Marguerite Duras in 1960. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Marguerite Duras’s Le navire Night (The ship named Night) is both a film and a would-be film, or rather a documentary of a film that the writer decided never to finish. Duras abandoned her initial project after several days of shooting, deciding instead to record the “disaster” it became. What results is an eighty-nine-minute composition of slow, panning shots and zoom-outs on the actors that would have starred (Dominique Sanda, Bulle Ogier, and Mathieu Carrière), the makeup and wardrobe they would have worn, and the Parisian backdrops and candlelit rooms in which they would have played their roles, overlaid by the voices of Duras and her friend the film director Benoît Jacquot reading directly from the text she had planned for the actors to use as their script. The original text, written in 1978, describes the paranoia and passion of an erotic affair conducted entirely over the telephone by a young man and woman, insomniacs both, the man working a night shift and the woman dying of leukemia, as they pleasure themselves to each other’s voices and make ill-fated plans to meet in person. Below, in a new English translation by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan, is Duras’s account of the making and unmaking of Le navire Night, a film which she would elsewhere call “beautiful and vain.”

—Owen Park, editorial assistant

The story in Le navire Night was told to me in December ’77 by the person who had lived it, J.M., the young man of Les Gobelins. I knew J.M. and I knew the story. There were about ten of us who knew of its existence. But we had never spoken about it together, J.M. and I. It was after three years passed that one day—I had spoken about it with a friend of J.M., who said she had already forgotten certain details—I was afraid that the story would be lost. I asked J.M. to record it on tape. He agreed.

Apart from certain dates and the knot of names in Père Lachaise that he had never managed to disentangle, he remembered. Everything was still there. It was three years after the end of the story, F.’s wedding.

Hearing him tell it, I understood that J.M. had no doubt always hoped to bring this story face to face with a listener, but that he had always feared—when the moment came—that people wouldn’t believe him “if he said everything.”

And that rather than being troubled by it, he was happy to speak about it.

It was based on that tape recording that I wrote Le navire Night—twice over, with six months in between. The first version of the text is from February ’78, it appeared in Minuit journal. The second version of the text is what is published here, it is the final text from the film shoot, July ’78. I gave the first version of the text to J.M. He read it. He said that “everything was true but that he recognized nothing.” I asked him if I could publish it and then perhaps, later on, turn it into a film. He told me that he hoped I would. That day we stopped talking about the story. T o tell the truth, never again. After having read what his own experience became—in the words of another—J.M. remained silent but as if he were always on the verge of speaking. I think he must have realized that other versions of his story were possible—that he had silenced them because he didn’t know that they were possible just as they were possible for any story. I think too that his own version had carried him so far that he had forgotten its sprawl, its banality. Read More