In what follows I speak from the position of an artist rather than theorist, and I explore the ways in which this locates me in a different methodology and different relationship to theory and practice. My reading of Duras's work is thus initially through visual imagery. The concepts which make up the chapter's main headings—Reflections and Distortions, Borders/Mist, Glass, Darkness, Day/Light, the Photograph, Murder—refer to the way I might use concepts or materials in my own practice in order to think about the relationship of time and space. These can often be fragmentary and are concerned with the temporality of moments of everyday life. Arranged in sequence as one might see an image in a film or photograph, they are intended deliberately not to give a clear linear reading, and thus may present contradictions, repetitions, interruptions and blurrings in the reading of the text. My reason for doing this is to present a new way of looking at Duras's work, one that leads from a linear sense of time and space in India Song—a film consumed by its own narcissism and doomed, I will argue, like the vampire—to a never-ending place of repetition of that time. This will lead me in turn to consider La mer écrite, a book of photographs which presents clues, fragments and parts of events having no fixed linear time and containing a temporality and open space of looking in both image and text.

Reflections and Distortions

India Song is a film that presents a reflection and re-reflection of itself. It devours both its dead self and repeats and devours the interior space which Marguerite Duras presents.