THE ATLANTIC MAN

THE ATLANTIC MAN (L’HOMME ATLANTIQUE), 1981

France | 35mm, Color | 45' | French

Director: Marguerite Duras

L’Homme Atlantiquebegins with a blank screen, which continues for half of the film, as Duras narrates a take of loss and mourning. When the image returns, she places and displaces the protagonist in and out of the dark, using film metaphors to explore the concepts of memory, self-consciousness and creation. Duras uses outtakes from one of her previous films, Agatha, to push her experiments with image and sound beyond familiarity and linearity – and the narrative follows suit. The film is a sublime experiment that wavers between things new and old, absent and present; where the gaps between image and sound align with the fissures of the characters’ sexual difference. Time is also cut open, from cyclical and endless worlds to eschatological life and death, further dismembered into years, months, days, hours, minutes and even seconds.