ selective use of Beethoven’s Variations on a Theme by Diabelli, Op. 120be a response to fellow Nouveau Roman colleague Michel Butor’s Dialogue avec 33 variations de Ludwig van Beethoven sur une valse de Diabelli, released just six years prior to her own scripted dialogue with the actor Gérard Depardieu? Or perhaps a provocation? Duras also takes the French Communist Party to task for its obeisance to Moscow and its glorification of the proletariat. A former fellow-traveler, she accuses the communists of worshipping “the obscene stigmata of work.” In other words: of mysticism. Beethoven’s Variations—here performed by Pascal Rogé—deconstructs the theme only to resurrect it in the form of thirty-three versions or transformations, mapping out thirty-three wildly hypothetical futures for this beer hall waltz. What exactly does Beethoven do to the theme with these transformations? And is it analogous to what Duras does to cinema in Le camion? The titular truck, like the initial waltz, is merely a point of departure. After all, “it was only during the process of” composing the Variations, writes William Kinderman, “that Beethoven discovered creative possibilities which have no immediate precedent in his earlier music.” It’s a virtuoso performance, a parody, perhaps not unlike Duras’ insistence that language (not images) should be the star of her films.
Is it a review? It would have been a review of The Darkroom, a once-new collection of texts related to Le camion (1977), The Truck or The Lorry, one of the many films bequeathed to us by the French author and filmmaker Marguerite Duras, and of this text, rendered into English by translators Alta Ifland and Eireene Nealand, in which a novel is not yet cinema or cinema is not yet a novel. Duras memorably appropriates the aesthetics of cinematic direction to commit literature. “I make my texts bend to the cinema,” she tells Jean-Luc Godard. “I’m not going to churn out a text that I would offer to be viewed, to be heard along with images, the way I would churn it out in a book, the way I would offer it to be read in a book.” The very cinematography is freighted with significance: “TRAPPES, SWITCHYARD. TRAINS. Freight cars. Trains. Sideways tracking. Overcast sky, white. TRAINS. TRAINS.” The conditional would appear as a kind of ghost, a specter haunting the text, a revolution indefinitely postponed. Are we supposed to be the man, the woman, the truck, the sea, or the camera, the eye that takes it all in? Does the driver represent modern labor, lacking a destination and hopelessly alienated from the purpose of its task? Or the vulgarity of the lumpen, the contemporary union? “La chambre noire” means both darkroom and camera obscura: a place in which time is superfluous, a crucible of representations.
It always happens at night, Marguerite Duras tells Michelle Porte in The Darkroom, a collection of texts—deftly translated by Alta Ifland and Eireene Nealand—related to Le camion, her 1977 film of a would-be film. “The place where we speak, I call it the darkroom.” Speaking of the conditional tense, she describes the games children play as cinema. “Their cinema.” Not a version of cinema, but the real thing. The motion picture industry as a kindergarten for adults. Or a holding pen. “I make films to fill my time,” Duras writes somewhere else. “If I had the strength to do nothing, I would do nothing. It is only because I haven’t the strength to do nothing that I make films.”
In 1819, Viennese publisher Anton Diabelli wanted to raise money for victims of the Napoleonic wars, so he did what the Viennese do best: he wrote a waltz. Then he invited the empire’s top composers to submit their own variations on the theme. Beethoven’s contribution took longest to complete. At first, he dismissed it as Schusterfleck—a cobbler’s patch or rosalia. Then, as the lead in his brain reacted with the material, he produced not one but a cycle of 33 variations, which he revised again and again. At that time, the ex-Communist author Marguerite Duras had not been born yet. Her parents, Henri Donnadieu and the green-eyed, black-haired Marie Augustine Adeline Legrand, had not been born yet. Le camion, her 1977 film of a would-be film, was not yet an idea in her mother’s mother’s womb. Neither was her book, Blue Eyes, Black Hair. Nor the idea of a cinema of exhaustion. To make a long story short: It’s terrible to find only what one is looking for.
Daniel Elkind is a writer and forager based in Atlanta. His latest book, Dr. Chizhevsky’s Chandelier: The Decline of the USSR and Other Heresies of the Twentieth Century, was published in 2025.
minor literature[s] 