I am for a poor cinema: Le Camion cost 300,000 francs. Describing the end of the world with a billion francs doesn’t interest me because I don’t want the billions to see themselves in the film. 

If the script of Le Camion had been made into a conventional narrative film, it would have depicted a woman hitchhiker waiting by the side of a country road, before being picked up by a lorry. The majority of the film would have been taken up by conversations between the pair. The viewer would have noticed “a discrepancy in their pairing—perhaps arbitrary, due to a difference in age and the fact that we can’t easily ascertain what social ‘class’ the woman belongs to, nor uncover any sort of explanation for her presence there.”

Instead, the only bodies that appear on-screen are those of the filmmaker and her long-time friend and collaborator, Gérard Depardieu (whom, for Duras, possessed “a Shakespearean physique but could just as well be a lorry driver”). At a table in Duras’s Neauphle-le-Château home, they read the script of this unrealised film, unrehearsed. Occasionally, we are shown images of a lorry, at a distance, as it travels along a country road. In its repetitions and withholdings, Le Camion – and even the large, hulking truck – exudes a strange eroticism. 

Introduced by Martin Crowley, Professor of Modern French Thought and Culture at University of Cambridge and author of Duras, Writing, and the Ethical: Making the Broken Whole.