Duras’s Aurélia Steiner and the Ethics of Cinematic Form

Abstract

This article examines the ethical stakes of the 'travelling' image in the cinematic representation of atrocity by taking up the case of Marguerite Duras's Aure ' lia Steiner Vancouver (1979). In this experimental short film, a meditation on the memory of historical violence is expressed primarily in the form of tracking shots. Following debates about the morality of the tracking shot in cinephilic discourse (encapsulated in the celebrated phrase, 'les travellings sont affaire de morale'), this article situates Aure ' lia Steiner Vancouver in the context of the films that have served as major points of reference in the debate over the ethics of cinematic representations of catastrophe. Through close analysis of tracking-shot sequences that specifically pose the ethical problems of identification and equivalence, proximity and distance, this article evaluates the unsettling force of the tracking shots in Aure ' lia Steiner Vancouver, arguing that the film constitutes an important intervention in our understanding of the relationship between form, figure, and ethics in the cinema of atrocity.