In this chapter, I shall consider the intimate relationship which exists between music and the multilayered and self-referential cinema of Marguerite Duras by investigating her films in relation to the concept of fugue, with its dual meanings of polyphonic musical structure and of flight, escape, or absence (as in faire une fugue, to run away). In so doing, I hope to identify ways in which her work relates to the wider modernist context, and to indicate a new perspective from which to view her films. Initially, it must be said, there seems little originality in applying the musical analogy to Duras's work, given that it already appears almost commonplace in the general critical canon, where it may serve to indicate either the lyrical qualities of her language, or the way in which the repetitive intertextuality that characterizes both her writings and her films constitutes a theme which confers coherence upon her entire corpus. Ishaghpour, for instance, considers that the musicality of Duras's language is fundamental to everything she does, while Carol Murphy uses the musical analogy to discuss the tight intertextuality of her works, whereby ‘fragments of the text reappear, are gently orchestrated, so as to confer upon the oeuvre a musical air which is the rhythmic reverberation of themes, characters, places and events’. In similar vein, an article in the French journal Le Point comments that ‘Duras constantly modulates her work, pulling out all the stops’. Yvonne Guers- Villate even posits a link with fugue: ‘It's a matter therefore of orchestrating certain themes in different ways … as in a musical fugue’, although she neither justifies nor develops this almost throwaway comment. Discussion of Duras's films also inclines to musical simile, as when Alain Vircondelet likens their composition to that of a piece of music: ‘her camera will create solemn and monotonous accents like a repetitive and haunting cello sonata’. Madeleine Borgomano explores Duras's filmic metaphor in terms of the counterpoint between the soundtrack and the images, and Sanford S. Ames directs the musical analogy towards the spectator for whom, he suggests, watching a film by Duras is like listening to music: ‘We are suspended and remade like music in time.’