The shorter of the two Aurélia Steiner films moves from black and white to colour, the tracking shots of the French countryside that stood in for 'Vancouver' replaced by shots from a boat moving along the Seine-Paris this time as 'Melbourne'. While the Vancouver film removes all sound save that of Duras' voiceover, this shorter companion piece mixes in the sound of the water, or occasionally, of the boat's engine, albeit low down in the mix. In the Vancouver film, the use of the tracking shot inserts itself into history-the debate over the Shoah and representation, Rivette and 'Kapo': in its Melbourne equivalent, as in 'Les Mains Négatives', 'Le navire night' and 'Le Camion', the perspective of the fixed camera transported in a vehicle-by car, lorry, or boat-renders the entire image with a different kind of constant, but passive movement. As in those films, the movement is also temporal: the rough span from dawn to dusk-but unlike those films, the focus is not so much on spatial peripheries, for we see the Seine's monuments, the iconic bank, its bridges; yet we think of that which passes beneath them, to their side, that which is hidden in the heart of the capital; we think of what else passed under these bridges, on these streets that witnessed war, occupation, suicide, murder. Bear in mind here Duras' comment that seeing the river made her think of the Algerians murdered there in 196-Steiner names the Shoah, but not the Algerian war or other murderous projects of extermination and conquest-recall the overlay of occupied France with Hiroshima in Duras' most famous cinematic contribution. Equivalence, displacement, replacement: these traumas of history, linked in the project of capitalism and fascism, their confrontations and complicities, the resistance to them and the victims they wrought, in films which refuse the grand narratives constructed around them in the attempts to render them legible-genre films, the war picture, the films that emerged even out of the same rubble through to the studio recreations as endless borrowed glories that, if anything, celebrated the wars existence for the narratives it gave them. In showing nothing, hardly a person, Duras' films are far truer to the ethical demands facing film and text. As the film closes with just the sound of engines in the early dawn (or is it the dusk?), and a single, miniaturised figure passing over a bridge passes over our heads, what kind of crossing, what kind of passage does history provide?
Review of Aurélia Steiner (Melbourne)
