Negative hands

Les mains négatives, a film by Marguerite Duras.

A paper on the film:

Les mains negatives is an 18 minute colour film made by the French writer Marguerite Duras in 1979. It consists evidently of a sequence of images, travelling shots of Paris at 7 in the morning, and a voiceover, read by Duras herself from a script published separately as ‘Les mains négatives’, usually alongside the text of the film Le Navire Night. The images of Les Mains negatives are in fact out-takes from the shooting of Le Navire night, and the script was written on the basis of (‘à partir de’) these out-takes. This is an important point to underline; the script was written from the starting point of the images, the visual document. It will become clear why.

I will summarise minimally some of the key elements of the film: Travelling shots of Paris, taken from a moving vehicle, mostly of the boulevards. Early morning. No synchronised sound. Voiceover. Little traffic. Street cleaners. A few lights. Advertisments. Shop signs. Café signs. Banks.

[…]

Duras’s film, as I said, is an enigma. It does not give us information about the caves nor the negative hands. It is not a document. Its effect, its affect, is elsewhere.

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