The vertigo that comes with making a film like Son nom de Venise makes the return to what one might call ‘the direction of actors within a given narrative’, or ‘classical narrative’ difficult. While I was making the film, I thought to myself, I’m going nowhere, I’m not going to end up anywhere. I thought, my producers must be crazy, I am drifting into a sort of cinematic no man’s land where there is no correlation between sound and image; I am drifting into a kind of disarticulated cinematic time. And yet I filmed and I finished Son nom de Venise. 

Looking at Son nom de Venise is like looking at somebody else’s film. I am like a traveller in a foreign land. 

Wanting to “finish what [she] had started” in 1975 with India Song, a film that had left her dissatisfied, Duras set out the following year, during the coldest days of winter – with a crew comprising only cinematographer Bruno Nuytten and his assistant – to remake the film. Son nom de Venise’s images provide a forensic exploration of the ruins of the Palais Rothschild in the Bois de Bologne – which, in slightly better condition and in better weather, had been used to stand for Calcutta in India Song. There are no actors in Son nom de Venise, but Carlos d’Alessio’s seductive, frenzied melodies and the soundtrack of disembodied voices remain from the “original”. Years before she noted, after making the image-deprived L’homme atlantique, that “sound is something to be looked at”, she observed with this “second India Song” that: “what there is to see in Son nom de Venise no longer hinders, no longer obstructs, the sound”. Son nom de Venise is an aural delight, and the product of an atmosphere of trust and complicity between her and her closest collaborators. 

Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert will be prefaced with Absis’s Cygne I & II, two short films made in collaboration with Duras, cinematographer Bruno Nuytten, and actor Michael Lonsdale (Détruire dit-elle, India Song). After their initial screenings in 1976, they fell into obscurity before their rediscovery by Judit Naranjo Ribó.

‘For Cygne I, I asked Marguerite to read from a script. I wrote the script for Cygne II with Michael Lonsdale’s voice in mind. 

The sets? I knew exactly what I wanted. I wanted to shoot in the high school where my father was the principal. It was there and nowhere else. His wife Colette, who is a painter, built them perfectly, just as I had imagined. The whole team came to this suburban high school on the day of the shoot. We shot both films on the same day. 

In Cygne I, Lizzie Lennard is lying naked, beautiful, in the foreground. I, her double, am standing at the piano and singing. For Cygne II, there is Colette Fellous, now an author, Jean-Baptiste Malartre and myself. 

On the shoot, there was the team, but also Marguerite, Michelle Porte and the producer François Barrat. 

We set the music at the same time as we filmed. For Cygne I, Ariadne’s Lamento is performed in its entirety as the scene is being played out as in the theater. But I hadn’t thought about the discrepancy between the speed of the images and that of the sound. As a result, when we saw the rushes, the singer’s back was pulsating against the beat.’ 
– Absis, in conversation with Judit Naranjo Ribó