Jaune le soleil takes place in the fictional town of Staadt, where David, a mason, and his female companion, Sabana (one of Duras’s brilliant recurring actresses, Catherine Sellers), have been tasked with guarding a man, “the Jew” – who, in the film, is also called “the Dog”, “the Foreigner”, “the Traitor”, “the Arab”, and “the Communist” – until his execution later that day.
 
While the film’s characters resemble pawns in a game of chess – moved around the checkered linoleum flooring of the film’s sole location – its dialogue, at once elusive and sharp, manifests the rotten foundations of systematic oppression. In Duras’s own words, “the purpose of the image is to carry the word”. Words that, though shared discreetly in a confined space, may bring about revolutionary change to the world outside. 
 
For Duras, the “Jew” in the film represented “every being who says no, who leaves, who is sceptical of all types of power”. If Duras vacillated on cinema’s political capacity throughout her career, at the time of Jaune le soleil, she was more than clear: “This film is a political film, not a circumstantial one. IF ONE IS ABLE TO LOSE SIGHT of the fact that this film is POLITICAL, we will have failed completely” [capitalisation Duras’s own].
 
Join us for the premiere of this recently-restored copy of Jaune le soleil from the Cinemathèque Française.