Still the Second Resource

This second resource is talk about that the writer use Michael Riffaterre's theory analysis the film about The Lover. I think this theory also can help us to understand Marguerite Donnadieu's writing form in The Lover.

Using Riffaterre to rehabilitate The Lover
By Siobhan Brownlie
In this article I shall use Michael Riffaterre's theory of intertextuality to re-examine the film The Lover. The film has been widely seen as a seriously inadequate adaptation of Marguerite Duras's novel L'amant. I shall show, however, how certain Riffaterrian "ungrammaticalities" in the film, inconsistencies and unusual elements, can be understood as approximating the subtle complexity of the novel. Riffaterre's theory thus provides a new and interesting way of analyzing film adaptations.
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In the discussion of film adaptation the concept of "intertextuality" has served the useful purpose of transcending the moralistic statements often associated with "fidelity," although the latter notion remains important. Stam proposes the concept of "intertextual dialogism," whereby a film is conceived as a turn in an ongoing dialogical process such that it bears the traces of multiple intertexts (64). Film adaptation can be conceived as the reproduction and transformation of intertexts through various processes such as selection, amplification, popularization, and reculturalization. These processes are conditioned by the material and financial contingencies specific to cinema, and by ambient target culture discourses and ideology reflected in studio style, ideological fashion, political constraints, auteur's predilections, economic advantage, and evolving technology (Stam 68-69).
As compared with Stam's notion of dialogism that conceptualizes a simultaneity or forward movement of evolving texts, Riffaterre proposes a backward-looking search for intertexts for the purposes of elucidation. Riffaterre is well known for his detailed and perspicacious readings of poetry, and for a theoretical framework explaining his practice of reading that seems to have been elaborated independently from work by other theorists. For Riffaterre there are two stages of reading: the heuristic/referential stage producing meaning and the retroactive/hermeneutic stage producing significance. The text is first read in a linear fashion in which the referential or mimetic dominates. If there are aspects that do not fit a mimetic reading, a second reading is made to gain an understanding of non-referential aspects such as tropes, ambiguities, contradictions, and sound patterns that create meaning. The second semiotic reading elucidates what Riffaterre terms "ungrammaticalities," anything unusual (formal or semantic) or which does not fit mimesis, in particular ambiguities, contradictions, and indeterminacies. Ungrammaticalities are understood through reference to other texts, termed intertexts, which may be conventional forms and styles, cliches and formulae, fragments of texts or entire texts. For Riffaterre every ungrammaticality is a sign of grammaticality elsewhere: "the poetic sign has two faces: textually ungrammatical, intertextually grammatical; displaced and distorted in the mimesis system, but in the semiotic grid appropriate and rightly placed" (Semiotics 164).
For Riffaterre an intertext may be aleatory (the reader may or may not enrich his or her understanding by bringing intertextual knowledge to the reading) or determinate (there is an intertext that is signaled by ungrammaticality, and which is necessary for comprehension of the text). In the latter case the reader may not be knowledgeable of a specific intertext, but an intertext will be presupposed because of the deictic intertextual trace of ungrammaticality. There may be more than one pertinent intertext: overdetermination provides multiple motivations for words used. In connection with intertextuality, Riffaterre also takes up the Peircean notion of "interpretant" as a mediating sign that explains the relationship between two signs such as the text and the intertext. An example of an interpretant is the phoenix, the symbol of eternity (and thus potentially of prostitution) that evokes also flame and flight. This interpretant links Mallarme's text "Le Tom-beau de Charles Baudelaire" 'Charles Baudelaire's Tomb' to Baudelaire's "Crepuscule du soir" 'Evening Twilight' in the following passages: Il allume hagard un immortel pubis Dont le vol selon le reverbere decouche 'Gas lights up wildly an immortal pubes whose flight sweeps away from home following the street lamp' (Mallarme) and A travers les lueurs que tourmentent le vent la Prostitution s 'allume dans les rues 'Through the lights which the wind torments, Prostitution is lit up in the streets' (Baudelaire) (Riffaterre, "La trace").
There have been various criticisms of Riffaterre's theory of reading and intertextuality. In his discussion of the reading process Riffaterre does not take fully into account the issue of the readers' competence and background, which are multiple and varied. Individual readers bring various presuppositions to reading, and there is a dialectical relationship between text and reader. In Riffaterre the issue of interpretation is oversimplified: he tends to think that all can be elucidated in a univocal manner by reference to the pertinent intertext. He does not allow for multiple and open-ended interpretations of texts; indeterminacy cannot simply be "solved." The concepts of determinate and aleatory intertexts are therefore problematic (Allen 126-30). However, Riffaterre's concepts may be useful tools in examining film adaptations: despite the potential oversimplification, the double reading for mimesis and semiosis, as well as the procedure of intertextual elucidation, are worth exploring.
In my case study of the film The Lover by filmmaker Jean-Jacques Annaud and related texts, I apply Riffaterre's ideas on intertextuality. The starting point is the notion of an "ungrammaticality." In Riffaterrian terminology this term has a wide extension. I apply it to the film The Lover as an aspect that strikes the viewer as unusual or inexplicable. The next step is to survey the main texts pertinent to the film to be referred to for the purposes of elucidation. Potentially the main intertexts are the novel L'amant by Marguerite Duras, its translation The Lover, and a second novel (1) by Duras, L'amant de la Chine du Nord. It is not entirely clear on what exactly the film screenplay was based. According to Laure Adler's account, Duras wrote an initial screenplay, which was used by Jean-Jacques Annaud and scriptwriter Gerard Brach in conjunction with the novel L'amant to produce the final screenplay in French. Annaud apparently said that he was mostly inspired by the book (561-62). The filmed screenplay is in English; it is a translation by Eric Sterling Collins of the French script adaptation (Avant-Scene Cinema 5). It is not clear either whether the screenplay translator referred to the existing English translation of the book The Lover. Having withdrawn from the film project, Duras published L 'amant de la Chine du Nord, which is based on her initial screenplay. All the different versions recount the story of the affair between a poor adolescent French girl and a wealthy older Chinese man in Indochina of the early 1930s, inspired by Duras's own youthful experience.
Critics of the film would indicate that it contains in fact few "ungrammaticalities" as compared with Duras's novel, L'amant. The film has been dismissed as being conventional arty soft porn. A more serious criticism is that Annaud turned Duras's nouveau roman style text into a simple linear autobiographical account of a sexual encounter, which not only eliminates the rich modernist complexity of the novel, but recuperates the work into a patriarchal and imperialist ideology that is in contradiction with the novel. In Bonnigal's words: The reduction of L'amant to its carnality excises the novel's
intellectual content and debases Duras's text to conservative and
queasy erotica in which the postcolonial self is silenced and the
female subject is reappropriated and re-exposed to patriarchal
voyeurism. (9) (2)
Another critic Randall is particularly interested in the notion of voyeurism. He finds that Annaud's film panders to the scopophilic, coercing the male viewer into inhabiting a culturally conditioned desire for objectification and dominance. This contrasts with Duras's novel, which defeats the voyeuristic impulse by double-coding, combining the realist and romanticized paradigms with self-reflexive anti-illusionist strategies (101). Given that the film explicitly sets forth the notion that it represents Duras's work by means of an initial scene that depicts the writer writing the book, the charge of misrepresentation seems all the more important. (3)
In contrast to the usual reaction to The Lover, I contend that a close viewing of the film reveals ungrammaticalities that on the one hand can be understood through reference to intertexts following the Riffaterrian procedure, and on the other hand serve to undermine the criticisms of the film. It is true that the film revolves around the sexual encounter, although there are also references to the importance of another discovery for the girl: the fact that she wants to become a writer. It is true that the film is representational and in the main linear (apart from one flashback near the beginning to the girl's stay in Sadec), which contrasts greatly with the novel L'amant, remarkable for its discontinuity, digressions, and mixing of events in different time periods. (4) Ungrammaticalities can be considered, however, to upset a simple reading of the film. These ungrammaticalities concern primarily the role and nature of the narration/voiceover that is an important feature of the film. The voiceover is provided by an older actress who represents the girl of the story grown old, and who is reminiscing about her youth. In the following discussion I will consider first ungrammaticalities that clearly derive from, indeed are copied from the book, before examining aspects that are specific to the filmic medium.
The first feature of the film to be discussed is the discrepancy between the kind of language in the characters' dialogues and in the voiceover narration and commentary. The dialogues are simple and banal in their language; (5) whereas the voiceover is much more profound, providing insights into characters and situations, and it has a particular poetic quality with repetitions, and some unusual imagery and vocabulary. Here is a short example of voiceover narration: [...] To write, that's what I see beyond the moment in that great
desert under the features of which I see the extent of my life [...]
The nature of the voiceover narration is elucidated by reference to one of the principal intertexts, the book L'amant. The narration consists primarily of an English rendering of parts of the French novel, and it is the striking style of the novel that is conveyed. Here is the corresponding passage to the above in the novel: Je vais ecrire des livres. C'est ce que je vois au-dela de
l'instant, dans le grand desert sous les traits duquel m'apparait
l'etendue de ma vie. (Duras, L'amant 126) (6)
Annaud explains that he deliberately used Duras's text in the voiceover, not only in order to be "faithful" to the literariness of the book, but also to distance himself at times from the generally over-riding filmic concreteness of the event, spoken dialogue, and the image by giving way to the alienated abstractness, the music, and pleasure of written words in the voiceover text (Alion 82).
A noticeable aspect of the voiceover narration is the shifting between first-person and third-person reference to the girl. Initially the first-person pronoun is used: "At 18 I aged [...] Look at me. I'm 15 and a half. It's the crossing of the river. When I go back to Saigon, it's as though I'm on a journey [...]." Then there is a switch to the third person: "He came that Thursday afternoon to the boarding house. He came to wait for her with the big black car" (my emphasis). In the recounting of the first love scene the third person for the girl is continued: "She touches the softness of the sex, of the skin, she caresses the gold hue, the unknown novelty [...]." However, shortly after the first love-making the first person is reverted to: "I had asked him to do it again and again, to do it to me." Sometimes there is a quick change between first person and third. In the following quotation from the narration, the first person "we" is used, then the girl is referred to as "the little one": We are lovers. Every day we go back to the bachelor's room. We can't
stop loving. This takes place in the sleazy district of Cholon every
evening. Every evening the little one comes to receive the pleasure
that makes one scream, from this dark man, this man from Cholon,
from China.
The first person is reverted to in the narration about the girl's family: "Now and then, I go back to the house in Sadec, to the horror of the house in Sadec [...]," and in following scenes of the family's meal at the restaurant with the Chinese man, the headmistress's meeting with the mother, and the scene at the beach between the girl and the Chinese man. However, at the end of the film the third person is adopted to recount the scene on the boat departing for France: "It was when the boat uttered its first farewell and the gangway had been hauled up [...] that she had wept." The third person used at this point for both main characters in the film gives a striking depiction, a portrait, of their final contact that unifies the film by mirroring their very first meeting: She was leaning on the railing like the first time on the ferry. She
knew he was watching her, she was watching him too [...]
The third person is continued for the rest of the film, during the boat trip when the girl realizes that she may have loved the Chinese man, and in recounting how years later he had phoned her in Paris. At this point the narrator/writer could be close to the age of the character, and thus it is surprising that the third person is used.
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As well as the shifts between first person and third person in the voiceover, there is ambiguity with regard to the first person. Sometimes "I" clearly refers to the young girl, whereas sometimes "I" refers to the narrator; at times the reference could be to both. Within the same passage there may be a shift from one to the other, as in the following: I still see the place of distress, shipwrecked, the distempered
walls, the slatted shutters giving onto the furnace, the soiling of
the blood. I remember well, the room is dark, it's surrounded by the
never-ending clamour of the town [...] my body was in that public
noise, this passing-by from the outside, exposed. The sea, I
thought, the immensity.
The first "I" in "I still see" is the narrator, the old woman, who is reminiscing; similarly "I remember well." The phrase "my body" is ambiguous given the previous uses of "I" for the narrator: is she thinking of her body when she was a young girl, or is she thinking of her body as an entity unchanging over time in its essence? This ambiguity acts as a transition to the final "I" in "I thought," which refers to the young girl, and her thoughts at that moment.
The uses of the pronouns in the film voiceover text constitute ungrammaticalities in the form of unusual use and indeterminacy. These ungrammaticalities can be understood with reference to the text of L'amant. The exact same features are present in the book, where they form an idiosyncratic use and have a specific significance: the concept of a coherent single self is challenged, and the reader/viewer is made to accept multiplicity, non-exclusive contradiction and uncertainty, and is invited to participate in the production of identity and meaning (Ramsay 34). Randall considers that the book L'amant "destructures" the voyeuristic impulse since the vacillating first- and third-person narrative perspectives impede the socially imposed imperative to forget the fiction's artifice. He argues, on the other hand, that the film's "rapacious scenes of simulated seduction, copulation, and prostitution coerce the male viewer into voyeuristic objectification" (101). We have seen, however, that the film too contains some oscillation between first and third person, and therefore at times highlights the nature of film as a construction and positioning entity. Just as in the book, the shift to third person highlights self-reflexivity and the girl/narrator taking charge, observing herself and others, inviting others to observe her, observing others observing her, and therefore undoing surreptitious voyeurism of viewers: the girl is not simply a passive object for the secretive male gaze.
Another unusual linguistic feature of the voiceover text is the mixture of verb tenses. The story is narrated using variously present tenses, preterit tense, and past perfect tense. Sometimes changes between tenses occur rapidly within the same section of narration. Here are some examples of the different tenses:
So that day I'm going back to Saigon. I'm wearing my Cavery shoes and my man's hat [...] He came that Thursday afternoon to the boarding house. He came to wait for her with the big black car [...] Now and then I go back to the house in Sadec, to the horror of the house in Sadec [...] She had wept because she had thought of that man from Cholon, her lover, and suddenly she wasn't sure of not having loved him with a love she hadn't seen because it had lost itself in the story [...]
This tense variation can be elucidated by reference to L'amant, which contains an analogous mixture. The shifting of time/tense reflects the shifting multiple points of view of a narrator who is omniscient but also has a point of view situated in the time that the writing and the evocation of the emotion of the writing is creating (Ramsay 41). Past and present do not belong to a continuum, but confront each other in various ways in the person of the narrator. It is the interplay of images of the self, rather than development through time, which characterizes the narrative procedure in L 'amant (Sankey 63). Tense also inscribes emotional intensity in several ways: the eternal time-lessness of the present tense in the description of the primal scene of the meeting of the girl and the Chinese man on the ferry; and the brutal breaking of the circuit of desiring and being desired by the distancing of the past perfect tense at the end of the book/film (Sankey 64, 66).
Having discussed unusual aspects of the voiceover that can be traced directly to the text L'amant, I shall now examine ungrammaticalities that involve specificities of the filmic medium. The voiceover is provided by the alluring voice of Jeanne Moreau, representing the girl of the story grown old. The girl played by Jane March has a British accent, and it is inconceivable in the real world that her accent could change into Jeanne Moreau's French-American accent when she is older. Furthermore Jeanne Moreau is a very accomplished actress, whereas Jane March's acting leaves much to be desired; this is reflected in delivery of words encompassing prosodic features such as intonation, rhythm, and pauses. The effect of the discrepancy between the two voices can be interpreted and understood in relation to the book L'amant. (7) As mentioned earlier with reference to pronoun usage in the voiceover, the notion of unified self is questioned in the book, and a confused and multiple self posited through diverse linguistic and compositional means. The film, a different semiotic medium with different resources at its disposal, can use sound in the form of two different accents and delivery for one character in order to effect this same questioning. In L 'amant there is also a questioning of the certainty of events and of linear time (partly through use of verb tenses, as discussed above): the simultaneous presence of the starkly contrasting young girl's and older woman's voices in the film emphasizes the bringing together of the present and the past, of events and memories/recountings/reconstruction of events--the (im)possibility of recovering the past self through the present self (Ramsay 27).
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The narrator's words serve to reinforce the action or scene on screen, adding a verbal poetic description to the image, or giving background information or a character's thoughts. However, there is quite often a discrepancy between what is being shown on the screen and the narrator's words. This can be a minor discrepancy, such as the narrator recounting a generalization whereas the scene depicts a particular instance. An example of both particularity and generalization in the narration concerns the ferry scene when the girl and the Chinese man first meet. The narrator says "It's the crossing of the river [...] That day it's the end of the school holidays, I don't remember which one." This is a very particular and special day shown on screen and narrated as "that day," but there is also generalization in the narration with regard to the return from the school holidays: the repetitiveness of the event is such that the narrator does not remember at the end of which particular holiday the meeting took place. Noticeable too are instances when the narrator starts to recount something before it is shown on the screen; or conversely the narrator recounts information relevant to a previous scene when a new scene has started. In this way the voiceover creates links between images and scenes, and upsets strictly linear time by telescoping present and past, or present and future. An example of the latter is when the two girls are dancing in the dormitory, and the voiceover starts to recount that the Chinese man came to pick up the girl that day, before the Chinese man's car is shown on the screen. Telescoping of scenes and of time is a feature of the book L'amant.
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The most striking discrepancy between voiceover and image is at the beginning of the first love scene in the bachelor's room. The Chinese man is sitting down; the girl is standing facing him; the camera is behind the girl; the man slowly lowers the straps of her dress, we see the top of her bare back. The voiceover during this scene is the following: He tore the dress off, he tore the little white cotton underpants
off, and he carried her like that naked to the bed.
These words are translated from the book L'amant. For a film that has been accused of being soft porn, it is interesting that a visual representation of the words is refrained from. There is a clear division between the audio and the visual. This kind of discrepancy or ungrammaticality can be understood by referring to an intertext not yet mentioned, the films that Duras directed herself. The audio/visual split is a technique much exploited by Duras, the filmmaker. Deleuze discusses this characteristic of Duras's films in which the visual and sound present two autonomous images, constantly separated, disassociated, non-totalizable but irrationally linked. The film does not lose unity, rather there is a more complex relationship between the visual and sound: Deleuze considers that each medium expresses what was unable to be expressed by the other. In speaking of Duras's film India Song he also says that the visual and sound give different perspectives on a story, a story that can be infinitely both the same and different (329-35). This could be said of The Lover in the example above: two different recountings of the story are presented simultaneously, which has the effect of questioning notions of reality, truth, and history.
In discussing L'amant de la Chine du Nord, which contains cinematic elements, Bonnigal points out that Duras's separation of the audio/visual represents the separation of what is seen and what is heard with regard to the "I," thus conveying the subject's hybridity. Bonnigal also says that this cinematic device is reminiscent of the strategies of reappropriation and estrangement characteristic of colonial resistance to the presence of authority, an undoing of whole and coherent authority (7). The disruptive strategy allows the writer/filmmaker Duras to "expose, deconstruct and transcend the stereotypes and romanticizations that must be read as markers of an ideology (imperialist and patriarchal) against which [she] positions herself" (8). Bonnigal considers that Annaud's film has reduced Duras's work to stereotypes only, whereas Duras in fact uses stereotypes in order to transcend them. I contend, however, that in the film The Lover there are instances where Durassian techniques such as the audio/visual split save the film from total appropriation into commercial cinema and mainstream rhetoric.
A further unusual feature of the film that concerns the use of voiceover is the way the voiceover is integrated into dialogues of characters. Quite often the characters are conversing, the voiceover intervenes, and then the characters continue their conversation. In two cases a piece of information given by the narrator is inserted in the middle of a dialogue. The first example of this occurs during the first meeting of the girl and the Chinese man on the ferry; the voiceover gives background information on the newly introduced character, the Chinese man. The second example takes place during a discussion between the girl and the Chinese man in an outdoor restaurant. The voiceover intervenes in the conversation to give a general comment about the relationship: Chinese. She's the sole heiress. I'm the sole heir. The date has
been set for years. That's another reason I came back from France.
Girl. You love her?
Chinese. No, I don't know her. For us marriages are arranged by the
families.
Voiceover. We know that a future together is unthinkable. So we
speak of the future in a casual manner, without any involvement,
detached.
Chinese. And the two families get together to hide their wealth
away. It's so much in the customs of ancient or modern China. We
don't think we could do anything any other way.
More attention-catching and most unusual is when the shifts from dialogue participant to voiceover and back are rapid as in the following (see the section in bold) that comes from the first love-making scene. The startling effect here is that the girl stops talking, and the narrator becomes almost like a voice participating in a dialogue with the Chinese man:
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Girl. I want you to do as you usually do with other women.
Chinese. Is that what you want?
Girl. Yes.
Chinese. I know you'll never love me.
Girl. I don't know. I don't want you to talk.
Voiceover. He tore the dress off. He tore the little white cotton
underpants off. And he carried her like that naked to the bed.
Voiceover. Once on the bed.
Chinese. You're too little.
Voiceover. Fear overcomes him.
Chinese. I can't.
Voiceover. He says it's not true, that she's too little. That he
can't do such a thing. So [silence] So she's the one who does it.
Her eyes closed. She undresses him [...]
This quick exchange procedure is specific to filmic techniques and resources: it conveys heightened emotion. The voiceover narration also adds reflexive depth to emotional scenes. Another case occurs in a scene between the narrator and the family characters when the girl returns to her home, although this time the exchange is less rapid. The scene is confrontational between older brother Pierre, the mother, and the girl; Pierre and the mother show anger in their suspicion that the girl is having an affair with the Chinese man. The narrator's voice intervenes twice in the angry conversation, here using "I" as if to voice the inarticulate feelings and thoughts of the girl, and calmly stating that this family of ruin and shame, of hate and love is where the girl (I) feels the most deeply assured of herself.
The striking use of voiceover within dialogues together with the other unusual features and techniques relating to the voiceover reproduce characteristics of the book L'amant: the fluidity between or telescoping of self and other, past and present, the lack of clear boundaries and blocking together of contrasting elements (Ramsay 54). Furthermore, the voiceover brings a particular dimension to the film: the question of memory, commentary, and reflection, and thus greater richness and complexity. It is largely because of the voiceover technique and its ungrammaticalities that the film is saved from being totally realist and from denying self-reflexive elements.
As far as camera techniques are concerned, the most unusual aspect of the film concerns close-ups and extreme close-ups on several occasions. Near the start of the film when the girl is on the ferry, following the voiceover words: "Look at me. I'm 15 and a half," the camera moves to show artistic close-ups of the girl's plaited hair, mended dress neckline, and tatty sequined high-heeled shoes. Two scenes of extreme close-ups are particularly noticeable. At the very beginning of the film a microscopic moving view of skin with hairs becomes paper on which the writer is writing; and the final love scene is filmed with a whirl of extreme close-ups of parts of the body, including shots between the undulating stomachs of the lovers. In these scenes we no longer recognize the body as a distinct or whole entity, or two bodies as two separate entities. Here fragmentation and hybridity are valorized (mirroring the book L'amant) against the background of generally conventional cinematography in the rest of the film. In parallel to the book, unusual camera techniques draw attention to the materiality of the construction of a story.
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The different aspects of the film discussed above, namely the contrast of characters' and narrator's voices and language, the split between audio and visual, the indeterminacies of pronouns and mixture of verb tenses in the voiceover text, the merging of narration and characters' dialogue, and camera techniques that highlight fragmentation, all produce ungrammaticalities that can be understood in terms of the film's intertexts. Although the film is a response to dominant commercial and ideological pressures mentioned by Stam (69, 75), the moments of ungrammaticality challenge aesthetic (classic realist) and ideological (patriarchal and imperialist) mainstreaming in line with the book L'amant, which proves to be the determinate intertext. At these moments the interpretant, the link between film (text) and intertexts, is "modernist destabilization" (Riffaterre "La trace").
The case study of The Lover has shown that Riffaterre's notions of ungrammaticality and intertextuality are useful and enriching in examining a film adaptation. These notions have helped to achieve a deeper understanding of the film, whereas previous critics had overlooked subversive aspects created by the infiltration of intertextual traces into the film. In Riffaterrian terms, a second semiotic reading is necessary.
Siobhan Brownlie
The University of Manchester, England
Notes
(1) The genre of these works is not certain; they could be termed "autofictions" (Ramsay 38).
(2) Bonnigal considers that the cause of the "disfiguration" undertaken by the film is the commercial motivation of Hollywood-dominated cinema that has affected French cinema from the 1980s onwards (8). Stam says that the mainstreaming of works like L'amant stems from dominant cinema's "ideologically driven failure of nerve to deal with the aesthetic implications of novelistic modernism" (75).
(3) Annaud himself says that he was faithful to his personal understanding of the book and its themes: "Je ne dis pas que je suis reste fidele au roman, mais je pretends avoir ete fidele a la facon dont je l'ai recu" 'I don't say that I was faithful to the novel, I claim that I was faithful to the way I received it' (Alion 82).
(4) L'amant de la Chine du Nord is linear and non-digressive as compared with L'amant.
(5) The dialogues occasionally contain oddness in English expression with respect to interrogative forms, which could be explained as the result of literal translation from a French text, for example: "You're who?" (following the French "Vous etes qui?" (Duras, L 'amant de la Chine du Nord 37), "You love her?" 'And you?' In the voiceover narration there is also the use of "the sex" meaning "penis" (a literal translation from the French).
(6) In this case it is interesting to note that the rendering of the main sentence given in the published translation of the book is different from the screenplay, the screenplay text being closer to the original French. Here is the book translation: "I'm going to write. That's what I see beyond the present moment, in the great desert in whose form my life stretches out before me." (Duras, The Lover 103)
(7) Some may consider that the choice of actresses reveals simply a weakness in Annaud's directorial skills. My interest is in the effects of the contrasting voices, and not in Annaud's motivations or level of skill.
Works Cited
Adler, Laure. Marguerite Duras. Paris: Gallimard, 1998.
Alion, Yves. "Entretien avec Jean-Jacques Annaud." L'Avant-Scene Cinema. L'amant: Un film de Jean-Jacques Annaud 500 (2001): 79-84.
Allen, Graham. Intertextuality. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.
L'Avant-Scene Cinema. L'amant: Unfilm de Jean-Jacques Annaud 500, 2001.
Bonnigal, Dorothee. "Authoritative Appropriation or Authoritarian Containment? Western Patriarchy Revisiting Marguerite Duras's L'Amant." Romance Languages Annual 8 (1997): 5-10.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: L'image-temps. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1985.
Duras, Marguerite. L'Amant. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1984.
______. L'Amant de la Chine du Nord. Paris: Gallimard, 1991.
______. The Lover. Trans. Barbara Bray. First published 1985. New York: Pantheon, 1997.
The Lover. Dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud. Perf. Jane March and Tony Leung. Renn Productions, Burrill Productions, Films A2, 1991.
Ramsay, Raylene L. The French New Autobiographies: Sarraute, Duras, and Robbe-Grillet. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1996.
Randall, David. "Transcriptions--The Translation of Self-reflexive Fiction into Film: Marguerite Duras's The Lover." West Virginia University Philological Papers 45 (1999): 94-102.
Riffaterre, Michael. Semiotics of Poetry. Methuen: London, 1978.
______. "La trace de l'intertexte." La Pensee 204 (1980): 4-18.
Sankey, Margaret. "Time and Autobiography in L'Amant by Marguerite Duras." Australian Journal of French Studies 25.1 (1988): 58-70.
Stam, Robert. "Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation." Film Adaptation. Ed. James Naremore. London: Athlone, 2000. 54-76.
Brownlie, Siobhan
Source Citation
Brownlie, Siobhan. "Using Riffaterre to rehabilitate The Lover." Literature-Film Quarterly 36.1 (2008): 52+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 23 June 2010.