The “impower” of cinema: an analysis of L’homme atlantique

Abstract

“You remained in the state of the one who left. And I made a

movie with your absence.” These words, spoken by Marguerite

Duras in L’Homme atlantique (1981), encapsulate the journey of

a film in which she turns the absent image, the blackness of an

imageless film, into the main figure. However, L’Homme Atlantique

refers not only to the other’s absence as told by the story,

but to the death of cinema itself, through the creation of a film

essentially constructed with words, conceived as an oral text. In

this way, L’Homme atlantique culminates in a reflection on writing

that Duras relates to desire and, more precisely, to a desire

that manifests itself as lack, as the “fullness of the lack of being”.

Contrary to the studies that have approached the film from

the perspective of the dialectic between literature and cinema to

support the idea of a death of cinema caused by the word, this

article focuses on the specificity of the film itself. To this end, I

take up, on the one hand, the “figural” question posed by François

Lyotard to consider the relations between desire, the figure and

the move away from textual meaning, and, on the other hand,

the question of the spectator addressed by the film, used by Jean

Louis Schefer to define cinema as an inevitable crime of the outside

world. This article considers both these approaches necessary

to explore the figurative “impower” that Duras’ films express

and that L’Homme atlantique enacts as a sense of loss.