Les mains négatives

Presented only in theatres

This film is part of the program Carte Blanche au Centre Pompidou and the program Carte Blanche à Paul Rothé — Rien à voir : Filmer le vide, l’absence, l’invisible.

It is from the unedited footage of her feature film Le Navire Night (1978) that the writer Marguerite Duras created the short film Les Mains Négatives (1979). Sublimed by the camera of Pierre Lhomme (a cinematographer closely associated with the French New Wave), the deserted streets of Paris in the middle of August, at the very moment when the night slowly fades to give way to dawn, serve as the backdrop for an existential wandering. Since India Song (1975), Marguerite Duras, perhaps recalling the Lettrist practice of ​“discrepancy,” confronts the autonomy of the soundtrack in relation to the images. In Les Mains Négatives, she gives her voice — a faceless voice unique to her cinema — to a text written against (in reaction to and alongside) the images. She fictionalizes the cave paintings, these negative hands left 30,000 years ago on the walls of caves (the discovery of Altamira in Spain at the end of the 19^th century is said to have inspired her text). She interprets them and transmits them through words, transforming them into a call, literally a cry of love with no specific addressee, except for anyone who is willing to hear it. In this temporal gap between the prehistoric era, from which the first traces left by humans reach us, and these images of the streets of Paris populated by an anonymous crowd (workers, Senegalese street cleaners, housemaids), the narrative seems to circle back on itself like an endless spiral. An allegory of cinema and the ontology of the photographic image, the film both shows and questions the negative hand as the imprint of reality.

Artwork label:
DURAS Marguerite (born DONNADIEU Marguerite)
1914, Gia-Dinh (Vietnam) – 1966, Paris (France)
Les mains négatives, 1979
35mm film digitized, color, sound, 14min 20s
35mm film, color, sound
Acquired in 2003
Centre Pompidou, Paris
Musée national d’art moderne / Centre de création industrielle
Additional information:
Producer: Les Films du Losange
Cinematography: Pierre Lhomme, Michel Cennet, Eric Dumage
Editing: Geneviève Dufour, Roselyne Petit
Music: Amy Flamer
Sound mixing: Dominique Hennequin
Distributor: Collectif Jeune Cinéma
Cinema
Cinema, Film
Duration: 14’20
Copyright: All rights reserved
Inventory number: AM 2003-F3
Insurance value: 0 EUR (19÷12÷2024)