Hélène Bamberger took photographs of Marguerite Duras during the summers they spent together in Trouville, Normandy, from 1980 to 1994. These images tell the story of Duras and depict her haunts, her worktable, her room, the skies of Normandy, her lover Yann Andréa…
“When I first met Marguerite,... Read more
Hélène Bamberger took photographs of Marguerite Duras during the summers they spent together in Trouville, Normandy, from 1980 to 1994. These images tell the story of Duras and depict her haunts, her worktable, her room, the skies of Normandy, her lover Yann Andréa…
“When I first met Marguerite, I had never read any Duras. It was only afterwards that I read her. We got on so well right from the very beginning; we started our road trips in my father’s car, a rusty old Peugeot. I was the one who drove during the summer of 1980; in the years that followed it was Yann. We would go wherever she wanted. Each place had a different name and a story of its own: the bridge at Tancarville crossed the Mekong; the salt-meadows became rice-fields; we drove through “the forests of Canada”… I took photos from the start; often she would direct my efforts and occasionally would put herself in the frame. Before I got to know her, the idea of photographing a landscape would never have entered my head, much less a puddle of water.” – Hélène Bamberger
Since the late 70s, Hélène Bamberger has worked as a photojournalist and she co-founded the Odyssey Agency in 1982. From 1980 to 1994, she made an impressive series of portraits that covers almost fifteen years of Marguerite Duras’s life, representing the most thorough photographic essay on the author. Her work is regularly featured in magazines such as Elle, Marie-Claire, Le Figaro, National Geographic France, Der Spiegel…
Exhibition opening and Readings with Kathleen Chalfant And William Nadylam. February 17
Readings – In French And English: 6:30 – 7:30 pm / Opening: 7:30 – 9 pm
Please note that space is limited. RSVP is required: duras@frenchculture.org or 212 439 1485.
New York-based American actress Kathleen Chalfant and Paris-based French actor William Nadylam will come together for an exclusive reading of excerpts from Marguerite Duras’s works. Kathleen Chalfant is a major figure among American actors. She won the Drama Desk, OBIE, and Outer Critics Awards for her performance in Margaret Edson’s Wit and two more OBIE Awards (one for Sustained Excellence in Performance for End Game directed by David Esbjornson, and the other in 2003 for Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads).
She was nominated in 1993 for the Tony and Drama Desk Awards for her part in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. She has worked with numerous directors, among whom Frederick Wiseman in Vasily Grossman’s The last letter, Doug Hughes in Henry V, and Les Waters, in Marguerite Duras’s Savannah Bay; she could be seen in Caryl Churchill’s Far away and Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues and has appeared in movies, such as Tony Gilroy’s Duplicity, and in television series (The Guardian). She received theDrama League and Sidney Kingsley Awards for her body of work. Kathleen Chalfant sits at the advisory board of the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Trained at the prestigious ENSATT School in Paris, French stage and movie actor William Nadylam has performed in numerous plays, notably under the direction of Olivier Py, Declan Donnellan (Le Cid), and Peter Brook (Hamlet). Recently he could be seen in the movie White Material by Claire Denis. Last year, he translated into French and co-directed David Hare’s play Stuff Happens. He is currently in New York working on Bellona, Destroyer of Cities, an adaptation of Samuel Delany’s novel Dhalgren under the direction of Jay Scheib.
