Les mains négatives, dir. Marguerite Duras, France 1979, 14 min.

As the first lines of this magnetic short explain, “negative hands” refers to Magdalenian cave art dating back to the Upper Palaeolithic, when hands were placed on cave walls and pigment was blown over them, leaving a negative image. 

Thousands and thousand of years later, Duras takes us on a night-time car ride through an unpopulated Paris in mid-August: During the forty-five minutes of tracking shot taken between a quarter past ten in the evening and a quarter to eight in the morning, we met only a prostitute in the boulevard de Magenta, Black men, a few Portuguese cleaning ladies on the Opéra side, the cleaners of banks, a few yobs, and a few homeless people. At that time, Paris does not belong to us. And these people, the ones who clean the banks, the streets, and the stores, have disappeared completely by eight o’clock, when we take their place. 

Accompanied by the sound of cello accords and Duras’s affecting voice-over, the film’s shades of blue and black had originally been undesired: they came from faulty footage shot for Le Navire Night. 

L’Homme atlantique, dir. Marguerite Duras, France 1981, 45 min.

Like Les mains négatives, L’Homme atlantique is composed of footage originally shot for another film: this time, of her long-time partner, Yann Andréa, and from Agatha et les lectures illimitées. But, Duras discovered that there was not enough footage from Agatha to make up L’Homme atlantique’s desired duration, and she didn’t want to shoot original footage for it either, so, just over half way through, the screen becomes black. Duras described L’Homme atlantique as her “most listenable film”, and what we hear is a woman’s account (voiced by Duras, and undoubtedly autobiographical) – often informed by cruelty – of her pain, having just been left by the man she loves. But Duras was also aware of its aesthetic shock, and, at the time of its one-cinema release in Paris, wrote a “warning” to potential audiences in Le Monde: 

I would like to warn everyone that most of the film is composed of black. It has become customary for the majority of cinemagoers in France to act as though cinema is something that is owed to them, to protest and scream bloody murder at the appearance of films that weren’t made for them alone. 

Therefore, I would like to tell these viewers not to step foot in the cinema that is screening L’Homme atlantique, that there is no use in doing so because the film was made in total ignorance of their existence, and that, by entering, they will only be disturbing those who are about to become the film’s audience. To these people, I say: do not take the risk of walking out of the film, do not buy a ticket in the first place. 

Please be warned: the ICA will issue no refunds.