India Song
Marguerite Duras 1975
[mad laughter]
- These things are built up from disjunctions it seems. A slow
accumulation coming in from the sides, like salt at the edges of the
mouth. Here are suggestion and overlap, our ways of arresting stories in
clipped, oblique images. We take the temperature of a colonial
experience in a mentioned name, in meteorological snatches – the song we
must dance to.
- Nothing but heat comes through these disconnections. A stifling
ring that encroaches on us and with us. The translation runs its ribbon
all the while – slow-moving wafts of odour we feel coming off the
screen.
- Poring over surfaces like maps of overlaid material – hair, silks,
zones of temperature – dotted by drugged saccades of ennui. Now we have
time to move across objects according to no measure, with time to
disperse into space in a way previously unavailable. We establish
location with a single word and an oblique tilt across a façade. The
cameras are moved by heat, buffeted by thermals, as they circle the
grounds before disappearing behind black trees.
- The drowsy rhythm is decadent, isn’t it? Smoke-filled language
disconnects us from sequence. And as if turning on a neck, taking it in –
yes, all an indulgent drinking of light. Not satisfied with the emptied
spaces, the arched mirrors redouble our dispersal. Taking up and
replacing entire doorways.
- We are only concerned with keeping out the noise, the leprous chaos
beyond the trees. Off-screen is where everything is contested, as all
voices join battle, freed from any prior determinations. To join the
beggar woman, railing. The only frays of the image.
- Positioned in our composites, like Rejlander tableaux, the way we
hunch and spread ourselves when sleepless. Divorced from settlement, we
then cut to a cuticle rising out of the lake. Everything is peeling,
drying out. Even so, the deserted space is cacophonous. Wandering around
the obviously entropic like automatons. These figures are set to
absorb, unable to move quicker, and this is the presentation of the
passage of thought sluggish with deliberation. Drained with repetition.
- A boxed collection of apertures. Figures pass past doorways,
leaning on limbs. All in service of a joke worn thin, up to the point
where it must be told again. It’s a cinematic aftermath. This is what we
press into, thick as syrup – images, voices, no air between them, even
though they are held at a distance. Like all this glamour it is
decrepit, exhausted. Anaesthetic.
- Voices cannot be trusted outside the mouth. Yet being within these
interiors is like being in an echo chamber – speech conjuring images or
trying to hold them off… and we’ve yet to decide about the voice,
whether comment or contamination leads. The voices are missing the hands
to cover the mouths, stopping them being seen.
- I watched the white suit move backwards almost to the edge of the
frame. An announcement of anguish slipping into absurdity, wailing from
outside – all pain is absurd then, peripheral, while we watch the
mirrors fool us into thinking in reverse.
- The vice-counsel’s wails are seen to return, past the point where
they needn’t fade back in. And it’s exhausting to see cigarettes running
off at the mouth.
- Was it a suicide pact discovered and nullified? Yes. And a
reference to an indifference to life already being its opposite, as if
no difference were to be drawn between the surface effects of either.
Everything is vulnerable. The entire party is wary of the night and the
rains, all sounds from the feral darkness and the madness that encircles
them all. Their lethargic anxiety accounts for failure and violent
breakdown in fragments – others are dismissed from a point of
immobility, where empathy is almost entirely evaporated.
- The monsoon fizzes and light is pulled down with an eyelid shutter.
This is how a day can be pressed in and out of night; everything can be
put out of mind, out of sight and earshot, while he fires on the lepers
of the Shalimar Gardens and puts bullets in the mirrors.
