Adjunct Professor Ivone Marguiles has written an essay for the Criterion Collection release of two of the most acclaimed films by Marguerite Duras, India Song and Baxter, Vera Baxter. This special edition, which includes a 1977 interview with the French writer, 2K digital restorations, and more, will be released in February.
“Writing for Criterion was a fantastic way of immersing myself once again into Duras's very particular universe. I always knew about her politics, but I discovered more about her journalistic writing work as an editor and playwright,” Marguiles said. “I first read Duras's novels because of Hiroshima Mon Amour. It was fascinating that such an abstract poetic work could have been issued from a conventional way of figuring out characters' backstories, as she details in her notes to the script. I hope my notes are helpful as an entry into Duras's two films and that more of her work is issued, particularly Nathalie Granger, another unique film.”
India song, Duras’s most famous movie, depicts the French ambassador’s wife in India having affairs with multiple men within the fortress of a lavish but decaying embassy during the 1930s. In Baxter, Vera Baxter, based on her then-unpublished novel Vera Baxter ou Les Plagues de l’Atlantique, the main character reflects on her life as she talks to a mysterious woman who was drawn to Baxter’s villa.
“Boldly reimagining the possibilities of dialogue, music, silence, and architectural space, the tantalizing, sphinxlike evocations of soul-deep female malaise India Song and Baxter, Vera Baxter embody Duras’s singular multisensory approach, with each opening up new spaces for the expression of women’s interior worlds,” the Criterion collection said about the upcoming release.
Ivone Margulies has a PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University. Her academic research focuses on reenactment and forms of theatricality in cinema, the representation of every day and duration in global realist cinema, cinema verité, psychodrama, French film, feminist film practice, Independent film, and performance. A film scholar and critic, she has authored Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist every day (translated into Portuguese and Spanish) and has published extensively on Chantal Akerman, on performance and realism in French and Brazilian cinemas as well as on moving image artists. Her most recent book, In Person: Reenactment in Postwar and Contemporary Cinema (2019), on films in which people reenact aspects of their own lives, was launched with a related series at Anthology Film Archives. She is the editor of Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema and co-editor of On Women’s Films: Across worlds and Generations.
