Marguerite Duras has pioneered what she calls the "multiple work of art," a text which is simultaneously a novel, a play, a dance, a film, an opera. Duras has broken the "rules," the long-standing codes which separated the various art forms, in order to provide a bridge from one to the other…. Duras's sense of the multiple work of art stems from her growing disillusionment with writing and reading as obsolete forms. She writes, she says, from compulsion, maintaining a love-hate relationship with phrases, reading very little herself, acknowledging that others don't read anymore. The solution seems to be a mass art form, a form which blends into each medium, an answer to mass reproduction, a multiproductive text. That text often operates as a cross between ritual and play, between sleep-walking and future-fantasy, with an aesthetic that could appropriately be termed creative destruction….
Her rejuvenating sense of the multiproductive text has been at the root of the apparently anti-cinematic narratives of her recent films…. Duras has refined her cinematic form, gradually eliminating concrete references for symbolic ones, restricting the camera's movement and the editor's arbitrary eclipse-cuts for long, repetitive takes and for fixed frames that are both boring and fascinating, flattened out and trance-inducing. Her narrative, then, operates within a neutralized comic strip and acting gives way to complex sound-image relationships: the "voices" are freed of their speakers, sometimes functioning as pure sounds. Bouncing off the figurative walls of the closed-room frame, sound and voice move in a dialectic between meditation and interview….
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