Les mains négatives

Marguerite Duras was a great soul, she stood up against nothingness, with the power and fragility that is love, and she cried out. If that which is base, which is most everything, collapses around you like a rubbish tip avalanche, there is still Marguerite Duras, and films like this.

The images of the film are Paris at dusk. A city far too great to comprehend on any level other than the superficial, a city that leaves one reeling in Stendhalism. It's a blank Paris, before the stories of the day play out, it mirrors the "mains negatives" of the title, presence by absence, the hand-print revealed by the blank left when the area round it is covered in paint. The beauty of the city is revealed by the traces that people have left behind, murals, avenues of trees, monuments.

Marguerite spoke of these images as images passe-partout, images that allow the narration to infuse them with meaning. It's good to watch the film without sound first to understand how fully the perception of the images is informed by the narration.

The parallel images you don't see are of pre-historic petroglyphs, stencilled scuplted hand-prints which Duras describes as being in a cave by the sea. These were, in her interpretation, people simply recording their existence, in front of the immutability of the sea and the granite. What they have in common is that all the hands look the same, there's an equality to each person's existence implied. I have learnt in life that people require your love for them to be special, an exception. Marguerite was far from this paltry model, and loved everyone who looked existence in the eye. I plan one day to visit her grave in Montparnasse and pay my respects.

What can we say about Les mains negatives??? Boring cinema sure,but if you're a Warhol freak like me who can stand eight hours of empire State building you can stand this annoying traveling shot of Duras with some words in between: philosophy to put you to sleep.

The visual component of this short film consists of outtakes from Duras' film 'Le Navire Night': shots from a moving car of Paris streets at dawn, their emptiness in some way linked to Duras' sparse voiceover. The text puts forth a simple supposition about the prehistoric hand prints-'blue for the sea, black for the night sky'-left in caves in Southern France, 30,000 years ago: a single human whose 'negative' mark is accompanied by a plea for human connection, a screamed 'I love you', announced to 'those who have names, those who have identities'-'to anyone who will hear me screaming'. Duras has him alone-the search for human connection that characterises all her work, but is presented in particularly stripped-back form in these short-to-medium lengths films of the late '70s and early '80s ('Cesaree', 'Aurelia Steiner', 'L'Homme Atlantique'). These films are concerned with the direct-though not necessarily answered, or even heard-address from an 'I' to a 'you': lover and beloved, speaker and hearer, director and audience. In 'Les Mains', ambient sounds from the footage are removed; instead, Duras' voice and the solo violin that plays through it all, in one of the loops of short musical material she favours, as if tuning up, finding its way to a melody. The roving camera finds the Parisian streets themselves as a kind of equivalent to this mark-the traces of human existence with the humans removed. The humans we see are, in the main, the street sweepers and garbage collectors whose peripheral existence recalls the figures at the edges of roads in 'Le Camion' the previous year. The footage-at least in the online print I saw-was too blurred to make out much more than silhouettes, the rhythmic action of brushes, vague figures tipping rubbish sacks into lorries, but Renate Gunther suggests that they're migrant workers: the film's progression from night to the first traces of day, as white people start to appear, rendering the 'negative hands' those of the labour rendered invisible, carried out before the dawn, while at the same time resisting the binary thinking that would reinforce precisely that racialised division, that classed division that maps onto the spaces of night and day as labouring spaces. Duras' voiceover here also serves to displace the mendacious lies by which 'European' identity-continental being-is tied to an increasingly exclusionary ideology, one which encourages migration for cheap and disposable labour while closing its borders and blaming those from its peripheries for its ill. So it is that Duras presents the lone prehistoric man in context of what she calls 'the endless forests of Europe'. Europe itself is here estranged from its mendacious myths of dwelling, belonging (for some, not others). The prehistoric man is not the primordial Aryan ancestor but an outcast: civilisation, the permanence and question for socialisation implied by mark-making, is not the first step towards exclusion, conquest, division, exploitation, but the search for connection that continue in spite of those practices. As such, the film comes down to an expression of Duras' theory of art-and of civilisation itself: the search for human connection and a sublimated scream for love that inheres in any mark-making, any mode of address. "I am someone who calls, I am someone who called, who screamed, thirty thousand years ago: "I love you". I scream that I want to love you. I love you. I will love anyone who will hear me scream."