ABSTRACT
India Song tells the story of the last months of Anne-Marie Stretter’s life and of her love affair with Michael Richardson. The story takes place in India in the 1930s, during the monsoon, and is told by voices whose faces stay invisible throughout the film. They do not remember the story perfectly, they hesitate, contradict themselves and one another and present a fragmented, non-chronological account of what they think might have happened. India Song associates the following terms: femininity, colonisation, poverty, blackness, as what is repressed, to the extent of obliteration, of unrepresentability. In this chapter the author shows how, by repositioning the oppressed element of the masculine/feminine dichotomy as the point of departure of her film, Marguerite Duras deconstructs the dichotomic system. The feminine with its paradigm silence, madness, colonised, blackness, outcasts, becomes the reference point for the narration and its characters.
