Screenwriting strategies in Marguerite Duras's script for Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1960)

The published scnario et dialogues (Duras 1960) (Figure 1) of the film Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) feature precise technical specifications of sound and image and more novelistic passages, all of which create an emotional resonance that has been left to the director to translate into images. This article explores Marguerite Duras's text as a particular example of how the written component of the screen idea (Macdonald 2004a) might function on the page and as part of a dialogue with the director. It also examines the way that the script's concern with problematizing and drawing attention to the process of representation makes it a palpable and controlling presence in the resulting film.