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Les Mains négatives
As the first lines of this magnetic short explain, “negative hands” refers to cave art dating back to the Upper Palaeolithic, when hands were placed on walls, and pigment was blown over them, leaving a negative image. Thousands and thousands of years later, Marguerite Duras takes us on a nighttime car ride through an unpopulated Paris in mid-August, in a single, uninterrupted shot from inside the car. From the end of night till dawn, from the Bastille to the Champs-Élysées, a depopulated Paris soothes itself with Marguerite Duras’ affecting voice-over, accompanied by cello accords.
The film’s shades of blue and black had been initially undesired: they came from faulty footage shot for her film Le Navire Night. In Les Mains négatives, Duras creates a cinematic literature where the boundary between fiction and documentation becomes obsolete. She deprives the photographic image of its documentary function, making visible something that never belonged to the picture.
Bio Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) was a French novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and filmmaker. One of the most influential intellectual figures of her generation, she is the author of classic works, such as the films Hiroshoma mon amour (1959) and India Song (1975), and the novel L'Amant (The Lover, 1984), which was awarded the prestigious Prix Goncourt.
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- This film was #28 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025