The Surviving Love of Marguerite Duras

Abstract

After ten years of working on the documentary genre, director Alain Resnais is asked to work on a production which deals with the cruelty of war and the deadly effects of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. But he changes the project and decides to make a film. He, therefore, chooses Marguerite Duras, screenplay writer and filmmaker. The result is the famous film Hiroshima mon amour (1959), which constitutes her debut. According to Marguerite, the main purpose of the film was to stop describing the “horror for its own sake”. To do so, the film describes a love story out of the ordinary: the leading lady will remember her first love and its tragic ending. The writer highlights the experience of not dying of love, showing in detail a path that goes from shadows to light and links reflections on Hiroshima (death) to love (life). The title of this work highlights the surviving love and its content relates Marguerite’s creation, especially that love story, to some of the concepts that we work in psychoanalysis, such as: the “petit a” object, and love and mourning, the latter being a necessary element “not to die of love”.