[D66] Memoir From the Underground

[A.O.]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/08/17/memoir-from-the-underground/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Hb0qN9Ss3I

August 17, 2018
Memoir From the Underground
by Louis Proyect


“Memoir of War” is an adaptation of Marguerite Duras’s La Douleur (The
Pain, published in English as The War), a 1985 semi-fictional memoir
about her experiences living in Vichy France in 1945 and during the
immediate post-liberation period. Her husband Robert Antelme was a
member of the Resistance and a Communist like her. With Antelme a
prisoner in a slave labor camp in Germany, she tries to prevent him from
being transferred to an even more lethal camp like Dachau by forming
ties to a Vichy collaborator who has a double agenda: to extract
information about the Resistance and to seduce her. She walks a
tightrope, trying to exploit her relationship with him to keep her
husband alive while avoiding a Harvey Weinstein moment.

The film is among the best I have seen about living under fascism and a
reminder of how great a writer Marguerite Duras was. “Memoir of War”
relies on her character’s (played brilliantly by Mélanie Thierry)
voiceover drawn from the text of La Douleur. I generally find such a
device intrusive but in this instance it worked perfectly since the
literary text meshed so well with the cinematic texture. Setting the
tone for the remainder of the film, we hear Duras’s words before the
credits role as she sits alone in her apartment smoking a cigarette
while pacing the floor:

    I found this diary in the blue cupboards at Neaulphe. I don’t
remember writing it. I know I did though. I know it was me. I recognize
the handwriting and the details of what happened. I can picture the
place. The Gare D’Orsay. My itineraries. But not myself writing. What I
found was evenly filled pages, the letters tiny, unbelievably placid and
regular. What I found was a phenomenal chaos of thought and feeling that
I dare not amend, besides which literary polish strikes me as shameful.
One thing is sure, obvious. It is unthinkable that these words were
written whilst waiting for Robert.

Of course, the claim that she didn’t “remember writing it” has to be
taken with a grain of salt. To understand why she would
double-reflexively write, “I don’t remember writing it”, you have to
place her in the context of French postwar culture. Now obscure to most
young people except maybe those who major in French literature at your
better universities, Duras was among France’s leading literary figures
in the 1950s. She worked in many genres, including fiction, theater,
essays, and screenwriting. In 1959, she was nominated for an Academy
Award for the screenplay for “Hiroshima, Mon Amour”, an antiwar film
that relies heavily on the interior monologues of the two main
characters. (This classic film can be seen here.)

Her own experimental films used the same technique according to
Wikipedia. “Her films are also experimental in form; most eschew
synchronized sound, using voice over to allude to, rather than tell, a
story; spoken text is juxtaposed with images whose relation to what is
said may be more-or-less indirect.” Director Emmanuel Finkiel, who
adapted La Douleur, clearly intended to remain consistent with the
aesthetic of Duras’s work that was known in the 1950s as Nouveau Roman,
or new novel. The school included Alain Robbe-Grillet, the Argentinian
Julio Cortázar, and Nathalie Sarraute.

If Nouveau Roman dismissed character and plot as outmoded devices, you
might conclude that Duras had returned to earlier traditions since
“Memoir of War” is so plot and character driven. Certainly, it would
have been difficult to put these figures from the Resistance into the
background since they were, like her, larger than life. Among them is
François Morland, the fictional name she assigned to François Mitterand,
who was the leader of the Resistance cell of writers and intellectuals
she belonged to. Played by Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet, Morland is shocked
to discover that Duras has been in a kind of strange platonic,
cat-and-mouse relationship with Pierre Rabier, a French cop and Vichy
collaborator.

The scenes with Rabier (Benoît Magimel) are brilliantly directed. He
tries to simultaneously woo and intimidate her, not surprisingly in a
manner that women must have encountered across a restaurant table (where
their rendezvouses take place) from Harvey Weinstein. Perhaps the only
difference between Rabier and Weinstein is ideological, with one
committed to German imperialism and the other to hollowed out and just
as murderous American liberal values.

Despite her terrible suffering in the absence of her husband, Duras is
cheating on him with another member of the cell, Dionys Mascolo
(Benjamin Biolay), who fathered her only child. Before he was arrested,
Antelme gave his benediction to this arrangement in what strikes me as a
“free love” gesture acceptable in French leftist circles. Mascolo once
said that the three “were against marriage, against normal education,
against the church, against the very concept of ‘family’.” To prove
that, the three lived together just as Friedrich Nietzsche, Lou
Andreas-Salomé and Paul Rée planned to do. Since Mascolo was the son of
poor Italian immigrants, this demonstrates the breadth and depth of
radicalism in France back then.

Perhaps trying to appeal to a mainstream audience, at least that segment
of it that prefers intelligent films, Finkiel does not emphasize the
Communist thinking in these circles except to note that they despised De
Gaulle. Mascolo and Duras both became disillusioned with the Communist
Party but remained committed to the left. In his case, this meant
founding a committee to support the liberation struggle in Algeria.

As for Duras, her exit from the CP was as dramatic as any of her
writings, as detailed in Literary Hub’s “When Marguerite Duras Got
Kicked Out of the Communist Party”. Fed up with Stalinism, she decided
not to renew her party membership in 1949. A year later, after being
pressured to explain why, she wrote an open letter stating: “My reasons
for leaving the Party are not the same as Dionys Mascolo’s. I am under
the influence of no one. I took the decision alone and long before
Mascolo. Viscerally I shall always remain a communist.” The party was
not content to allow her to leave so unceremoniously. It expelled her
after the fact on the basis of:

    (1) Attempts to sabotage the Party by disrupting the cell, with
constant attacks against the branch committee through insulting and
slanderous behavior, and resorting to subterfuge to conceal divergence
from the Party political line.

    (2) Frequenting Trotskyites, such as David Rousset, and other
enemies of the working class and the Soviet Union (in particular a
former attaché at the Yugoslav embassy at present chief editor of Borba).

    (3) Frequenting nightclubs in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district
where political, intellectual and moral corruption prevails, an activity
vigorously and justifiably condemned by the working population and
honest intellectuals of the arrondissement.

She replied to the charges:

    One final point. I am accused of not agreeing with Party policy
concerning politics and the arts. Very well, I admit that but let’s set
the record straight. The Party said we had to knock on doors. I knocked
on doors. The Party said we had to raise funds. I raised funds on café
terraces and elsewhere. The Party asked us—as this was crucial—to take
in the children of strikers. For two months I took in the daughter of a
miner. I signed up housewives in the markets, I sold L’Humanité, I stuck
posters, I contributed by getting Antelme, Mascolo and many more to
become members, etc. Everything I could do, I did. What I can’t do is
change some of my tastes in for example literature, which are what they
are, and which would be physically impossible for me to give up. But
since I have never shouted them from the rooftops, why are they suddenly
being dug up at the last minute to be turned into my principal crime?

If this isn’t grounds to see a movie based on this extraordinary woman’s
life, I don’t know what else could. It opens on August 17that the Film
Forum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York and at the
Laemmle in L.A. a week later. Right now, it has the inside track for my
nomination of best foreign-language film of 2018 and is also a good
reason to begin reading an author most deserving of being rescued from
obscurity.