All of Duras’ films are in some senses about the impossibility of making films; about trying to make the impossible film; about taking apart a medium felt to be at once incompatible with and an ideal medium for a particular approach to writing, narrating and speaking. As she writes/speaks in the late book/film ‘Writing’ (1993):
One should be able to make a certain film. A film of insistence, flashbacks, new beginnings. and then abandon it. And also film that abandonment. But not one will do it, we already know this […] Because this would be the film of the mad, unattainable idea, a film about the literature of living death.
As ever, Duras insists on separating and simplifying the strands that go into the normative idea of a film: scenario, plot, dialogue, narrative, characterisation, the creation of temporal and spatial continuity through editing, the self-contained world. In each of her films, this is accomplished in different ways; a different recombination of elements, building blocks rearranged with the overall structure that is the film: a combination of moving pictures, sound and dialogue which lasts for a set period of time, bracketed by opening and closing credits. In India Song (1975), the entirely non-diegetic soundtrack severs one link on which the sound film—and to an extent, the silent film—rests: that between the visible movement of lips and uttering of speech and its sounding (or the intertitles that accomplished the same function at an anticipatory delay in the silent era). This cut between the seen and the sounded, one in which the sense of re-enactment, dramatization and the like is retained through the silent tableaux of actors who recreate some of the social situations described on the soundtrack in glacial, frozen poses, is heightened in India Song's 'sequel', Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert (1976), in which the same soundtrack instead unfolds over landscapes entirely devoid of actors, of people. Images, though, are central in both films: in L’Homme Atlantique (1978), images themselves almost disappear, an almost entirely blank screen over which we hear Durasian speech removing, not only the connection between the sounded and the visual, but the visual element per se.
Le Camion is somewhere between these two extremes, the relationship between film and narrative severed—or alternatively reinforced. Duras reads a script to Gerard Depardieu in her house. The script describes the scenario for an imaginary film in which a woman hitches a ride on a truck by the sea and launches into a monologue—with occasional interdictions, responses, questions from the (male) driver—sometimes closing her eyes and launching into song, observing the landscape (apparently inaccurately), hinting at stories, providing vague hints of a family connection (the birth of her daughter’s child), a love affair, her disillusionment with the present state of Marxist politics, the complicity of the proletariat’s official representatives with those of the power structure they ostensibly seek to overthrow, leaving only the possibility of ‘ruin’ ("Let the world go to its ruin, that's the only form of politics"). Duras describes this scenario in the conditional tense—this is what she would have said if we had made this film—yet this description is itself scripted, everything under a tight control belying the vagueness, the dissolution, the aimlessness imparted by dialogue and scenario. Depardieu’s questions seem, too, to be scripted, his and Duras’ eyes fleeting downwards to the pages of script they hold even when the dialogue appears spontaneous. They are not playing the female passenger and the male driver, but of course they cannot not be read as analogues. As in ‘Le Navire Night’ (1979), in which the focus on settings, costumes, the process of make-up, are disconnected from any dramatized acting of the scenarios described, film becomes a record of narration rather than an embodiment of what’s narrated; but as one critic points out, perhaps this makes ‘Le Camion’ more truly a ‘narrative film’ than any conventional film narrative.
The film cuts between Duras and Depardieu, filmed in one setting in the day, in another at dusk; between shots, filmed from a moving vehicle, of the landscape—factories, lorry parks, the edges of towns constituting neither the urban built environment nor the rural; spaces of transport and passage—and shots of the titular blue lorry travelling through it, Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations intermittently coming and going as if on the truck’s radio. Beethoven’s grand cycle of 33 pieces departs from a melody by publisher-composer Anton Diabelli, who’d commissioned the leading European composers to write variations on his waltz theme, both as an exercise in vanity and a charitable enterprise for families affected by the Napoleonic wars. In these variations, the original theme, characterised by the simplicity of its repeated musical sequences, its ‘melodic neutrality’ (Hans von Bulow’s phrase), is taken apart from its smallest elements outwards and turned into a display of virtuosity, complexity, variant texture and mood, in a process often read as a kind of satire or parody on the drab and thin material it extends to other realms. Alfred Brendel: “The theme has ceased to reign over its unruly offspring. Rather, the variations decide what the theme may have to offer them. Instead of being confirmed, adorned and glorified, it is improved, parodied, ridiculed, disclaimed, transfigured, mourned, stamped out and finally uplifted.” Writing on Ivor Levit’s recent recording of the piece, a critic describes this principle of variation as “identifying with the particular musical situation and at the same time maintaining his distance from it”. The piece itself is not mentioned in the film, unlike the now (semi-)famous waltz by Carlos D'Alessio that haunts ‘India Song’, or the less well-known pan-flute melody that equally haunts ‘Baxter, Vera Baxter’—both sounds which could well be said to imagine diegetically from what we see onscreen, even in the radically discontinuous non-diegesis of the ‘India Song’ soundtrack, recorded before shooting, to emerge from the traces of a social milieu in which sound spills over and signifies classed anxieties, doubts, desires, proximities. D'Alessio's pieces are characterised precisely by their simplicity, their incessant repetition: these are not extend 'works', but 'pieces', morceaux, fragments entire in themselves, the opposite of grand structures. Here, the Diabelli Variations' grandeur, its variations on a theme, the parodic play between distance and identification built into its structure and the circumstances of its composition, are subject to further 'variation', heard only in fragments--sometimes alone on the soundtrack, sometimes as an undertone beneath voiceover--fitting Le Camion’s own distances between what’s described, what’s seen, what’s spoken and unspoken. In a film that--as we'll see--is in large part to do with political despondency, Beethoven may be invoked for his association with the revolutionary hopes associated with art—as he is in Fredric Rzeswki’s ‘The People United Will Never Be Defeated’, written two years before Duras’ film, and using the model of the Diabelli Variations to spin a bravura fantasy on the Chilean revolutionary song, on the political movement/s of peoples and nations, of the possibility of, first Eurocentric, then ‘Third World’ universalism. In Duras, though, perhaps what wins out is parody—the distance between technique and melodic core, between idea and execution, between the cohesiveness of the large-scale concert work based on a single theme and the elliptical nature of the fragmentary variation form. Or perhaps to do so would be to over-read detail, in a film at once so sparse and, in its ambiguity, seemingly freighted with an easily-missed significance in every aspect.
Duras notes in her script that the film could be shot in various different locales—all of them outside the metropolitan centre, through-spaces, neglected spaces, a ‘land of migrants’. As such, they destabilise notions of national belonging, of the power relations read into landscape, while suggesting the fate of the economic periphery, that which is to the side of dominant narratives, albeit in a manner far removed from the conventional representational framings of social realism, cinema verité, and the like. When we see these landscapes, we might think, if not of cinema verité, of the social critique imparted through landscape film in Masao Adachi’s theory of ‘fukeiron’, in which “all the landscapes one faces in one’s daily life, even those such as the beautiful sites shown on a postcard, are essentially related to the figure of a ruling power”; of his 1969 film A.K.A. Serial Killer in particular. At this point in the 1970s, Adachi’s work, or at least his theories, would presumably have been known to Duras through left-wing and filmmaking circles, but overshadowed and supplanted by Adachi’s own disappearance from filmmaking and exile in Lebanon as part of the Japanese Red Army. Perhaps more likely, we think of James Benning; not yet occupying his position as a prime filmmaker of landscape, Benning’s and Bette Gordon’s United States of America had nonetheless been released two years before Le Camion, with its single moving camera shot as two protagonists—a man and a woman—driving across the States; or Barbara Loden’s Wanda, in which driving, and the female-passenger, male-driver relationship, becomes index of power and passivity. Later, the wanderings of Varda’s Vagabond amplify the sense of being outside social structures, on the edge of towns, between urban and rural, with the road as conduit for a journey without destination. In all these films, the relations between gendered power dynamics, transport, travel and landscape are inscribed into the very (narrative) texture of the film. In A.K.A. Serial Killer, Adachi’s misogynist serial killer, his repression and hatred emerging from the social structures we see, not as a kin of disembodied ideology, but inscribed into the very physical structures in which he lives and moods: structures which the film hopes it can re-train us to read, train us to re-read, not as neutral backdrop but as an open book of domination and violence. Loden’s, meanwhile, is an exploration of safety-in-domination, passivity-in-violence, the role of the accomplice, the subjugated, the drifting.
At the same time, Duras’ insistent return to the static, interior scene of reading—the scenes with Depardieu occupy at least as much screen time as the footage of and from the lorry—prevents these resonances of the ‘road movie’ – as quintessentially American or pseudo-American import (think Wim Wenders). Here is none of the fetishization of vehicles, the potentials of travel or escape found in the road movie as latter day cowboy movie, nor as obvious a diagnostic of gendered power and domination as found in Adachi or Loden. The film feels at once specific and non-specific: in one shot, the camera sweeps round the cabin of the parked lorry—described in the script as both prison and safe house—with a combination of clinical precision and vagueness. The camera seems too big to move comfortably around the space, we see few details that indicate that someone has actually been inside. It feels too antiseptic, too uninhabited, too clean. In Duras’ script, the room in which the reading takes place—curtains shut in day, with a light on inside to create a ‘dark room’; or curtains open to the night, with the film light outside visible in the reflection—becomes analogous to the lorry’s cabin and again in turn to a photographic dark room; all three keeping out a kind of unbearable or sinister light from outside--a door suddenly opened on a darkroom, destroying the image developing within--which nonetheless constitutes its very conditions of possibility.
I feel as though you and I, too, are threatened by the same light that they are frightened of; the fear that all of a sudden the lorry’s cab, this darkroom, may be flooded by a stream of light, you see…The fear of a catastrophe: political intelligence.
Is this fear the fear of political intelligence, or is this fear political intelligence in itself? What might this catastrophe be, insulated but constantly on the move? Is this even all an extended metaphor for the ‘fellow traveller’?
For the film's 'exterior' shots--which, as that dialogue might indicate, are always poised delicately between exterior and interior--we view the lorry from the outside, seen from a distance, the shots too brief and spatially ambiguous to give much sense of where the vehicle's come from or where it's going. Alternatively, in the ‘landscape’ shots filmed from within it, the lorry becomes merely a floating conduit, its apparently directionless motion emblematised in a scene in which it drives around a roundabout twice for seemingly no reason. As the lorry passes various built structures, the woman remarks that people used to live on these sites—you’re lying replies the driver—I’m lying, she admits. But of course people do live here; this is not a ruined landscape, an ‘end of the world’ (as she describes the sea). To be sure, aside from a brief shot of children by the roadside in the roundabout ‘scene’, these roads and roadsides are devoid of people, the dwellings they pass crumbling or half-built, spaces of potential or aftermath, spaces of passage rather than certainty. The driver doesn’t know what packages he’s delivering or where he’s delivering to; the woman doesn’t know where she’s going—perhaps back to the sea from where she came—the journey doesn’t seem to stop or end. But people do live here, here in the Yvelines region; immigrant families, like those families who are the focus of Duras’ later novel ‘Summer Rain’; those who are not ‘integrated’ into the fabric of the dominant order, those to whom the ‘social contract’ is barely extended or not at all. These, no doubt, are the people we see at the side of the world—those who inhabit spaces which, to those who pass through them, are liminal, transitory, excluded from any rhetoric of ‘dwelling’ or ‘belonging’.
If the passenger’s disillusion with Marxism appears close to the familiar left melancholy born out of—or bearing—cynicism and despair from the comfortably sad, sadly comfortable vantage of its own beautiful rooms and antique furniture, perhaps its disillusion with (one presumes) an official Communist Party line might derive from the historical failure of that line to encompass the experience of those marginalised, those by the roadside, those not justified, glorified, given their historical place as subject-objects of history within the ranks of and by the name of ‘proletariat’. This view, in which race, nationality and gender are divisive modes of subsidiary otherness detracting from the predominant struggle, refuses that which Duras names in ‘Writing’ as “coexistence with humans, with colonised populations, with the fabulous mass of strangers in the world, of people along, of universal solitude”; as “planetary death, proletarian death”. For Duras in ‘Writing’, the smallest detail—in this case, the slow death of a fly which she happens to witness—connects to the crises of war and death, “these mountains of war on earth”—or, as the woman suddenly cries out in Le Camion (in what’s also a kind of ironic self-reference to Duras’ most famous cinematic contribution, the screenplay for Hiroshima Mon Amour), “Hiroshima!” The PCF son-in-law's reluctance to name his non-Jewish son 'Abraham' for fear of inciting a pogrom; Stalinist anti-Semitism; the scriptural Abraham’s own nomadic wandering, poised between an abandonment of social context and myths of nation-building and identity-formation; the sea as the figure of departure and arrival, in betweenness, mist, coasts, borders, the switches and ambiguities of power.
“Is it a film?” asks Depardieu at the very beginning of this film, reading from a script he was seeing for the first time. “It would have been a film”, replies Duras, reading from the script she’s written. And then: “Yes, it’s a film”. Perhaps we might draw that film that "would have been a film"—yet which, in its rehearsal, retelling, conjectural description, is a film—into the orbit of Duras' conception of revolution, of a non-derailed, non-betrayed communism that refuses compromises with the established order, those compromises Duras describes as a bargain between capitalism and socialism, resulting “the infinite delay of any free revolution”: 1956—“the clowns on the tanks, entering Prague”—1968—a time of promise returned again to compromise and defeat; the Party as patriarchal structure (the male driver accusing the unattached, middle-aged, unfixed woman, who can’t be interpellated in terms of sexuality, desire or attachment to the familial structure, of being, first, a reactionary, and then a ‘madwoman’ escaped from a psychiatric hospital); yet a certain turn towards a pragmatic politics (in Duras’ continued endorsement of Mitterand, based in part on their shared past in the Resistance) which might well be accused of exactly the same compromises—those between socialism and capitalism—with which Duras (rightly) accuses Stalinism. The passenger, in her apparent lack of attachment to existing systems of social conscription, is not an ideal, utopian figure—the impossible fulfilment of that which exists as contradiction, the material affects of power, class struggle, patriarchy, silencing, the nothingness of sound and fury, in the realm of the impossible film. Her—and the film’s--'aimless', 'banal' mobility (Duras’ own terms) are not escape, but a kind of fugitive moving within entrapment, encampment, an endless negotiation of power, of the frames—filmed, written, spoken, gendered, politicised—within which one can speak.
“Several explanations would have been possible”.
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