This book examines Durass contribution to contemporary cinema. The dark room in the collections title refers to one of Durass metaphors for the writing process, la chambre noire, as the solitary space of literary creation, the place where she struggles to project her internal shadow onto the blank page. The dark room is also a metaphor for the film theater and, by extension, for the filmic experience. Duras rejected conventional forms of cinematic address that encourage the spectator to develop a positive identification with the films diegesis and narrative. Her films create unusual rapports between image and sound, diegetic and extra-diegetic elements, and textual and intertextual dimensions of cinematic representation. In doing so, they allow the film spectator to establish new connections with the screen.
This collection focuses on the aesthetic, conceptual, and political challenges involved in Durass innovative approach to cinematic representation, from an interdisciplinar perspective including film and literary theory, psychoanalytic analysis, music theory, gender studies, and post-colonial criticism. The book opens with a theoretical introduction to Durass cinematic practice and its peculiar position in contemporary cinema and contemporary film theory and is divided into five parts, each one devoted to a specific aspect of Durass films: the interaction between literature and cinema (Part One); the reconfiguration of the cinematic gaze (Part Two) and of the image/sound relation (Part Three); the representation of history and memory (Part Four) and of cultural identity (Part Five).