HIM: Was this summer as beautiful as we say it was? 

HER: Yes, it was a marvellous summer. The memory of it is stronger than we are, stronger than we who remember it... stronger than you, than we who stand together before it... The summer was overpowering, stronger than us, bluer than you, more forthright than our beauty, than my body, sweeter than this skin against mine in the sun, than this mouth that I do not know... 

In the deserted lobby of a hotel by the sea (Duras’s Trouville residence, which also serves as the location for La Femme du Gange and L’Homme atlantique), the memories of an incestuous summer love affair between a sister and brother unfold over voice-over (Marguerite Duras, unmistakably, and the voice of her long-time, final partner, Yann Andréa), as Andréa and Bulle Ogier, dressed for winter, drift across the large room without making contact. Sometimes, in the hall’s mirror, we see a cameraman behind the heavy equipment which is being used to make the film itself. Displaying Duras’s distinctive challenge to the relationship between sound and image, a collage is created in Agatha that mirrors the ephemeral and elusive nature of memory itself. 

Somewhat amusingly, Marguerite Duras wrote that Agatha was “The first film I’ve written about happiness.” Agatha is an adaptation of the play she had written earlier that same year, which in turn was inspired by Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930), which she had recently discovered. 

The screening will be introduced by writer Laura Staab.