Marguerite Duras at the ICA in London

Duras was seventy-seven at the time and would die five years later. The occasion for Garis’s conversation with the novelist, playwright, and filmmaker in her Parisian apartment was the publication of The North China Lover, which by Garis’s count would be her fifty-fourth book. It was written, as Garis tells it, in a race against the January 1992 release of Jean-Jacques Annaud’s adaptation of Duras’s most famous work, The Lover, the 1984 winner of the most prestigious literary award in France, the Prix Goncourt, and a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic.

Set in 1929 and drawing on Duras’s own experience, The Lover is the story of an affair between a fifteen-year-old French girl and a wealthy twenty-seven-year-old Chinese man in Indochina. Duras had written the screenplay but then fell out with Annaud. As Garis put it, with The North China Lover, Duras “recast her best seller into a new version, which is a fuller telling of the original, including many new shocking details, and—always mischievous—camera angles and directions for the soundtrack. Duras says her new book is more true than The Lover. Truth, in the Durasian universe, is a slippery entity.”

Last December, Another Gaze Editions published My Cinema, a collection of Duras’s writing on all nineteen of her films—essays, articles, production notes, press releases, letters, interviews—translated by Daniella Shreir, the cofounder and coeditor of the outstanding journal Another Gaze and the programmer behind Another Screen. Shreir has now curated and written extensive program notes for Let Cinema Go to Its Ruin: The Cinema of Marguerite Duras, a comprehensive retrospective opening today at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and running through August 25.

Fairly or not, Duras is better known to most cinephiles for the screenplay—her first—that she wrote for Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) than for the films she directed. Her first feature, The Music (1967), based on her own play, codirected with Paul Seban, and starring Delphine Seyrig and Robert Hossein as a couple preparing to finalize their divorce, is “essential viewing,” writes Adam Scovell in his Duras primer for the BFI. “Unlike her later work, Duras specifically uses detailed close-ups, capturing even the subtlest hint of emotional changes in her two leads; their feelings are laid bare with a brutal honesty. It’s one of the most visually accomplished and beautiful films of the 1960s thanks to Sacha Vierny’s cinematography and even features a cameo from Jules Dassin’s daughter, Julie.”

For her second feature and first solo outing, Destroy, She Said (1969), Duras adapted her own novel about one couple’s encounter with another in a secluded hotel out in the French countryside. Nathalie Granger (1972) is “both a star vehicle for Jeanne Moreau and Lucia Bosè and a home movie filmed at Duras’s cluttered old house near Paris,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. “The headily feminine ambience is disrupted by a hulking door-to-door washing-machine salesman—a young Gérard Depardieu—who suffers, in the women’s blankly skeptical presence, a comical existential breakdown. The acclaimed cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet’s velvety black-and-white images peer through windows and doorways, down corridors, into mirrors, and at walls and floors; Duras deploys his imposing technique to scrutinize her surroundings and to elevate them to living legend.”

“Beginning with Woman of the Ganges (1974), about a man who returns to a coastal ghost town and basks in the memories of the passionate affair he once had there, Duras began to launch a more radical offensive against the conventional union of sound and image,” writes Beatrice Loayza in the Notebook. “Disembodied voices observe the man disinterestedly, and speak indirectly of lost loves.”

Unseen narrators tell the story of Anne-Marie Stretter (Seyrig again), the wife of the French ambassador in Lahore, the lover of many, and a recurring character in Duras’s work, in India Song (1975). Loayza notes that in Her Venetian Name in Deserted Calcutta (1976), “the full soundtrack to India Song (both the score by Carlos d’Alessio and the narration) is repurposed to accompany new images of the same château, now in a state of decay, seemingly years after the events of the other film.”

“Unafraid to scavenge and repurpose, to reimagine and reinvent,” writes Lawrence Garcia in the Notebook, Duras “cycled through familiar memories and anecdotes and twice-treated tales, unabashed about producing works that might be considered adjunct, subsidiary, or otherwise incomplete. Which is to say that she did in the open what most artists do in secret.”

In The Truck (1977), Duras and Depardieu talk their way through a screenplay about a woman hitching a ride with a truck driver, and their read-through is spiked with Duras’s bitter comments on the state of the world. “After completing her India-related work and The Truck’s radical experiment with cinematic listening,” writes Ivone Margulies, “Duras returned, with Baxter, Vera Baxter (1977), to a set of motifs that she had first explored in Nathalie Granger: a feminine universe where silence reigns, where a house is a safe and threatening place, and where bordering exteriors, forest and sea, are made strange by the wan winter light.”

“In her books, but more saliently in her cinema,” writes Isabella Trimboli for the Los Angeles Review of Books, “Duras’s aquatic attention is absolute. She would often plant her female leads at the water’s edge, in some purgatorial coastal town, all despair and floppy limbs. But the sea is also the shape of desire and memory in her cinema, an endless force that washes away borders, destroys and engulfs, drifts and edges us closer to the void. These are films interested in a particular type of haunting: of a story that is not entirely yours but which deposits itself onto the shores of your consciousness anyway, retreating and returning again and again.”