Rethinking Feminist Cinema - Agnes Varda and Filmmaking in the Feminine

RETHINKING FEMINIST CINEMA: AGNÈS VARDA AND FILMMAKING IN THE FEMININE

by

Nam Lee

A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (CRITICAL STUDIES)

August 2008

Copyright2008

NamLee

3325062

Copyright 2008 by Lee, Nam

All rights reserved

3325062 2008

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DEDICATION

To My Parents and Kunsoo

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Nothing and nobody exists independently of others and this dissertation is no exception. Many people have contributed to the writing of this dissertation and I would like to express my sincere gratitude for their inspiration, support and encouragement. My greatest debt is to my dissertation chair, Dana Polan. I thank him not only for his sustained attention to my project, since its earliest conception to its completion, but also for encouraging me to challenge myself and to go beyond my own expectations through his enthusiasm for my project. An independent study with him on French New Wave cinema and his single-theorist classes on Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci were instrumental in developing my own theoretical framework to approaching Agnès Varda’s work from a broad perspective. His scholarly passion and committed mentoring embodied the kind of scholar and mentor I hope to become. I am also grateful for the intellectual guidance and inspiration I received from my dissertation committee members. Anne Friedberg led me to inquire into the issue of visuality in transposing literary theory to film narratives. Peggy Kamuf willingly offered me an independent study on French women writers and feminine writing, as well as her expertise on Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous. She inspired and urged me to elaborate on my very basic ideas on feminine writing and to pursue lines of thought beyond my limit.

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My gratitude also goes to Marsha Kinder, who has been supportive of my project throughout the dissertation process, offering me her insightful comments and suggestions. I must also thank David E. James, who encouraged me to stay engaged with East Asian cinema, and whose words of advice and support have been vital to my growth as a scholar. Special thanks must also be given to Agnès Varda for making the films that inspired me to write this dissertation. She gladly opened her personal archive when I visited her Ciné-Tamaris office in Paris in 2004, and mailed me her out-of-print book,

Varda par Agnès, which turned out to be one of the most important source materials for my dissertation. I hope to visit her again as I plan to further expand my research on her work. I would also like to thank my colleagues and friends. I especially thank Linda Robinson for her time and energy in proof-reading the dissertation and offering valuable suggestions. Her continued interest in my project helped me to refine my thoughts and arguments. I thank the members of my dissertation group - Dong Hoon Kim, Jaime Nasser and HyeRyoung Ok - for reading parts of my work and sharing common anxieties and frustrations during the writing process. I thank Paul Reinsch, Dukyu Min Kim, Sunyoon Lee and Sejung Kim for their friendship, encouragement and for many hours of enjoyable conversations. I thank Jae-Cheol Lim, a long-time friend and a true cinephile, who first introduced me to the films of Agnès Varda.

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I am grateful to the USC Graduate School for providing me with a Dissertation Completion Fellowship (2007-2008) which allowed me to focus entirely on writing. This dissertation would not have been finished with such timeliness had it not been for this financial support. I also thank the USC Department of French and Italian which, in summer 2004, awarded me Margaret Kershaw Associate Scholarship and made the research trip to Paris possible. Last, but not least, I thank my family: my parents, Sang Ho & Jung Hee Lee, for their unconditional love and support throughout my life. I would not be where I am today without their sacrifice and unfailing confidence in me. No words can describe my deepest appreciation and gratitude for my husband, Kunsoo. Without his love and understanding, I would not have been able to embark on this academic journey. Thank you for being with me and for believing in me even when I doubted myself. Finally, I thank my two sons, Yong Oh and Yong Jae, just for being themselves.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication

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Acknowledgments

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Abstract Introduction

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ChapterI:AgnèsVardainContext 15 1. Agnès Varda and the French New Wave Cinema: “The Only GirlamongtheBoys” 15 2. Feminist Reception of Varda’s Films: From “Reactionary” to a “Feminist Auteur” 52 Chapter II: “Writing” in Film: Agnès Varda and Female Authorship 1. The Conceptualization of “Writing” in French Critical Theory 2. Agnès Varda, AuteurTheory and Female Authorship

87 88 99

Chapter III: Theories of the Feminine, Feminism and Feminine Writing 132 1.FrenchFeminismandPhilosophy 134 2. Contested Notions of Feminist vs. Feminine in France and the U.S. 146 3.TheoriesofFeminineWriting 156 Chapter IV: Visualizing Feminine Writing: Agnès Varda’s cinécriture 1. Between the Real and the Imaginary: Narrative Subversion andFemale Subjectivity 2. Writing the Body: Inscription of the Feminine 3. Writing the Other: Varda’s ‘Cinema of Marginality’

171 173 204 231

Conclusion

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Filmography

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Bibliography

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vii ABSTRACT

My dissertation examines the work of French director Agnès Varda in the context of French feminism and its theory/practice of “feminine writing”(écriture féminine). By demonstrating how Varda’s notion of cinécriture (cine-writing)—her own term for her filmmaking—shares close similarities with “feminine writing,” I argue that Varda uniquely practices “feminine writing” in film: a cinematic writing concerned with exploring questions of feminine identity and creating an alternative film language that challenges and disrupts the dominant mode of filmmaking. Since a study of a film director inevitably raises the question of authorship in film, I examine the development of auteur theory to question male-centered canonical

auteur studies of the past. I also interrogate traditional accounts of French New Wave cinema and feminist film criticism to establish how Varda, previously marginalized, is pivotal to both. I then turn to “feminine writing” as proposed by French literary critic/writer Hélène Cixous: an alternative textual, political, and ethical strategy to dismantle the hierarchical binary oppositions of “phallogocentrism” that subordinate the feminine to the masculine. Drawing upon the idea of the “feminine” and “feminine writing” as proposed by Cixous and other French feminist critics such as Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, I analyze Varda’s films in terms of the three major characteristics of “feminine

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writing”: narrative subversion and female subjectivity; writing the body; and writing the Other. To provide a theoretical context for understanding Varda’s cinécriture as feminine writing and a political act, I examine the notion of writing ( écriture) in French critical theory, especially that of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, which greatly influenced French feminists’ development of the concept of feminine writing. I view “feminine” not as a biological term but as an ethical term, and I define it as an openness towards the Other. Thus, even though not all of Varda’s films are about women, they are all “feminine” because they share the common trait of attention to the marginalized Other. Hence, by linking women and other marginal groups in her films, Varda has opened up new possibilities for feminist cinema to go beyond sexual politics and to embrace the “feminine.”

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INTRODUCTION

In her 1975 essay, “Sorties,” French feminist literary critic and writer Hélène Cixous gives a list of hierarchical binary oppositions in which Western philosophy and literary thoughts are caught up: Activity/passivity Sun/Moon Culture/Nature Day/Night Father/Mother Head/Heart Intelligible/Palpable Logos/Pathos. Form, convex, step, advance, semen, progress. Matter, concave, ground—where steps are taken, holding-and dumping-ground. Man___ Woman 1 Cixous argues that the structure of Western thought is based on this endless series of binary oppositions in which the second term is considered inferior to the first one; moreover, she argues that these hierarchical binaries ultimately come back to the fundamental oppositions of man/woman. Therefore, phallogocentrism, a system based on these binary oppositions, subordinates the feminine to the masculine order. Since

Hélène Cixous, “Sorties,” The Newly Born Woman , trans. Betsy Wing, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 63. 1

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these binaries operate through language, Cixous calls for a feminine writing (écriture

féminine) to disrupt the masculine language of patriarchy. A similar concept of “binary oppositions” is also found in the Asian philosophy of yin-yang. Yin and yang represent all the opposite principles and qualities of every phenomenon in the universe. Literally, yin means shady or cloudy, while yang means sunny. Yin qualities are characterized as passive, negative, feminine, and dark, whereas

yang qualities are characterized as active, positive, masculine, and light. Yin is the earth, yang heaven. Since the notions of yin-yang srcinated in sun-based daily life where people work during the daylight and return home at dark, yang represents movement, and yin represents rest. Yang is the sun, yin the moon; the list of binaries is endless. However, there is a fundamental difference between the binaries of phallogocentrism and those of yin-yang. There is no valuational hierarchy in any of these

yin-yang oppositions. Yin and yang are two complementary qualities, both of which are required to form life or any natural phenomenon in the cosmos. One is not complete without the other; one cannot exist without the other. The harmony of the two is the ultimate goal. For example, in traditional Asian medicine, a balance between yin energy and yang energy is crucial to maintaining good health. This notion of yin-yang is applied universally, and it is foundational not only in classical thought but also in everyday wisdom. People seek harmony of yin-yang in virtually everything from food to interior decoration. Therefore, “unity in duality” lies at the base of yin-yang philosophy. In a

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strict sense, the binaries in yin-yang philosophy are not oppositions but simply opposites that complement each other. However, this complementary relationship does not mean man ( yang) and woman (yin) have been considered absolute equals in Asia. Far from it. Even though the principle of srcinal yin-yang philosophy lies in an absolute equality between the two, patriarchy and social, political, philosophical systems such as Confucianism have distorted yin-yang philosophy in furtherance of male domination and have produced a hierarchy between man and woman. Consequently, a sexist interpretation of yin-yang was established and disseminated: yang, the heaven, symbolizes man while yin, the earth, symbolizes woman; earth is beneath heaven, so woman should uphold man as heaven. Thus, patriarchal thought has distorted the principal idea of yin-yang and produced an inequality between man and woman. As a Korean, I have known the yin-yang concept as a part of my everyday life since childhood; all my life, I have heard people talking about the importance of “ yin-

yang harmony” in life. When I was first exposed to the French feminist notion of the feminine and of feminine writing as a means to dismantle patriarchal society, I saw similarities between their ideas and srcinal yin-yang philosophy: the recognition of “non-hierarchical” differences. I was also struck by French feminists’ criticism of AngloAmerican feminism as forcing women to function like men through its preoccupation with political, economic, and social equality within the present system. As one of few women journalists in a male-dominated newspaper company, I often had to “act” (or

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sometimes “overact”) mannish (or what is considered mannish) to avoid persistent gender-bias. However, I gradually begin to think this kind of overacting was not solely a woman’s problem. Some of my male colleagues were also having difficulties adapting to the “survival of the fittest” competitive environment of Korean journalism, an environment in which you have to push aside others in order to win. These men had certain “feminine” characteristics. According to yin-yang philosophy, the human body contains yin energy and yang energy; in both bodily and psychological functioning, men are predominantly yang but contain a yin aspect, and women are predominantly yin but have a yang aspect. Consequently, if femininity and masculinity co-exist within everyone, it must be the masculine system and culture that forces both men and women to maximize masculinity and minimize femininity as much as possible to survive and compete successfully. For me, femininity and feminine behavior signifies, above all, the positive quality of an openness to differences and to the Other. Therefore, French feminists’ notion of the feminine struck a chord in me. The argument that the present system of patriarchy forces women to function like men resonates with recent cultural phenomenon in which “masculine” women are valorized whereas “feminine” men are often the subject of comedy in mainstream media. Also, in cultural studies, girls who enjoy traditional “masculine” activities or sports, such as boxing and pro-wrestling, are considered as making a positive transgression. But I do not think I have come across any essay valorizing men who enjoy “girlie” or

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women’s pursuits, such as soap opera or melodrama, i.e. the “weepies.” This type of “transgression” is not considered a worthy object for cultural studies. Here again, we see too much emphasis on yang for both men and women, and again because yin is considered worthless. Once again harmony is broken. What I saw in French feminist thought, however, is a reinstatement of the harmony between yin and yang. French feminists see a potentially liberating force in the feminine, an open attitude towards the Other. And their argument that feminine writing offers a strategy for dismantling masculine language also made sense to me because language is so crucial to creating ideas and shaping cultures. As a film journalist/critic, it was natural for me to think about the possibility of feminine writing in film. What would feminine writing in film consist of? I began to ask this question to find ways to promote the “feminine” attitude of embracing differences and otherness in filmmaking. This is how I began my study of Agnès Varda in the context of French feminism and its notion of feminine writing. I was especially drawn to Cixous’ argument that even though women are more likely to adopt a feminine attitude at present, femininity and feminine writing is not confined to women and women’s writing. Since the “feminine” implies not a biological sex but an attitude, it offers the possibility of considering feminist politics in a larger context than sexual politics. In this so-called “post-feminist era,” feminism based on oppositions of sex is considered out of fashion, particularly in the West where post-feminists believe that the feminist goal of achieving political and economic equality with men has been achieved.

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Poststructuralist criticism that dismantled the notion of fixed identity also contributed to the decline of feminist questions such as “what is woman?” and “what does it mean to be a woman?” However, in reality, patriarchal domination persists, and patterns of white, male privilege can still be observed on a global level. In this respect, French feminists’ idea of the feminine—especially as articulated by Julia Kristeva –as encompassing all marginalized groups suggests the possibility that feminism can expand its scope to encompass and to align itself with other “feminine” groups—that is, all those groups who are marginalized by racism, neo-colonialism, and sexual preference. Since masculinity is appropriately no longer a sex-specific term but is viewed as an attitude one adopts, feminism is not about hating men but about hating (over-exaggerated) masculinity both in men and women. Along with the general decline of feminism, feminist film criticism in particular also seems to have lost the political edge it had in the 1970s. I argue, however, that expanding the notion of feminist cinema to include a new conception of “feminine” cinema and filmmaking will help spark productive rethinking, redefining, and broadening of the concept of feminist cinema. Studies of feminist cinema have largely concentrated on the representation of women and on the workings of patriarchal ideology in films by male directors. Thus, many anthologies of feminist film theory are filled with essays on canonical films of male directors. Interest in women’s filmmaking is increasing; however, the decline of both feminism and feminist film theory has meant that studies of women’s filmmaking are still limited. Furthermore, increasing suspicion

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of the notion of auteur has also contributed to a lack of studies on women directors. However, if feminine writing is an important tool to disrupt masculine order and, as French feminists have argued, if women are currently more likely to adopt a feminine attitude than men, then studying women’s filmmaking becomes an important task. Women should be studied not only as consumers but also as producers of cinematic discourses. Agnès Varda’s films offer excellent examples of feminine writing in film. Not all of her films are about women, but many of her films feature groups of people often marginalized by the dominant system. Whether literally about women or not, Varda’s films share “feminine” qualities: an openness toward the Other; reflections on and a questioning of social and cultural clichés; and formal experimentation. Throughout the fifty-four years of her career as a filmmaker, Varda has shown a constant attention to marginalized people considered the “other” by mainstream media. Her filming techniques also incorporate different media into cinema to generate multiple meanings. In particular, Varda’s interest in exploring the possibilities of combining both photography and cinematography has inspired her filmmaking throughout her career. What she has written about photography and cinema is reminiscent of yin-yang philosophy: “These two captures of life—one immobile and silent, the other moving and talking—are not enemies but differences, even complementary. The photography is

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stopped movement or immobilized interior movement. The cinema proposes a series of successive photographs during the length of time which animates them.”2 Varda manifests in her films an interest in various contradictions in life: between personal life and collective life; between the real and the imaginary; between fiction and documentary. She often talks about her dialectical approach to contradictions: “This dialectic, this ambiguity, this contradiction between the clichés of the interior life and the images of the lived life, it is the subject of all my films.”3 In fact, the resolution of these contradictions constitutes the framework of her films. Many of her films juxtapose two different worlds: for example, her first film La Pointe courte (1954) juxtaposes the personal story of a Parisian couple and the collective story of fishermen; L’Opéra Mouffe (1958) juxtaposes the documentary world of street people and the subjective fantasies of a pregnant woman; and One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977) is a story of a long friendship between two women of very different character and life paths. Often, an individual’s inner world is juxtaposed with the outer world of reality. When her films have female protagonists, such as Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961), One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, Vagabond (1985), Jane B. par Agnès V. (1987), and The Gleaners and “Ces deux saisies de la vie, l’une immobile et muette, l’autre mouvante et parlante, ne sont pas ennemies mais différentes, complémentaires même. La photographie, c’est le mouvement arrêté ou le mouvement intérieur immobilisé. Le cinéma, lui, propose une série de photographies successives dans une durée qui les anime.” Agnès Varda, Varda par Agnès, Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1994, 130. All the translations from French are my own, unless otherwise indicated. 2

“cette dialectique, cette ambiguité, cette contradiction entre les clichés de la vie intérieure et les images de la vie vécue, c’est le sujet de tous mes films.” Agnès Varda, “Un bonheur bien défendu,” Cinéma 67, no. 97, juin 1967, quoted from Françoise Audé, Ciné-modèles, cinéma d’elles, Paris: L’Age d’Homme, 1981, 141. 3

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I (2001), Varda raises issues relating to the female body. This practice is similar to feminine writing’s proposal to “write the body” and to “write the Other.” This dissertation, therefore, examines Agnès Varda’s work in the context of French feminism and its theory/practice of feminine writing. Drawing upon Hélène Cixous’s idea of feminine writing as a political act that contains the potential to explode the hierarchical binaries of patriarchal society, I explore the possibility of a “feminine filmmaking” that opens up space for the “feminine.” In America, the word “feminine” tends to carry negative connotations, but I regard the “feminine” not in biological terms but as an ethical term: it is an open attitude that embraces the Other. I therefore define “feminine filmmaking” as a filmmaker’s way of resisting the increasing masculinization of everyday life and mainstream filmmaking, and I argue that Varda is an exemplar of such filmmaking who has consistently challenged the masculine language of dominant cinema. I also distinguish feminine filmmaking from feminist filmmaking in that the former is less a cinema of women’s issues than a cinema that challenges the various hierarchical binaries of phallogocentrism both in its subject matter and its style. My first chapter, “Agnès Varda in Context” is divided into two sub-chapters. The first one, “Agnès Varda and the French New Wave Cinema: ‘The Only Girl among the Boys,’” is an overview of historical accounts of the French New Wave Cinema. It examines how Varda has been placed within the history of French cinema, especially in relation to the French New Wave. Although Varda’s first film, La Pointe courte, has been heralded in some quarters as the first film of the French New Wave, she has been

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marginalized in most accounts of this film movement. By examining the French New Wave within a larger historical, political, social, and cultural context, I suggest the need to redefine French New Wave cinema and to re-position Varda as the first filmmaker to make a truly modernist film in France. The second sub-chapter of Chapter One, “Feminist Reception of Varda’s Films: From ‘Reactionary’ to ‘Feminist Auteur,’” traces the changes in feminist reception of Varda’s films since the establishment of feminist film theory in the 1970s to the present day. Varda is one of the rare women directors in France who has openly claimed to be a feminist filmmaker. However, she has been underappreciated not only in the accounts of French New Wave but also in feminist film criticism. Claire Johnston even condemned Varda’s work as being “reactionary.” 4 Interestingly, since the mid-1990s, feminist critics’ attitude toward Varda’s body of work has become much more appreciative, and her 1961 film Cléo from 5 to 7 has now acquired iconic status as a representative feminist film. By tracing this change in reception, I argue that the dismissal of Varda by early feminist film critics is partly due to their relative neglect of the importance of textual politics and of the need for resistance to dominant film language. The second chapter, “’Writing’ in Film: Agnès Varda and Female Authorship,” is also divided into two sub-chapters. The first one, “The Conceptualization of ‘Writing’ in

Claire Johnston, “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema,” Claire Johnston ed., Notes on Women’s Cinema, BFI pamphlet, 1973, 30. 4

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French Critical Theory,” examines the notion of “writing” (écriture) as developed in French critical theory, especially by Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, whose ideas greatly influenced French feminist critics such as Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva in their notion of the feminine and of feminine writing. This sub-chapter provides a theoretical ground on which to understand Varda’s notion of cinécriture, a term she coined to describe her filmmaking practice, as a political act that challenges dominant cinema on a textual level as well as on a discursive level. This sub-chapter also examines the theory of writing in order to understand filmmaking as an act of writing. The second sub-chapter, “Agnès Varda, Auteur Theory, and Female Authorship,” examines the development of auteur theory in film studies and the ongoing debates surrounding its validity. A study of a film director inevitably raises a question of authorship in film. By examining the issue of authorial death as discussed by such theorists as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, I suggest that the meaning of a text does not depend on authorial intention. The “death of the Author” does not deny that there was an author who produced the text by his/her gesture; instead it argues that once the text is written, the author has no control over the text. Therefore, reading a text according to its author’s intention is simply one of many ways to read a given text. This sub-chapter also examines the issue of female authorship, since studies of women filmmakers have been limited. The notion of auteur has been intensely contested in film studies because filmmaking is a collaborative practice, making it difficult to assign a single author to a given text. Nevertheless, the fact that Varda has

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made films using an artisanal mode of production by which she has more or less full control over her work means that she is appropriately deemed an auteur. The third chapter, “Theories of the Feminine, Feminism, and Feminine Writing,” examines French feminism within the context of contemporary French philosophy; the notion of the feminine as developed by French feminist thinkers; the distinction between the descriptors “feminine” and “feminist” in France and the U.S.; and lastly, French feminists’ theory of feminine writing and its pertinence to understanding Varda’s films. The chapter is divided into three sub-chapters. The first one, “French Feminism and Philosophy,” provides an overview of the history of “post-68” French feminism and its theory, particularly Jacques Derrida’s influence on French feminist ideas of the feminine and feminine writing as a challenge to phallogocentrism. The second sub-chapter, “Contested Notions of Feminist vs. Feminine in France and the U.S.,” examines the differences in the perception of the term “feminine” and “feminist” between France and the U.S. While Anglo-American feminists perceive “feminine” as an anti-feminist term, French feminists see in the feminine a potentially subversive force. By examining the varied receptions of these terms, I reveal the different philosophical traditions that influenced feminists to take different paths in each country. The third sub-chapter, “Theories of Feminine Writing,” examines the strategies and characteristics of feminine writing as proposed by Hélène Cixous and others; I then demonstrate briefly how Varda’s films constitute feminine writing in film.

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The fourth and last chapter, “Visualizing Feminine Writing: Agnès Varda’s

cinécriture,” offers textual analyses of those of Varda’s films which I argue best exemplify feminine writing. The chapter is divided into three sub-chapters, each devoted to one aspect of feminine writing. The first one, “Between the Real and the Imaginary: Narrative Subversion and Female Subjectivity,” looks at Varda’s fiction films in which she explores female subjectivity. This sub-chapter pays particular attention to the ways in which Varda’s film techniques disrupt the linearity and visual perspective of classical Hollywood cinema. In this sub-chapter, I compare Varda’s narrative strategies and experiments with the conventions of mainstream cinema, i.e., masculine film language. The second sub-chapter, “Writing the Body: Inscription of the Feminine,” examines six of Varda’s films which mostly clearly exemplify a feminine cinécriture that inscribes the female body in the text. Maternity has been a constant subject of interest in Varda’s films, and in such films as Jane B. par Agnès V. and The Gleaners and I, Varda inserts herself into the film text to both declare her authorial presence and raise the issue of the female body. The third sub-chapter, “Writing the Other: Varda’s Cinema of Marginality,” examines Varda’s films as embodying feminine writing by giving voice to the Other. Attention to the marginalized has been a constant marker of Varda’s oeuvre, and I argue that the discourse of the Other emerges as one of Varda’s central preoccupations. I also explore Varda’s own sense of marginality in relation to this preoccupation. Throughout fifty-four years of filmmaking, Varda has made films with a conscious emphasis on creating new cinematic language. Her notion of cinécriture shares

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close similarities with that of feminine writing. However, her films have not been examined in the context of French feminism. By exploring the possibility of feminine writing in film, I hope to contribute to the ongoing discussion on feminist film criticism and to expand the notion of feminist cinema to embrace the “feminine.” In summary, I argue that Agnès Varda is an exemplary filmmaker who practices feminine writing in film and that her films constitute active political writing: a cinematic writing that is concerned, at the level of content, with questions of feminine identity and, at the level of form, with redefining filmmaking from a feminine perspective by creating a new kind of narrative and discursive practice.

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CHAPTER I AGNÈS VARDA IN CONTEXT 1. Agnès Varda and the French New Wave Cinema: “The Only Girl among the Boys” When Agnès Varda began shooting her first film, La Pointe courte, in the early summer of 1954, she was a twenty-six-year-old young woman with no background in filmmaking. After studying art history at the École du Louvre, Varda had studied photography at the École de Vaugirard. In 1949, at the age of twenty-one, she started her career as a theater photographer for the famous stage actor Gérard Philippe at the Avignon Theater Festival, and from 1951 to 1961, she worked as the official photographer at Jean Vilar’s Théâtre National Populaire (TNP). It was during this time that Varda shot La Pointe courte, which she also wrote. Not only did she have no training or experience in filmmaking, she had not even seen many films in her life. Thus, she recalls in her 1994 autobiographical book, Varda par Agnès, that her film début was a “mystery”: When I began my first film, I knew nothing about filmmakers or films and had not even a vague idea of entering the world of cinema. Therefore, [my becoming a filmmaker] is a mystery or an incomprehensible combination of chance and embryonic desire.5

“Au commencement de mon premier film, il n'y avait presque rien, aucune idée sur les cinéastes ou sur les films et aucune aspiration, même vague, à entrer dans le monde du cinéma. Mystère donc ou combinaison incompréhensible de hasards et de désirs larvaires.” Agnès Varda, Varda par Agnès, Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1994, 38. 5

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It can be inferred from her book that the lack of words in photography is one of the reasons she undertook filmmaking. She writes that “[p]hotography seemed to me 6

too silent” and that especially to capture the ebb and flow of feelings, “the wounds of the spirit,” photography was “not enough.”7 At the time, she saw cinema as “silent images plus words spoken out loud.”8 After filming La Pointe courte, Varda had no idea how to go about editing the film and had to call on Alain Resnais to edit the film. Her first meeting with Resnais provides an interesting anecdote about Varda’s absolute lack of knowledge of the filmmaking process. Resnais, who initially declined to work as the editor after reading Varda’s script because the concept of her project was too close to his own, 9 agreed to look at the rushes upon her insistence. Varda brought him ten hours of silent images (because of a tight budget, she filmed silent and added dialogue during postproduction), but Resnais found that she had not numbered any of her film footage. After four hours of watching the rushes, Resnais told Varda he was unable to work on the film because “in order to edit a film, the film must be numbered, a number for each 6

“La photographie me semblait par trop muette.” Ibid.

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Ibid., 39.

“Sans doute ai-je pensé (et c’était stupide, dis-je maintenant) qu’images muettes plus mots dits à voix haute, c’était du cinéma.” Ibid. 8

Varda recalls in her book that somebody mentioned Resnais to her when she was looking for an editor who would work without a salary but in a cooperative she set up for the production of La Pointe courte. When she wrote a letter to Resnais he asked for her scenario. Then he sent her a letter of decline stating, “Your research is too close to mine… I am sorry.” (Vos recherches sont trop proches des miennes… Je regrette.) Ibid., 46. 9

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foot.”10 Resnais offered to lend her his equipment; she took it home and began writing small numbers on the edges of the film to mark each shot and take. She worked on it all day for ten days and called Resnais on the phone: —I have finished what you have told me to do. —You have numbered ten thousand meters in ten days! You are crazy! OK. I will do the editing, but on some conditions. Salary on cooperative basis is all right, but you have to pay for lunch everyday. And I am going to stop working at 6 pm [everyday].11 After agreeing to edit the film, Resnais then worked on it for months. When he discovered that Varda had shot the film in slow speed and without any alternative shots or close-ups, Resnais decided to keep its slowness and its rigid, objective quality. When he told her that her film reminded him of Luchino Visconti’s La terra trema and Michelangelo Antonio’s Il Grido, Varda had to ask him who Visconti and Antonioni were.12 Varda mentions that she will never forget Resnais’ generosity in working for months on the editing and in giving her the education she has remembered ever since.

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“pour monter un film il faut numéroter la pellicule, un numéro à chaque pied.” Ibid.

—J’ai fin ce que vous m’avez dit de faire. —Vous avez numéroté dix mille mètres en dix jours! Vous êtes folle! Bon! Je vais venir faire votre montage, mais en y mettant des conditions. Salaire en coopérative d’accord, mais il faut me payer de quoi déjeuner tous les jours. Et aussi je m’arrête à 18 heures. Ibid. 11

Below is the conversation between Varda and Resnais quoted from her book: —This shot make me think of Visconti’s La terra trema. —Who is Visconti? —The same taste for walls exist in Antonioni’s Il Grido. —Whos is Antonioni? (—Ce plan me fait penser à La terra trema de Visconti. 12

18

It was basically through Resnais that Varda began acquainting herself with the world of cinema. It was Resnais who introduced Varda to the films of directors such as Dreyer, Renoir, and Murnau and to the Cinémathèque française in Paris, where she went to see films and learned the names of great directors. It was also through Resnais, during the editing of La Pointe courte, that Varda first met with the young critics of the

Cahiers du cinéma, such as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, who later became the representative filmmakers of the French New Wave. Varda’s account of her first encounter with these cinephiles conveys how different from them she felt: These famous Cahiers which I knew nothing about, I met some of the members for the first time on a winter evening in 1954-55 because they had asked to see Resnais, who received them at his place. It was during the editing period of La Pointe courte. Since I did not know these young men, it’s solely from a vague memory of their faces (better identified later) that I can say Chabrol, Truffaut, Rohmer (who had another name), Brialy, Doniol-Valcroze and Godard were present that evening. I did not follow the conversation well. They cited thousands of films and me…I addressed their to feeling Resnais,small, talking so fast they lost was all there as comments an anomaly, ignorant, and the only girl among the Cahiers boys.13 —Qui est Visconti? —Il y a chez Antonioni, dans Il grido, le même goût pour les murs. —Qui est Antonioni?) Ibid. “Ces fameux Cahiers, dont je ne savais rien, j’en rencontrai pour la première fois quelques membres un soir de hiver 54-55, car ils avaient demandé à voir Resnais qui les reçut chez lui. C’était le temps du montage de La Pointe courte. Comme je ne connaissais pas ces jeunes gens, c’est seulement sur un vague souvenir de leurs visages (mieux identifié plus tard) que je crois pouvoir dire que Chabrol, Truffaut, Rohmer (qui avait un autre nom), Brialy, Doniol-Valcroze et Godard étaient réunis ce soir-là. Je suivais mal la conversation. Ils citent mille films et proposaient je ne sais quoi à Resnais, tous parlant vite… Moi j’étais là comme par 13

19

Ultimately, however, she developed a long relationship with Cahiers du cinéma members, especially with Godard, who starred with his then-wife Anna Karina in a black-and-white film-within-a-film in Varda’s 1961 film Cléo from 5 to 7 . In addition, she also collaborated in the 1967 collective film, Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam), with Godard, Resnais, Chris Marker, Claude Lelouch, William Klein, and Joris Ivens. Similarly, Varda did not know anything about the business side of cinema before she met Resnais, who surprised her by knowing the audience numbers for a given film; he also explained to her that box office receipts can be checked daily or weekly on a regular basis. Varda had believed that “a film was like a painting, seen by some people and circulating from gallery to gallery.” 14 Actually, Varda could not release La Pointe courte on the commercial circuit because her mode of production and filming did not correspond to the professional rules set up by the CNC (Centre Nationale

de la Cinématographie) and because she did not obtain authorization from the CNC; in fact she didn’t know such an institution and its rules existed. Thus, her film was considered an amateur film. Nevertheless, two years later, in January 1956, the film was screened in a Studio Parnasse theater in Paris and won critical praise during its twoweek run.

anomalie, me sentant petite, ignorante, et seule fille parmi les garçons des Cahiers.” Ibid., 13. 14

“…un film était comme une peinture, vu par quelque-uns et circulant de galerie en galerie.” Ibid., 47.

20

Ironically, the fact that Varda was totally unaware of all the professional rules of filmmaking and of film history allowed her to be completely free from conventional 15

film grammar and to follow her own ideas about the film she had in mind. La Pointe courte was inspired not by any great film or filmmaker but by modernist literature: William Faulkner’s 1939 novel Wild Palms. This was Varda’s attempt to produce on film what Faulkner did in literature: narrative innovations. Wild Palms alternates between two completely different stories that never meet: one is a story of two men escaping from a penitentiary during the Mississippi River floods of 1927, and the other is a love story taking place in 1938. La Pointe courte is also composed of two separate stories that run parallel to each other: a story of a couple on the verge of a breakup, and a story of fishermen trying to organize a union. As Bruce F. Kawin points out, Wild Palms, which was first translated into French in 1953 (a year before the shooting of La Pointe courte), had a huge impact on leading French intellectuals at the time and greatly influenced writers of the nouveau roman (new novel), such as Alain Robbe-Grillet.16

Varda recalls that at the age of twenty, she had seen only four or five films altogether including two films she saw as a child. She says, “If I had seen the films of masters, men or women, that I discovered later, I may have been intimidated or even inhibited.” (si j’avais vu alors ces films de maîtres, hommes ou femmes, que j’ai découverts depuis, j’aurais peut-être été intimidée. Ou même inhibée.) Emile Breton, femmes d’images, Paris: Messidor, 1984, 56. 15

Bruce F. Kawin, “A Faulkner Filmography,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 30, no. 4, Special Book Issue, Summer 1977, 16. 16

21

Although French film historian Georges Sadoul praised La Pointe courte as “certainly the first film of the French nouvelle vague,”17 Varda has been marginalized in accounts of French New Wave cinema. In order to position Varda properly in the history of French cinema of the 1950s and 60s, this chapter examines how the French New Wave has been defined by various film scholars and historians, and how Varda has been placed in relation to the movement. The French New Wave cinema has traditionally been understood as synonymous to the films made by the Young Turks—a nickname for Cahiers du cinéma critics-turned-filmmakers—who first formulated new film theories in the decade after the Liberation and then put them into practice in the late 1950s and early 1960s by making films themselves. James Monaco’s 1977 book, The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard,

Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette, one of the early studies of the French New Wave cinema, limited the term to the films by the five directors of the Cahiers du cinéma group. Monaco’s definition is the most extreme case; however, most French film history books, even though they may include other directors and films, also privilege the Young Turks who started as critics for Cahiers du cinéma. In his two-volume history, French Cinema

Since 1946 (1966), Roy Armes considers the Cahiers du cinéma directors as the only pure members of the New Wave because they came from a background of film criticism. He 17 Georges Sadoul, Dictionary of Films, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972, 288. In his Dictionary of Film Makers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), Sadoul writes of Varda, “Independent and srcinal, she is one of the most important film makers of the nouvelle vague.”(261)

22

distinguishes the Cahiers du cinéma directors as “men who see the world exclusively in film terms,” quoting Godard’s remark about his film Breathless: “Our first films were 18

purely ‘films of cinéphiles.’” In Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction (1996), Guy Austin also privileges the Young Turks when he christens the preview of Claude Chabrol’s first film,

Le Beau Serge, in 1958 as the beginning of the Nouvelle Vague. However, Austin also views Varda’s absence from historical accounts of the French Nouvelle Vague as a major omission and identifies Roger Vadim’s 1956 film Et Dieu créa la femme (And God

Created Woman) as another precursor of the Nouvelle Vague: La Nouvelle Vague is usually taken to encompass five principal directors: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette, all of whom wrote for Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s. However, this canonical list, and indeed the dating of the movement as beginning in the 1958/9, should be qualified. Agnès Varda, a major omission from some accounts of the movement, predated Chabrol, Truffaut, and Godard by shooting her first feature, La Pointe courte, in 1954… In 1956… another important precursor of la nouvelle vague, 19 Et Dieu créa la femme , proved a great commercial Roger Vadim’s success.”

Roy Armes, French Cinema since 1946, Volume two: The Personal Style, New Jersey: A.S.Barnes & Co, 1966, 44. Armes takes auteur-based approach to chronicle the French film history by important directors, which in itself is influenced by the Cahiers du cinéma’s politique des auteurs. 18

Guy Austin, Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996, 15. 19

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Varda’s exclusion from accounts of the New Wave occurs, I contend, for two main reasons: first, because she was a woman and women filmmakers have always remained on the margins of film history; and second, because she was not a cinephile and did not belong to the Cahiers du cinéma group long considered the core of French New Wave. Indeed, the French film industry in 1950s France was very masculine. As Carrie Tarr and Brigitte Rollet point out, “There were no women among the 135 directors who made their first film in the period of 1956-1962, the time of the New Wave, and the directors, producers and technicians (and to a certain extent stars) of French 20

cinema have been overwhelmingly male, as have its critics and historians.” Varda was the only woman to make a full-length feature film ( Cléo from 5 to 7, 1961) during this period, but since it was not her first film and since the New Wave was in a way a “cult of first films,” she was not generally included as one of the New Wave directors. Varda also suffered from obscurity because she made only three documentary shorts between La Pointe courte in 1954 and Cléo from 5 to 7 in 1961: Ô Saisons, ô château (1957), L’Opéra-Mouffe (1958), and Du côté de la côté (1958). Moreover, except for L’OpéraMouffe, these shorts were publicity films commissioned by the Tourist Office. Like many women filmmakers before her, Varda had difficulty securing funding for her films. It was only when her husband and fellow filmmaker Jacques Demy introduced her to

Carrie Tarr with Brigitte Rollet, Cinema and the Second Sex: Women’s Filmmaking in France in the 1980s and 1990s, New York: Continuum, 2001, 10. 20

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Georges de Beauregard, a prominent New Wave producer who produced Demy’s film

Lola (1961), that she was finally able to make another feature film. In fact, she had wanted to make a film titled La Mélangite in color and on location outside Paris; however, Beauregard asked her to make a black-and-white film with a budget of thirtytwo millions francs.21 Hence, she made a black-and-white film about a singer who wanders around the city of Paris. The fact that she was not able to make her second feature film, Cléo from 5 to 7 , until 1961, seven years after La Pointe courte, contributed to her relative obscurity in the French cinema scene, especially during the peak moments of the French New Wave. Even though La Pointe courte was made five years before the French New Wave “officially” started, it shows many characteristics of French New Wave cinema. First, it was a low-budget film made by a first-time filmmaker in her twenties; second, it was totally outside the mainstream commercial film circuit; third, it was a feature film shot on location with a documentary sensibility, featuring unknown actors; and finally and most importantly, it was innovative in its film language and narrative structure—it aimed to create a new “modern” cinema. To make the film, Varda set up a cooperative with young actors and technicians to work without salary, who would be reimbursed when and if the film made profit. 22 21

Agnès Varda, op.cit., 48.

Eventually, it took Varda thirteen years to pay back all parts of the cooperative in 1967. “ La Pointe courte: Agnès Varda, une femme à l’avant-garde de la Nouvelle Garde,” ( La Pointe courte: Agnès Varda, a woman at 22

25

She made the film with 6.5 million francs she inherited and borrowed from her parents at a time when, according to the French film historian René Prédal, the average 23

production cost of a film was seventy million francs. Furthermore, like the New Wave directors who made their début in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Varda did not go through the long apprenticeship traditionally required to become a director in France at the time. In the 1950s, the average age of a first-time director was forty-five.24 Also, as her coining of the term cinécriture (cinematic writing) demonstrates, Varda was very much influenced by the French cinema’s tradition of low-budget auteur films; in her films, she has consistently created a new cinematic language and alternative forms of narrative organization. Furthermore, her analogy between filmmaking and writing shares an affinity with the French New Wave and its notion of caméra-stylo 25 (camera-pen).

the avant-garde of the New Garde), Kinescopie(s), http://interieurjour.free.fr/spip/article.php?id_article=177. René Prédal, Sans toit ni loi d’Agnès Varda, (Vagabond by Agnès Varda ), Paris: Atlande, 2003, 29. The francs here is old franc; the new franc was introduced in 1960, worth one hundred of the old francs. 23

In her 1986 interview with Barbara Quart, Varda describes herself as “a courageous artist, a filmmaker” pointing out that at the time of the shooting of La Pointe courte, “nobody was making films at my age at the time—men or women,” and adds, “…in ’54, at that time nobody young was making films….in France at the time you had to be third assistant, then second assistant, then first assistant for years, and then you would have a chance to direct after age 45.” Barbara Quart, “Agnès Varda: a Conversation,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 40, no. 2, Winter 1986-1987, 6. 24

In his landmark essay, “Birth of a New Avant-Garde” (1948), film critic and filmmaker Alexandre Astruc argues for “caméra-stylo (camera-pen)” which provided the basic theory for the ‘ politique des auteur’ which in turn, became the core idea of the French New Wave cinema, especially by the Cahiers du cinéma critics. He argued that a camera is to a filmmaker what the pen is to a writer and that the cinema has become a language by which a filmmaker can express his or her personal thoughts. 25

26

Even so, for the most part, traditionally, Varda’s only connection with the French New Wave or recognition by the French New Wave was as its “Grandmother,” even though she is only two years older than Jean-Luc Godard and is in fact eight years younger than Eric Rohmer. Varda herself once mentioned that she was called “the ancestor of the New Wave” when she was only thirty. She also described her marginality in the French film scene on several occasions. When asked by the indie Wire about the French New Wave, Varda responded: “I've been called the Grandmother of the New Wave, because my featurehad I made in '54, five before thethat Newthey Wave, andfirst I already the freedom andyears the principles had. I hadn't met with the Cahiers du Cinema. I never had any training. I wasn't a cinebuff like they were. I wasn't a film critic. So, they called me the Grandmother, because I started it, almost. There was a critic who said I was the first "son de cloche d'un immense carillon." It's a beautiful sentence. It's the first bell ring of a massive peal of bells. The “immense carillon” is the fifty films of the New Wave.”26 This representation as “Grandmother” not only marginalizes her first film, La

Pointe courte, to the periphery of the New Wave movement, but it also underestimates the importance of her film in the history of French cinema, especially the innovation in its mode of production and film style. Indeed, the only time La Pointe courte was discussed by Cahiers du cinéma critics in the 1950s was during a roundtable discussion Andrea Meyer, “Celebrity, Filmmaker, Grandmother: Agnès Varda” http://www.indiewire.com/people/int_Varda_Agnes_990419.html 26

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on Alain Resnais’ film Hiroshima, mon amour in 1959. In the discussion entitled, “Hiroshima, notre amour” (Hiroshima, our love), Jacque Rivette regards Varda as merely a “fragment” of Alain Resnais since Resnais was the editor of La Pointe courte. When Jean-Luc Godard brings up La Pointe courte as “one film that must have given Alain Resnais something to think about”27 in terms of its modernist narrative technique, Rivette argues, “I don’t think it’s being false to Agnès Varda to say that by virtue of the fact that Resnais edited La Pointe courte, his editing itself contained a reflection on what Agnès Varda had intended. To a certain degree Agnèsvarda becomes a fragment of Alain 28

Resnais…” This dismissive mention of Varda and her film reflects a complete disregard of the film’s importance as an early or even the first attempt to experiment with modern narrative form in cinema. When Varda is mentioned in the history of French cinema, she is often classified, along with Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, with the so-called “Left Bank” (Rive Gauche) filmmakers, who started making modernist films slightly before the Cahiers du

cinéma group did. Unlike the Cahiers group, who were cinephiles, these filmmakers were concerned with documentary and were influenced by the literary avant-garde movement of the time: the nouveau roman. Their films were less commercial and more

“Hiroshima, notre amour,” Jean Domarchi, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Jean-Luc Godard, Pierre Kast, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, Cahiers du cinéma 97, July 1959, from Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s· Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave., Jim Hillier ed., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985, 66. 27

28

Ibid., 66-67.

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political than those of the Cahiers group. They are often considered as the precursors of the French New Wave. Varda received only minimal recognition from French New Wave filmmakers at the time. Writing in 1956, French critic André Bazin deemed La Pointe courte to be a “miraculous film. . . . by its existence and by its style.”29 As Bazin saw it, there were two miracles: the first was that Varda did not search for a producer in a traditional way but formed a cooperative with other young actors and technicians to make the film with little money; the second miracle, which was made possible by the first miracle, was that Varda had the total freedom of an auteur in shaping the film’s style. Bazin also notes that La Pointe courte is unique in that it was made by a woman: “First of all, [La Pointe

courte] is a film by a woman, which is practically the only one in cinema, even though women novelists do exist.”30 Also, with La Pointe courte and the three short films she made in the late 1950s—Ô Saisons, ô château (1957), L’Opéra-Mouffe (1958), and Du côté de

la côté (1958)—Varda was heralded by film critic and filmmaker Jean Douchet as the 31

first representative of a modern cinema. He writes in Arts, “[Varda] is the true forerunner and promoter of this revival.”32 29 “La Pointe courte est un film miraculeux. Par son existence et par son style.” André Bazin, “Agnès Varda: La Pointe courte: un film libre et pur,” ( La Pointe courte: a free and pure film), Le Parisien libéré, Janvier 7, 1956 quoted from André Bazin, Le Cinéma Français de la Libération à la Nouvelle Vague, Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1983, 194.

“D’abord, c’est un film de femme, je veux dire comme il existe des romans féminins, ce qui est quasiment unique au cinéma.” Ibid., 195. 30

31

Michel Frodon, L’Âge moderne du cinéma français: de la Nouvelle Vague à nos jours (The Modern Age of French

29

Even today, in most accounts, Varda is denied rightful place as the innovator and the actual founder of the new film movement born in France in the 1950s. Varda’s

La Pointe courte has not even been given proper credit for its place in “modern cinema.” Instead, in most studies, Alain Resnais’ 1959 film Hiroshima, mon amour is credited as the first “modernist” film. Georges Sadoul, who praised Varda’s La Pointe courte as the first Noulvelle Vague film, is one of the few critics to recognize that “[La Pointe courte’s] interplay between conscience, emotions, and the real world make it a direct antecedent of Hiroshima, mon amour.”33 Admittedly, establishing Varda as “founder” of the French New Wave requires some re-conceptualization of the French New Wave. If French New Wave cinema is defined as cinema of cinephiles (made by cinephile directors and consumed by a cinephile audience), then Varda is certainly not a New Wave filmmaker since she was not a cinephile. However, recent scholarship is challenging the “traditional” definition of the French New Wave. While taking different approaches, recent scholars are unanimous in arguing that the French New Wave must be de-mystified, that it must be expanded beyond the Young Turks, and that to be understood correctly, it must be examined within a broader social, economic, and cultural context. Cinema: from the New Wave to the present), Paris: Flammarion, 1995, 76. 32

“C’est elle le véritable précurseur et promoteur de ce renouveau,” quoted from Michel Frodon, Ibid.

Quoted from Film Reference, “Agnès Varda,” http://www.filmreference.com/Directors-St-Ve/Varda-Agn-s.html 33

30

Although the French New Wave movement exerted a great influence on world cinema (we saw multiple New Waves in the 1960s), there had been a paucity of booklength studies devoted to the movement until recent years. In addition to Monaco’s book, one of the few early studies in English was The New Wave (1968) by Peter Graham, a selection of writings by both supporters and opponents of the Nouvelle Vague films. However, thanks to renewed interest in the French New Wave on the occasion of its fortieth anniversary in 1998, several significant studies have appeared both in France and the U.S. They include Michel Marie’s La Nouvelle Vague: Une école artistique(1997, translated into English as The French New Wave: An Artistic School in 2002); Jean Douchet’s Nouvelle Vague (1998, translated into English as French New Wave in 1999); Antoine de Baecque’s La Nouvelle Vague: portrait d’une jeunesse (The Nouvelle Vague:

Portrait of a Youth, 1998) and La cinéphilie (Cinephilia, 2003); Richard Neupert’s A History of the French New Wave Cinema (2002); Nouvelle vague, nouveaux rivages (New Wave, New Shores, 2001) edited by Jean Cléder and Gilles Mouëllic; Que Reste-t-il de la Nouvelle Vague? (What Remains of the New Wave? 2003) edited by Aldo Tassone; Geneviève Sellier’s La Nouvelle Vague: Un cinéma au masculin singulier (The New Wave: A Cinema in the Masculine Singular, 2005); and Naomi Greene’s The French New Wave: A New Look (2007). Except for the books by Richard Neupert and Naomi Greene, all of these books were srcinally published in France, and most of them are not yet translated into English.

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Each book focuses on a different aspect of the Nouvelle Vague: Douchet’s book provides a useful political analysis; Marie’s book focuses on the movement’s economic and technical contexts; de Baecque’s La Cinéphilie recounts 1950s cultural history and film criticism; Neupert’s book also offers a solid cultural context of the New Wave; and

Nouvelle vague, nouveaux rivages focuses on the narrative techniques of various films. Further, in discussing the French New Wave period in his 1995 book, L’Âge moderne du

cinéma français: de la Nouvelle Vague à nos jours (The Modern Age of French Cinema: From the New Wave to the Present), Jean-Michel Frodon looks at cinema as a site of conversion of the ideas and philosophies of the time. Naomi Greene’s book defines New Wave cinema as part of a dramatic generational shift that France underwent in the 1950s; she contends, as Armes did, that the young directors and young audience of the cinematic Nouvelle Vague “belonged to, and embodied a generation that adored films—cinephilie.”34 Geneviève Sellier examines the New Wave from a gender perspective. She asserts that all prior studies of the French New Wave have been done from a masculinist male perspective, and she criticizes French historiography on the New Wave cinema for its failure to consider women filmmakers. As Richard Neupert points out in his book, A History of the French New Wave

Cinema, opinions differ about how to define or periodize the New Wave. He himself 34

Naomi Greene, The French New Wave: A New Look , London: Wallflower Press, 2007, 13.

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defines the New Wave as “first and foremost a cultural phenomenon, resulting from economic, political, aesthetic, and social trends that developed in the 1950s.” 35 He summarizes the New Wave as “a complex network of historical forces, including all films made by young directors exploiting new modes of production as well as unusual story and style options.”36 He includes in this network all creative personnel –directors, producers, actors, and even the audience, whom he calls the “nouvelle vague spectator”37 –all of whom helped make the new films. Neupert represents the view of most recent studies on French New Wave cinema in two respects: first, he re-examines the New Wave within a larger historical context; and second, he revises the srcinal definition of the French New Wave cinema as a movement initiated and carried on by a discrete number of directors, especially those of the Cahiers du cinéma. Neupert blames the 1962 special issue of Cahiers du cinéma for the “unfortunate condensation and canonization of the New Wave into a list of directors.” 38 More than half of this special issue on the New Wave was devoted to interviews with three directors—Chabrol, Godard, and Truffaut—and the issue listed “162 New French

35

Richard Neupert, A History of the French New Wave Cinema, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002,

3. 36

Ibid., xviii.

37

Ibid., xxi.

38

Ibid., xviii.

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Filmmakers”; thus, this issue presents the New Wave as a collection of directors rather than of films. While recent studies each take slightly different approaches to the New Wave, a common thread runs through them: an attempt to de-mystify the French New Wave cinema and to place it within the larger context of the changes in postwar French society that made the emergence of a new cinema possible or, in a certain sense, inevitable. Compared to previous accounts, which consisted primarily of auteur-based thematic and stylistic film analyses of certain core directors, these new studies adopt broader perspectives. They no longer posit the New Wave as a group of young film geniuses suddenly bursting onto the scene and revolutionizing filmmaking practices; rather, they evaluate the movement as a phenomenon that was fundamentally a product of its time. Film historians, especially Michel Marie and Richard Neupert, replace the various myths surrounding the New Wave with a defined contextualization of its economic, social, technical, and political conditions. The general consensus of these new studies is that it is necessary to look at the new movement in cinema in a wider context and thus to regard the New Wave filmmakers as just one part—though the most impressive—of this larger movement in French society and culture. This new historiography involves, therefore, de-mystifying the Cahiers du cinéma group. The Cahiers du cinéma, long considered as the sole birthplace of the French New Wave, published a special issue on the movement in 1998. Its title, La Nouvelle Vague: une

légende en question (The New Wave: A Legend in Question) seems to carry a symbolic

34

meaning representative of the recent reassessment of the French New Wave in film history. French film historians Antoine de Baecque and Charles Tesson state in their editorial for the special issue, “The New Wave was quickly caught up in its own mythology of having made a desire for renewal equate with a certain style, form, themes, methods and new faces”;39 they contend that to fully understand the movement, scholars must “undo the myth”(défaire le mythe) and to “withdraw its aura”(retirer son aura). In a roundtable discussion with Jean Douchet and Luc Moullet, André S. Labarthe describes the first films by the Cahiers du cinéma filmmakers, such as Rohmer, Rivette and Godard, as “films of amateurs.” He explains that it was only later that these filmmakers joined the professional cineastes such as Resnais, Franju, and Varda who did not write for the Cahiers du cinéma but practiced a nouveau cinema (new cinema) that

Cahiers du cinéma defended.40 He includes Varda as one of the professional filmmakers who showed the “first cinematic signs” of the French Nouvelle Vague. Labarthe also states that “[t]here is a danger in saying ‘the Cahiers is the Nouvelle Vague’ because the

Cahiers was not responsible for the 170 directors who had just suddenly made their first films.”41 In the same discussion, Jean Douchet argues that the Cahiers du cinéma’s “La Nouvelle Vague a été vite rattrapée par sa légende, pour avoir fait coincider un désir de renouveau avec un style, une forme, des thèmes, des manières et de nouveaux visages.” Antoine de Baecque, Charles Tesson, Editorial “La Nouvelle Vague en question,” Cahiers du cinéma numéro hors-série, décembre 1998, 5. 39

“Toute a changé en Bretagne (All changed in Bretagne)”, round table with Jean Douchet, André S. Labarthe and Luc Moullet, Ibid., 14. 40

“Le danger était de dire …Car les Cahiers n’avaient pas en charge les cent soixante-dix réalisateurs qui venaient tout d’un coup de faire leur premier film.” Ibid., 16. 41

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“politique des auteurs (auteur policy)” is in fact a “ politique des copains (policy of buddies)”42 developed by those Cahiers du cinéma critics-turned-directors. They shared a common taste for films and defended those filmmakers whom they considered their “buddies.” They also helped each other by quoting each other’s films and by supporting each other’s films and filmmaking. This strong bond among the Cahiers du cinéma filmmakers and their self-promotion has contributed to the previously accepted notion of the New Wave as synonymous with the filmmakers of the Cahiers du cinéma. The editors of Que Reste-t-il de la Nouvelle Vague? asked thirty French filmmakers, “What remains of the French New Wave after forty-five years?” Among these filmmakers is Agnès Varda. When asked to define Nouvelle Vague, she responds, “In a word? Godard… [the Nouvelle Vague] is not at all a school or a group like Dada , surrealists, fauvists or cubists. It is a cluster; and a true explosion which saw the birth of thirty (or more) new cineastes in five years. This burst of an independent and creative French cinema marked by the freedom of tone and low budget had a true impact on the entire world. However, if you take a closer look, there were more differences and divergences than common ideas among the cineastes of the Nouvelle Vague, except for, perhaps, the group coming from the Cahiers du cinéma.”43 From the filmmakers’ answers

42

Ibid., 15.

“En un mot? Godard…Ce n’était pas du tout une école ou un groupe comme Dada ou les surrealists ou les fauves ou les cubists. C’est un agglomerate. Et une vraie explosion qui a vu la naissance de trente (ou plus) nouveaux cinéastes en cinq ans. Ce jaillissement d’un cinéma français indépendant et créatif, marqué par la 43

36

to a set of questions, the book’s editors conclude that “[t]he Young Turks of the Cahiers were truly exaggerated.”44 Another conclusion derived from these interviews is that “the Nouvelle Vague was a technical revolution and [revolution] in terms of production, but not an ‘aesthetic’ revolution,”45 and that the only authentic aesthetic revolutions in cinema occurred in the French cinema of the 1930s and in Italian neo-realism. Georges Franju, one of the Nouvelle Vague period filmmakers, even denounces the Nouvelle Vague as a “joke”: The Nouvelle Vague was not even a group, it was a false grouping, with false friendship: advantagemovement of a trend. […] They made us believe it wasthey abouttook an aesthetic but it was a totally different thing. What did they invent? Nothing. They created a myth about the Nouvelle Vague, but in my opinion, it was only a joke. It was the triumph of amateurism; it brought about new customs, but not a new cinema.46

liberté de ton et par de petits budgets a eu un vrai retentissement dans le monde entier. Mais si vous y regardez de près, il y avait plus de différences et de divergences entre les cinéastes de la Nouvelle Vague que d’idées communes, sauf peut-être le groupe issu des Cahiers du cinéma.” Aldo Tassone, Que Reste-t-il de la Nouvelle Vague? Paris: Stock, 2003, 335-336. 44

“…les jeunes Turcs des Cahiers ont vraiment exagéré.” Ibid., 12.

“…la Nouvelle Vague a été une revolution technique et dans la production, mais pas une révolution …” Ibid. 45

“la Nouvelle Vague ce n’était même pas un groupe, c’était un faux regroupement, avec de fausses amitiés, ils profitaient du courant. […] Ils nous ont fait croire qu’il s’agissait d’un courant esthétique, mais c’était tout autre chose. Qu’ont-ils inventé? Rien. On a fait un mythe de la Nouvelle Vague, mais selon moi elle n’a été qu’une blague. Ç’a été le triomphe de l’amateurisme; cela a amené des moeurs nouvelles, mais pas un nouveau cinéma.” Ibid., 21. 46

37

The book also questions the common assumption that modern cinema begins with the New Wave, perceiving the influence of Robert Bresson on modern cinema as more important than that of the New Wave and highlighting the innovations of Alain Resnais, who made films before the Cahiers du cinéma group did so. Ultimately, the book’s editors conclude that the French New Wave was only one branch of a tree that ended up hiding the forest. They define the French New Wave as a mark of a generational change in cinema and as a “revolution both technical and of production,” 47 but argue that the aesthetic revolution was realized by Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais and Chris Marker. It should be noted here that Agnès Varda is the only one of the LeftBank group who is not mentioned as aesthetically innovative, which suggests that Varda’s contribution to the new cinema is still eclipsed, even in recent studies. Among various approaches to the French New Wave cinema, I agree with that of Jean-Michel Frodon, who distinguishes between the French New Wave cinema (la

Nouvelle Vague) and New Cinema ( le Nouveau Cinéma). (From now on I will use the French terms Nouvelle Vague and Nouveau Cinema to distinguish the two more clearly). I support this position because unlike young filmmakers who emerged, en masse, in the late 1950s as part of the Nouvelle Vague, Varda does not belong to the

47

“…une révolution technique et de la production.” Ibid., 20.

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group who trained themselves to be filmmakers by watching films in ciné-clubs and at the Cinémathèque française run by Henri Langlois.48 However, even though it is proper to distinguish the Nouvelle Vague from Nouveau Cinema in terms of “cinephilia,” I question the commonly accepted notion that it was these “cinephile-directors” who invented a “new” “modern” cinema in France. This question, in turn, prompts another set of questions concerning the exact period of the Nouvelle Vague. When did it start and when and how did it decline? And how are the Left Bank filmmakers, including Varda, positioned within its period? Jean Douchet, who posits Nouvelle Vague as a cinematic style, lists its traits as “impertinent, playful, inventive,” and as “emphasizing chance, rupture, improvisation, and brilliant intuition.”49 In his book, The French New Wave , Douchet divides the Nouvelle Vague into two groups, first generation and second generation, and asserts that “there was a significant generation gap among the members of what would become the New Wave cinema.”50 The first generation is represented by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Pierre Kast, Alexandre Astruc, Eric Rohmer, Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, and the second generation, a younger group, includes Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Along with André Bazin, Henri Langlois played a crucial role in forming the Nouvelle Vague cinema. As Antoine de Baecque states in his book, La Cinéphilie: Invention d’un regard, histoire d’une culture 1944-1968 (Cinephilia: Invention of a look, history of a culture 1944-1968), it is “in the Cinémathèque under the direction of Langlois that the group of Young Turks was formed” (C’est là que se forme, sous la direction du professuer un peu fou qu’était Lnaglois, le groupe des ) (38). 48

49

Jean Douchet, French New Wave, trans. Robert Bonnono, New York: DAP, 1999, 8.

50

Ibid., 11.

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Chabrol, François Truffaut, Jacques Rozier, and Jacques Demy. 51 First generation filmmakers/critics were born between 1918 and 1925, and the second generation filmmakers were born between 1928 and 1932. Douchet does expand the scope of the Nouvelle Vague beyond the Cahiers du cinéma group to include pre-Cahiers du cinéma critics and the Left Bank group; however, he does not recognize Varda as belonging to the Nouvelle Vague generation. Varda, born in 1928, seems to straddle the two groups because according to her birth year, she should belong to the second generation, but her début as a filmmaker and affinities with the Left Bank group align her with the first generation. In addition to the different opinions about whom to include in the Nouvelle Vague, its exact period—when it started and when it declined—is also still being debated. Scholars disagree as to whether the year of the first Nouvelle Vague film is 1958 or 1959. Some historians, especially those who consider Nouvelle Vague cinema to be synonymous with the filmmakers of the Cahiers du cinéma group, argue for 1958, the year Claude Chabrol’s first feature film, Le Beau Serge, was previewed; others argue for 1959, the year when Resnais’ Hiroshima, mon amour and Truffaut’s 400 Blows were introduced at the Cannes Film Festival. This latter view stems from the characterization of the Nouvelle Vague as being the invention of a new, modern cinema, since Le Beau

51

Ibid.

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Serge is more or less conventional in its narrative structure. As for the end of the Nouvelle Vague, most critics agree that it had declined by the early 1960s. Despite these different opinions, historians agree that the major characteristic of the Nouvelle Vague period is the explosion of first films by young directors. However, if we define the Nouvelle Vague as the birth of “modern” cinema as well as the explosion of first-time filmmakers, the year 1959 is more appropriate as the starting year for Nouvelle Vague. Jean-Michel Frodon asserts 1959 as the beginning of the Nouvelle Vague, and Michel Marie also defines it as a “coherent movement which existed for a 52

limited period of time [1959-1962].” Geneviève Sellier, too, states that the 1959 Cannes Film Festival where Hiroshima, mon amour and 400 Blows were presented marks the “official” birth of the Nouvelle Vague.53 However, in her book French National Cinema (1993), Susan Hayward extends the Nouvelle Vague period further. She divides the Nouvelle Vague period into two stages: the first period from 1958 to 1962, marked by an explosion of young filmmakers, and the second period from 1966 to 1968, when filmmakers turned toward political filmmaking in the lead-up to the events of May 1968. Richard Neupert argues that the Nouvelle Vague lasted from 1958 to 1964. Scholars also differ on how to position the Left Bank filmmakers in relation to the Nouvelle Vague. Whereas Frodon distinguishes between Nouvelle Vague and the Left 52

Michel Marie, The French New Wave: an Artistic School, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003, 2.

53

Geneviève Sellier, La Nouvelle Vague: Un cinéma au masculin singulier, Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2005, 2.

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Bank group’s Nouveau Cinema, Naomi Greene groups the Left Bank filmmakers as “‘the first generation’ of the New Wave,” 54 and thus includes them as a part of the Nouvelle Vague. She describes their filmmaking as challenging the conventions of documentary and lists three traits the Left Bank group shares that distinguish them sharply from the Cahiers group: first, intense historical awareness coming from their direct experience of the war and its aftermath; second, deep political consciousness as left-wing artists; third, their immersion in other arts of painting, theater, and particularly literature, as all three of them had distinct affinities with the novelists of nouveau roman.55 Greene argues, however, that despite these differences in terms of politics and sensibilities, the two groups shared a fundamental trait: an idea of cinema as an “intensely personal calling.” In her estimation, this common pursuit unifies them within the Nouvelle Vague. Michael Witt and Michael Temple further expand the scope of the Nouvelle Vague by adding yet a third group: Jacques Demy, Louis Malle, Jean-Daniel Pollet and Jacques Rozier, who shared some of the “aspirations of the New Wave.”56 Frodon recognizes that the expression “Nouvelle Vague” has been used inaccurately since the term had been used for two years already by 1959, what he

54

Naomi Greene, op.cit., 41.

55

Ibid., 43-45.

56

Michael Witt and Michael Temple,The French Cinema Book, London: British Film Institute, 2004, 183.

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considers the birth year of Nouvelle Vague.57 He acknowledges, though, that 1959 is certainly a year that exploded with new directions, especially with the Cannes Film Festival where Resnais’ Hiroshima, mon amour, Truffaut’s 400 Blows, and Marcel Camus’ Orfeu Negro each represented a different current in French cinema. However, Frodon still reserves the term “Nouvelle Vague” for the Cahiers group, which was the most coherent expression of the epoch. To refer collectively to different groups who were part of this new filmmaking, he employs instead the term “modern cinema.” To Frodon, modern cinema represents a revolution in the practice of filmmaking. According to him, the Nouveau Cinema group is “less structured” than the Nouvelle Vague group, and he regards the Cahiers group as the hard core of the Nouvelle Vague. He defines the Nouvelle Vague films as “…those made by a small group of people (Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Rivette, Chabrol) who know each other and think highly of each other, who were formed under the spiritual direction of Bazin.” 58 The Nouvelle Vague appeared contemporaneously with great intellectual advances and with the whole modern art movement; Frodon appropriately points out that it was not only the small group from the Cahiers who were the protagonists of the

The term “Nouvelle Vague” was first used in L’Express magazine in 1957. Journalist Françoise Giroud coined the term in her article entitled, “Report on Today’s Youth” to describe the emerging fresh and lively youth culture in 1950s France. 57

“Les films de la Nouvelle Vague au sens strict sont le fait d’un petit groupe de gens (Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Rivette, Chabrol) qui se connaissent et s’estiment, qui ont été formés sous la conduite spirituelle d’André Bazin.” Jean-Michel Frodon, op.cit., 24. 58

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new, modern French cinema. He asserts that the Left Bank filmmakers were “‘ideological’ artists very much explicitly engaged in political reflections on society.” 59 It is interesting to note that Frodon singles out Resnais as the most remarkable filmmaker of the year 1959: …to the eyes of all the defenders of the renewal movement, including those of the Cahiers, it is not 400 Blows but Hiroshima, mon amour which appeared at the moment as the most important film of the year 1959, and as the most convincing signal of the invention of another “ écriture” (writing) of cinema.60 Frodon points out the exaggerated importance that has been placed on the Nouvelle Vague group as the inventor of modern cinema. As Frodon suggests, the notion of “modern” and “modernity” became the crucial criteria for the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers and critics to distinguish themselves from previous filmmaking in France. Frodon further sees a difference between the Nouvelle Vague and Nouveau Cinema in terms of their self-promotion. Referring to the filmmakers of the Nouveau Cinema, he writes: “…they do not form a public group comparable to that of the Young

“….des artists , beaucoup plus explicitement engagés dans une réflexion politique sur la société.” Ibid., 28. 59

“Aux yeux de tous les défenseurs du movement de renouveau, y compris parmi les gens des Cahiers, ce n’est d’ailleurs pas Les Quatre Cents Coups mais Hiroshima qui apparaît sur le moment comme le film le plus important de l’année 1959, et le signal le plus convaincant de l’invention d’une autre de cinéma.” Ibid., 27. 60

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Turks. They did not share their taste for the media fuss…”61 Susan Hayward also points out that the “producer hype” and “the commercial greed on the part of producers” contributed to making the Nouvelle Vague seem “bigger and more important than it was.”62 Furthermore, she uses the term “entre-hommes” (between men) to describe the fraternity of male directors who typically quoted from and referred to the films of other members of their group. In fact, the Nouvelle Vague was a “new wave” in film criticism long before it became a “new wave” in filmmaking. Its core members were all film critics of Cahiers du

cinéma before they became film directors. Antoine de Baecque’s book, La cinéphilie, is an excellent account of the development of French cinephilia and film criticism in the 1940s and 50s before the advent of the Nouvelle Vague. De Baecque defines the history of cinephilia as the cultural history of cinema and considers cinephilia as “a manner of viewing the films, talking about them, then diffusing this discourse.”63 In short, cinephilia is about learning to view films. 64 And it is this cinephilia that distinguishes the Nouvelle Vague from the Nouveau Cinema. “…ne forment pas un groupe public comparable à celui des jeunes Turcs, dont ils ne partagent pas le goût pour le tapage médiatique…” Ibid., 27-28. 61

62

Susan Hayward, French National Cinema, New York: Routledge, 1993, 235.

“La cinéphilie, considéré comme une manière de voir les films, d’en parler, puis de diffuser ce discourse…” Antoine de Baecque, La cinéphilie : Invention d’un regard, histoire d’une culture 1945-1968.(The Cinephilia : Invention of a look, history of a culture 1945-1968) Paris: fayard, 2003, 11. 63

Numerous cine-clubs and especially Henri Langlois’s Cinémathèque française played an important role by offering numerous screenings to the cinephiles. Through these screenings, the cinephiles rediscovered silent 64

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According to de Baecque, the significance of the French cinephile culture lies in the fact that it gave birth to modern film criticism. It also affirmed the important role cinema played in French cultural history because serious discourses and critical reviews of cinema, especially the auteurism of the Cahiers du cinéma critics, helped to elevate cinema to the status of art. French cinephilia is also unique in that its criticism actually invented a new cinema. De Baecque’s account of French cinephile culture also shows that the 1950s French film scene was very male-dominated and that it would not be an exaggeration to describe it as a “boy’s club.” Not only the filmmakers, but also the audience was primarily male—many of them adolescents and young men—and film viewing served as an “education in feelings” ( éducation sentimentale) for them: For a cinephile, . . . female characters appear as objects of desire: he can collect them, exchange them, dream about them, love them. They are fetish elements of a cult of cinema in the paroxysm of his desire.65 De Baecque states his view that many young men entered into cinephilia through love and desire for the women seen on screen; the cinema brought them women’s bodies, cinema and this in turn made them become more conscious of the film language and formal aspects of miseen-scène. For detailed account of Langlois’ efforts, see Glen Myrent and Gesrces P. Langlois, Lisa Nesselson trans., Henri Langlois: First Citizen of Cinema , New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995. “Pour un cinéphile, toutes ces apparitions féminines s’apparentent à des objets de désir: il peut les collectionner, les échanger, les rêver, les aimer. Elles sont les éléments fétiches d’un culte du cinéma au paroxysme de son désir.” “Amour des femmes, amour du cinéma: L’érotomanie cinéphile, maladie infantile des salles obscures (1944-1963) (Love of women, love of cinema: the Cinephile Erotomania, infantile disease of the dark rooms)”, Antoine de Baecque, op.cit., 268. 65

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their movements, their gestures, their emotions, and their beauty, as well as their monstrousness. In short, the cinema educated young cinephiles about women. It was during the peak years of this cinephilia that both the Nouvelle Vague and Nouveau Cinema filmmakers began to practice filmmaking; unsurprisingly, women filmmakers were denied any significant place within this film culture. Among recent new studies, Sellier’s La Nouvelle Vague: Un cinéma au masculin

singulier (The New Wave: A Cinema in the Masculine Singular), stands out because it is the only book-length study of the French Nouvelle Vague cinema that is centrally concerned with the issue of gender; indeed, the French Nouvelle Vague cinema movement had never been studied or assessed from a gender/feminist perspective before this book. Sellier explores what she describes as this “blind point of the French historiography on the Nouvelle Vague,”66—the absence of a gender dimension—and criticizes most previous studies of the French Nouvelle Vague cinema for identifying with “the masculine point of view of the young filmmakers and with their vision of women and the relationships of sex, without ever questioning the absence of women filmmakers in this generation.”67 She explains that the mythic dimension of the aesthetic revolution has eclipsed all other dimensions, and although recent studies show an

66

“…ce point aveugle de l’historiographie française sur la Nouvelle Vague…,” Geneviève Sellier, op.cit., 6.

“…au point de vue masculin des jeunes cinéastes et à leur vision des femmes et des rapports de sexe, sans jamais s’interroger sur l’absence de femmes cinéastes dans cette génération…” Ibid. 67

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increasing interest in the socio-cultural context of the Nouvelle Vague, they still do not include the issue of gender in their analysis. Sellier’s book is significant in two aspects: first, it attempts to re-write the history of the French Nouvelle Vague from a gender perspective, and second, it includes the Left-Bank group in the Nouvelle Vague, reassessing this cinema style as synonymous with modernity in the aesthetic sense. In addition, Sellier highlights the fact that

Hiroshima, mon amour by Resnais, Cléo from 5 to 7 by Varda, and Thérèse Desqueyroux by Georges Franju—all films directed by a Left Bank filmmaker—are the only films of the 1960s generation which “construct female characters as an example of consciousness, as subject, and not as object of the story.” 68 Sellier also argues that the Left Bank filmmakers were “more inclined to defend a modern form of ‘art for art’ than the Cahiers group,” and to share “the idea that stylistic research can be articulated with a progressive political engagement.”69 From a feminist perspective, Varda has often been compared with Marguerite Duras as an avant-garde filmmaker. Guy Austin identifies the two as the principal auteurs in French film since the 1960s “whose idiosyncratic styles epitomize avant-garde

“Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962) et Thérèse Desqueyroux (1962) sont sans doute les seuls films de cette génération (deux de ces films sont écrits ou réalisés par une femme) qui construisent le personnage féminin comme instance de conscience, sujet, et non pas comme objet du récit.” Ibid., 133. 68

“les cinéastes dits …. plus enclin à défendre une forme moderne de . …partagent l’idée que les recherches stylistiques peuvent s’articuler avec un engagement politique progressiste…” Ibid., 183. 69

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auteur cinema.”70 This shows that in France, women filmmakers are regarded within the auteur tradition of French cinema. Duras and Varda both spoke of their work in literary terms; Duras described each of her films as “un livre sur de la pellicule” (a book recorded on film), and Varda described her filmmaking as cinécriture (cinematic writing).71 Their thoughts on cinema show that French women filmmakers worked inside the intellectual scene of their time and tended to explore the deep structure of film language rather than deal with immediate women’s issues. Unlike Varda, Duras did not direct a film during the Nouvelle Vague period, although she wrote the script of Resnais’s Hiroshima, mon amour in 1959. Unlike Varda, who started filmmaking at the age of twenty-six without having any prior experience, Duras was already an established writer when Resnais asked her to write a script for him. Her first directing experience, however, did not come until 1966, when she codirected La Musica with Paul Seban; she did not direct a film on her own until 1969, when she directed Détruire, dit-elle (Destroy, she said), which was based on her own novel. ű

Renate G nther positions her as closer to the Nouveau Cinema than the Nouvelle Vague because her background was literary and her films were more politically committed than those of the Nouvelle Vague.72

70

Guy Austin, op.cit., 81.

71

Ibid., 81-86.

72

Renate Günther, Marguerite Duras, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.

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Estimating Varda’s proper place in relation to the French New Wave cinema is a tricky task because, as I have elaborated, even almost five decades since its inauguration, the question of what really constitutes the French Nouvelle Vague cinema and its major traits is still being debated among film historians and critics. However, as Naomi Greene points out, “critics generally agree that Varda—perhaps because of her outsider status as a woman—has not really been given adequate credit for her pioneering work.”73 Varda has usually been slotted in with the Left Bank Group,74 along with Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, in the accounts of 1950s and 60s French cinema. However, as previously noted, scholars also disagree about how to place this Left Bank filmmakers in relation to the Nouvelle Vague. Sandy Flitterman-Lewis asserts that by expanding the definition of the Nouvelle Vague beyond the filmmakers of Cahiers du cinéma to include

73

Naomi Greene, op.cit., 110.

The Left Bank Group is not a movement but a loose group of independent filmmakers of the same generation who shared similar tendencies. They were older than the filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague Group, and their direct experie nces of World War II are reflected in their politically and socially conscious films. They were more radical in their political stance and often mentioned the Algerian war in their work. They were also more influenced by literary avant-garde movement of the time than by cinema and therefore were much more committed to experimenting with language and narrative. Resnais collaborated with Marguerite Duras as well as Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Duras herself became an influential avant-garde filmmaker in the 60s. Varda certainly shares these characteristics of the Left Bank Group, constantly making documentary films and continually posing the question of cinematic language in her work. Her concept cinécriture of can be understood in reference to the avant-garde literature. The French Algerian war is often referred to in her films as in 5 to7, Cléofrom where Cléo meets a soldier on his short vacation from the Algerian war. She collaborated with Resnais, Marker and Godard on the protest documentary filmLoin du Vietnam (1967), but the political aspect of her work is best understood as the politics of sexual difference and representation that calls for a different cinematic language for women. 74

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those filmmakers who maintained a continual preoccupation with the language of film, forms of narrative organization, and strategies of cinematic discourse, Resnais, Varda 75

and Marker should be included. Jill Forbes, on the other hand, characterizes Varda as a “post-nouvelle vague” director although she excludes from this category major filmmakers such as Resnais, Chabrol, Bresson, Rivette and Rohmer. The reason for the exclusion is that although they continued to make films in the 1970s, their innovative influence was over. In contrast, Forbes classifies Varda as one of the “…filmmakers whose career had begun in the 1950s or 1960s for whom the 1970s represented a new departure and who thus produced a body of work of new significance in the post-1968 period.”76 She names Varda as one of cinema’s most influential filmmakers, along with Truffaut and Godard, who in the ‘70s began to work for television. Richard Neupert argues that the young Agnès Varda, along with Jean-Pierre Melville and Alexandre Astruc, produced low-budget films which contained valuable narrative lessons that anticipated and influenced the Nouvelle Vague. Recent revisionist studies on the historiography of the Nouvelle Vague certainly place more weight on Agnès Varda compared to previous accounts; however, her contribution to the making of a new cinema in the 1950s, in particular through her first film, La Pointe courte, is still underrated. She therefore remains one of the least studied Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently-Feminism and the French Cinema, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996, 250. 75

76

Jill Forbes, The Cinema in France-After The New Wave, New York: MacMillan Press, 1992, 2.

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filmmakers in French film history. Varda’s place within the history of French cinema of the 1950s and ‘60s deserves much more attention, if for no other reason than the potential to enhance our understanding of the Nouvelle Vague. It is evident from recent research on the Nouvelle Vague that this “cinematic revolution” should not be wholly attributed to the small group of critics-turneddirectors of the Cahiers du cinéma. Rather, it was a part of larger historical, political, economic, social and cultural changes that were taking place in postwar France. Also, the invention of modern or modernist cinema in France did not begin with the Nouvelle Vague, despite previous perceptions. It started with Agnès Varda’s La Pointe courte in 1954. Therefore, I question the equation of New Wave =Cahiers du cinéma= modern cinema and argue that Varda is the true initiator of the “modern” era in French cinema. Following Frodon’s definition, I distinguish “Nouvelle Vague” cinema from the “Nouveau Cinema.” The main difference between the two is that the former is closely related to the vogue for cinephilia, whereas the latter was more influenced by modernist literature and tried to find the ways to translate it onto film. Therefore, arguably we could say that New Wave films are closer to “cinematic modernism,” meaning that they use the film medium more self-consciously and display greater selfreflexivity than those of the Nouveau Cinema. Therefore, if we redefine the Nouvelle Vague as an invention of a new “modern” cinema—Nouveau Cinema—and a new cinematic writing, then Varda certainly deserves an important place as pioneer and legitimate member. However, I

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prefer to distinguish between the Nouvelle Vague and the Nouveau Cinema because I would emphasize that the Nouvelle Vague, which began in the year 1959 when Truffaut’s 400 Blows and Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, mon amour were screened at the Cannes Film Festival, is a product of the postwar French cinephile culture. The Left Bank filmmakers—Varda, Resnais and Chris Marker—were making modernist films before 1959, but they did not belong to the cinephile generation. Also, the Nouvelle Vague erupted during the short period of 1959-1962 when more than 160 young filmmakers made their first films, resulting in the Nouvelle Vague becoming the “cult of first films.” In this regard, Varda deserves her proper title as the pioneer of the Nouveau Cinema which in turn influenced the emergence of a new cinema by young filmmakers. 2. Feminist Reception of Varda’s Films: From “Reactionary” to a “Feminist Auteur” Some radical feminists hated my work, some feminists loved it—I was like a ping-pong ball. But in terms of real life, simple things, and not theoretical—because I never was, never read anything about feminists—all these people knew about Babel and Engels, which I came to know very late. But I was naturally involved in fighting whatever was prejudicial to women. So we started in France—I’m speaking about ’48, ’49, ’50— going with other groups to the government, making petitions. I was there, helping women with that, and trusting women and working with them, giving them confidence and pushing them to become technicians— way ahead of others. 77 --Agnès Varda

77

Quart, Barbara. “Agnès Varda: A Conversation.” Film Quarterly, Vol. 40, no. 2, Winter 1986, 6.

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In 2007, two books on women’s films came out whose front covers, coincidentally, consist of exactly the same still from Agnès Varda’s 1961 film Cléo from 5 to 7 (French title, Cléo de 5 à 7 ). One is Valerie Orpen’s Cléo de 5 à 7 , the first book-length study in English entirely devoted to a single film by Varda. The other is Geetha Ramathan’s

Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women’s Films, which analyzes, from a feminist perspective, a set of diverse films by women directors. The image used is a close-up of Cléo, the protagonist of the film, trying on a hat and looking at herself in the mirror in a moment of narcissism. It is in fact a mirrored image of Cléo, who in the course of the film transforms herself from a woman-being-looked-at to a woman-with-an-active-look; in other words, from an object of a look to a subject looking. Whereas it is clearly logical for the first book to choose Cléo’s image for its cover since the film is the book’s only subject, the choice seems rather odd for the second book because it never mentions Cléo from 5 to 7 . Of course, Ramathan discusses Varda as one of her “feminist auteurs,” but the Varda film she analyzes is not Cléo from 5 to 7 but

Vagabond (French title, Sans toit ni loi, 1985). Why did the publisher decide to use a still from Cléo from 5 to 7 and not from Vagabond, and for that matter, why not any still from the twenty-two films actually discussed in the book? It is possible to guess a few answers to the question: first, Cléo from 5 to 7 is Varda’s best known film; second, Cléo

from 5 to 7 is not only representative of Varda but of feminist cinema; and third, Cléo is more pleasurable to look at than Mona, the protagonist of Vagabond (Cléo is a beautiful

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singer whereas Mona defies feminine beauty by being filthy) so that this still makes the book more eye-catching than it would be with a shot from Vagabond on the cover. Whatever the reason, it seems plausible to argue that in today’s feminist film studies, Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 has acquired an iconic status. This raises the question, however, of why now, more than forty-five years after the film was made? The same question can also be asked about Varda, the filmmaker herself, who has been making films for more than half a century. Since her first film, La Pointe courte (1954), Varda has made more than forty films, including shorts and documentaries, and at the age of 78

eighty, she is still committed to active filmmaking. However, as Jill Forbes asserted in 1987, “Varda is literally invisible, either because her movies do not find a distributor… or more subtly, through a damaging critical silence.” 79 Susan Hayward also wrote in 1990 that “Varda has been little heralded by feminist critics, least of all by those in the United States and the United Kingdom.”80

According to Variety.com on February 5, 2008, Varda has finished filming a new film Les Plages d’Agnès (Agnès’ Beaches) and is in post-production. It is an “autobiographical docu feature” which records the beaches and the people in Varda’s life. Variety.com adds that the film is to be ready for the Cannes Film Festival in May 2008. http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117980226.html?categoryId=19&cs=1&nid=3078 78

Jill Forbes, “Agnès Varda: The Gaze of the Medusa,” Sight & Sound, Vol. 58, no. 2, Spring 1989, 122. Forbes adds that the silence is so systematic that “Varda’s exclusion must be related to the fact that she is a woman.” 79

80 Susan Hayward, “Beyond the gaze and into femme-filmécriture: Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi (1985),” French Film: Texts and Contexts, eds. Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau, London and New York: Routledge, 1990, 285.

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As I have elaborated in the previous section, Varda has not been given the appropriate credit she deserves as the “inventor” of a “new cinema” or “modern cinema” in France. At the same time, Varda has been underappreciated in feminist film criticism as well. Varda is one of the rare women filmmakers in France who has openly claimed to be a feminist filmmaker and who made an explicitly feminist film, One Sings,

the Other Doesn’t (French title, L’une chante, l’autre pas, 1977) during the height of 1970s French women’s liberation movement. Nevertheless, her films have not been well received by feminist critics; she was even attacked as “reactionary” by Claire Johnston, one of the most prominent feminist film critics of the ‘70s. Interestingly though, since the mid-1990s, feminist critics’ attitude towards Varda’s body of work has become more appreciative, and her films, most notably Cléo from 5 to 7 and her feature documentary

The Gleaners and I (French title, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, 2000), have in recent years joined the list of the films most studied by feminist critics. This belated recognition of Varda as a feminist auteur opens an area in which historical changes in feminist film criticism and feminist filmmaking can be explored. This section of the chapter traces the changes in feminist reception of Varda’s films since the emergence of feminist film theory in the ‘70s to the present day. It will examine the feminist criticism of Varda in France, the United States and United Kingdom, paying particular attention to the similarities and differences between French and Anglo-American feminist film criticism. In fact, French feminist film criticism was short-lived, lasting only from the mid-1970s to early ‘80s, during which time several

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books and journal issues on feminist cinema were published: La Revue du cinéma’s issue on Les Femmes et le Cinema (Women and Cinema, April 1974), CinémAction’s Le cinéma au

féminisme (Feminist Cinema, Autumn 1979), Françoise Audé’s Ciné-modèles cinéma d’elles (Cinema Models Women’s Cinema, 1981), and Emile Breton’s Femmes d’images (Women of Images, 1984). It is interesting to note that studies on Varda’s films in France these days do not emphasize gender issues; she is discussed as a cinéaste (filmmaker) rather than a feminist filmmaker. The rise and decline of feminist film criticism in France directly reflects the success of a strong feminist movement which followed the events of May 1968 and subsequently declined in the early ‘80s.81 October 1973 saw the creation of Musidora (L’Association Musidora), a feminist association whose goal was to promote the production and distribution of films by women and to critique the roles and images of women in cinema. In its manifesto, Musidora declared, “We deem that women’s cinema, in fact, is in creation and in movement and that it does not have any lesson to learn from 81

It is beyond the scope of this dissertation to elaborate on the history of the women’s movement in France. However, it is worthwhile pointing out that the feminist movement in France was triggered by the events of May 1968 which had an enormous social impact in France by replacing the old conservative order and moral values with the leftist liberal political institutions and morality. Women who participated in this revolutionary movement were dismayed to discover that their male colleagues’ ideals did not include equal relationship between men and women. Realizing the need for their own movement, they created Mouvement de libération des femmes (Women’s Liberation Movement, MLF), a name given by analogy to the Women’s Liberation Movement in the U.S. The MLF actively and successfully pursued women’s rights in the 70s; however, since the late 70s, the differences within MLF intensified eventually causing the movement to disintegrate. Additionally, the election of the socialist François Mitterrand as President in 1981, and the passage of law against sexism in 1983 further weakened the feminist movement. For a detailed account of the feminist movement in France, read Claire Duchen, Feminism in France: From May ’68 to Mitterrand, London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986.

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current cinema, which expresses only one ideology, male sentiments and sensibilities. Reference to the cinema of men deforms, mutilates and kills the creativity of women.”82 Musidora organized a women’s film festival in April 1974, and for the event, the film journal La Revue du cinéma: Image et son published a special issue dedicated to the subject of “Les femmes et le cinéma (Women and Cinema).” In this issue, Agnès Varda contributed an article on women’s films at the Toronto Film Festival. In 1976, Musidora also edited an anthology paroles…elles tournent! (Words…Women Shoot Movies!) in which women filmmakers, critics, writers, and actresses talk about women’s filmmaking. However, Varda is not featured in this book. Another film journal CinémAction also dedicated an issue to the subject of “Le

Cinéma au Féminisme” (Feminist Cinema) in 1979 and discussed the works of several women filmmakers, including Agnès Varda’s One Sings, the Other Doesn’t. Fourteen years later in 1993, CinémAction published an issue on feminist film criticism: 20 ans de

théories féministes sur le cinéma (20 Years of Feminist Film Theories). Interestingly, this time the issue consists mainly of French translations of essays in feminist film criticism written by Anglo-American feminist critics such as Laura Mulvey, Claire Johnston, Mary Ann Doane, Constance Penley, Annette Kuhn, bell hooks, Linda Williams, Anne

“nous estimons en effet que le cinéma des femmes est en création et en mouvement et qu’il n’a pas de leçons à prendre dans le cinéma actuel, qui n’exprime qu’une idéologie, des sentiments, des sensibilités mâles. La référence au cinéma des hommes déformes, mutile ou tue la créativité des femmes.” Françoise Audé, Ciné-modèles cinéma d’elles: Situations de femmes dans le cinéma français 1956-1979, Paris: L’Age d’homme, 1981, 95. 82

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Friedberg, Ginette Vincendeau, Judith Mayne, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis and others. In her editorial introduction, Monique Martineau states, “Although France has largely ‘colonized’ diverse Anglo-Saxon countries with her theories of cinema (notably the auteur policy and semiology), she has sent them nothing in the area of feminist film criticism.”83 It is evident from Martineau’s comment that in France, feminist film theory and criticism were not able to develop and flourish as they did in the U.K. and the U.S. Bérénice Reynaud and Ginette Vincendeau also point out that although French theorists—Lacan, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Althusser, Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva and others—continue to inspire the development of Anglo-American feminist criticism, France has remained in “theoretical isolation” when it comes to feminist film criticism. Reynaud and Vincendeau find the reason for this absence in the “intellectual disrepute into which feminism in the 80s and 90s was cast.”84 Indeed, unlike in the U.K. and the U.S., women’s studies are not considered a serious academic discipline in France. In 1982, Hélène Cixous criticized the 1980 suppression of the Women’s Studies Program at

“Alors que la France a largement divers pays anglo-saxons avec ses théories sur le cinéma (politique des auteurs et sémiology notamment), elle ne leur a rien envoyé en matière de critique de cinéma féministe.” Monique Martineau, “Inconnu au bataillon!” (Unknown to the battalion!), 20 ans de théories féministes sur le cinéma, CinémAction, no. 67, 2e trimestre 1993, 5. 83

84

Bérénice Reynaud and Ginette Vincendeau, “Contre-champs,” Ibid., 9.

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the University of Paris VIII by the minister of the universities, Mme. Saunier-Séité, and a government attack on the Program later in the year.85 Feminism’s falling into disrepute in the French intellectual scene must have played a significant, if not decisive, role in the decline and failure of feminist film criticism in the early ‘80s. It also influenced women filmmakers to eliminate gender or feminist issues from their work. When I first met Varda in 2003 at the University of Southern California where she received the first Eisenstein Award presented by the School of Cinematic Arts, she questioned my approaching her films in the context of French feminism. She seemed to disapprove of being “labeled” a feminist filmmaker, emphasizing instead that she is a “cineaste” (filmmaker). Carrie Tarr and Brigitte Rollet state that “French women directors characteristically disclaim their gender as a significant factor in their filmmaking[,] and their films lack a critical engagement with feminism and feminist film theory ” because “issues relating to gender inequalities and sexual difference have been persistently obscured by discourses on Republican 86

universalism inherited from the French Revolution.” This lack of engagement with feminism is surprising because France has, arguably, the strongest presence of women filmmakers in the world. According to Tarr and Rollet, during the 1990s, the total

Hélène Cixous, “Comment on Women’s Studies in France,” Signs, Vol. 7, no. 3, Feminist Theory, Spring 1982, 721-722. 85

86

Carrie Tarr and Brigitte Rollet, op.cit., 1-5.

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number of films made by women was 166, 13.7% of the nation’s total production. 87 Tarr and Rollet argue, in fact, that women directors have been successful integrating into the 88

French film industry because they have set aside the question of their gender. In contrast to France, where the women’s movement and feminist studies flourished for only a short time during the 1970s, feminist film theory has exerted a great influence on film theory in the U.K. and the U.S. since the publication of Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Although during the 1990s and onwards, the emergence of so-called “post-feminism” has more or less had the effect of making the term “feminism” seem outdated, feminist film criticism continues to play a significant role in film studies, especially with the development of cultural studies. The focus of feminist film studies has moved from analyzing the representation of women in dominant cinema (mostly from a white, middle-class women’s perspective) to investigating issues of differences among women: race, class, and sexual preference. In addition, cultural studies have given rise to reception studies that explore the role of spectatorship in popular culture, and to visual culture studies that focuses on cultural aspects of visual forms of media, communication and information. Recent re-discovery of Varda’s films by feminist critics, especially in the U.S., reflects this new trend in film/cultural studies. For example, Ruth Hottell’s 1999 essay, 87

Ibid., 3.

88

Ibid., 11.

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“Including Ourselves: The Role of Female Spectatorship in Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur and L’une chante, l’autre pas,” examines how Varda brings previously marginalized 89

female spectators into the interpretative, creative process, and Janice Mouton’s 2001 essay, “From Feminine Masquerade to Flâneuse: Agnès Varda’s Cléo in the City,” draws upon Walter Benjamin’s notion of “flânerie” to trace Cléo’s transformation as a female flânerie in the city of Paris90. Undoubtedly, Benjamin is one of the crucial figures in the development of American cultural studies. Jill Forbes’ posthumous essay, “Gender and Space in Cléo de 5 à 7 ” (2002), reconsiders the canonical feminist reading of the film that Cléo is empowered as a subject; she argues that “the film is as much about Paris as about a woman” and that Cléo is mapped on to Paris as whore. 91 Space and the city are also important subjects in cultural and visual culture studies. Feminist critics’ response to Varda’s films has not always been favorable. In fact, the recent surge of interest in Varda’s films among feminist critics is a stark contrast to the assessment she received in the 1970s, when feminist theory began to develop in the 92

English-speaking world. Claire Johnston, who in 1973 edited the pioneering anthology in feminist film theory, Notes on Women’s Cinema, attacked Varda as “reactionary”: 89 Ruth Hotell, “Including Ourselves: the Role of Female Spectators in Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur and L’une chante, l’autre pas,” Cinema Journal, Vol. 38, no. 2, Winter 1999, 52-71.

Janice Mouton, “From Feminine Masquerade to Flâneuse: Agnès Varda’s Cléo in the City,” Cinema Journal, Vol. 40, no. 2, Winter 2001, 3-16. 90

91

Jill Forbes, “Gender and Space in Cléo de 5 à 7 ,” Studies in French Cinema, Vol. 2, no. 2, 2002, 83-89.

92

The focus of this chapter is not on the elaboration of differences between feminist film criticism among

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The films of Agnès Varda are a particularly good example of an oeuvre which celebrates bourgeois myths of women, and with it the apparent innocence of the sign. Le Bonheur in particular, almost a Barthesian analysis! portrayal of fantasyinvites constitutes one of the nearestVarda’s approximations to female the facile day-dreams perpetuated by advertising that probably exist in cinema. Her films appear totally innocent to the workings of myth; ….Varda’s concern for nature is a direct expression of this retreat from history: history is transmuted into nature, involving the elimination of all questions, because all appear ‘natural.’ There is no doubt that Varda’s work is reactionary: in her rejection of culture and her placement of woman outside history her films mark a retrograde step in women’s cinema.93 By the time Johnston wrote this essay, Varda had five feature-lengths films in her

oeuvre: La Pointe courte (1954), Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), Le Bonheur (1965), Les Créatures (1966), and Lions Love (1969). Johnston’s primary target was Le Bonheur; however, Cléo

from 5 to 7 was also subjected to harsh criticism at the time. Naome Gilburt, whose essay, “To be Our Own Muse: The Dialectics of a Culture Heroine,” is included in Notes on

Women’s Cinema, categorizes Cléo from 5 to 7 as one of those films in which “the female

different countries; however, it is useful to point out here that within Anglo-American feminist film criticism there is a different tendency between the U.K. and the U.S. According to Ruby Rich, “the distinction between the personal voice and the voice of history allows to differentiate the two types of feminist criticism. …one is British, the other American; the American is sociological and subjective, one speaks in one’s own name; British is more methodological, more objective, it is the voice of the history which speaks.” This difference is embodied in feminist film journals: Camera Obscura in the U.S., and Screen in the U.K. Monique Martineau, op.cit., 5. Claire Johnston, “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema,” Claire Johnston ed., Notes on Women’s Cinema , BFI pamphlet, 1973, 30. 93

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image was characteristically oppressed and the roles were stereotypes.” 94 Her analysis of

Cléo from 5 to 7 offers a very different reading from contemporary critics, who see Cléo’s empowerment in the film: In Cléo from 5 to 7 , Agnès Varda projects the other side of the same negative female myth and reality. Cléo, a wealthy and successful Parisian singer, actress and sex idol, experiences feelings of existential worthlessness behind her beauty, artifice, and histrionics. Cléo’s form of oppression . . . is equally as corrosive and undermining to self-esteem . . . Cléo is the image men have of her…[T]he film suggests there is nothing tolove for.95

Cléo from 5 to 7 is a story about a beautiful singer who is waiting for the results from a medical test, which might reveal that she has cancer. Seized by a great fear of death, she begins to reflect upon herself. Realizing that she has been living the life of a doll, she throws off her blonde wig, the symbol of her false identity, goes out into the streets of Paris and begins to interact with people differently. The first half of the film depicts Cléo as an embodiment of conventional femininity, and the latter half follows the trajectory of her recovery of her true identity and subjectivity. Obviously, Cléo’s empowerment was not evident to the early feminist critics. In fact, the early feminist film critics’ call for a “counter-cinema” was based on their critique of Hollywood cinema

Naome Gilburt, “To be Our Muse: the Dialectics of a Culture Heroine,” Claire Johnston ed., Ibid., 6. Among the films Gilburt criticized together with Cléo from 5 to 7 include Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970), Lina Wertmuller’s The Lizards (1963), and Ida Lupino’s The Bigamist (1953). 94

95

Ibid., 6-7.

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and European art cinema that reproduce and perpetuate the myths of women and stereotyping of women. Johnston calls for a new type of film that makes a strategic use of the forms of Hollywood commercial cinema: entertainment cinema informed by political ideas. Her notion of “counter-cinema” is achieved by women’s films made within the system which interrogate and demystify the workings of sexist ideology. In this respect, it was Nelly Kaplan, another French woman director who made her feature début in 1970 with La fiancée du pirate (English title, A Very Curious Girl), who suggested a model for the counter-cinema. Johnston argues that Kaplan poses woman as subject while leading the audience into self-awareness with the surrealist impulse in her films. Johnston also praised Kaplan for embracing “narrative conventions and iconography derived from Hollywood” and using the “entertainment” fiction film to draw on the collective fantasies of women.96 Also, “[Kaplan] understands the dangers of myth invading a sign in the art film, and deliberately makes use of Hollywood iconography to counteract it.”97 Similarly, Johnston perceives Dorothy Arzner’s Dance,

Girl, Dance (1940) and Ida Lupino’s Not Wanted (1949) as films that show the possibilities of subverting the workings of myth in the Hollywood system. Since Johnston’s emphasis is on the strategic use of the Hollywood entertainment form for feminist ends, she puts more weight on women’s films made within the Hollywood system. She argues that 96

Claire Johnston, “Nelly Kaplan: an Introduction,” Claire Johnston ed., Ibid., 14.

97

Claire Johnston, “Women’s Cinema as Counter-cinema,” Ibid., 25.

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European art film is more open to the “invasion of myth [of women]” than Hollywood cinema and takes as examples the works of Leni Riefenstahl, Nina Companeeze, Nadine Trintignant, and Varda. In France, although Cléo from 5 to 7 received critical acclaim—it was presented at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival in competition for the Golden Palm Award and won the Best Film award from the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics in 1963—it was not in fact acclaimed by women critics at the time of its release. For example, Françoise Giroud, a journalist of L’Express who first used the term New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) to describe the newly emerging French youth culture in 1957, wrote, “She is beautiful? Rather sleepy in her head, not awakened to the world, object… Certainly the WOMAN. For others, nothing and especially not one to make noises.” 98 Varda’s next feature film, Le Bonheur (Happiness), which Johnston harshly criticized as “a retrograde step in women’s cinema,” 99 in fact, provoked much debate among critics and the public alike at the time of its release in France. For her third feature film and the first film shot in color, Varda chose a male as the central character. François is a young, handsome, and happily married carpenter living an idyllic life in a tiny suburb near Paris with his wife Thérèse and two children, a girl and a boy. The film

“elle est belle? Plutôt ensommeillée dans sa tête, non éveillée au monde, objet. . . Pour certains, LA femme. Pour l'autre, rien et surtout que ça ne fasse pas de bruit.” Françoise Giroud, “ Cléo de cinq à sept,” L’Express, 1962, quoted from Françoise Audé, Ciné-modèles cinéma d’elles, op.cit., 140. 98

99

Claire Johnston, “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema”, op.cit., 30.

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begins with this ideal family of four having a picnic on a Sunday afternoon: the very picture of happiness. The film depicts François’s anxiety-free, stress-free and conflictfree everyday life. Then, while on a business trip, he meets Émilie, a pretty blonde post office clerk, and falls in love with her. They begin an affair, and François feels that his happiness has doubled now that he loves both his wife and his mistress. While on another family picnic, Thérèse asks him why he looks happier than usual. He tells her about his affair with Émilie but explains that it does not affect his love for Thérèse. Thérèse hesitates only briefly before telling François that she can accept the situation as long as he is happy. However, when François falls asleep after love-making, Thérèse wanders into the woods and is drowned, it being unclear whether by suicide or by accident. The film ends with the same image of the happy family picnic with which the film began, except that Émilie has taken Thérèse’s place as the wife. It is understandable why the film provoked heated debate. The story is told from François’s point of view, and the film does not condemn his infidelity. Georges Sadoul, who wrote a review of the film in Les Lettres françaises, quotes a woman spectator who wrote, “It is scandalous. It is this rotten man who should have drowned, not his wife!” 100 Sadoul predicts that the entire audience will be shocked by the story and that the shock will come from the idea that François has the right to regain happiness with the other woman. He points to the fact that none of the three characters (François and the two 100

Georges Sadoul, “Un règne heureux,” Les Lettres françaises, Mars 10, 1965.

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women) feels shame and writes, “The real scandal of the film is that a wound does not

imply the end of happiness and that Varda does not consider happiness as a ‘good thing,’ 101

as a prize granted to highly deserving people.” The ironic title, Le Bonheur (Happiness), also became an object of debate. How could a story that contains such a shocking death of the wife be called Happiness? At the time of its release, critics and journalists reported on the heated reaction of the audience and interviewed Varda to ask what she meant by happiness. From a feminist standpoint, is the film downright “reactionary” as Claire Johnston declared, or is it merely depicting a cruel truth about the status of women in relation to men? The juxtaposition of picnic scenes—one at the beginning with Thérèse as the wife and the other at the end with Émilie as the wife—conveys visually that women are replaceable. It does so in a very detached and objective way. It does not take sides. According to Johnston, however, “[t]he idea of non-intervention is pure mystification”102 because cinema involves the production of signs: The sign is always a product. What the camera in fact grasps is the “natural” world of dominant ideology. Women’s cinema cannot afford such idealism; the “truth” of our oppression cannot be “captured” on celluloid with the “innocence” of the camera: it has to be constructed/manufactured. New meanings “Le vrai scandal du film est qu’une blessure n’implique pas la cessation du bonheur et que le bonheur ne soit pas considéré par Agnès Varda comme un “bon point,” comme une prime accordée aux personnes hautement méritantes.” Georges Sadoul, Ibid. (Italics in srcinal) 101

102

Claire Johnston, “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema,” op.cit., 28.

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have to be created by disrupting the fabric of the male bourgeois cinema within the text of the film.103

Therefore, for Johnston, Le Bonheur is naïve about the workings of the myth of women and perpetuates dominant ideology. Johnston objected to realism in women’s cinema, arguing that “The law of verisimilitude (that which determines the impression of realism) in the cinema is precisely responsible for the repression of the image of woman as woman and the celebration of her non-existence.”104 In this regard, Cléo from 5

to 7 falls into the same category as Le Bonheur. However, Johnston’s criticism of Varda’s films is based on a misunderstanding of their inner workings. Although the films depict a very submissive wife and a selfish husband (Le Bonheur) and a beautiful, sumptuous woman (Cléo from 5 to 7), they generate within their text an internal criticism of clichés of women. As I mentioned previously, Le Bonheur reveals the replaceability of women, and Cléo actually breaks the cliché to recover her own subjectivity. In her interview with Jacqueline Levitin in 1974, Varda expresses dissatisfaction with the reaction she received from critics and audiences. According to Varda, women came to her and said, “Le Bonheur is shit, it’s not a film for women made by a woman.

103

Ibid.

104

Ibid., 26.

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Society got you and you betrayed us, etc.”105 Varda explains that her intention in making

Le Bonheur was to show the clichés of society; those clichés, in fact, are what the film is about. She adds that she wanted to make a beautiful, entertaining film which would make people think about “what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman, what cruelty it involves if you want to be happy, how someone must pay for you. . . ” 106 Varda wanted to raise questions about the function of woman and her ready replaceability, but at the same time she wanted to make the film beautiful so that people did not have to think about these issues if they did not want to. Indeed, the cinematography of Le Bonheur was inspired by Impressionist paintings which, in Varda’s words, “emanate. . . melancholy though they depict scenes of everyday happiness.”107 Thus, one of the film’s goals was to recreate the look and feeling of Impressionist paintings on screen, a goal Varda achieves successfully with experiments with colors, composition, and Mozart’s music. In fact, much of the criticism against Le Bonheur involved the issue of aestheticism. Many of Varda’s films display beautiful and stunning cinematography, which testifies to her penchant for painting. In the case of Le Bonheur, this

Jacqueline Levitin, “Mother of the New Wave: An Interview with Agnès Varda,” Women and Film, Vol. 1, no. 5-6, June 1974, 64. 105

106

Ibid., 65.

Agnès Parle du “Bonheur” (Agnès Talks about “Happiness”), a short interview film made in 1998, included in the DVD collection 4 by Agnès Varda by Criterion, 2008. 107

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cinematography triggered more criticism than in any of her other films because its striking chromatic beauty belied the cruel content of the film. Varda herself writes, “Everywhere, people accuse me of aestheticism. They say, ‘it’s too pretty, it is composed, it is planned,’ . . . They also say ‘it is too intelligent, it is planned, it is dishonest.’. . . They again say ‘This man loves two women at the same time: it is not possible.’”108 Despite women’s complaints about the film, Le Bonheur’s photographic proficiencies were commended by critics, and the film won the Louis-Delluc award in 1965. Most contemporary reviews of the film are about either the scandalous debate or the film’s aesthetic quality, since in 1965, feminist film theory had not yet emerged. Le Monde reports that in the vote for the award, Le Bonheur won eight votes against JeanLuc Godard’s The Married Woman, which received five votes.109 Le Monde says of the film, “Its colors and composition recall the canvases of Sisely, Monet, Berthe Morisot by the simplicity of its story (a boy finds the happiness in loving his wife and his mistress with an equal heart) and by its gentle populism.” 110 Max Kozloff, critic for Film Quarterly, calls

Le Bonheur “a pastoral, imbued with a simple gravity, nymph and shepherd. . . ” and praises the “color lyricism” of the film. 111 108

Agnès Varda, “Un bonheur bien défendu,” Cinéma 65, no. 97, 1965, 14.

109

“Le Bonheur, d’Agnès Varda obtient le prix Louis-Delluc 1965,” Le Monde, January 10, 1965.

“les coloris et la composition rappellent les toiles de Sisley, de Monet, de Berthe Moroisot, par la simplicté, de son intrigue (un garçon trouve le bonheur en aimant d’un coeur égal sa femme et sa maîtresse), par son gentil populisme.” Le Monde, Ibid. 110

111

Max Kozloff, “Le Bonheur,” Film Quarterly, Winter 1966/67, 35-36.

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After Le Bonheur, Varda made another feature film, Les Créatures (1966), with the major stars Catherine Deneuve and Michel Piccoli. The film is about a science fiction writer (Michel Piccoli) and his mute wife (Catherine Deneuve), who find themselves living between fantasy and reality. Unlike Le Bonheur, which attracted both critics and audiences to become a box office success, Les Créatures was a flop at the box office despite the star actors, and it was not well received by critics. However, unusual for Varda’s films, Les Créatures had a fight scene, and according to Varda, having made the fight scene helped her get over an inferiority complex that a woman couldn’t make a fight scene: I was impressed because I thought it was always said that a woman couldn’t make a fight scene, or war films, or things like that. And I never wanted to make war films or fight films… So I had a slight inferiority complex that I had a limit. And after not only did I get over this complex but I realized that this complex was silly because the role of a woman is not to prove that she can do all that a man can do or knows how to do. On the contrary, the role of a woman is to do what she feels she should do as a woman. 112 After Les Créatures, Varda left for the U.S. in 1967 with her husband Jacques Demy and stayed in California until 1969. Her stay in California prevented her from participating in the events of May 1968 in France, but it gave her an opportunity to

112

Jacqueline Levitin, op.cit., 66.

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observe the American women’s movement. During her stay, she read books by such feminists as Kate Millet, Germaine Greer, and Shulamith Firestone, and she reports that “I learnt a lot about myself and about feminism thanks to the ‘women in the movement,’ the American radicals, or theorists, then the French women after May ’68.”113 Varda was also able to witness other civil rights movements including the Black Power movement, and she made a documentary Black Panthers about the Free Huey rally held on February 17, 1968, at Oakland Auditorium in Alameda, California. Huey Newton was a young college student who founded the Black Panther Party and was jailed for allegedly killing a police officer, although his arrest was widely believed to be a setup. Varda’s documentary chronicles a rally held on his behalf. Varda also witnessed the hippie period in the U.S. and produced a short documentary, Oncle Yanco (Uncle Yanco), and a feature film, Lions Love. Her interest in the feminist movement, however, did not materialize in any feminist filmmaking at this time. Nonetheless, upon her return to France, Varda took an active part in the French women’s movement: the MLF (Mouvement de libération des femmes). Varda was one of the 343 women, many of whom were famous artists and writers, who signed the MLF manifesto in 1971, calling for abortion rights. They also affirmed having had abortions. She participated in street demonstrations, including the struggle over the famous “J’ai beaucoup appris sur moi-même et sur le féminisme grâce aux ‘femmes du mouvement,’ les américainnes radicales, ou théoriciennes, puis les françaises d’après mai 68.” Agnès Varda, “Autour et alentour de Daguerréotypes,” Cinéma 75, no. 204, Décembre 1975, 46. English translation quoted from Alison Smith, Agnès Varda, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998, 103. 113

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Bobigny trial that occurred in 1972. The trial involved a minor, a rape victim, who obtained an abortion with the help of her mother. The mother and daughter were prosecuted under a 1920 law which made abortion a criminal act. Women gathered together to fight for abortion rights, and the trial resulted in acquittal. Varda’s 1977 feature film, One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (French title L’Une chante, l’autre pas), a story of a long friendship between two women, is set during the period of women’s movement. Varda included diverse sequences that evoke the history of abortion in France. For example, one of the protagonists, Suzanne, goes to Switzerland for an abortion but comes back sterile. In addition, she re-created in the film women’s street demonstrations over the Bobigny trial. Thus, it was during this period that Varda made two explicitly feminist films: a documentary short, Réponse de femmes: Notre corps, notre sexe (Women Reply: Our Body,

Our Sex, 1975) and the feature film, One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977). Both films deal with maternity and the question of whether to have children. Réponse de femmes is an eight-minute documentary Varda made when the magazine F. comme Femmes (W as in Women) asked a number of women filmmakers to each make a film answering the question, “What does it mean to be a woman?” (Qu’est-ce qu’être femme?). Varda chose “Our Body, Our Sex” as her theme. She asks a group of diverse women questions such as “What does it mean to be a woman?” “Do all women want to become mothers?” and “What is a real woman?” Starting with a shot of a naked baby girl, the film shows nude young women, a nude pregnant woman and nude mothers. Young

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girls to women of old age talk about social preconceptions about women and the taboos inflicted upon them. They question and contest social norms, and state, “Women must be reinvented.” In her book, Varda par Agnès, Varda recalls that when the film was aired on Antenne 2, letters of complaint were received from viewers who thought showing naked women on TV at the dinner hour was inappropriate for children.114

One Sings, the Other Doesn’t was made for commercial release. In fact, after the commercial failure of Les Créatures, Varda had difficulty in securing funding for her films. The difficulty continued after she returned from the U.S.; would-be producers did not like the script for One Sings, the Other Doesn’t because men had minor roles and musical interludes were included. Finally, however, in 1976 the CNC ( Centre Nationale de

la Cinématographie) accepted the scenario of One Sings, the Other Doesn’t for its Avance sur recettes (advance on future revenues) funding. One Sings, the Other Doesn’t is an exceptional film in Varda’s oeuvre in two respects: first, it was an overtly feminist film supporting the women’s movement and its demand for abortion rights, and second, its narrative structure and style were conventional compared to other Varda films. Varda herself labeled the film a “feminist musical”115 because one of the protagonists sings several songs in the film. 114

Agnès Varda, Varda par Agnès, op.cit., 113.

115

“Propos sur le cinéma par Agnès Varda,” ed. Mireille Amiel, Cinéma 75, no. 204, Décembre 1975, 50.

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Although it was a feminist film expressing Varda’s stance on women’s rights over their bodies, One Sings, the Other Doesn’t received mixed reviews from feminist critics. According to Monique Martineau, the film was strongly criticized in several aspects: some thought the storyline was too melodramatic, and others disapproved Varda’s choice of the two protagonists, Pomme and Suzanne, who are both attractive and become successful in somewhat stereotypical ways. 116 When the film was aired on TV in 1979, Hélène Hazéra, the critic of Libération, wrote, “What is fascinating in this film is the ease with which Varda collects banality and even creates it anew. . . ”117 and criticized some scenes for being too melodramatic and tear-jerking. Martineau is also critical of Varda’s choice of heroines, Pomme and Suzanne. She points out, first of all, that they both have a pleasant appearance and become more attractive at the end of the film. She also writes that the social trajectory of both Pomme and Suzanne is stereotypical: As for their social evolution, one can read it as an ascension in accordance with two codes ofbecomes equallya doctor. recognized values: Suzanne, daughter of a peasant, Pomme, born into a petit-bourgeois family, will live in an environment of artists and the marginalized. One represents the classical journey of social promotion procured through a good marriage, Monique Martineau, “Un coup de tendresse pour les femmes: L’une chante, l’autre pas , d’Agnès Varda,” (Tenderness for women: One Sings, the Other Doesn’t by Agnès Varda), Le Cinéma au Féminisme, ed. Monique Martineau, CinémAction no. 9, Automne 1979, 53-58. 116

“Ce qui est fascinant dans ce film, c’est l’aisance avec laquelle Varda accumule les poncifs et crée même de nouveaux…” Ibid., 54. 117

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and the other represents that of a certain intelligentsia. In both cases, the farming countrys ide is shown as a passage place that one leaves as quickly as possible, and rejects.118

One Sings, the Other Doesn’t also received tepid reactions from feminist critics in the U.S. at the time of its release. Carrie Rickey criticized the film for lack of character development and political scope. She argues that “Varda’s images are of a sunny, carefully composed and deep space, but the people in them are paper dolls flattened against the screen,” adding that even though Varda reduces the male characters’ roles in order to maximize the women’s roles, this choice “fails as a strategy because of its smugness.”119 Pauline Kael, an established film critic in the U.S., also sums up the film as straightforward and all up-front, shallow with no depth. She concludes, “It’s a cheery, education feminism-can-be-fun movie,” and further criticizes Varda for being “a lively, sophisticated film technician who thinks that this ode to superficiality is poetic truth.” Kael characterizes the scenes in which Pomme sings songs that celebrate the satisfactions of pregnancy as “a new form of asexual lyricism” and “a Disney touch to women’s

“Quant à leur évolution sociale, on peut la lire comme une ascension conforme à deux codes de valeurs également reconnus: Suzanne, fille de paysans, va devenir femme de médicin. Pomme, née dans une famille de petits-bourgeois à l’horizon borné, va vivre au milieu d’artistes et de marginaux. L’une représente la parcours classique de la promotion sociale que procure un beau marriage, et l’autre celui que prône une certaine intelligentsia. Dans les deux cas, le monde paysan est montré comme un lieu de passage, que l’on quitte au plus vite, et un repoussoir.” Ibid. 118

Carrie Rickey, “Tepid Yesterdays: Some Make Movies, Others Don’t,” Artforum 16, December 1977, 53, quoted from Louise Heck-Rabi, Women Filmmakers: A Critical Reception, Metuchen & London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1984, 348. 119

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liberation.”120 Sandy Flitterman-Lewis also pointed out the limitations of One Sings, the

Other Doesn’t in 1996: “…although Varda’s more avowedly feminist films, such as L’Une chante, l’autre pas, are quite explicit in their concern with women’s issues, they fail to offer a serious challenge to dominant structures of representation, a challenge which forms the core of any alternative cinema.”121 It is ironic that the only film Varda openly claimed to be feminist should receive such harsh criticism from women critics. However, One Sings, the Other Doesn’t was not without positive aspects. Although she agrees that this film is overly simple, Judith 122

Thurman sees strength in Varda’s open-endedness. Martineau also praises the fact that the “film does not end on the images of women among themselves, but on the idyllic vision of a mixed community, which regroups the two friends, their children and almost all those who are dear to them.” Further, she recognizes that the story of the long friendship between Pomme and Suzanne permitted Varda to “put on screen a grand diversity of situations the women were subjected to and under which they made their 123

choices in their relationships with children, men, and with themselves.” According to Pauline Kael, “Scrambled Eggs,” New Yorker 53, November 14, 1977, 75-78, quoted from Louise Heck-Rabi, Ibid., 349-350. 120

Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema , New York: Columbia University Press, 1996, 215. 121

122

Louise Heck-Rabi, op.cit., 350.

“le film ne clôt pas sur des images de femmes entre elles, mais sur la vision idyllique d’une communauté mixte, qui regroupe les deux amies, leurs enfants et presque tous ceux qui leur sont chers…..de mettre en scène une grande diversité de situations subies ou choisies par les femmes dans leur rapports aux enfants, 123

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Martineau, it was a film which showed the freedom of choice women now have, not only about having children but also about what they want to do with their lives. After One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, it took Varda seven years to make another feature film. Vagabond (French title Sans toit ni loi ), made in 1985, won three major prizes, including the Golden Lion Award and International Critics Award at the Venice Film Festival. It brought Varda worldwide attention and her greatest critical acclaim. It is a story about a young woman drifter, Mona, who was found frozen to death in a ditch. The film begins with the discovery of her corpse, stained in purple, and the rest of the film unfolds entirely in flashback to uncover how she died. The film traces the last three weeks of Mona’s life by interviewing the people she met while on the road. Thus, Mona’s last weeks are reconstructed through the subjective testimonies of a series of individuals, each of whom had his or her different perception of her. René Prédal, who wrote a book on Vagabond, praised it as “[Varda’s] central work, at once the synthesis of the preceding films and the antecedent for the following ones.”124 Indeed, Vagabond is considered by many critics to be the best of Varda’s work, and rightly so. It won critical acclaim from both feminist and non-feminist film critics alike for its challenge to the narrative conventions of dominant cinema and for its concern with the issue of women’s identity. aux hommes et à elles-mêmes.” Monique Martineau, op.cit., 56. “Sans toit ni loi est une oeuvre centrale, à la fois synthèse des films précédents de la cineaste et programmatique des suivants.” René Prédal, Sans Toit ni Loi d’Agnès Varda, Paris: Atlande, 2003, 10. 124

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In her essay, “Beyond the Gaze and into Femme-Filmécriture: Agnès Varda’s Sans

toit no loi (1985),” Susan Hayward asserts, “Sans toit ni loi is as much political as it is— 125

and because it is—feminist in its conception and message.” Hayward analyses the film in detail to show how the film goes counter to dominant filmmaking. According to Hayward, Vagabond takes the genre of the road movie and deconstructs it in several ways: first, Mona, the protagonist, moves backward, from right to the left; second, the narrative is not linear—it starts with the ending, an unhappy one at that; three, the film presents everyone’s point of view except Mona’s; four, the traveler is not a man but a woman on her own; and five, the road-movie does not lead to the protagonist’s selfdiscovery or self-knowledge but to her death. Stating that the film shows that Mona’s identity cannot be produced by male discourse and therefore Mona remains a puzzle, Hayward concludes, “We cannot fix the film any more than we can fix Mona, and it is in this de-fetishization of the text as well as the body-female that Varda asserts her own brand of feminist film-making practices.”126 Unlike Cléo from 5 to 7 and One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, which received mixed reviews from feminist critics, Vagabond earned undisputed status as a feminist film, both in its content and its form. We could argue that it is Vagabond which played a crucial role

125 Susan Hayward, “Beyond the Gaze and into Femme-Filmécriture: Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi (1985),” French Film: Texts and Contexts, eds. Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau, London and New York: Routledge, 1990, 269. (Italics in srcinal) 126

Ibid., 278.

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in the re-evaluation of Varda as a feminist auteur. As I mentioned previously, feminist critics’ attitude towards Varda became more appreciative during the 1990s, and this is linked to the wide range of critical acclaim Vagabond received. Sandy Flitterman-Lewis’s 1996 book, To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema, offers what is now considered a canonical reading of Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond. FlittermanLewis includes Varda as one of the three major women filmmakers (Germaine Dulac and Marie Epstein being the other two) in France who have challenged male-dominated filmmaking. Emphasizing the importance of textual politics in conceiving resistance to dominant cinema, Flitterman-Lewis engages in detailed textual analyses of the two films. According to her, “Cléo has made the journey from object to subject of vision,” and the “textual process of the film traces Cléo’s development in terms of movement from narcissistic containment to a burgeoning awareness of and empathy for others,”127 a reading that is widely accepted by feminist critics today. In Vagabond, which traces “Mona’s progress from a triumphant wanderer with leather jacket and pack to a frozen, crying vagrant in tattered boots and wine-soaked blanket,”128 Varda “redefines cinematic

127

Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, op.cit., 269-270.

128

Ibid., 288.

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55%pleasure just as certainly as she interrogates ‘femininity’ and its cultural representations.”129 Varda achieved more international acclaim fifteen years later in 2000 with her feature documentary, The Gleaners and I (French title, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse). Between

Vagabond and The Gleaners and I, she made Kung-Fu Master (1987), Jane B. par Agnès V. (1988), Jacquot (French title, Jacquot de Nantes, 1991), A Hundred and One Nights (French title, Les Cent et une nuits de Simon Cinema , 1995), The Universe of Jacques Demy (French title, L’Univers de Jacques Demy , 1995) and some short films, but none of these films received as much attention as Vagabond. In case of Kung-Fu Master and Jane B. par Agnès V., both of which have a lot to offer feminist film criticism, the lack of attention was due to lack of accessibility. For the other films, this lack of attention stems from their subject matter -- Jacques Demy, Varda’s husband ( Jacquot and The Universe of Jacques Demy ) and cinema on its centennial anniversary (A Hundred and One Nights) – which had nothing to do with women’s issues per se. As previously noted, feminist film criticism virtually disappeared in France after the 1980s; therefore, from that point forward in French criticism, Varda was discussed not as a feminist filmmaker but as one of the great cineastes in France who continues to push the limit of her cinécriture. However, in the U.S. and the U.K., feminist interest in Varda’s films surged with the international success of The Gleaners and I. In fact, the 129

Ibid., 286.

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most popular films among feminist critics in the U.S. are Cléo from 5 to 7 and The Gleaners

and I. In contrast, in France, Vagabond is still Varda’s most studied film among film critics. Whereas Cléo from 5 to 7 is the first and only film of Varda’s to have a book-length study published in the U.S., Vagabond is the only film to be the subject of a book published in France. As I briefly mentioned previously, the difference seems to lie in the fact that Cléo

from 5 to 7 is a more accessible film than Vagabond, not as complex in its narrative structure, and that Cléo from 5 to 7 invites a more cultural studies approach than

Vagabond, which is more cinematically challenging. Gleaners and I became the third film by Varda to win major film awards after Cléo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond. It received numerous documentary awards, both in Europe and the U.S., including the Best Documentary Award in 2000 European Film Awards, the Gold Hugo Award for Best Documentary in the Chicago International Film Festival, and the Best Film award from the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics. Varda herself once expressed her surprise at the enthusiastic reception of her film, which in fact became the most widely distributed and appreciated of her films. Varda was even able to make a sequel, The Gleaners and I… Two Years Later (French title, Les Glaneurs et la

glaneuse… deux ans après) in 2002, inspired by audiences’ avid responses to the first film. The Gleaners and I is a documentary about modern-day gleaners in rural and urban France that explores how the notion of gleaning has changed over time. Varda begins with a shot of Jean-François Millet’s famous nineteenth-century painting of The

Gleaners and the dictionary definition of “gleaning”: “To glean is to gather after the

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harvest. A gleaner is one who gleans.” She then explores the current state of “gleaning” or “scavenging” by meeting and interviewing different people who are forced to or who choose to live on the waste that an over-consuming society dumps in enormous quantities everyday. However, it was Varda’s insertion of herself into the film that attracted attention from feminist critics. This was the first film Varda shot with a DV camera. With the small camera held in one hand, Varda films her own aging body; she “gleans” images of her own hand, with its brown spots and wrinkled skin, and of the grey roots of her dyed hair. While filming she says, “I’m getting old, the end is near,” and “I’m something of a leftover myself,” comparing herself to decaying vegetables. By filming her own body, Varda breaks the traditional image of women on screen: she presents an old female body, which is taboo in dominant cinema. In her essay, “Agnès Varda’s Les Glaneurs et la

glaneuse: Portrait of the Artist as an Old Lady,” Mireille Rosello writes, “[Varda] questions both the cultural definition of female beauty and the cultural imperative that 130

makes beauty mandatory in our representational universe” by systematically avoiding two prevalent stereotypical conventions: first, the taboo on an old female body; and second, the convention that when it does appear on screen, old age should be presented as beautiful. Martine Beugnet also asserts that Varda’s filming of her own body

Mireille Rosello, “Agnès Varda’s Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse: Portrait of the Artist as an Old Lady,” Studies in French Cinema, Vol. 1, no. 1, 2001, 34. 130

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“articulates the crucial connection between femininity, aging, and otherness in positive terms,” and that the film offers “a space where femininity as old-age may gain access to 131

presence and representation as a subjective discursive voice and analytical vision.” As I have elaborated in this chapter, feminist critics’ reception of Varda’s films underwent a significant change during the 1990s. In the 1970s, she was either absent or condemned. This absence or dismissal is first of all due to the fact that the early feminist criticism concentrated on revealing the workings of the “male gaze” and sexist ideology in dominant Hollywood cinema; therefore it was mostly canonical films by male directors that were the object of feminist analysis. Most of the anthologies of feminist film theory published at this time contain more analyses of films by male directors than those by women directors. It should be noted that from her first film, La Pointe courte, Varda has been given critical attention in France, not necessarily as a feminist filmmaker, but as an individual

auteur who pioneered the Nouvelle Vague cinema and who consistently challenges the limits of cinematic expression. Her films are discussed as individual works with distinct cinematic style. It is valid to say that early feminist film critics’ dismissal of Varda is due partly to their misunderstanding of her films and partly to these critics’ relative neglect of the importance of textual politics and “cinematic” resistance to dominant film language. The early criticism about Cléo being the embodiment of frivolous femininity Martine Beugnet, “Screening the old: Femininity as old age in Contemporary French Cinema,” Studies in the Literary Imagination, Vol. 39, no. 2, Fall 2006, 12. 131

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missed Varda’s textual process in which Cléo transforms herself and gains subjectivity. However, during the 1990s, as the importance of resisting dominant cinema in textual terms began to take hold, Varda’s films and her cinematic strategies began to be reassessed from a feminist perspective. Now Varda is appreciated both as a feminist filmmaker who is concerned with women’s identity and image construction and as an individual auteur who has developed her own idiosyncratic cinécriture. Varda’s cinematic writing is now appreciated by feminist critics as presenting the possibility of a feminist alternative cinema. However, to define Varda’s filmmaking as strictly feminist is rather limiting since not all of her films are about women. Rather, I focus particularly on the issue of marginality that runs through all of her films and define her filmmaking as “feminine” rather than “feminist.” Varda herself once remarked on the difference between European and American approaches to filmmaking. In her interview with Barbara Quart, Varda commented, “I have not seen a woman director in American that I could speak to as I can speak to European women directors—to von Trotta, to Chantal Akerman. They do what they can but I never spoke with an American woman director who had thought about what is the cinematic writing, and where are the goals of what I call in French cinécriture, which means cinematic writing. Specifically that. Not illustrating a screenplay, not adopting a novel, not getting the gags of a good play, not any of this…. I started, since La Pointe

courte, for something that comes from emotion, from visual emotion, sound emotion, feeling, and finding a shape for that, and a shape which has to do with cinema and

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nothing else. That conversation I almost never had here. Either the talk goes to subject, like the woman subject; or screenplay, the story.”132 Varda has been making films for over fifty years, and as Barbara Quart has appropriately pointed out, “her longevity as a serious filmmaker, her capacity for survival, is in itself moving.”133 However, although feminist critics’ interest in Varda’s films is surging, it is still limited to very few of the more than forty films in her oeuvre. The fact that Varda’s films received mixed reviews among feminist critics provides an interesting starting point to delve into questions of feminist or feminine alternative cinema. The change in the reception of her films reflects a change of paradigm in feminist film criticism. The study of Varda’s films might suggest a new way to approach women’s filmmaking -- feminist or feminine filmmaking -- that I will discuss in detail in Chapter III.

132

Barbara Quart, op.cit., 3.

133

Ibid.

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CHAPTER II “WRITING” IN FILM: AGNÈS VARDA AND FEMALE AUTHORSHIP Agnès Varda explains her filmmaking as cinécriture, a cinematic writing, which displays her concern for cinematic textuality. Her definition of filmmaking as an act of writing places her within the French New Wave tradition, with its preoccupation with inventing a new film language and making low-budget auteur films. However, what distinguishes her cinécriture from other concepts of filmic writing, such as the French New Wave’s notion of caméra-stylo (camera-pen), is that her concept draws our attention to the issue of female authorship and to the possibilities of feminine writing (écriture

féminine) in film. As a woman director working in the world of cinema dominated by men, Varda can be compared to women writers such as Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Colette, and Virginia Woolf, who tried to break or subvert the confines of the masculine language system to write novels which explored the issues of feminine identity. Varda has consistently made films with a conscious emphasis on creating an alternative film language that challenges the masculine language of both Hollywood dominant cinema and French New Wave films, and a concern for female subjectivity and agency has been prominent throughout her career. To provide a theoretical context for understanding Varda’s cinécriture as a feminine writing, this chapter will examine the notion of writing (écriture) in French critical theory, especially the theory of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, whose ideas

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greatly influenced the development of the concept of feminine writing by French feminist literary critics and writers such as Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. Since a study of a film director inevitably raises a question of authorship in film, this chapter will also examine the development of auteur theory in film studies and ongoing debates surrounding its validity. Despite the fact that the auteur approach to film studies has been much contested in audience-oriented cultural studies, director studies seem to linger on and even show signs of resurgence. In fact, authorship offers a valid critical starting point in evaluating Varda because she has consistently made films outside the commercial film industry, creating an alternative cinema over which she has had more or less full control. Also, the fact that she has been marginalized in accounts of French New Wave cinema, as I established in Chapter I, allows us to question the malecentered canonical auteur studies of the past. Furthermore, Varda’s own definition of filmmaking as writing shows she is very much self-conscious about being the author of her films. 1. The Conceptualization of “Writing” in French Critical Theory The term “writing” (l’écriture) became an important critical term among French intellectuals in the 1960s when structuralism came to prominence. Influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic theory, structuralism rejected the notion of human freedom and choice promoted in the aftermath of World War II by Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism. Instead, structuralism focused on various structures imposed on human

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behavior and studied the resulting underlying structures inherent in cultural texts. Structuralism sought to identify the structures of language, psyche and society that operate unconsciously. It led to the founding of semiology in the 1960s and to the subsequent poststructuralist idea of deconstruction of the phallogocentric language system. Within this philosophical tradition, French feminists have advocated for feminine writing as an alternative to the masculine language of patriarchy. A new concept of writing was first proposed by Roland Barthes in his 1948 essay, “Writing Degree Zero” (Le Degré Zéro de L’Écriture), in which he critiqued the ideal of committed literature Jean-Paul Sartre had put forth in “What is Literature?”, a series of essays written in 1947. A supporter of non-authoritarian socialism, Sartre called for writers’ social engagement in postwar France. He asked a series of questions to expound on his notion of “committed literature” (littérature engagée): “What is it to write?” “Why write?” “For whom does one write?” He locates the difference between literature and other arts, such as music and painting, in its use of language, with which everybody is familiar. According to Sartre, the role of the writer is “both to disclose the world and to offer it as a task to the generosity of the reader,” 1 and the writer’s main function is communication. Language is an instrument of action, and writing is a praxis: an action to change the society. Therefore, Sartre prioritized journalistic prose writing as the best form of writing to disclose the world and in turn, change it. For him, “Poets are men 1

Jean-Paul Sartre, “What is Literature?” and Other Essays , Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988, 65.

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who refuse to utilize language,”2 whereas the “prose-writer is a man who has a certain method of secondary action which we may call action by disclosure.”3 Poets are caught up in language itself; in contrast, the prose-writer is the “committed writer” who reveals the world with an intention to change it. In “Writing Degree Zero,” Barthes shifts Sartre’s question of “What is Literature?” (Qu’est-ce que la littérature) to “What is Writing?” (Qu’est-ce que l’écriture?) and introduces “writing” as the third analytical category that is absent from Sartre’s analyses. Whereas Sartre initiates an inquiry into the nature or essence of literature by examining the nature of language and style, Barthes shifts the focus to the function of writing (écriture). According to Barthes, the two existing categories—language and style—impose fixed frames on the writer, while writing is the space in which the writer enjoys freedom. That is, Barthes argues that language is “a corpus of prescriptions and habits common to all the writers of a period,”4 a resistant medium in which no writer can act freely. Similarly, style is “imagery, delivery, vocabulary [that] spring from the 5

body and the past of the writer.” Therefore, language and style are “givens” (language by History, style by personal biography) that limit the writer’s form of expression. In 2

Ibid., 29. (Italics in srcinal)

3

Ibid., 37.

Roland Barthes, “What is Writing,” Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, Boston: Beacon Press, 9. 4

5

Ibid., 10.

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contrast, writing is the space where the writer can make intentional decisions and choices: …there is a room, between a language and a style, for another formal reality: writing. Within any literary form, there is a general choice of tone, of ethos, if you like, and this is precisely where the writer shows himself clearly as an individual because this is where he commits himself.6 Thus, Barthes opens up new possibilities for the writer by arguing that a “meaningful gesture of the writer”7 can transcend the limits of language and style, and invent new modes of writing. Barthes claims that to dismantle the dominant mode of writing which reflects bourgeois ideology, we should adopt a colorless writing, what he calls “writing degree zero” -- that is, a writing free of all the restrictions imposed by dominant language and style. Writing degree zero is a writing that is not bound by force and that refuses to serve dominant ideology. For Barthes, modernist literature is a form of “writing degree zero,” and this is where he differs sharply from Sartre. While Sartre, who believes that writers should adopt forms of mass communication, does not consider modernist texts “committed,” Barthes argues that modernist texts are a committed writing at another level. For him, writing is not a mere 6

Ibid., 13.

Ibid., 17. Barthes writes that writing as freedom is a mere moment because “writing derives from a meaningful gesture of the writer that it reaches the deeper layers of History, much more palpably than does any other cross-section of literature.” The word “gesture” implies the body; it is the gesture from the body that gives forms in writing. 7

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means of communication but a way for the writer to show his ideological attitude to the world, and for Barthes, form takes on responsibility as important as that of content. He celebrates the writer’s self-consciousness of the medium and, consequently, modernist literature that breaks existing codes of writing. In other words, Sartre and Barthes both call for committed literature and the responsibility of the writer but differ in their opinion about formal aspects. For Barthes, writing is an issue of ethics in which form represents a key choice: A language and style are blind forces; a mode of writing [ écriture is here translated as mode writing] is an act of historical solidarity. A language and aofstyle are objects; a mode of writing is a function: it is the relationship between creation and society, the literary language transformed by its social finality, form considered as a human intention and thus linked to the great crises of History. 8 These [historical] modes of writing, though different, are comparable, because they owe their existence to one identical process, namely the writer’s consideration of the social use which he has chosen for his form, and his commitment to this choice. Placed at the centre of the problematics of literature,

writing is thus conscience, notthe of morality efficacy. of9 form . . . . His choice is a matter of Since the act of écriture implies an ethical choice on the part of the writer, it becomes his/her political act upon a given reality. This idea can also be applied to 8

Ibid., 14.

9

Ibid., 15. (Italics added)

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filmmaking: a filmic écriture, the choice of form, is also a moral issue and a political act, just as Jean-Luc Godard has famously declared that tracking shots are “a question of morality.” The notion of writing as an act is further developed by Jacques Derrida, who examined the transformative potential of literary and other texts and shifted the central question in literary theory from “What is literature?” to “What does, and can, literature do?” Derrida emphasized the primacy of writing over speech to counter the history of “phallogocentrism”10 that privileges speech over written texts. Derrida talks about the “audacity of writing” that “disturbs the order of the logic of phallogocentrism or touches on limits where things are reversed.”11 He considers literature as something that has to invent something new. Derrida’s notion of writing as a performative act is useful in thinking about filmmaking in general, and Varda’s notion of cinécriture in particular, since films are visual texts that not only represent reality but also have the potential to change it. In their book, Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle challenge traditional ways of thinking about literature by examining twenty-eight Phallogocentrism or phallocentrism is a term coined by Derrida to refer to the privileging of the masculine (phallus) in the construction of meaning. In logocentrism, speech is prioritized over writing because it is considered as a direct, transparent representation. According to Derrida, this hierarchy is based upon a metaphysics of presence: whereas speech is made in the presence of both speaker and the listener, writing is done in the absence of both the writer and the reader. 10

Jacques Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” Acts of Literature ed. Derek Attridge, New York: Routledge, 1992, 50. 11

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important issues in literary theory and, in the process, revealing the transformative power literary texts possess. In particular, they explore the idea that “literary texts are acts that destabilize the very notion of the world and disturb all assumptions about a separation between world and the text.”12 They argue that texts “may be considered as performative speech-acts,13 acts of language which themselves do things, as well as just talk about things.”14 Edward Said also argues against the text/world dichotomy in his criticism of American literary theory of the 1980s era of conservative Reaganism: As it is practiced in the American academy today, literary theory has for the most part isolated textuality from the circumstances, the events, the physical senses that made it possible and render it intelligible as the result of human work. 15 He affirms the connection between texts and the realities that produced the texts, and asserts that “texts are worldly, to some degree they are events, and even, when they Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, Introduction to Literature, Criticism, and Theory, Second Edition, New York: Prentice Hall, 29. 12

Speech act theory was developed by J. L. Austin whose 1955 lectures at Harvard University were published posthumously as How to Do Things with Words (1975). Austin discovered the performative function of the language for the first time. He upset the idea that the primary function or use of language is representing meaning by his revolutionary distinction between the constative speech act and the performative speech act. His notion of performativity in ordinary speech contradicts the notion of language as representation. However, Austin did not develop his discovery further into the discussion of perfomativity in literature. The transformative potential of literary texts was brought up later by J. Hillis Miller and Jacques Derrida. 13

14

Ibid.

15

Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983, 4.

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appear to deny it, they are nevertheless a part of the social world, human life and of course the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted.”16 Bennett and Royle further affirm the transformational value of the “literary”: To talk about texts as ‘representing’ reality simply overlooks ways in which texts are already part of that reality, and ways in which literary texts produce our reality, make our worlds. 17 How does a literary text “produce” our world? This question inevitably leads us to the mediating function of the language, since every human activity, including literature, is mediated by language. As evident in Derrida’s famous statement, “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (“There is no outside-text”18), there is no way to perceive the world without the mediation of language. Literary texts are always constructed by and within a context. However, since contexts are historical and changeable, it is important to understand how language shapes our thoughts and to think about how language could possibly subvert the binary oppositions on which traditional thought is based. Hence, Derrida’s emphasis on the act of writing, which derives from a “meaningful gesture of the writer.”19

16

Ibid.

17

Bennett and Royle, op.cit., 33. (Italics in srcinal)

18

Translation by Bennett and Royle. Ibid, 31.

19

Roland Barthes, op.cit., 17.

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In his essay, “Signature Event Context,” Derrida modifies J. L. Austin’s speech act theory and its notion of performativity. Although Austin argues that he is moving away from intentionalist models of meaning toward contextualist models, Derrida criticizes him for still relying on the notion of intention. Austin claims that the effect of the speech act is what its author intends it to achieve and what its auditors understand it to mean; Derrida argues this claim is flawed because it relies only on successful examples, ignoring the risk of failure inherent in all language use. According to Derrida, signature is an act, an event that happens only once at the moment the author signs his or her work. After that moment, the text breaks away from the author and its srcinal context. One of Derrida’s main concerns here is that the model of writing as communicating an author’s intended meaning is inadequate because it ignores the “essential drift” of the text. The meaning of a text arises from its context, but since at the moment of “signature,” the text broke away from the srcinating context, it cannot have any fixed meaning. And because writing is capable of being reappropriated and recontextualized in ways no author can control, writing does not belong to the author. Thus, the text remains beyond its srcinal intention and context. For both Barthes and Derrida, authorial “death” divides literature’s modern history between “the age of the author and the age of the text.”20

Peggy Kamuf, Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988, 6. 20

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These discussions about language, text, and writing are also pertinent to studies of film and filmmaker because films are also texts that represent and produce our reality. Not only literary texts but any cultural products capable of symbolic interpretation and reinterpretation can be considered texts. Indeed, many literary concepts were transported to film studies through the semiotic revolution into film theory during the 1970s. Since the events of May 1968, which brought a vast change in French culture, semiology was applied to the criticism of the avant-garde, including cinema and other non-linguistic texts such as painting and music. Christian Metz was the leading film theorist in France who attempted to establish a semiotics of film language in his books Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (Essais sur la signification au cinéma , 1971) and

Language and Cinema (Langage et cinéma, 1971), in which he applies structural linguistics to the language of film. He states that both film and natural language have syntagmatic natures; however, whereas language selects and combines phonemes and morphemes to form sentences, film selects and combines images and sounds.21 Metz sees film as a textual system and analyses how signifiers are organized within a film. Even before semiotics in film was established, the film critic André Bazin wrote a famous essay, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” in which he traces the history of film aesthetics from the silent era to the 1950s and argues that deep focus and For a comprehensive understanding of the concept of film semiotics and the key aspects of contemporary semiotic and cultural debate, see Robert Stam’s book, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Poststructuralism and Beyond, New York: Routledge, 1992. 21

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the long take constitute the tools of realist film language.22 Therefore, the idea of film as language has a long history, and since Barthes, the term écriture took on far more 23

extensive meaning than the English translation, “writing” would indicate. It is not unusual for French filmmakers and critics to use the term to indicate filmmaking practice; for example, the expression écriture filmique (filmic writing) is commonly used. The concern for the forms and structures of the medium is also reflected in the cinema of the French Nouvelle Vague and Nouveau Cinema. Film historian James Monaco asserts that Barthes’s theory of literature is similar to the New Wave vision of film. He argues that two ideas of vital importance to Bazin, the film critic considered the Father of the French New Wave, and to the Cahiers du cinéma critics are also present in Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero: first, the dialectical relationship between the history of the art and the artist’s personal action (for Barthes language and style, for Bazin genre and the auteur theory), and second, the result from the interaction of these two forces of a third thing: écriture. Thus, Monaco describes the cinema of the New Wave as “a cinematic écriture that combines ‘language’ and ‘style’ and is ‘written’ with a CaméraAndré Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” What is Cinema? Vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, 23-40. 22

In the English translation of Roland Barthes book, Writing Degree Zero, écriture is translated as ‘writing’ and ‘mode of writing.’ In her preface to the book Susan Sontag points out that the translation of écriture as “writing” is literally correct but it does not maintain a special inflection of the French word. She suggests the old word “scripture” as more accurate but since the word is no longer available writing is used in English. She suggests a more helpful translation of “ écriture”—the ensemble of features of a literary work such as tone, ethos, rhythm of delivery, naturalness of expression, atmosphere of happiness or malaise—might be “personal utterance.” Susan Sontag, “Introduction,” Roland Barthes, op.cit., xvii. 23

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Stylo.”24 Varda’s own term cinécriture reflects this concern for textuality in French critical theory. Furthermore, this concept of cinema as writing naturally led to the concern for the writer of the film: the auteur. 2. Agnès Varda, Auteur Theory and Female Authorship As noted in the previous chapter, women filmmakers in France tend to disown gender or feminism in relation to their work. Rather, they “embrace a sense of diversity and individualism born not of feminism but of the auteur tradition in French cinema.”25 Novelist, critic and filmmaker Alexandre Astruc introduced the idea of “ caméra-stylo” in his 1948 landmark essay, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-stylo.” This concept provided the basis of the politique des auteurs (author policy) developed by the

Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s and of auteurist critics’ subsequent French New Wave filmmaking. By equating filmmaker with serious writer, Astruc defined film as personal expression and called for a cinema where “the film-maker/author writes with his camera 26

as a writer writes with his pen.” He envisioned that the cinema could become “a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language”27:

James Monaco, “Introduction:The Camera Writes,” The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette, New York: Oxford University Press, 1976, 9. 24

Guy Austin, Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996, 82. 25

Alexandre Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-stylo,” in Peter Graham, The New Wave, New York: Doubleday & Company Inc., 1968, 22. 26

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To come to the point: the cinema is quite simply becoming a means of expression, just as all the other arts have been before it, and in particular painting and the novel. After having been successively a fairground attraction, an amusement analogous to theatrbecoming e, or a means of preserving the images of ana era,boulevard it is gradually a language. By language, I mean form in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions exactly as he does in the contemporary essay or novel. That is why I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of caméra-stylo (camera-pen).28 Equating a filmmaker’s work with that of a writer is not unique or new. In the silent era, D.W. Griffith compared his narrative techniques, such as parallel editing and the close-up, to those of Charles Dickens, and Dziga Vertov declared himself a “film writer.”29 Bazin also asserted that “[t]he film-maker is no longer simply the competitor of the painter or the playwright; he is at last the equal of the novelist.” 30 What

27

Ibid., 18.

28

Ibid.

29

In his 1949 essay, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” Russian filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein points out that Griffith borrowed various narrative techniques such as parallel editing and closeup from Dicken’s novels. When the Biograph studio people were skeptical about his idea of using close-up and of cutting from one scene to another without finishing either, Griffith asked, “Doesn’t Dickens write that way?” and explained that filmmaking and writing is not much different: “These stories are in pictures, that’s all.” Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. Jay Leyda, New York: A Harvest Book, 1977, 195-256. Dziga Vertov wrote in his September 6, 1936 diary: “I’m a film writer. A film poet. I write not on paper but on film. Like any writer, I must have a creative stockpile. Recorded observations. Rough drafts. But not on paper; on film….I can write only as they [events] happen.” Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: the Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, 199. 30

André Bazin, op.cit., 40.

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distinguishes Astruc’s concept of the caméra-stylo from these earlier ideas is his call for a new film language and a “different and individual kind of film-making” in which the individual director expresses his or her philosophical thoughts rather than simply illustrating or presenting scenes. Astruc anticipates that the scriptwriter will direct his or her own scripts, eliminating the distinction between writer and director and thus making the writer/director the auteur. Astruc saw this new kind of cinema in Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game, Orson Welles’s films, and Robert Bresson’s The Ladies of the

Bois de Boulogne. Varda’s own notion of cinécriture also shares this self-consciousness of the filmmaker herself as the author/writer of film. The use of the literary term écriture (writing) in her coining of the term cinécriture emphasizes personal creation. 1950s classical auteurism was built on two premises: that a film has an author and that the author is the director. François Truffaut’s 1954 article, “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” had a great influence on French film criticism during the 1950s and ‘60s. In the article, Truffaut claimed that auteurs are those filmmakers who express in their films not only their personality but also a certain world view. While Truffaut celebrated the artistically compelling and highly individualistic cinéma d’auteurs (cinema of auteurs)—the films of Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau etc.—he harshly attacked the French “tradition of quality,” exemplified in the films of Claude AutantLara, Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, which consisted of adaptations of well-known literary works. In subsequent film criticism, not only European art film directors but also

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American directors who worked within the Hollywood system, such as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, were studied as auteurs because auteurist critics were fascinated with instances of an individual voice emerging out of the system. Hence the auteur theory had a romantic streak because Hollywood auteurs were seen as heroic individuals. In France, the politique des auteurs paid particular attention to mise-en-scène, but the Cahiers du cinéma critics distinguished an auteur from a mere metteur-en-scène who did not write his own script but simply filmed a literary work or a scenario written by a scriptwriter. Ideally, the auteur should write his own script, and auteur studies involved both thematic interpretation and stylistic analysis. In France, autuerism stimulated the New Wave directors’ new kind of filmmaking. The French notion of cinéma d’auteurs was misappropriated in the U.S. by the film critic Andrew Sarris, who created a pantheon of great directors in the history of American cinema in his 1968 book, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-

1968. Prior to the publication of this book, Sarris had defined the three premises of the auteur theory: …the first premise of the auteur theory is the technical competence of a director as a criterion of value. . . The second premise of the auteur theory is the distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value… The third and ultimate premise of the auteur theory is concerned with interior meaning, the ultimate glory of the cinema as an art. Interior meaning is

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extrapolated from the tension between a director’s personality and his material.31

According to these criteria, Sarris ranked American directors into categories such as “Pantheon Directors,” “The Far Side of Paradise,” and “Less than Meets the Eye.” Sarris was severely attacked by American film critic Pauline Kael in her 1963 article, “Circles and Squares.” Kael argued that the director’s signature has nothing to do with the artistic value of the film. In particular, she criticized the auteur critics in England and the U.S. for their emphasis on virility: The auteur critics are so enthralled with their narcissitic male fantasies that they seem unable to relinquish their schoolboy notions of human experience. (If there are any female practitioners of auteur criticism, I have not yet discovered them.) Can we conclude that in England and the United States, the auteur theory is an attempt by adult males to justify staying inside the small range of experience of their boyhood and adolescence—that period when masculinity looked so great and important but art was something talked about by poseurs and phonies and sensitive-feminine types? And is it perhaps also their way of making a comment on our civilization by the 32

suggestion that trash is the true film art? The advent of structuralism in the 60s also undercut the notion of the auteur as the srcinator of meaning. Now auteurs were thought of as only a part of language system. Auteur-structuralism put the director’s name in quotation marks to emphasize a 31

Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” Film Culture, Winter 1962/63.

32

Pauline Kael, “Circles and Squares,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 16, no. 3, Spring 1963, 16.

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view of the author as a critical construct rather than an srcinary person. Peter Wollen argued that, “the structure is associated with a single director, an individual, not because he has played the role of artist, expressing himself or his vision in the film, but [because] it is through the force of his preoccupations that an unconscious, unintended meaning can be decoded in the film, usually to the surprise of the individual concerned.”33 Therefore, for Wollen, auteur analysis is not about re-tracing a film to its srcins, to its creative force, but about tracing a structure within the work. Despite the continuing debate on its validity, auteur studies lingers on but in modified forms: director studies moved away from canonical Hollywood auteurs and focused on marginalized directors, such as avant-garde filmmakers, women filmmakers, and Third World filmmakers; also the scope of the film auteur broadened to include producers, screenwriters, stars, and even the Hollywood production system itself. Roland Barthes’s 1968 essay, “The Death of the Author” and Michel Foucault’s 1969 essay, “What is an Author?” were instrumental in the decline of auteurism in film studies. Classical auteurism of the 1950s and 60s that called for “personal” films and traced a thematic and/or stylistic consistency over all of a director’s films gave way to textual analysis less concerned with the personality of the director. Film theorists often quote Barthes and Foucault to talk of “the death of the author,” “author function,” and

Peter Wollen, “The auteur theory,” Theories of Authorship: A Reader, ed. John Caughie, London and New York: Routledge, 2001, 146. 33

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“film as a discursive practice.” The effect Barthes’s essay had on film studies is twofold: on one hand, it brought about the decline of classical auteurism, and on the other hand, it gave rise to an increasing interest in audience research and reception studies since Barthes concludes his essay by saying, “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”34 Both structuralism and poststructuralism relativized the notion of the author as the sole srcinator of meaning of the text, and Barthes’s provocative title, “The Death of the Author,” was taken rather literally, shifting critics’ attention from

auteurs to spectators. Subsequently, as film studies evolved more and more into cultural studies, reception studies took precedence over studies of film and/or cultural production. It is ironic, in fact, that auteurism proliferated in film criticism when in literature, the status of the author was pronounced “dead.” The essays by Barthes and Foucault profoundly changed the critical approaches to film authorship in the 1970s. In “The Death of the Author,” Barthes argued, “We now know that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of an Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them srcinal, blend and clash.”35 He pushed aside the figure of author from the center of literary studies and argued that we should study not authors but texts. Subsequently, literary discourse and Roalnd Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath, New York: Hill and Wang, 1977, 148. 34

35

Ibid., 146.

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filmic discourse gravitated towards notions of writing and textuality. In S/Z, Barthes again valorizes avant-garde, modernist writing as the “writerly text” as opposed to the “readerly text.” The “readerly text” is writing that follows classic conventions and therefore meets the reader’s expectation, whereas the “writerly text” challenges readers into thinking by breaking conventions and defying the predictability of the classic narrative. However, it is important to note that Barthes does not totally eliminate the figure of author. As Kaja Silverman appropriately points out, “The author’s body remains as the support for and agency of écriture.”36 As Bennett and Royle aptly indicate, “Barthes is in fact talking about not ‘the author’ but ‘the Author.”37 What Barthes put to death is “the Author-God.” He distinguishes author, the person, and the Author, the srcin of meaning, to emphasize the specific meaning he attributes to the Author. He was against the notion that the meaning of a text comes from its author because “it is the language which speaks, not the author.”38 In fact, what Barthes was criticizing in his article are literary critics, and what he was rejecting is God: To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a Kaja Silverman, “The Female Authorial Voice,” Film and Authorship, ed Virginia Wright Wexman, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003, 51. 36

37

Benett and Royle, op.cit., 23.

38

Barthes, op.cit., 143.

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conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is ‘explained’— victory to the critic . . . literature, by refusing to assign a ‘secret’; an ultimate meaning, the text to the worldactivity, as text),and liberates what may betocalled an (and anti-theological activity that is truly revolutionary. . . 39 The author, the person, does exist but “[l]inguistically, the author is never more than the instance of writing,”40 and in fact, the author dies as writing begins. That is, writing is “the destruction of every voice, of every point of srcin.”

41

This is very similar

to Derrida’s notion of writing; he also argues that the authorial death occurs in the act of writing since texts escape writers’ control after they are written because of the nature of language and writing. Foucault’s essay, “What is an Author?,” written a year after Barthes’s essay, also affirms the disappearance of the author from modern literature and further interrogates the relationship between the text and the author. Whereas Barthes replaced the figure of Author with that of écriture, Foucault proposed to examine the author as a “function of discourse.” He developed a new concept, “the author function,” that explains the discursive role played by the author. Implicitly referring to Barthes’ notion of writing, Foucault argued that this concept “runs the risk of maintaining the author’s privileges 39

Ibid., 147.

40

Ibid., 145.

41

Ibid., 142.

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under the protection of the a priori.”42 Instead, Foucault problematizes the figure of the author and the privileged position that is given to that figure. He argues that the author is in fact an interpretative construct associated with canonical works and that the figure of the author plays a discursive role in a given society: The author’s name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and a culture. It has no legal status, nor is it located in the fiction of the work; rather it is located in the break that founds a certain discursive construct and its very particular mode of being. As a result, we could say that in a civilization like our own there are a certain number of discourses endowed with thefunction ‘author function’ whilecharacteristic others are deprived it…. The author is therefore of the ofmode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society.43 Although Foucault mainly discusses literary works, he does not limit the author function to literature, arguing that the concept of the author function applies in painting, music, and other arts as well. He also identifies certain authors as “founders of discursivity.” These are not just the authors of their own works but those who have produced “the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts;” 44 Marx and Freud are two such “founders of discursivity.” The texts of these figures apparently Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author,” Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and al., New York: The New Press, 1998, 208. 42

43

Ibid., 211.

44

Ibid., 218.

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point to an authorial figure; however, Foucault argues that the author is not an indefinite source of the meaning of the text. The significance of Foucault’s essay is that the author is considered as an ideological figure and that he is decentered from the text: he only possesses the subject position. The author is not the srcin of the meaning of the text but a product or function of the writing and of the text. In his work in the philosophy of language and writing, Jacques Derrida also talks of authorial death: For a writing to be a writing it must continue to “act” and to be readable even when whathe is called the author of thehewriting longer answers for what has written, for what seems no to have signed, be it because of a temporary absence, because he is dead or, more generally, because he has not employed his absolutely actual and present intention or attention, the plenitude of his desire to say what he means, in order to sustain what seems to be written ‘in his name.’45 Derrida’s conception of authorial death has been much less influential than Barthes’ in the discussion of film authorship. First, Derrida himself rarely wrote about film,46 and second, because Derrida’s theories are about challenging and deconstructing Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” Limited Inc, ed, Gerald Graff, trans.Jeffrey Mehlman and Samuel Weber, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988, 8. 45

Jacques Derrida played himself in three films: in Ken McMullen’s feature film Ghost Dance (1983) he talks about our perceptions of ghosts and memory; and he is the subject of two documentaries in which he appears and talks about his ideas—Safaa Fathy’s Derrida’s Elsewhere (D’ailluers, Derrida, 1999) and Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman directed Derrida (2003). He also co-authored with Safaa Fathy a book entitled, Tourner les Mots: Au bord d’un film, which is written based on their film Derrida’s Elsewhere. In Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, a book he co-authored with Bernard Stiegler, Derrida speaks directly about cinema relating the experience of cinema to that of phantoms and ghosts. 46

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the logocentrism of the Western modern philosophy, his influence has been much greater in theories of post-colonialism, gender and identity than in film theory. Third, the notion of writing has been of less concern in film studies than in literary theory because filmmaking is generally considered to be a collaborative process. Finally, Derrida’s theory may have been viewed as redundant of Barthes’. Although his concept of deconstruction has been widely applied by film scholars and theorists in their discussion of films, his influence on the theory of film authorship remains minimal. However, with the recent resurgence of interest in film authorship, we do begin to see theorists adopting Derrida’s notion of writing and deconstruction in posing the question of the place of author in film. The most recent example is David A. Gerstner’s essay, “The Practices of Authorship,” included in the anthology of Authorship and Film (2003). Gerstner, who is the co-editor of the anthology, draws from Derrida’s discussion on the question of intention and sets out to articulate “the ways in which issues of authorship and intention have recently operated as political intervention, especially in 47

film studies.” He interprets Derrida’s notion of writing as “an effective intervention” that, through deconstruction, resists the traces of the dominant force. It is ironic that Derrida’s notion of authorial death is quoted by a theorist who wants to argue the

47

David A. Gerstner & Janet Staiger eds. Authorship and Film, New York and London: Routledge, 2003, 17.

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opposite: Gerstner and his co-editor Janet Staiger declare in the introduction of the book, “We don’t think the author is dead.”48 Peter Brunette and David Willis’s book, Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory (1989) is the only book in English which deals exclusively with Derrida and film. Brunette and Willis examine Derrida’s notion of writing, textuality, and deconstruction in relation to film theory and criticism. They assert that film is to be considered as a type of writing because cinema, like all other forms of writing, “leaves something behind, something involving material effects that cannot be hidden if the operation is to 49

continue to function, like printed letters and words or reels of celluloid.” And to the extent that film is a language, an institution and convention according to Derrida, the strategies of deconstruction effective in subverting that institution offer a new perspective to film criticism. Brunette and Willis argue that applying Derrida’s concept of writing to film is strategically important on two counts: [F]irst, it inscribes film (or cinema…) within the domain of the

textual; and second, it can providebetween new insights the ancient problematic of perhaps the relation imageintoand referent… It is within this concept of textuality that the consequences of refutation of the srcin as controlling center of meaning and coherence are exploited to the fullest. 50 48

Ibid., xi.

Peter Brunette and David Wills, Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989, 61. 49

50

Ibid., 62. (Italics in srcinal)

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In the same vein, Robert Smith raises the issue of authorship in film in terms of Derrida’s notion of signature and countersignature: [Derrida] raises a question about the applicability of his comments to film. He says that “[f]or Van Gogh we can say that he was an individual with his brush, but in the case of film, what is the equivalent, where is the body in that case?” There is no single creator, no single body that creates a film, for all the talk in film studies about the “auteur.” Highly polymorphous and fragmentary, the creative body in film fails to stabilize our experience of it. Nevertheless the srcin of a film will be marked in a certain way that Derrida chooses to discuss in terms of the signature. This does to a signature understood, rathernot to refer the conditions of anconventionally artwork’s “thereness” again,but the possibility of its being there and being recognized and received.51 Smith concludes that although Derrida’s notion of signature in the above quote refers to painting, it applies to film as well because the film exists as an “event.” The fact of its “thereness”—it is there—constitutes a kind of signature. Derrida acknowledges the fact that film is necessarily a collaborative work; however, he does not completely do away with the notion of authorship in film. Film is also a form of writing which involves the body and the signature of the creator. Derrida explains his terms “signature” and “countersignature”:

Robert Smith, “Deconstruction and Film,” in Deconstructions: A User’s Guide, ed. Nicholas Royle, New York: Palgrave, 2000, 129. 51

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[T]he signature is not to be considered either with the name of the author, with the patronym of the author, or with the type of work, for it is nothing other than the event of the work in itself, inasmuch as it attests in a certain way… to the fact that someone did that, and that’s what remains. less, and here entire politicoinstitutional problem…Neverthe is involved, it cannot be the countersigned, that is to say, attested to as signature, unless there is an institutional space in which it can be received, legitimized, and so on. …Without that political and social countersignature it would not be a work of art: there wouldn’t be a signature. 52 Derrida, in fact, specifically identified film as a writing, an event. In Derrida,

Elsewhere (D’ailleurs, Derrida, 1999), a documentary by Safaa Fathy, Derrida addresses the filmmaker who is filming him, “You yourself are writing, in that you are recording images that you will subsequently edit. You will select, cut and splice. So we are, albeit artificially, preparing a text that you will write and sign. And I am a kind of material for your writing.” Any film is a writing since it requires a recording, after which it is edited and becomes a text which can be viewed again and again in multiple contexts. It is an event that is signed and then accepted and received by a social community. Also in an interview with Cahiers du cinéma focused exclusively on his experience and perception of cinema, Derrida talks about editing (montage) as one of the specificities of cinema and relates it to deconstructive writing:

Peter Brunette and David Willis, Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 18. 52

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There is an essential link between the deconstructive type of writing in which I am interested and the cinema. It is the exploitation in the writing . . . of all the possibilities of montage . . . of playing on the rhythms, of quotations, of inserts, of changes tones, of changes languages, of crossroads between theof“disciplines” and theofrules of the art, of arts…. But the writing is aspired as much inspired by this “idea” of montage. Moreover, the writing, or let’s say the discursivity, and the cinema are pulled along in the same technical, therefore aesthetic evolution, that of the more and more refined, rapid, accelerated possibilities offered by technological renovations (computers, internet, synthetic images).… The cut-and-paste, the recomposition of texts, the insertion of citations, all that the computer permits, come closer and closer to the writing of cinematographic montage. . . Deconstruction or not, a writer has always been an editor. Today, he is so even more.53 Derrida’s comment on the techniques of editing is useful in discussing filmmaking as an act of writing and the filmmaker as a writer. His description of editing techniques corresponds to Varda’s own idea of cinécriture by which she compares

“Il y a entre l‘écriture de type déconstructif qui m’intéresse et le cinéma un lien essential. C’est l’exploitation dans l’écriture, que ce soit celle de Platon, Dante ou Blanchot, de toutes les possibilités de montage, c’est-à-dire de jeux sur le rythmes, de greffes de citations, d’insertions, de changements de tons, de changements de langues, de croisements entre les “disciplines” et les règles de l’art, des arts….. Mais l’écriture est comme inspirée et aspirée par cette “idée” du montage. De plus, l’écriture, ou disons la discursivité, et le cinéma sont entraînés dans la même evolution technique, donc esthétique, celle des possibilités de plus en plus fines, rapides, accélérées, offertes par le renouvellement technologique (ordinateurs, Internet, images de synthèse). … Le couper-coller, la recomposition des texts, l’insertions toujours plus rapide de citations, tout ce que l’ordinateurs permet, rapproche de plus en plus l’écriture du montage cinématographique, et inversement. Si bien que le cinéma est en train de devenir, paradoxalement… une discipline plus “littéraire,” et inversement: il est evident que l’écriture, depuis quelque temps, participe un peu de quelque vision cinématographique du monde. Déconstruction ou pas, un écrivain a toujours été un monteur. Aujourd’hui, il l’est encore davantage.” “Jacques Derrida: Le cinéma et ses fantômes,” interview by Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse, Cahiers du cinéma, Avril 2001, 81-82. 53

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editing techniques to the writing techniques of choosing the type of words, numbers of adverbs, chapters and so on.54 Although Barthes’s essay exerted a great influence on the development of poststructuralist theories, its argument that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author”55 is perceived by other poststructuralist literary theorists as a sort of an embarrassment, since it simply switches the authorial figure from the author to the reader. Moreover, the essay’s slogan-like title opens itself up to the risk of misappropriation. Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle assert that Barthes’s claim is “manifestly problematic” because “rather than solving the problem of interpretive authority, ‘The Death of the Author’ in certain respects simply transfers it.” 56 Peggy Kamuf wonders, “How did this essay end up saying almost precisely what it does not want to say, having perhaps done nothing else than exchange the ‘tyranny’ of the idea of the Author for that of the reader?” 57 Indeed, it is legitimate to say that Barthes’s essay has been misappropriated and overly simplified in both film studies and cultural studies, especially in reception studies that valorize fandom and the individual’s taste. These studies argue that it is in the

54

Agnès Varda, Varda par Agnès, op.cit., 14.

55

Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,”op.cit., 148.

56

Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, op.cit., 22-23.

57

Peggy Kamuf, op.cit., 10.

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reader/spectator’s power to do with any text what he or she wishes, to read into any text whatever pleases him or her. There is a tendency in cultural studies, especially American cultural studies, however, to give too much importance to the reader/spectator and his/her pleasure. Besides the reader/spectator’s responsibility, we should also be aware that even though the reader/spectator or fan may resist a dominant reading, his/her choice of what to read/watch is limited to what is or can be produced. Therefore, critical inquiry at the level of cultural production should not be neglected. Moreover, while personal pleasure is important, what is equally, if not more, important is readers’/viewers’ relation with others because cultural products themselves are “ideological forms,” both produced by and producing ideology. It is the reader/spectator’s responsibility to think about what kind of relation with others he or she is experiencing and reproducing through his or her reading/watching. Reading/watching involves choice, and thus we must have ethical understanding of the reading relation, the responsibility of the self toward the Other. In this respect, Derrida’s notion of the performativity of language sheds an insightful light on the reader/spectator’s ethic: What goes for “literary production” also goes for “the reading of literature.” The performativity we have been talking about calls for the same responsibility on the part of the readers. A reader is not a consumer, a spectator, a visitor, not even a “receiver.”58 58

Jacques Derrida, ““This Strange Institution Called Literature’: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” Acts of

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Thus Derrida’s notion of the reader/reading is similar to that of Barthes, who also sees reading as “the true place of writing.”59 Derrida also influenced the development of the idea of feminine writing with his new concept of phallogocentrism. Derrida argues that the symbolic order of patriarchal society depends on the “logo” of “phallogocentrism” to perpetuate binary oppositions and hierarchies such as man/woman, good/evil, light/dark, truth/error, soul/body, life/death, presence/absence and speech/writing, where the first term of the two is prioritized over the second one. According to Derrida, this concept of hierarchical binary oppositions forms the fundamental basis of Western thought: logocentrism. In terms of language, because speech is associated with presence (a speaker and listener(s) present in the same space at the same time) and writing with absence (the writer writes in absence of readers and readers read in the absence of the writer), speech is privileged over writing. Derrida, however, argues for the deconstruction of the traditional priority given to speech over writing. Through his emphasis on writing, Derrida counters the history of logocentrism and aims to dismantle the binary oppositions by arguing that writing and texts are performative. One of the binary oppositions that create hierarchy in our world is that of man versus woman. Arguably, it is the most profound and persistent of all oppositions, for it Literature ed. Derek Attridge, New York: Routledge, 1992, 51. 59

Roland Barthes, op.cit., 147.

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perpetuates the dominance of man and the subordination of woman. Bennett and Royle problematize the conventional presuppositions about the difference between men and women and point out that “[a]ll literary texts can be thought about in terms of how they represent gender difference and how far they may be said to reinforce or question gender-role stereotypes.”60 Here they adopt Derrda’s notion of phallogocentrism that depends on masculine language and writing. Therefore, it becomes imperative for feminists to recognize this working of the masculine language and to find a way to deconstruct it. Creating a feminine language opens a possibility of breaking with the masculine. Thus, the act of writing in feminine language, as promoted by French feminists such as Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, is bound up with a strategy of deconstruction: Deconstruction could be defined as a strategy of disruption and transformation with regard to every and any kind of essentialism…. Deconstruction, however, entails not only the reversal or overturning of hierarchies but also the transformation of the basis on which they have operated.61 Then what is feminine writing as proposed by feminist writers? In fact, it was Derrida who insisted on the femininity of writing, writing that would include the repressed: the feminine. He urges writers to keep the opportunities for meaning open 60

Bennett and Royle, op.cit., 142.

61

Ibid., 146.

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and plural. He also emphasized that what defines feminine writing is not the gender of the writer, but the gender of the writing: …what is called “feminist” literature or criticism, we risk finding the same paradoxes: sometimes the texts which are most phallocentric or phallogocentric in their themes (in a certain way no text completely escapes this rubric) can also be, in some cases, the most deconstructive. And their authors can be, in statutory terms, men or women.62 Some texts signed by women can be thematically antiphallogocentric and powerfully logocentric. ….without a demanding reading of what articulated logocentrism and phallogocentrism, in other words without a consequential deconstruction, feminist discourse risks crudely the very thing which it purports to bereproducing criticizing.63 very Thus, influenced by Derrida, the post-1968 feminists—Cixous, Kristeva, and Irigaray—developed the notion of and practiced a feminine writing that seeks to deconstruct and subvert the masculine language system by establishing a feminine mode of writing. That is, feminism in its deconstructive mode undermines essentialist ideas and calls for a disruption or subversion of identity at the level of language itself. Writing in the feminine is about opening a site of questioning and subverting phallogocentrism. Cixous argues:

62

Jacques Derrida, op.cit., 58.

63

Ibid., 60.

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…writing has been run by a libidinal and cultural—hence political, typically masculine—economy; that this is a locus where the repression of women has been perpetuated, over and over, more or less consciously… that this locus has grossly exaggerated all the woman signs of has sexual opposition not sexual difference), where never her turn(and to speak—this being all the more serious and unpardonable in that writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures. 64 Therefore, feminine writing is about the transformative potential of the literary – the performative and the invention of the new. Specifically, Cixous declared woman must challenge phallogocentric authority through an exploration of the continent of female pleasure, and through writing, she should construct an erotic aesthetics rooted in her difference: that is, she must write the body and write the Other. Then, how can we think of Varda’s cinécriture as feminine writing? In her autobiographical book, Varda par Agnès (1994), Varda defines cinécriture as follows: I invented the word and now I use it to mean the filmmaker’s work. It puts thethe work of thewho scriptwriter who writes butback doesin not film, and of director does the mise-en-scène, their respective boxes. The two may be the same person, but there’s often lasting confusion. I am so fed up with hearing: “It’s a well-written film,” when I know that the compliment is meant for the scenario and the dialogue.

Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” New French Feminisms: An Anthology, eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, New York: Schocken Books, 1981, 249. (Italics in srcinal) 64

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A well-written film is also well filmed, the actors are well chosen, so are the locations. The cutting, the movement, the points-of-view, the rhythm of filming and editing have been felt and considered in the way a writer chooses the depth of meaning of sentences, the type of words, number of adverbs, paragraphs, asides, chapters which advance the story or break its flow, etc. In writing, it is called style. In cinema, style is cinécriture.65 In her description of the filming of The Gleaners and I (2000), Varda further elaborates the relationship between her cinécriture and documentary filmmaking in particular: The definition I gave to film-writing ( cinécriture) applies more specifically to documentary films. The encounters I make and the shots I take, alone or together with a team, the editing style, with echoing or counterpointing moments, the wording of the voiceover commentary, the choice of music, all this isn't simply writing a script, or directing a film or wording a commentary, all this is chance working with me, all this is the film writing that I often talk about.66

“J’ai lancé ce mot et maintenant je m’en sers pour indiquer le travail d’un cinéaste. Il renvoie à leur cases le travail du scénariste qui écrit sans tourner et celui du réalisateur qui fait sa mise en scène. Cela peut être la même personne mais la confusion persiste souvent. J’en ai tellement assez d’entendre: ‘C’est un film bien écrit’, sachant que le compliment est pour le scenario et pour les dialogues. Un film bien écrit est également bien tourné, les acteurs sont bien choisis, les lieux aussi. Le découpage, les mouvements, les points du vue, le rythme du tournage et du montage ont été sentis et pensés comme les choix d’un écrivain, phrases denses ou pas, type de mots, fréquence des adverbs, alinéas, parenthèses, chapitres continuant les sens du récit ou le contrariant, etc. En écriture c’est le style. Au cinéma, le style c’est le cinécriture.” Agnès Varda, Varda par Agnès, op.cit., 14. (The translation is from the book Agnès Varda by Alison Smith, 14.) 65

Agnès Varda, “Filming the Gleaners,” interview, http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/current/gleaners/gleaners.filming.html 66

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It is evident that her notion of cinécriture has an affinity with Astruc’s idea of

caméra-stylo and with the French New Wave definition of auteur: directors should write their own scripts (or produce film without written script by recording events directly on camera) and should be in control of every aspect of filmmaking. Film is not about story or dialogue, it is about mise-en-scène. Varda’s definition does not explicitly show that she is using the word écriture in the same sense as Barthes or Derrida. However, Varda’s cinécriture does open up a possibility of feminine writing in film, a filmécriture (filmic writing) that has the potential to dismantle the existing language and style of dominant cinema. What does it mean to “write” film as a woman in the world dominated by men, and how does Varda’s

cinécriture realize feminine writing as proposed by Cixous and other theorists of feminine writing? And why does her “writing” matter? Both Barthes’s and Derrida’s notion of writing is relevant to the analyses of Varda’s films because Varda is a filmmaker who sees filmmaking as an act of writing: as

cinécriture. Their notion of authorial death also offers a useful theoretical framework to distinguish the act of writing from the text. It also helps to think about how I should negotiate between her intentions in making the films and my own readings of her films. Since reading of texts varies according to context, the intention of the filmmaker is one of multiple ways his or her films can be read. The filmmaker’s intention is no longer the “true” meaning of the film but a means with which he or she related to her own social and historical situations at the time of its production. W.K. Wimsatt and M.C. Beardsley

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identified the tendency to define meaning in terms of authorial intention as “intentional fallacy.”67 Barthes’ distinction between an act of writing and the text is particularly pertinent to my study because Varda is a filmmaker who can be thought of as an intertextual site: Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing. 68 Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of 69 multiple writings,ofdrawn from many contestation… cultures and entering into mutual relations dialogue, parody,

As French film historian René Prédal points out, Varda possesses a vast knowledge of visual culture from her background in art history and photography. Prédal awards her a unique position within the French cinema tradition as representing a rare case of “painter-cineaste,” alongside the “poet-cineaste Jean Cocteau.” 70 Indeed, she is often inspired by paintings in conceiving ideas for her films, and many of her films include or reference art images. The story of Cléo from 5 to 7 was inspired by

William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C Beardsely, “The Intentional Fallacy,” The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meanings of Poetry, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1967, 3-20. 67

68

Ibid., 142.

69

Ibid., 148.

70

René Prédal. Sans Toit ni Loi d’Agnès Varda, Paris: Atlande, 2003, 23.

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Baldung Grien’s painting, Death and the Maiden. In Vagabond, when the living Mona is being introduced for the first time, coming out of the sea after bathing, Varda herself narrates, “… it seems to me she came from the sea,” an obvious reference to Sandro Botticelli’s famous quattrocento painting Birth of Venus. Gleaners and I starts with JeanFrançois Millet’s 1857 painting The Gleaners. The film, like many of her other films, is also a self-reflexive one where Varda often comments directly on the art of filmmaking. For example, she introduces on screen the new digital camera which she is using for the first time and whose small size makes filming close-ups of flowers easy. She sets up her project as filming “my one hand with the other hand,” something impossible with a traditional camera. And while telling the audience her story of discovering many of Rembrandt’s self-portraits in Japan, she claims “[Art/filmmaking] is always selfportrait.” Varda is also influenced by literature, especially the nouveau roman and other modernist literature. The dual narrative structure of her first film, La Pointe courte, was influenced by William Faulkner’s novel Wild Palms, and she dedicates her film Vagabond to the French writer Nathalie Sarraute, who has been a pervasive influence throughout her work. Many of her films, both fiction and documentary, use interviews, and she is also keen on commenting on social issues directly and indirectly in her films. Besides overtly political films, such as Salute, les Cubains and Loin du Vietnam, she explains that

Cléo from 5 to 7 reflects the collective fear cancer was creating among the French in the early 1960s. Social and political issues such as the Algerian war are mentioned through

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the radio or the character of Antoine in the film. In the taxi scene, the driver turns on the radio, and the newscaster reports on various international and national events, from American shampoo to the Algerian war. This long sequence apparently has nothing to do with the progression of the story, but Varda uses it to make political or social comments. This is because at the time, dealing with Algerian war in film was taboo. In sum, her films are rich in intertextual reference. Varda’s idea of cinécriture and her attention to the formal aspects of filmmaking can also be linked to Barthes’s notion of “writing as the morality of form,” since her call for the realization of film as an open textual process that allows for random encounters and chances opens up a space for the Other. It also, in Derrida’s sense, disturbs the order of phallogocentrism. Varda has never indicated that her notion of cinécriture has anything to do with gender or “the feminine;” nonetheless, her practice of cinematic writing shares many similarities with that of “feminine writing.” Her films are consistently concerned with the question of feminine identity and a desire to create an alternative film language that challenges established conventions. I will discuss feminine writing in more detail in Chapter III below, and I will fully examine Varda’s films as “feminine writing” in Chapter IV below. For the moment, I will sketch out the similarities between Varda’s cinécriture and feminine writing with the example of her feature film Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961). If Varda’s cinécriture is a feminine writing in film, and if Cléo from 5 to 7 is a realization of her cinécriture, how does it embody the characteristics of feminine writing? We can view and analyze the film in

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terms of feminine writing precisely because it is a film that challenges the established narrative conventions of dominant cinema for the purpose of exploring issues of female identity and agency. Traditionally, the subject of classical narrative is male, and only the male hero is capable of progressing and changing. Thus, a woman’s becoming a subject capable of defining her own desires and pleasures involves a narrative transgression or revolution.

Cléo from 5 to 7 is about Cléo’s transformation from a woman-being-looked-at to a woman-with-a-look. As the only New Wave film made by a woman, it also challenges the French New Wave films made by male directors which, although they also defy the conventional film language, nonetheless cannot escape the criticism of misogyny in their representation of women. Varda often incorporates documentary techniques in her fiction films as well, blurring the boundaries of reality and fiction. This blurring of the dichotomy of inside/outside is consistent with Derrida’s notion of writing and with feminine writing. In Cléo from 5 to 7 , whose narrative is carefully constructed by Varda, the protagonist Cléo goes walking in Paris and encounters people on the streets. The film makes the audience wonder whether these encounters with people on the streets were carefully planned by Varda or whether they were the result of pure chance. It is on these streets, by encountering others, that Cléo begins to change. Thus, this film embodies the two major traits of feminine writing as proposed by Cixous: that of “writing the body” and “writing the Other.” The film challenges the conventional notion of femininity and the

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patriarchal ideology of dominant cinema. Like other Varda’s films, Cléo from 5 to 7 calls our attention to its visual forms as well as their discursive function. In discussing Varda’s films, one cannot escape the question of authorship, especially because one of the distinct features of her films is her authorial presence. She inscribes herself in most of her films, both fiction and documentary, either through voice-over narration or her actual presence within the film. The feature documentary The

Gleaners and I is a cinematic essay about modern-day gleaning in France in which Varda herself speaks directly to the audience and guides the audience through urban and rural areas and into thinking about the excess of waste in contemporary society. At the same time, she contemplates her own death by presenting to the audience her own aging body. In Jane B. par Agnès V., a documentary about the actress Jane Birkin, Varda foregrounds her status as the author by the very title of the film: Jane B. by Agnès V. In the film, Varda is a “camera-painter” who tries to draw a portrait of Jane Birkin, and during the course of the film, raises questions of representation and of female authorship. Varda’s use of her own voice-over narrations in such films as Vagabond, One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, The Gleaners and I and Jane B. par Agnès V. also serves as a mark of female authorship that has been excluded in traditional narrative filmmaking. In her essay, “Disembodying the Female Voice,” Kaja Silverman emphasizes the absence of a female voice-over in classical cinema. And this absence marks the exclusion of female subjects from the position of discursive authority:

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the male subject is granted access to what Foucault calls “discursive fellowships,” is permitted to participate in the unfolding of discourse. In other words, he is allowed to occupy the position of the speaking subject—in fiction, and even to some fact. Within dominant narrative cinema the 71 male subjectdegree enjoysinnot only specular but linguistic authority. Therefore, Varda’s constant use of her own voice-over in her films is another way of resisting classical cinema’s conventional narrative construction. Furthermore, Varda’s statement that “I always get involved very precisely in my films, not by narcissism, but by honesty in my approach,”72 shows her belief in the cinema of auteur and in her responsibility as a filmmaker. Varda always insists on having full control over her work. She had a chance to make a Hollywood movie, but she refused because she did not want to compromise her way of filmmaking. In the late 1980s, she was approached by an American producer who wanted to do a remake of Cléo from 5 to 7 with Madonna as Cléo. However, according to Varda’s memoir, “[Madonna] believed that we should make a very American film. She was afraid of my directorial freedom.” 73 Varda liked the idea of Madonna as the protagonist; however, their approaches to filmmaking were too different for them to come to an agreement. Madonna also recalled in a 1993 interview Kaja Silverman, “Dis-Embodying the Female Voice,” Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990, 309. 71

“Je m’implique toujours très précisement dans mes films, non par narcissisme, mais par honnêteté dans ma démarche.” Agnès Varda and Mireille Amiel, “Propos sur le cinéma par Agnès Varda,” Cinéma 75, no. 204, Décembre 1975, 46. 72

“Elle croyait devoir faire un film très américain. Elle avait peur de ma liberté de cinéaste.” Agnès Varda, Varda par Agnès, op.cit., 60. 73

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with a French TV, “What happened was [Varda] wanted to make the film one way. Improvisational. Very different from the American way of filming. To get financing from studios, you need a script. You do it their way or no money. Agnès didn’t want to make it their way.”74 So the remake was never realized. In fact, since her 1977 film One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, all of Varda’s films have been made by her own production company, Ciné-Tamaris. And her films bear her authorial mark in the credit title, which always states, “Un film écrit and realisé par Agnès

Varda” (a film written and directed by Agnès Varda), emphasizing both writing and directing. Varda is one of those filmmakers, self-conscious of their status as the author of their films, who resist conventional modes of filmmaking so as to invent something new. That is why there is a particular rationale for considering authorship as the starting point in studying Varda’s films. Furthermore, the existence of women directors and their films has been neglected by traditional auteurism and even in feminist film theory, which in fact was more concerned with the films by canonical male directors and their negative representations of women. Therefore, affirming the presence of women directors as auteurs is in itself a challenge to the established canons of cinema. It is hard to deny that women experience different sets of social relations and discourses within a given society. As a result, women auteurs should be studied, not as the srcin or agent of meaning but as a subject The quote is from the 1993 French TV special Madonna, c’est Madonna in which Varda and Madonna discuss Cléo from 5 to 7. Clip included in DVD set 4 by Agnès Varda, Criterion, 2008. 74

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in the Foucauldian sense of “an effect of discursive practice”: in other words, as subjects of discursive function. Unlike literature, cinema is inherently a collaborative, commercial and highly technologically mediated art form, making it difficult to attribute the role of author to one person. Hence, the notion of auteur is increasingly contested in film studies. One modification of auteurism comes from the theory of intertextuality—the idea that the seemingly personal work of the author is in fact a series of quotations from previous cultural voices and influences that work through him or her. Therefore, auteurs should not be studied as the sole srcinators of meaning in their films but as historical beings who mediate a reality by means of their act of filmic écriture. Also, although the auteur no longer occupies the central position in analyses of the meaning of a film, director studies are still meaningful because directors are in the position of a decision maker in filmic écriture. Once the film is made, the auteur has no control over how his/her film is received or interpreted by spectators or critics; however, it is his/her meaningful gesture that transcended the limits of the existing system and created something new. Moreover, Alison Smith claims, “It is . . . hard to deny to Varda’s work that rather over-used title of

cinéma d’auteur”75 because Varda remains firmly in control of every aspect of her cinécriture even if she does not herself hold the camera.

75

Alison Smith, Agnès Varda, op.cit., 16-17.

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Thus, from a variety of theoretical perspectives, Varda can be appropriately examined as an auteur in film because she had more or less full control over her work; also, her marginal status in film studies and criticism offers a good starting point to dismantle the masculine pantheon of traditional auteur studies. As Robert Stam points out, “the real scandal of the auteur theory lay not so much in glorifying the director as the equivalent in prestige to the literary author, but rather in exactly who was granted this prestige.”76

76

Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction, Malden: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 2000, 87.

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CHAPTER III THEORIES OF THE FEMININE, FEMINISM AND FEMININE WRITING A feminine text cannot fail to be more than subversive. It is volcanic; as it is written it brings about an upheaval of the old property crust, carrier of masculine investments; there’s no other way. There’s no room for her if she’s not a he. If she’s her-she, it’s in order to smash everything, to shatter the framework of institutions, to blow up the law, to break up the “truth” with laughter. 1 — Hélène Cixous

To argue that Agnès Varda’s filmmaking constitutes feminine writing in film, it is necessary, first of all, to define what “feminine” means. In film theory, the focus of discussion has always been on “feminist cinema”—what it is and what it should be— and the descriptor “feminine” has never been associated with cinema. The concept of “women’s cinema” might appear to be similar to feminine writing in film; however, I distinguish “feminine” from “women’s” since it is my position that “feminine” is not a biological term as “woman” is. The term “women’s cinema” encompasses diverse films made by women and/or for female audiences and/or films concerned with women. “Feminine cinema,” however, does not necessarily have to be made by women or for women or to be concerned with women. Rather, I expand the notion of the “feminine” to include not only those films which have to do with women but also those which Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” New French Feminisms: An Anthology, eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, New York: Schocken Books, 1981, 258. 1

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embrace, explore, and give voice to the “Other,” recognizing of course that in patriarchal society, the Other includes women. In America, the word “feminine” carries negative connotations that denigrate and devalue qualities traditionally associated with women; American culture commonly associates femininity with weakness and with a conformity to the standards and values of the dominant tradition. However, in French feminism and philosophy, the feminine is considered a subversive force that has the potential to dismantle the hierarchical binaries of patriarchy, i.e., phallogocentrism. Thus, while the term “feminist” has more currency in the Great Britain and the U.S., the “feminine” is the central concept in French feminism. What is at stake historically and ideologically in the distinction between the terms feminine and feminist both in France and the U.S.? If “feminine writing” means something other than writing by women, what is it and how does it form a model for a style of filmmaking that embodies feminine qualities? And how is “feminine writing” relevant to Agnès Varda’s films? To answer these questions, this chapter will examine French feminism and its philosophical context, the notion of the feminine as developed by French thinkers, the distinction between the descriptors “feminine” and “feminist” both in France and in the U.S., and French feminists’ theory of feminine writing and its pertinence to understanding Varda’s films.

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1. French Feminism and Philosophy The history of the French women’s movement dates back to the French Revolution, when a Women’s Petition was presented to the National Assembly in November 1789 after the Women’s March on Versailles in October. The Petition proposed that the National Assembly issue a decree giving women equality. However, it was not until 1944 that women acquired the right to vote in France. In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex in which she argued that women’s oppression srcinates in men’s social construction of Woman as the Other. It was only after the events of May 1968, however, that feminism in France took a new turn when women realized that they needed their own movement separate from mainstream left politics. As Margaret Atack points out in her book, May 68 in French

Fiction & Film, “the public face of May [1968 was] overwhelmingly male.”2 Not only were the student and union leaders all male, but women’s issues were missing from the leftist agenda. In view of this marginalization of women, de Beauvoir, a symbolic figure in the women’s movement, discarded her srcinal belief that a socialist revolution would liberate women, recognizing instead that women would have to engage in a separate struggle with the mainstream political force. This realization led the May ‘68 generation of women to initiate what would become the “New French Feminism.” The significant

2

Margaret Atack, May 68 in French Fiction & Film, Oxford University Press, 1999, 88.

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difference between the old and the new feminism lies in the fact that the new feminism developed in close relation to changes in the French intellectual scene, which at the time was fascinated with structuralism, semiotics and psychoanalysis. As Laura Mulvey noted in 1978, “Both film theory and feminism, united by a common interest in the politics of images and problems of aesthetic language, have been influenced by recent intellectual debates around the split nature of the sign (semiotics) and the eruption of the unconscious in representation (psychoanalysis). There has also been a definite influence from Louis Althusser’s Marxist philosophy, especially his essay ‘Ideology and 3

Ideological State Apparatuses.’” Althusser’s reinterpretation of Marxism provided a theoretical framework for critiquing the function and the structure of bourgeois ideology; post-Freudian psychoanalysis revealed how gendered subjectivity is constructed through language; and semiotics analyzed how meanings are created in language. The “new” French feminists such as Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray adopted the theories of Lévi- Strauss and Jacques Lacan, who reinterpreted Saussure and Freud, respectively. In particular, Lacan’s theory of the Symbolic Order and language had a pervasive influence on French feminist thinking about sexual difference and the notion of “feminine writing.” Lacan’s post-Freudian psychoanalysis emphasized the role of

Laura Mulvey, “Film, Feminism, and the Avant-Garde,” Visual and Other Pleasures, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 120. 3

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language in constructing the social subject and revealed how sexual difference produces gendered subjectivity. Lacan argued that women do not have subjectivity in the 4

Symbolic Order, i.e. the Law of the Father ; rather, woman is represented as a lack (of penis) and a negativity. This relationship between the Law and language prompted French feminists to develop strategies to attack and dismantle the language of the Symbolic Order: that is, they sought to achieve a feminine writing which would radically change the relationship of the female subject to language. Outside of psychoanalysis and semiotics, three additional contemporary thinkers influenced French feminist thinking: Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, all of whom argued that there is no such thing as a fixed meaning. Barthes revealed the workings of bourgeois ideology behind everyday cultural phenomena in

Mythologies and other works; Foucault studied how the relationship between power and knowledge worked on language and discourse, and how differences have been repressed and excluded as the “other”; and Jacques Derrida developed the concept of

différance, a constant deferral of meanings. All three of these thinkers influenced French feminists’ concern with sexual difference and otherness, although Derrida’s influence was the greatest. As Elizabeth Grosz points out, “Jacques Derrida was one of the very few philosophers for whom feminism made a difference and who, in turn, made a The Law of the Father is Lacan’s formulation for language as the medium for the formation of subjectivity, a medium represented by the figure of the father in the family. It is also a willingness of the subject to accept and follow patriarchal authority or law. Freud’s term, the “Oedipus Complex” can also be referred to as the Law of the Father. 4

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difference to feminism.”5 Grosz identifies Derrida’s gift to feminism as his concept of difference, a notion central to “understanding the relation of the two sexes neither as a relation of sameness, equivalence, or identity, nor as a relation of opposition or dichotomy.” Thus, she notes that Derrida’s work on difference “has engendered a new kind of feminism, a feminism beyond the egalitarianism of [John Stuart] Mill, a feminism beyond the discourses of human rights, a feminism not simply interested in equal treatment in civil and legal institutions . . . but above all a feminism committed to the full elaboration of difference and its uncontrollable and uncontainable movements of 6

differentiation or becoming.” When asked in 1982 about sexual difference, femininity and feminism, Derrida claimed that the destruction of phallogocentrism will require two phases. The first phase is the reversal of the hierarchical opposition of man and woman, in which woman would become the dominant and positive pole of the binary. Derrida argues, however, that this phase retains the traditional hierarchical binary structure and thus fails to radically transform it. That is, reversing the hierarchical opposition only affirms phallogocentrism, and therefore feminism that strives to efface sexual difference runs the risk of maintaining what it hopes to deconstruct:

Elizabeth Grosz, “Derrida and Feminism: A Remembrance,” Differences: Derrida’s Gift, vol. 16, no. 3, Fall 2005, 88. 5

6

Ibid., 91-92.

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When sexual diffe rence is determined by opposition in the dialectical sense, one appears to set off “the war between sexes” but one precipitates the end with victory going to the masculine sex. The determination of sexual difference in opposition is destined, designed, The in truth, for truth;opposition it is so in order to eraseor sexual difference. dialectical neutralizes supersedes the difference. One insures phallocentric mastery under the cover of neutralization every time. And such phallocentrism adorns itself now and then, here and there, with an appendix: a certain kind of feminism.7 Therefore, it is not asexuality that renders the relationship to the Other nondiscriminating in terms of sexual difference but a “multiplicity of sexually marked voices.” With this multiplicity, no monological or monosexual discourse—no single voice—could dominate. The new non-discriminating relationship to the Other would be sexual “beyond the binary difference that governs the decorum of all codes, beyond the opposition feminine-masculine, beyond bi-sexuality as well, beyond homosexuality and heterosexuality, which come to the same thing.”8 Consequently, it is not the reversal of the traditional opposition but proliferation of differences that allows for a space where sexual markers no longer function as a discriminating code. This, then, is Derrida’s second, more radical phase of deconstruction, one which he argues must occur simultaneously with the first so that a “new” concept of woman may emerge.

Jacques Derrida and Christie McDonald, “Choreographies,” A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, 449. 7

8

Ibid., 455.

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Hélène Cixous further develops Derrida’s notion of sexual difference and attempts to do away with the traditional opposition between masculine and feminine. She argues that all human beings are inherently bisexual. In her conception, however, the bisexuality capable of neutralizing sexual differences is not bisexuality as it is traditionally understood but what she terms “other bisexuality,” defined as “each one’s location in self of the presence—variously manifest and insistent according to each person, male or female—of both sexes, non-exclusion either of the difference or of one sex, and, from this ‘self-permission,’ multiplication of the effects of the inscription of 9

desire, over all parts of my body and the other body.” Therefore, instead of concentrating on achieving equality within the present system, French feminists sought fundamental changes in the hierarchical binary system of thought and focused their attention on the possibility of deconstructing philosophical and literary discourses based on male-centered phallogocentrism. Unlike American feminists, who more or less argue that no difference exists between men and women, French feminists took sexual difference, the feminine, and maternity as their central precepts. They criticized Western thought for representing only one sex—the male—and worked on developing theories that took into account the sexual difference of women. They saw silence and absence as the major form of women’s oppression and thus began

9

Hélène Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa,” op.cit., 254.

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to criticize and reshape male language.10 By analyzing the power structure in language, they tried to define and practice a “feminine writing.” In her 1976 essay, “Castration or Decapitation?”, Cixous lays out her thinking of sexual difference and criticizes phallogocentrism for marking woman as “Other” and as the inferior in hierarchical binaries: This opposition to woman cuts endlessly across all oppositions that order culture. It’s the classic opposition, dualist and hierarchical. Man/Woman automatically means great/small, superior/inferior…means high or low, means Nature/History, means transformation/inertia. In fact, every theory of culture, every theory of society,that the is, whole of symbolic systems—everything, that’sconglomeration spoken, everything that’s organized as discourse, art, religion, the family, language… is all ordered around hierarchical oppositions that come back to the man/woman opposition, an opposition that can only be sustained by means of a difference posed by cultural discourse as “natural.” 11 To disrupt this phallogocentric economy, Cixous argues that women should “put aside all negativeness and bring out a positiveness which might be called the living Other, the rescued Other, the Other unthreatened by destruction. Women have in them to affirm the difference, their difference, such that nothing can destroy that Their writings and other French feminist thinking were first introduced in English in New French Feminisms-An Anthology, edited by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, The University of Massachusetts Press, 1980 and then in French Feminist Thought-A Reader, edited by Toril Moi, Blackwell, 1987. French feminist theories were not introduced to American feminist critics, who were still unfamiliar with psychoanalysis, until the 1980s. 10

11

Hèlène Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?” trans. Annette Kuhn, Signs, Vol. 7, no. 1, Autumn 1981, 44.

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difference…”12 She calls for a feminine textual body, which she defines as “a female

libidinal economy, a regime, energies, a system of spending not necessarily carved out by culture. A feminine textual body is recognized by the fact that it is always endless, without ending: there is no closure.”13 Thus she contends it is woman’s writing that has the potential to bring about a shift in hierarchical binaries and to “ ‘de-phallocentralize’ the body, relieve man of his phallus, return him to an erogenous field and a libido that isn’t stupidly organized round the monument, but appears shifting, diffused, taking on all the others of oneself.”14 Ultimately then, for Cixous, female sexual pleasure (jouissance) constitutes a force that has the potential to disturb the phallogocentric order. Thus, as Elaine Marker and Isabelle de Courtivron point out, “[t]he greatest discrepancy between French and American feminisms is in the realm of psychoanalytic and linguistic theory.”15 Until the mid-1970s, when Pam Cook, Claire Johnston, and Laura Mulvey began to develop a theoretical framework for feminist film criticism, Anglo-American feminists were unfamiliar with continental philosophy and psychoanalysis. Unlike Anglo-American feminists who considered Freud their enemy, French advocates of “feminine writing” adopted psychoanalysis, especially the post-

12

Ibid., 50. (Italics in srcinal)

13

Ibid., 53. (Italics in srcinal)

14

Ibid., 51.

15

Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron eds., op.cit., xii.

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Freudian theories of Lacan, as their theoretical tool to explore the woman’s unconscious and woman’s libido that had been repressed under patriarchy. This is evident in the fact that one of the earliest feminist groups formed in France was “Psyche et Po” (short for “Psychanalyse et Politique”), which sought to overthrow patriarchal culture by developing specifically feminine discourse. Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva all passed through this group, and “Psych et Po” became a significant site of intellectual debate in the mid-1970s.16 This group rejected the label of feminism and considered de Beauvoir’s feminism 17

to be phallogocentric or male-identified because of de Beauvoir’s attitude toward psychoanalysis and her perception of woman’s independence. Specifically, in The Second

Sex, Beauvoir writes, “Psychonalaysis fails to explain why woman is the Other… We therefore decline to accept the method of psychoanalysis, without rejecting en bloc the contributions of the science or denying the fertility of some of its insights.” She also writes, “The ‘modern’ woman accepts masculine values: she prides herself on thinking, taking action, working, creating, on the same terms as men; instead of seeking to disparage them, she declares herself their equal.” 18 In response, “Psyche et Po” defined 16

Toril Moi ed. French Feminist Thought: A Reader, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987, 4.

Jacques Derrida coined the term “phallogocentrism” to describe the masculine logocentric system. It helps to reduce the confusion that comes from the use of the gender related terms of feminine and masculine but it is not yet widely used. For Derrida’s thoughts on the questions of sexual difference, woman, and “the feminine,” see “Choreographies,” in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, 440-456. 17

18

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M.Parshley, Penguin, 1972. My quotations are taken from the

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“feminism” negatively as a “reformist movement of women wanting power within the patriarchal system,” and its members even carried placards in the streets that read, 19

“Down with feminism!” on International Women’s Day. “Psyche et Po” viewed women who called themselves “feminists” as imitators of male models. Thus, it is understandable that Anglo-American feminists embraced de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex more enthusiastically than their French counterparts. Here, we can see noticeable differences within modern French feminism between the old feminism represented by de Beauvoir and the new feminism represented by “Psyche et Po,” from which the notion of “feminine writing” evolved. These differences came about because the new feminism developed in close relation with changes in the French intellectual scene after May 1968 and specifically, the intellectual turn to structuralism and semiotics as part of a larger effort to analyze and demystify hidden power structures, including language. The resulting emphasis on feminine language and writing is what sets the new French feminism apart from both the old French and American feminisms that concentrated on civil rights and equality, and on women’s issues such as abortion and contraception. Concern with the relationship between language and politics remains the major characteristic of French feminism. In contrast, most American feminists took a website “Simone de Beauvoir Archive”: http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/2ndsex.htm. 19

Toril Moi, op.cit., 3.

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sociological approach in their political action for equality and had backgrounds in the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam war activism. Compared to their French counterparts, American feminists tended to distrust theory because they thought it was too abstract and hyper-intellectual. Instead of pondering philosophical questions such as the notion of the feminine, they were concerned with history—in which women had been invisible—and thus concentrated on re-discovering women’s history (“herstory”). Their goals were improving women’s social, economic, and political situation. In short, their approach was more empirical than theoretical. On the other hand, the new French feminism was developed by women with theoretical backgrounds, such as literary critics and writers, philosophy professors, and psychoanalysts. They shared a radical anti-bourgeois thinking and considered writing and reading to be subversive political means to overthrow the present system. One of the reasons that French feminists were more philosophical than their American counterparts can be located in the different role philosophy plays in the French education system from its role in American and British education. As Claire Duchen points out, “The French school student has a compulsory class in philosophy and can be examined in philosophy when she leaves school. The French lycée pupil therefore has a familiarity with certain philosophical ideas and thinkers that the British or American child lacks . . . and the institutionalizing of philosophy affects the degree of importance allocated to abstract inquiry, and the relative importance of intellectual life in France

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compared to British anti-intellectualism.”20 Elaine Showalter summarizes the difference between French, British and American feminism as “English feminist criticism, essentially Marxist, stresses oppression; French feminist criticism, essentially psychoanalytic, stresses repression; American feminist criticism, essentially textual, stresses expression.”21 It should be emphasized that French feminists’ notions of the feminine and of femininity are not confined to women as a biological sex but include various “others” who have been excluded and repressed in bourgeois (capitalist) and patriarchal society. Still, their very use of the term “feminine” created much confusion among AngloAmerican feminists and led to their attack on French feminism for being “essentialist.” Now, let us look at how the term “feminine” and “feminist” are perceived differently by the French and American feminists.

Claire Duchen, Feminism in France: From May ’68 to Mitterrand, London and New York: Routledge &Kegan Paul, 1988, 68. 20

Elaine Showalter, “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Vol. 3, no. 1/2, Spring-Autumn 1984, 186. 21

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2. Contested Notions of Feminist vs. Feminine in France and the U.S. Woman (truth) will not be pinned down. In truth woman, truth will not be pinned down. That which will not be pinned down by truth is, in truth—feminine. This should not, however, be hastily mistaken for a woman’s feminini ty, for female sexuali ty, or for any other of those essentializing fetishes which might still tantalize the dogmatic philosopher, the impotent artist or the inexperienced seducer who has not yet escaped his foolish hopes of capture. 22 —Jacques Derrida

Defining what is feminine and what is feminist is a challenging task, and perhaps it will continue to engender endless debates not only among feminist but also among theorists concerned with the larger issue of identity. Before navigating through the confusing and conflicting ideas surrounding these terms in France and the U.S., I would like to start by articulating how I myself perceive the distinction between the two. My definition is partly indebted to the French notion of “feminine writing” and partly to my experience, although limited, of recent American popular culture, especially the remarkable increase in the popularity of films, TV shows, and video games that feature tough warrior women as their protagonists. In my opinion, films like Lara Croft: Tomb

Raider (2001) might be feminist films but not feminine films. They are feminist because they break the traditional idea of passive woman and create an alternative image of strong female characters on screen. However, they are not “feminine” precisely because Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1979, 55. (Italics in srcinal) 22

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they do nothing other than change action heroes into action heroines. The world depicted in these films does not question the binaries of good/evil, self/other etc. that constitute the basis of the dominant masculine ideology that mainstream Hollywood cinema promotes and maintains. Here, I refer to “masculine” and “feminine” not as biological terms but in an ideological distinction between what is dominant and what is marginal. For example, Lara Croft shows that it is possible for a woman to be strong and heroic; however, it fails to undermine the idea that the world is divided into “good guys” and “bad guys” and that the “good guys” are white. Lara Croft travels to exotic Asian locales in search of treasures in ancient ruins, and the action scenes depict ruthless destruction of the ancient heritage of the Third World. Lara is a beautiful, slender, sexy, yet tough British heiress who goes to the Third World to save the world from evil. She is a white, upper-class woman; therefore, the film reflects and maintains a culture in which whiteness is associated with virtue. Lara Croft is often dubbed “a female Indiana Jones,” and in fact the film is an action adventure film with a reversed gender role; the action heroine simply adopts the roles and behaviors that have long been considered masculine. However, Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft wears tight tee-shirts that reveal her curvy figure and is subject to what Laura Mulvey defined as the “male gaze.” Therefore, despite the fact that the film appears to subvert the stereotypical gender roles of man as hero/rescuer and woman as victim/rescued, the film replicates the looking relations of dominant cinema.

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It is evident from the example of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider that what we think is “feminist” can inadvertently serve to maintain patriarchal ideology. We could say that the term “feminist” has to do with images and representations of women and with eliminating the differences between man and woman, whereas the term “feminine” can be viewed as a potentially subversive force that threatens the patriarchal system. The “feminist” is more about the content on the surface level, while the “feminine” is more about formal transformations. However, my use of these words already brings out the different meanings of the word “feminine” in the different cultural contexts of French feminism and Anglo-American feminism. The confusion comes partly from the use of the word “feminine,” which was already tainted with negativity in both France and in the U.S., although to different degrees. In her interview with Verena Andermatt Conley in 1984, Hélène Cixous claims that feminists’ “use of the word ‘feminine’ is one of the curses of our time” because “words like masculine and feminine which circulate everywhere and which are completely distorted by everyday usage [and] refer to a classical vision of sexual opposition between men and women are our burden.”23 Here, she is referring to the common misunderstanding of the term “écriture féminine” as specifically “woman’s writing.” Instead of defining the “feminine” or “femininity” as characteristics belonging exclusively to women, however, Cixous declares the existence of a “libidinal femininity” 23

Hélène Cixous and Verena Andermatt Conley, “Voice I…,” boundary 2, Vol. 12, no. 2, Winter 1984, 50.

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which is distinct from traditional, phallocentric representations of femininity and which can be located in a writing produced by either a male or female. For Cixous, “feminine writing” is not defined by the sex of the writer but by the sex of the writing itself: it is a writing whose qualities of language disrupt the symbolic order of patriarchy by inscribing femininity. Cixous singles out Jean Genet as one of the rare men whose writing, as a man, does not repress his femininity: Which works, then, might be called feminine? I’ll just point out some examples: one would have to give them full readings to bring out what is pervasively feminine in their significance which shall doinelsewhere. In France (have youcountries noted our infiniteI poverty this field?—the Anglo-Saxon have shown resources of distinctly greater consequence), leafing through what’s come out of the twentieth centur y—and it’s not much—the only inscriptions of femininity that I have seen were Colette, Marguerite Duras,…and Jean Genet.24 In Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, Cixous writes of Genet: “Genet constantly puts a process of reversal into effect. He is absolutely clear on this subject. He exalts what is abased by society, what is considered inferior. Dregs are what he most esteems, what he likes most. His process is one of provocative contrast… This process of reverse relief is, as he always insists, at once moving, magnificent, and magnifying. At the same time it is disquieting, since it undoes, undermines, and saps a social hierarchy…”25 24

Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” op.cit., 248n.

Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, trans. Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, 149. 25

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Similarly, Varda argues that the filmmaker’s gender is irrelevant to whether he or she speaks in a female or feminine voice: Woman can be as wrong as men about women and some men can be better. I believe that [Ingmar] Bergman, for example, knows more about women than a lot of women… I don’t think we should put so much importance on the sex of the filmmaker, but on what he is saying about women and how.26 For Cixous, feminine libidinal economy is based on free spending and giving, and femininity is the ability to give without reserve. In “Sorties” she writes, “The more you have, the more you give, the more you are, the more you give, the more you have. Life opens up and stretches to infinity.”27 She uses the terms masculine and feminine to distinguish different modes of behavior towards difference and otherness: whereas masculine conduct eradicates differences with binaries, feminine conduct preserves and celebrates differences. Also, for Cixous, although these terms run the risk of being misunderstood, they are still useful because “women” are more likely than “men” to open up to differences and the Other. Whereas Anglo-American feminists viewed the term “feminine” as being antifeminist, seeing it as a patriarchal construction that functioned to confine women to a

Jacqueline Levitin, “Mother of the New Wave: An Interview with Agnès Varda,” Women and Film 56, 1974, 64. 26

Hélène Cixous, “Sorties,” The Newly Born Woman , trans. Betsy Wing, Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1987, 124. 27

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domestic or private sphere, “ [w]omen concerned with the woman question in France use the words ‘feminism’ and ‘feminist’ less often than did their counterparts in the 28

United States.” In fact, the title “French New Feminism” is a label given to the French theories of the feminine by Anglo-American feminists.29 On the other hand, French feminists view Anglo-American feminists’ pursuit of equality as perpetuating the status quo of women’s subordination. As Susan Sellers points out, “Both Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, for instance, believe that the Anglo-American feminist preoccupation with equality forces women to function like men.”30 For French feminists, American feminism that was concerned with advancing the position of women through the achievement of political, legal, economic rights equal to those granted men perpetuated the standard of male adulthood as the norm. As a result, they believed American feminists were pursuing only surface-level changes and were driving women to become like men to survive in male-dominated society, without achieving any fundamental change to society itself. Therefore, they sought other goals besides access to male privilege and power; instead, they focused on sexual difference

28

Elaine Marks. “Why this book?” New French Feminisms: An Anthology, op.cit., x.

Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, who first translated the French writings by Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and others into English in their book, New French Feminisms: An Anthology ,explains they decided to place “feminism” in the title of the book “because there is as yet no better word to account for the phenomenon we are presenting.” (Ibid.) 29

Susan Sellers, Language and Sexual Difference: Feminist Writing in France , New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991, xii. 30

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and argued that women’s difference, repressed by patriarchal culture, is the source of women’s potential liberation. To understand these different perspectives between American feminism and French feminism, it is necessary to locate the srcins and growth of these different ideas within their specific social, cultural, political context. However, because AngloAmerican feminists began to actively adopt French theories in the mid-1970s and reevaluated femininity and difference as positive notions that were to women’s credit, the comparison between two feminisms here mainly focus on the period of early and mid-1970s. In her Introduction to the book, French Feminist Thought, Toril Moi summarizes the differences between French feminism and Anglo-American feminism of the 1970s: Where we [Anglo-American feminists] were empirical, they [French feminists] were theoretical; where we believed in the authority of experiences, they questioned not only the category of experience, but even that of the ‘experiencer’—the female subject herself. If we were looking for a homogeneous female tradition art or that female writing could onlyinever be history, visible inthey the insisted gaps, contradictions or margins of patriarchal discourse. And when we were looking for women writers, they sought feminine writing.31 Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, who find the distinct characteristic of French feminism in the combination of language and politics, state, “Women concerned 31

Toril Moi ed. French Feminist Thought: A Reader, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987, 5.

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with the woman question in France use the words ‘feminism’ and ‘feminist’ less often than do their counterparts in the United States” because “the ridicule to which ‘feminists’ were subjected has always been more aggressive in France” and also because of “the desire to break with a bourgeois past” and its “fixed categories of humanistic thought, including feminism.”32 Despite the fact that “feminine writing” is about challenging the various binaries that stem from the male/female dichotomy, American feminists such as Ann Rosalind Jones criticize French feminist writers for envisioning a separate language for women, 33

metaphorically based on women’s physical experience of sexuality. However, Cixous herself renounces the idea of sexual essentialism: There is “destiny” no more than there is “nature” or “essence” as such. Rather, there are living structures that are caught and sometimes rigidly set within historicocultural limits so mixed up with the scene of History that for a long time it has been impossible (and it is still very difficult) to think or even imagine an “elsewhere.” We are presently living in a transitional period—one in which it seems possible that the classic structure might split…And let us imagine a real liberation of sexuality, that is be to say, a transformation of each one’s relationship to his or her body (and to the other body), an approximation to the vast, material, organic, sensuous universe that we are. This cannot be accomplished, of course, without political transformations that are equally radical. Then “femininity” and “masculinity” would inscribe quite differently their effects of 32

Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron eds., Ibid., x.

Ann Rosalind Jones, “Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of L’Écriture féminine”, Feminist Studies, Vol. 7, no. 2, Summer 1981, 247-63. 33

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difference, their economy, their relationship to expenditure, to lack, to the gift. What today appears to be “feminine” or “masculine” would no longer amount to the same thing.34 It is important to note at this point that there is a growing concern within American feminism about “the increasingly paralyzing anxiety over falling into ethnocentrism or ‘essentialism,’”as Susan Bordo points out in her book, Unbearable

Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. This concern highlights the need to determine how to negotiate between biological and cultural determinants when thinking about feminist issues. Bordo, who takes a cultural approach to women’s bodies and eating disorders, nevertheless cautions against the tendency of contemporary feminists who deny the need to regard women as a general category over race, class, and national srcin. I lean toward her conclusion that "too relentless [a] focus on historical heterogeneity can obscure the transhistorical hierachical patterns of white, male privilege."35 The question, “What is woman?” across history and culture is still pertinent because when we look into the relationship between men and women within other categories of identity, such as race, class, and ethnicity, we can see that a system of maledomination still remains. I am not against the theoretical principle that identities are constructed or theoretical doubt about the notion of a fixed identity; however, to argue

34

Hélene Cixous, “Sorties,” Ibid., 83.

Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993. 35

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that “women are not really different from men” or to promote differences rather than commonalities among women is to ignore thousands of years of patriarchal history and its socialization processes. Furthermore, as Silvia Bovenschen argues, the motto “Women are not really different from men” “comes as a strategy to undermine women’s efforts to discover their own capabilities and needs, to reappropriate their uniqueness.”36 I agree with Bovenschen’s argument that “art should be feminised, and women’s participation would do it a lot of good,”37 and I would re-interpret the expression “feminized” or “feminine” not in terms of sexed identity of woman but as an attitude towards the Other. In “Extreme Fidelity,” Cixous explains that her use of the terms “masculine” and “feminine” is to distinguish between two different modes of behavior toward the law: What I call “feminine” and “masculine” is the relationship to pleasure, the relationship to spending, since we are born into language, and I cannot do otherwise than to find myself before words: we cannot get rid of them, they are there. We could change them, we could put signs in their place, but they would become“masculine” just as closed, as immobile and petrifying the words andjust “feminine” and would lay downasthe law to us. So there is nothing to be done, except shake them like apple trees, all the time.38 Silvia Bovenschen, “Is there a Feminine Aesthetic?” in Feminist Aesthetics ed. Gisela Ecker, Boston: Beacon Press, 1985, 29. 36

37

Ibid., 50.

Hélène Cixous, “Extreme Fidelity,” The Hélène Cixous Reader ed. Susan Sellers, New York: Routledge, 1994, 132. 38

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Cixous compares the story of Perceval, who accepts the Law without any questioning, with the story of Eve, who was willing to transgress the prohibition laid out by the incomprehensible law of God. According to Cixous, although women are, at present, more likely to adopt an open, questioning “feminine” attitude than men, it is not anatomical difference between men and women that determines which attitude one adopts. Therefore, as previously noted, feminine writing is open to male writers. Then, what are the strategies of feminine writing? Cixous argues that they are to “write the body” and to “write the Other.” 3. Theories of Feminine Writing As noted previously, language was at the center of intellectual debates in twentieth-century France. Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida all explored the ways in which meaning operates in language and how ideologies are encoded in language through the processes of distinction and exclusion. French feminists’ response to this tradition of thought is the concept of feminine writing ( écriture féminine), which makes space for the feminine in language and writing. Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva are the major proponents of feminine writing, although they differ from each other in locating the “feminine.” They argue that we can transform the current order of patriarchal relations only by inscribing femininity in writing. They specifically call for feminine language that is different from the masculine language of phallogocentrism

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because if women are liberated through men’s language, nothing would be accomplished except simply reversing the hierarchical opposition of man/woman without fundamental transformation of the binary system. The goal of feminine writing is to dismantle the hierarchical binaries and to do away with linear masculine logic that excludes the Other. The acceptance of the Other will create a new order to replace patriarchal and capitalist hegemony. Thus, feminine writing will transform the structures of language and culture, and hence of our social and political system. Julia Kristeva claimed in 1977 that there had been no “female writing” up to that point: If we confine ourselves to the radical nature of what is today called “writing”, that is, if we submit meaning and the speaking subject in language to a radical examination and then reconstitute them in a more polyvalent than fragile manner, there is nothing in either past or recent publications by women that permits us to claim that a specifically female writing exists.39 Moreover, in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” her 1976 manifesto on feminine writing, Hélène Cixous also declared that “there has not yet been any writing that inscribes femininity” and criticized women writers who wrote in male language, “the immense majority of whose workmanship is in no way different from male writing, and which either obscures women or reproduces the classic representation of women (as 39 Julia Kristeva, “A partir de Polylogue,” interview with Françoise van Rossum-Guyon, Revue des sciences humaines, vol. XLIV, no. 168, trans. Seán Hand, Oct/Dec 1977, 495f, quoted from Kelly Ives, Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva: The Jouissance of French Feminism, second edition, Kent: Crescent Moon Publishing, 2007, 31.

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sensitive—intuitive—dreamy, etc.)”40 In “Castration or Decapitation?”, Cixous emphasizes again the danger of women writers’ writing in the masculine and points out the possibility of man’s writing in the feminine: Most women are like this: they do someone else’s—man’s— writing, and in their innocence sustain it and give it voice, and end up producing writing that’s in effect masculine. …To be signed with a woman’s name doesn’t necessarily make a piece of writing feminine… and conversely, the fact that a piece of writing is signed with a man’s name does not in itself exclude femininity. It’s rare, but you can sometimes find femininity in writings signed by men: it does happen. 41 Although she reserves the possibility of feminine writing by men, Cixous mainly discusses women’s writing in “The Laugh of the Medusa”: Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away violently as from their bodies – for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement.42 Cixous’s idea of feminine writing stems from women’s long-standing oppression by the Law of the Father. Women are marginalized in the signifying process and have

40

Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Ibid., 248.

41

Hélène Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?” op.cit., 52.

42

Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” op.cit., 245.

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been denied a voice. Thus, she argues that to resist this repression and marginalization, women must start representing themselves by writing. Further, for Cixous, feminine writing starts with the body: Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth. Our naphtha will spread, throughout the world, without dollars— black or gold—nonassessed values that will change the rules of the old game.43 Feminine writing is subversive because “writing is precisely the very possibility of 44

change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought.” Women should write to challenge and transform male writing “that has been run by a libidinal and cultural—hence political, typically masculine—economy; . . . a locus where the repression of women has been perpetuated.”45 By writing, women begin to challenge male language and representations, and feminine writing is revolutionary in that it opens a new world in which women are no longer governed by male rules . In Newly

Born Woman, Cixous views women’s inscription of their sexuality and history as containing the potential to explode masculine thinking and initiate changes in our social

43

Ibid., 250.

44

Ibid., 249. (Italics in srcinal)

45

Ibid.

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and political system. Specifically, in her view, feminine writing is about inventing a new woman: Everyone knows that a place exists which is not economically or politically indebted to all the vileness and compromise. That is not obliged to reproduce the system. That is writing. If there is a somewhere else that can escape the infernal repetit ion, it lies in that direction, where it writes itself, where it dreams, where it invents new worlds.46 Then, who is this feminine writer who can challenge the very foundation of the patriarchal system? In “Coming to Writing,” Cixous suggest that the feminine writer is: [s]he who looks with the look that recognizes, that studies, respects, doesn’t take, doesn’t claw, but attentively, with gentle relentlessness, contemplates and reads, caresses, bathes, makes the other gleam. Brings back to light the life that’s been buried, fugitive, made too prudent. Illuminates it and sings it its name.47 Thus, whereas masculine law and masculine writing are based on the destruction or exclusion of the Other, feminine writing is about embracing and writing the Other. Therefore, feminine writing becomes an act of writing the Other, bringing into being a new “type of exchange in which one would keep the other alive and different.”48 For

Hélène Cixous, “Sorties,” The Newly Born Woman , trans. Betsy Wing, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, 72. (italics in srcinal) 46

Hélène Cixous, “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays, ed. Deborah Jenson, trans. Sarah Cornell et al., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991, 51. 47

48

Ibid., 79. (Italics in srcinal)

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Cixous, feminine writing requires openness and entails the quest for the Other; it is about love and nourishment. Thus, feminine writing is to write with “milk” and to open a space for the Other. It is an act of love that liberates. Above all, in order to open up new possibilities of becoming the Other, it has to challenge and transform masculine structure. Further, feminine writing is a fluid one that cannot be defined and that takes place at the margin: It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded—which does not mean that it doesn’t But it will always surpass regulatesexist. the phallocentric system; it doesthe anddiscourse will takethat place in areas other than those subordinated to philosophico-theoretical domination. It will be conceived of only by subjects who are breakers of automatisms, by peripheral figures that no authority can ever subjugate.49 Cixous herself is also a prolific writer in the feminine. She writes not only criticism but also essays and fiction. In fact, she produces writings that collapse all generic distinctions; her analytical writings blur the boundaries between theoretical writings and poetry. She is a writer of feminine writing that does away with established genre conventions and invents a new mode of writing that cannot be categorized. Like other French theorists such as Barthes and Derrida, Cixous criticizes the literary illusion of realism and celebrates modernist and experimental writing. She is against

49

Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,”op.cit., 253. (Italics in srcinal)

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representation associated with linearity and conservatism. She dreams of a nonoppressive and non-sexist utopia achieved through feminine writing. Unlike Cixous who does not preclude men from the possibility of producing feminine writing, Luce Irigaray identifies feminine language specifically with the female body and female libido. In “This Sex Which Is Not One,” written in 1977, Irigaray argues that the difference between the eroticisms of man and woman is manifest in the difference of language: [W]oman’s autoeroticism is very different from man’s. In order to touch body, himself, man needs hand, ata woman’s language… And an this instrument: self-caressinghis requires least a minimum of activity. As for woman, she touches herself in and of herself without any need for mediation, and before there is any way to distinguish activity from passivity. Woman “touches herself” all the time, and moreover no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two— but not divisible into one(s)—that caress each other… 50 Her sexuality, always at least double, goes even further: it is plural….But woman has sex organs more or less everywhere. She findsispleasure anywhere… the geography of her pleasure far morealmost diversified, more multiple in its differences, more complex, more subtle, than is commonly imagined—in an imaginary rather too narrowly focused on sameness.51

Luce Irigaray, “This Sex Which Is Not One,” This Sex Whis Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985, 24. 50

51

Ibid., 28. (Italics in srcinal)

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For Irigaray, feminine language is linked specifically to woman’s sexuality. She argues that since the time of the Greeks, woman has been the object of man’s sexual imaginary (governed by the erection, which is foreign to the feminine) and thus has been kept in a perpetual state of dependency upon man. Irigaray characterizes the world of man’s imaginary as “the predominance of the visual, and of the discrimination and individualization of form” and argues that this imaginary is very foreign to female eroticism because “[w]oman takes pleasure from touching rather than from looking, and her entry into a dominant scopic economy signifies, again, her consignment to passivity: 52

she is to be the beautiful object of contemplation.” Therefore, the woman’s sexual organ lacks its own form of representation. Since woman’s sexuality is plural and since she always touches the Other in herself, she cannot be understood by male language, which is linear and is based on the exclusion of the Other. In contrast, woman’s language is plural, whimsical, capricious, and cyclical: “She” otherincomprehensible, in herself. This is doubtless why she is saidistoindefinitely be whimsical, agitated, capricious … not to mention her language in which “she” sets off in all directions leaving “him” unable to discern the coherence of any meaning. Hers are contradictory words, somewhat mad from the standpoint of reason, inaudible for whoever listens to them with ready-made grids. …One would have to listen with another ear, as if hearing an “other meaning” always in the process

52

Ibid., 26-27.

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of weaving itself, of embracing itself with words, but also getting rid of words in order not to become fixed, congealed in them. 53

Since there is no room for women’s language in phallogocentrism, women must “undertake tactical strikes, [and] keep themselves apart from men long enough to learn to defend their desire, especially through speech…”54 Irigaray differs from Cixous in that she argues women’s speech is possible only when men are not present and therefore, men should be excluded from efforts to establish feminine language. However, Irigaray also cautions against the simple reversal of masculine and feminine that simply maintains the phallocentric system of binary oppositions. For Irigaray, establishing woman’s language is central to the creation of a feminine aesthetics. Finally, she argues that woman’s language is different from man’s in that it is used to forge relationships between genders and not for self-projection. Julia Kristeva’s discussion of femininity differs sharply from that of Cixous and Irigaray. Whereas Cixous and Irigaray link the notion of “feminine writing” and “woman’s language” to the female body, Kristeva refuses to define “femininity” in terms of biological woman. She states in an interview conducted in 1974 that “[t]o believe that one ‘is a woman’ is almost [as] absurd and obscurantist as to believe that

53

Ibid., 28-29. (Italics in srcinal)

54

Ibid., 33.

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one ‘is a man.’”55 Femininity, for Kristeva, has nothing to do with women’s sexuality or libido; it is a form of language that is open to both man and woman. Woman is “that which cannot be represented, that which is not spoken, that which remains outside naming and ideologies.”56 As Toril Moi states, “Kristeva does not have a theory of ‘femininity’ and even less ‘femaleness’. What she does have is a theory of marginality, subversion and dissidence.”57 Kristeva’s main concern lies in the relationship between language and the subject’s development within the Symbolic order. She argues that if a child can choose between the father or the mother as the object of identification when it enters the Symbolic order, then boys can identify with the mother, and girls with the father. Therefore, men can write in the feminine form and women in masculine form. She argues that to distinguish language according to biological sex runs the risk of confining men and women within the limits of patriarchy. In her book, Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva talks about chora, “a modality of significance in which the linguistic sign is not yet articulated as the absence of an object and as the distinction between real and symbolic.” 58 It is a pre-Oedipal stage when 55 Julia Kristeva, “La femme, ce n’est jamais ça,” Tel Quel, 59 Automne, 20, quoted from Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory , London and New York: Routledge, 1985, 163. 56

Ibid.

57

Toril Moi, op.cit., 164.

Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984, 26. 58

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the child is dominated by a chaotic mix of perceptions and feelings, and in this prelinguistic stage, the child does not distinguish itself from the mother. Therefore, the mother’s body mediates the symbolic law and becomes the “ordering principle of the semiotic chora.” 59 The subject is dominated by “drives,” the most instinctual drive being the death drive. Kristeva argues that to disrupt adult language, we should return to the pre-linguistic energy of chora. More particularly, Kristeva articulates her notion of “the semiotic” and “the symbolic,” the two elements of signifying process: the semiotic is the pre-Oedipal bodily drive associated with the maternal body, while the symbolic element is associated with the Law of the Father—grammar and structure. The two elements are constantly engaged in a dialectical process to produce meaning. Kristeva emphasizes the semiotic, the maternal function, in the development of subjectivity because it has been neglected in male discourse. She argues that since masculine discourse has reduced the maternal to nature (reproduction), a counter-action is necessary to develop a new discourse of the maternal function that plays an important role in culture. In her view, the maternal is a function of love and desire, and it is associated with gesture, rhythm and tones. For Kristeva, the semiotic arises from the pre-Oedipal, maternal phase where there is no gender distinction. Kristeva sees a subversive energy in the pre-Oedipal or pre-mirror stage that can be used to counter masculine language.

59

Ibid., 27.

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Although Kristeva does not define the semiotic as belonging exclusively to women, it is closely connected to women. Kristeva sees subversive potential in the marginal positions in which women are placed in masculine culture. Women speak and write as outsiders to male-dominated discourse, and therefore their semiotic style is likely to be different from men’s, which is structured and which produces the fixed subject. Kristeva often links social revolution with poetic revolution and argues, “[t]he text is a practice that could be compared to political revolution: the one brings about in the subject what the other introduces into society. The history and political experience of the twentieth century have demonstrated that one cannot be transformed without the other.”60 The revolutionary subject, according to Kristeva, is a subject who is able to let

jouissance disrupt the Symbolic order, and that subject can be either masculine or feminine. Kristeva locates this revolutionary activity in avant-garde poets such as Lautréamont and Mallarmé or in modernist writers like James Joyce—all male poets and writers. In an interview conducted in 1974, Kristeva characterizes male avant-garde literature as feminine writing: For at least a century, the literary avant-garde (from Mallarmé and Lautréamont to Joyce and Artaud) has been introducing 60

Ibid., 17.

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ruptures, blank spaces, and holes into language… All of these modifications in the linguistic fabric are the sign of force that has not been grasped by the linguistic or ideological system. This signification renewed, “infinitized” by the rhythm in a text, 61

this precisely is (sexual) pleasure ( la jouissance). She adds, “In Western societies, (sexual) pleasure (the advent of non-sense which multiples sense) is granted to women provided it isn’t discussed. In the same way, writer and literature in general are considered feminine.” 62 And she describes the role women should play in the writing process as a “negative function”:

If have a role tofunction: play in this on-going process, it is only in women assuming a negative reject everything finite, definite, structured, loaded with meaning, in the existing state of society. Such an attitude places women on the side of the explosion of social codes: with revolutionary moments….The avant-garde has always had ties to the underground. Only today, it is a woman who makes this connection. This is important. Because in social, sexual, and symbolic experie nces, being a woman has always provided a means to another end, to becoming something else: a subject-in-the-making, a subject on trial.63

It is important to emphasize at this point that for Kristeva, the feminine is not so much a gender as it is an attitude that resists conventional culture and language. For her, the “feminine” is the “moment of rupture and negativity which conditions and Julia Kristeva, “Oscillation du ‘pouvoir’ au ‘refus’,” (Oscillation between power and denial), an interview by Xavière Gauthier in Tel Quel, Summer 1974, quoted from New French Feminisms: An Anthology, op.cit., 165. 61

62

Ibid., 165-166.

63

Ibid., 166-167. (Italics in srcinal)

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underlies the novelty of any praxis.”64 Kristeva’s notion of the feminine or femininity is useful in my definition of the “feminine” because according to her, femininity is that which is marginalized by the Symbolic order. Therefore, not only women who are marginalized within the patriarchal system but also other classes, races, or other figures marginalized by the dominant system can be revolutionary subjects. In sum, although Cixous and Kristeva both agree that women have more potential than men to adopt a “feminine” attitude, femininity and “feminine writing” are not confined to women and women’s writing. Hence, Anglo-American feminists’ attack on the French feminists as “essentialists” is based on a misunderstanding. French feminists’ idea of the “feminine” is not essentialist precisely because it is understood as a revolutionary attitude that questions and challenges all fixed meanings and structures. We can view and analyze Varda’s films in terms of feminine writing because they are films about challenging masculine film language via narrative experiments and subversion of genre conventions. In addition, most of her films are about transformation: the transformation of the female protagonist in Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961), and in The Gleaners and I (2000), the transformation of “waste” into a necessity of life and a means of sharing, “junk” into beautiful works of art, and the audience’s ignorance of the Other into consciousness and perception. Furthermore, her films raise issues relating to the female body: the beautiful woman fearing death (Cléo from 5 to 7), and her own 64

Ibid., 167.

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aging body as she nears death (Gleaners and I). Varda’s films are also rich in the intertextuality and jouissance that Julia Kristeva applauds and champions. In most of her films, she uses still images—photography and painting—to generate stories; even in her documentaries, she includes subjective shots and surrealist images. In her much acclaimed film Vagabond (1985), Varda questions masculine language itself: the protagonist Mona refuses to speak, and different characters’ descriptions of her or statements about her do not draw a coherent picture of who she is. On the contrary, the audience never gets to know her real identity, indicating that woman cannot be understood by means of masculine language. The fact that not all of Varda’s films are about women makes the analysis of her films in terms of “feminine writing” particularly pertinent. Many of her documentary films do not have a central character but portray groups of people, especially minorities. Furthermore, Varda coined the term “cinewriting” (cinécriture) to describe her own filmmaking, and her practice of “cine-writing” shares many similarities with these French feminists’ notion “feminine writing.” In the next chapter, I will analyze Varda’s films in terms of a feminine cinécriture that subverts the conventions of masculine film language and that embodies such characteristics of feminine writing as “writing the body” and “writing the Other.”

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CHAPTER IV VISUALIZING FEMININE WRITING: AGNÈS VARDA’S CINÉCRITURE In an interview with Jean Michaud and Raymond Bellour in 1961, Agnès Varda affirmed, “A woman’s vocabulary exists, linked to the feminine universe. I feel this occasionally in that I am inspired by a certain number of attractions, subjects which always draw me rather more than they would if I were a man… I don’t want to make feminist cinema either, to tell women’s stories about women.”1 This was the year she filmed Cléo from 5 to 7 ; three years earlier, she had made a documentary, L’Opéra Mouffe, about the people and the marketplace of rue Mouffetard in Paris. Although one is a fiction film and the other a documentary, Varda described both films as “subjective documentaries.” Cléo from 5 to 7 contains images and scenes seen through the eyes of Cléo, a woman facing her fear of death; L’Opéra Mouffe was filmed when Varda was pregnant with her first child, Rosalie, and was subtitled, “Diary of a pregnant woman.” Both films exemplify “woman’s vocabulary” in that they convey the sensations, emotions, and visions of a woman. Since directing her first film, La Pointe courte, in 1954, Varda has made ten fiction films and more than thirty documentary films, including ten feature documentaries. For

“Il existe un vocabulaire de femme lié à l’universe féminine. Je sens cela par moments dans la mesure où je suis aiguillée par un certain nombre d’attirances, de sujets qui m’attirent toujours un peu plus que si j’étais un homme…Je ne veux pas non plus faire un cinéma féministe, raconter des histoires de femmes concernant les femmes.” “Agnès Varda,” interview with Jean Michaud and Raymond Bellour, Cinéma 61, no. 60, Octobre 1961, 7. (Translation is from Alison Smith, Agnès Varda, op.cit., 92.) 1

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most of these films, she employed an artisanal mode of production. She writes and edits at her home/office/lab in rue Daguerre in Paris, where she has been living since 1951. And throughout this fifty-four-year career, her interest in the feminine has been constant. Although not all of her films are about women, they share certain common characteristics: attention to the marginalized Other, blurring of the boundaries between documentary and fiction, her own authorial presence, extensive use of art images and photography, and narrative experiments. These characteristics of her cinécriture share features with those of feminine writing. Furthermore, Varda’s distinction between the terms ”feminine” (“feminine universe”) and the “feminist” (“feminist cinema”) allows us to connect her idea and practice of cinécriture to those of feminine writing. Her adoption of the literary term “writing” in describing her filmmaking is significant in thinking about film specificity. Since most film theories, especially film narrative theories, were modeled on literary theories, one of the most persistent questions in film theory has been how to adapt pre-existing theories of other media to the examination of the medium of film. How useful are literary theories in theorizing film? How do we extend traditional literary theory and practice to visual culture? What are the specificities of visual narratives, especially film narrative, that are different from text-based or word-based narratives? How can we visualize “writing”? And of particular concern here, how do Varda’s films embody “feminine writing”? This chapter is devoted to textual analyses of Varda’s films in an effort to answer

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these questions. To do so, I have chosen films that I have determined best exemplify the three major characteristics offeminine writing: first, narrative subversion andfemale subjectivity; second, writing the body; and lastly, writing theOther. 1. Between the Real and the Imaginary: Narrative Subversion and Female Subjectivity From her very first film, La Pointe courte (1954), Agnès Varda experimented with narrative structure and film language in ways that are radically different from dominant cinema. Whereas the stories of classical films unfold in a linear narrative with invisible editing that does not interrupt spectators’ absorption into the fictional world on screen, Varda’s films adopt various narrative and editing techniques that break down temporal and spatial continuity and reveal the film’s own constructedness. As I have argued in Chapter I, La Pointe courte claims its rightful place as the first modern or modernist film in France before the advent of the French Nouvelle Vague. By breaking the illusion of reality on screen, Varda’s narrative experiments challenge the conventions and ideologies of classical Hollywood cinema. This is one of the aspects that identify Varda’s cinécriture with feminine writing: deconstruction of the classical film language of Hollywood—its linearity, continuity and patriarchal ideology—through non-linear, disruptive, fragmentary, and experimental narrative and style. As mentioned previously, Varda’s notion of cinécriture applies most appropriately to documentary films that allow for random encounters and chances. Varda is a filmmaker very much invested in making documentary films (more than half

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of her filmography is documentary, although the documentaries are rarely shown); even her fiction films interweave real events, people and places with fictional characters and plots. It is her tendency to inflect narrative with documentary reality that allows for the play of random chances and encounters within her films, a combination that is one of the prominent characteristics of her narrative construction. This strategy of interweaving documentary and fiction is an embodiment of her concept of cinécriture, which calls for the realization of film as an open textual process, and this openness in turn is an embodiment of feminine writing that blurs boundaries, limits and the distinction between the real and the imaginary. In this section of the chapter, I will look at Varda’s fiction films, especially La

Pointe courte, Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961) and Vagabond (1985), to explore her narrative strategies of mixing documentary and fiction, and her techniques of breaking temporal and spatial perspectives. What is unique about Varda’s narrative experiments is that she employs these strategies to explore issues of female identity. A concern for female subjectivity and agency has been prominent throughout her fifty-four-year career. Cléo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond in particular address the issues of gaze, femininity, and cinematic conventions to answer such questions as “What does it mean to be a woman?” and “How do we represent female agency in film?” The two films share several common elements that are significant in terms of narrative organization: first, they both feature a female protagonist who pursues her own agency as she journeys through space; second, they both present an alternative and subversive way of deconstructing normative

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conventions of traditional film narrative; and third, the narrative desire of both films centers around death. In exploring Varda’s narrative strategies, it is crucial to define what narrative is and to identify the primary function it performs. Marsha Kinder argues that narrative should be seen “broadly as a discursive mode of patterning and interpreting the meanings of perception, an operation crucial to culture.”2 Making narrative is, as film theorist Edward Branigan argues, “a strategy for making our world of experiences and desires intelligible. It is a fundamental way of organizing data.” 3 Feminist film theorist Teresa de Lauretis also posits that the aim of narrative theory is not to establish a grammar of narrative but “to understand the nature of the structuring and destructuring, even destructive, processes at work in textual and semiotic production.”4 Therefore, as Kinder explains, the primary function of narratives can be contextualized in three ways: aesthetically, ideologically and cognitively: Aesthetically, the function of narrative is to arouse emotion or give pleasure; to create a simulacrum of the world or preserve one’s experience in the face of death… Ideologically, the function of narrative is to transmit or challenge the dominant values of culture, as in myths, religion and history…

Marsha Kinder, “Narrative Equivocations Between Movies and Games,” The New Media Book , ed. Dan Harries, London: BFI, 2000, 121. 2

3

Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film, London and New York: Routledge, 1992, 3.

Teresa de Lauretis, “Desire in Narrative,” Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984, 105. 4

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Cognitively, the function of narrative is to contextualise the meanings of perceptions, a process involving montage and other modes of selection and combination, as well as the hermeneutic pleasures of problem-solving.5 With these three primary functions of narrative in mind, I will now examine how Varda successfully achieves these functions in her films. Although aesthetic and hermeueutic pleasures are both effectively mobilized in her films, my main emphasis will be on the ideological function of narrative since her films are consistent in their challenge to the dominant master narrative of patriarchal society. As previously noted, Varda was inspired by modernist writers such as William Faulkner and Nathalie Sarraute. The narrative structure of La Pointe courte was inspired by William Faulkner’s novel The Wild Palms, and she dedicated Vagabond to the French woman writer of nouveau roman, Nathalie Sarraute,6 who has been pervasive influence throughout Varda’s work. In her autobiographical book, Varda par Agnès (1994), she explains why she dedicated the film to Sarraute: For more than ninety years now, sheis always sharp, intelligent, and funny. To spend a moment with herwould galvanize me, but

5

Marsha Kinder, op.ct., 121.

6 Varda met Sarraute through Sarruate’s daughter Anne Sarraute who assisted Alain Resnais editing La Pointe courte in 1954. They stayed as close friends until Sarraute’s death in 1999. Varda admired Sarraute and her work because “she talks about the indescribable with often hesitant words.” (from radio interview about Vagabond). Her description of Sarraute’s work resembles that of feminine writing. Sarraute also admired Varda’s films.

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when I imagine her, from her books, Isee a figure walking alone in winter countryside.7

Varda has also stated that she “dedicated [ Vagabond] to Nathalie Sarraute because, to me, she is an absolute rebel.” Her comments on Sarraute’s work evoke traits of feminine writing: “[Sarraute’s] work is trying to capture the elusive, the space between things, delving into feelings before they are put into words and actions.” Varda reveals that in Vagabond, she was trying to do in film what Sarraute does in novels: “Portraying each character in various ways, constantly reassessing opinions, everyone 8

being contradictory, nothing certain.” Although Sarraute herself rejected the notion of feminine writing, Leah D. Hewitt sees Sarraute’s writing as fitting the theories of feminine writing since her writing manifests a return to a repressed feminine.9 Sarraute is also considered the precursor of the nouveau roman in that she called for a renewal of novel’s form and sought to express multiple psychological points of view in her work. In La Pointe courte, Varda adopts the dual structure of Faulkner’s Wild Palms. The film tells two different stories taking place in La Pointe courte, a fishing village near “A plus de quatre-vingt-dix ans maintenant, elle est toujours aussi vive, aussi intelligente et drôle. Passer un moment avec elle me galvanise mais si je l’imagine, à cause de ses livres, je la vois en solitaire qui marche dans la campagne en hiver.” Agnès Varda, Varda par Agnès, op.cit., 172. Nathalie Sarraute was born in 1900 and died in 1999. She was ninety-four years old when Varda wrote this book. Varda also writes that she borrowed details from Sarraute’s novel Planetarium for Vagabond. 7

Quotes in this paragraph are from a radio interview included in the DVD Vagabond in the DVD set 4 by Agnès Varda released by Criterion Collection in 2008. 8

9

Leah D. Hewitt, Autobiographical Tighttropes, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.

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Sète: one is a story of a couple in a relationship crisis after four years of marriage, and the other is a story of the local fishermen’s struggle to organize a union. The two stories are told in parallel without any connection between them, just as Wild Palms alternates between a story of a couple and a story of prisoners trying to escape during a Mississippi flood. Varda’s film consists of seven sequences that alternate between the couple and the villagers of La Pointe courte. All the sequences except the last one are approximately ten minutes long; in the last, which is twenty minutes long, the couple and villagers intersect without really connecting.

La Pointe courte set a tone for Varda’s films to come in several aspects: first, the meshing of documentary with fictional narrative; second, Varda’s interest in contradictions and oppositions (La Pointe courte explores the opposition between individual life and the collective); third, depiction of contemporary socio-political issues within the narrative (La Pointe courte depicts the conflict between the fishermen and the Board of Health); fourth, insertion of images of landscape, objects, pictorial references and animals (especially cats in La Pointe courte) as metaphors and as a means of breaking narrative linearity; fifth, simple narrative but complex and carefully constructed miseen-scène that breaks visual perspective; sixth, attention to the marginal; and lastly, Varda’s interest in female subjectivity (In La Pointe courte, it is the wife who is transformed during the couple’s brief stay in La Pointe courte.) In the film, the stories of the couple and of the village residents are visually contrasted because each is created with a different style of filming and editing. The story

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of the couple deals with the psychological problems the man and woman are going through about their love, and the story of the villagers deals with the chores and rituals of everyday life, such as laundry, fishing, children, death, young lovers, and Sunday festivals. The filmic style of the sequences involving the couple is highly formal, using professional actors who act without expression and deliver their lines as if they are reading. Both the camerawork and the acting are distant and somewhat cold. Also, the mise-en-scène is carefully designed to disturb the visual perspective; for example, the couple often walks into the frame and across the screen diagonally, and they are rarely placed at the center of the frame. The couple’s dialogue drives each of these sequences, and Varda ignores conventional rules of sound perspective, with the result that the couple’s voices sound as if they were narrating the film and not speaking to each other. On the other hand, the life of the village residents is shot in documentary style—simple and lively—and the village residents play themselves, speaking natural dialogue. Also, whereas the couple sequences are accompanied by music, the sequences involving the villagers have no music. Thus, the film’s aesthetics play with the opposition between formalism and realism. Further, Varda’s techniques constantly disrupt the audience’s identification with the film’s stories and characters, which was precisely Varda’s intent. In a recently conducted video interview, Varda says that she wanted to produce the effects of Brechtian “distanciation” in the film: “It was courageous to adopt such literary structure. One so radically opposed to the conventions of film and narratives. The narrative

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doesn’t flow smoothly, it’s jerky and uneven, almost Brechtian. I was with Jean Vilar [at the Théâtre National Populaire] listening to Brecht’s theory.”10 Varda’s interest in opposition and contrast carries through to the couple themselves. The husband (Philippe Noiret) was born in La Pointe courte, and the wife (Sylvia Monfort 11 ) is Parisian. When the film introduces the couple for the first time, Noiret is waiting for Monfort at the La Pointe courte railway station. It is Monfort’s first visit to Noiret’s hometown; however, she is considering separation because she thinks they are no longer “passionate” or “madly in love.” Noiret has different thoughts about love. He thinks the couple has arrived at a mature love, and he tells Monfort his love has not changed at all. The couple discusses existential questions while wandering around the village. Monfort learns of her husband’s childhood and about the way of life in La Pointe courte. Later in the film, Monfort decides not to leave her husband, saying, “In Paris, so many people want to succeed and make a place for themselves. I was born there and saw lots of excitement around me. For a long time, I thought it was useful. You taught me to keep still.” She adds, “Everything would have been easier if I’d been next door to you.” By coming to La Pointe courte, she has been exposed to a different life and locale, The interview is included in the DVD La Pointe courte, a part of the DVD set 4 by Agnès Varda from Criterion Collection, 2008. 10

Varda chose Sylvia Monfort for the role of the woman because “of her resemblance with the women in [the paintings] of Piero della Franscesca, with their absent look in the round and calm faces.” (… sa ressemblance avec les femmes de Piero della Franscesca, avec leur regard absent dans des visages ronds et calmes…) Varda par Agnès, op.cit., 44. 11

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and her concept of love is transformed through her interaction with the otherness of La Pointe courte where things are calm and slow. She tells her husband, “We’ve lost the youth of our love, the emotion, discovery, desire, the passion. And I can’t get over it. But adult love based on knowledge is a passion, less external, not so fragile, rather like maternal love that nothing can truly hurt.” At the end, it is she who decides their fate. However, the couple still does not relate with the villagers; even though they all appear together in the last sequence, the film ends with the couple leaving the village.

La Pointe courte also manifests “feminine” values in its mode of production. As noted in Chapter I, Varda made the film completely outside the French commercial circuit and in collaboration with young actors and technicians in the form of a cooperative. The very words by which Varda herself describes the film’s production demonstrates a “feminine” attitude: “I didn’t bother with laws or unions, or get official authorization. It was a way of eliminating the ‘taboo’ of Cinema, of the closed world of cinema and its hierarchies. That’s how it became a real film.” 12 She did not have any commercial profit in mind when she made this film, and she has taken an artisanal approach to filmmaking all through her career. The French word jouissance, which means “sexual pleasure” and which French feminist writers call for in feminine writing, is also interpreted by feminist literary critics as a pleasure different from the masculine

12

Jacqueline Levitin, “An Interview with Agnès Varda,” Women and Film, Vol. 1, no. 5-6, 1974, 63.

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pleasure associated with the desire for capitalist profit and appropriation. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron explain: This pleasure [ jouissance], when attributed to a woman, is considered to be of a different order from the pleasure that is represented within the male libidinal economy often described in terms of the capitalist gain and profit motive. Women’s jouissance carries with it the notion of fluidity, diffusion, duration. It is a kind of potlatch in the world of orgasms, a giving, expending, dispensing of pleasure without concern about ends or closure. 13 The basic thematic and aesthetic elements of La Pointe courte can also be found in

Cléo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond. Both of these latter films mix documentary elements with fictional narrative; both take note of the contemporary socio-political issues—Cléo from 5

to 7 deals with the collective fear of cancer in the 1960s France, and Vagabond was inspired by the emergence of le nouveau pauvre (the new poor) of the 1980s; both employ filming and editing techniques that break linearity and visual perspective; both tell a simple story by means of complex narrative devices; and both demonstrate Varda’s interest in the issue of female subjectivity.

Cléo from 5 to 7 is the story of a beautiful singer anxiously awaiting the results of a medical exam. She fears that the diagnosis might be cancer, and so she is a woman forced to face her fear of death. This was one of the films produced in “the highly

13

Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, “Introduction,” op.cit., 36, 8n.

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politicized context of Paris in the 1960s and 1970s, the historical period when the shift to post-structuralism took place,”14 and under the surface of a seemingly conventional melodrama, Varda has carefully constructed a political film that de-naturalizes the conventional notion of femininity. The film covers Cléo’s life for two hours in real time and is carefully organized in chapters that indicate whom the scene is about and emphasize the progression of time. By progressing in real-time, the film deliberately imposes on itself a linear narrative. However, this linearity is not designed to lay out the chronology of a narrative’s beginning, middle, and end in a conventional way but to create a documentary sense of “reality.” While following Cléo during these two hours, Varda inserts digressions that pull us away from the film’s fictional structure into moments of documentary. Wandering through the streets of Paris, Cléo encounters people in their everyday activities and, as Janice Mouton and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis have argued in their respective writings, transforms herself from a “feminine masquerade into a flaneuse,” a knowing subject 15; from a woman being-looked-at to a 16

woman with her own active look.

14

Marsha Kinder, op.cit., 120.

Janice Mouton, “From Feminine Masquerade to Flaneuse: Agnès Varda’s Cléo in the City,” Cinema Journal, Winter 2001, 3-16. 15

Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema , New York: Columbia University Press, 1996, 268-284. 16

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The film is carefully structured to enhance the moment of her liberation from being a “cliché woman” and the profound transformation she undergoes thereafter. The thirteen chapters are precisely organized in such a way that the seventh chapter, the middle chapter, provides the pivotal moment of Cléo’s rejection of her artificial femininity. Here, after a series of meetings with close friends and her lover, all of whom impose on her a “false” persona of femininity, she throws away her blonde wig and goes out into the street alone. From that point, the people she meets or encounters by chance, such as Antoine, a young soldier on leave from Algeria who is also facing the possibility of death, play a crucial role in her transformation. It is during her talk with Antoine that we find out her real name is not Cléo, but Florence. Varda’s camera also shifts from its voyeuristic gaze at Cléo to a position that captures the things and people Cléo observes in the streets. One other important aspect of the film is the way Varda uses tarot cards to set up a compelling narrative. As Marsha Kinder points out, Cléo from 5 to 7 combines the three narrative modes of documentation of an open yet specific narrative field, a game, and a singular fictional narrative to create “a formidable narrative machine whose ideological operations are exposed.”17 The film opens with a scene in color of an old woman reading Cléo’s tarot cards. She sees death in her cards but reminds Cléo that death might mean a profound transformation. However, after Cléo leaves, the old woman tells her

17

Marsha Kinder, op.cit., 128.

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companion that she sees cancer and that Cléo is doomed. This is an interesting and significant sequence because it sets up a mental game between the film and the audience of whether the prophecy will turn out to be true. Will Cléo’s diagnosis be cancer? Is Cléo going to die? The tarot card reading seemed to be accurate about her past and present, but what about her future? This device encourages the audience to keep checking what the old woman predicted against the narrative as it unfolds. Thus, the “game” of the tarot card reading engenders an interactive mental game between the story and the audience, resulting in a “writerly text.” At the same time, this introduction allows Varda to comment on narrative itself. For instance, while Cléo and Antoine walk in a park together, Antoine talks about books and films, and Cléo responds, “I hate reading reviews. I dislike knowing the story beforehand.” This line highlights the narrative desire for an ending that will engage the audience, which is what Varda tries to achieve with the compelling start to her film. A playful digression inserted into this linear narrative is a short silent film Cléo gets to see when she visits Raul, her friend Dorothée’s boyfriend and a film projectionist. The boy and girl in this film-within-a-film are played by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina (a real couple at the time, casting which again shows Varda’s tendency to inflect reality into her fictional narrative). When the boy puts on his sunglasses, the action in the film-within-a-film turns dark: Anna changes from a blonde into a dark-skinned brunette, and she gets hit by a truck and dies. Then the boy realizes that “my glasses made everything look black” and removes them. The scene is replayed in white, and this

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time the girl escapes the truck and the lovers are reunited. This comic moment can be seen as Varda’s comment on perception and interpretation—how our understanding of the world is colored by artificial constructions and how we can throw away that artifice—and also as a tribute to silent comedy, an intertextuality which was one of the characteristics of New Wave films.

Cléo from 5 to 7 certainly raises the issue of death as narrative desire, but what is more significant is the way Varda expresses female subjectivity and agency in her narrative. According to Teresa de Lauretis, the subject of classical narrative is masculine. Only the male hero is capable of progressing and changing. For a woman’s desire to be fulfilled, she must first become an object. Thus, a woman’s becoming a subject capable of defining her own desires requires a narrative transgression or a revolution. In Cléo from 5

to 7, the female protagonist transforms herself from an object of desire to a woman of active looking by interacting with social reality. The film unfolds a linear narrative but still subverts the notion of woman in patriarchal society, and Varda’s cinécriture effectively deconstructs the symbolic order inscribed in the traditional male-centered film narrative. While death is used as a metaphor for self-discovery and transformation in Cléo

from 5 to 7, it acts as a hermeneutic code18 in Vagabond. While Cléo ultimately overcomes her fear of death, Vagabond starts with the death of its female protagonist, Mona. In In his book, S/Z, Roland Barthes lists the five major codes under which all the textual signifiers can be grouped. The hermaneutic code is the driving question of a narrative that arouses the reader’s curiosity. 18

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Vagabond, Varda has consciously borrowed the narrative structure of Citizen Kane but has completely inverted it. Vagabond is not a story of the death of a rich and famous old man but of the death of a young, poor, female drifter who leaves no clues as to her identity. Citizen Kane took first place in the American Film Institute’s list of “100 Greatest Films.” Therefore, Vagabond is a feminine filmmaking that deconstructs the number one canonical film. The film begins with Mona frozen to death in a ditch in rural France. Her body is stained with the color purple. There is nothing on her body to give the police a hint of her identity. Thus, “who is she” and “how did she die” become the focus of narrative desire, and her identity is the ultimate enigma carried by the hermeneutic code. To solve this mystery, the film is structured as a series of flashbacks recreating Mona as witnessed by the people she met during the last few weeks of her life. There are eighteen witnesses, and they offer eighteen different versions of Mona—that is, eighteen differently held images of Mona, none of which, of course, is the actual Mona. Rather, their perceptions of her are inflected with their own dreams and desires. For example, Yolande, who is unhappy about the lack of affection in her life, perceives an example of an ideal love when she first sees Mona in an empty mansion sleeping peacefully in the arms of David, a young man with whom Mona has had only a brief relationship. However, in Yolande’s eyes, they appear as perfect lovers who surely do everything together and enjoy blissfully sleeping in each other’s arms. Similarly, for another young

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girl who lives with her parents, Mona is a symbol of the freedom she longs to have herself. The plot of the film is very simple—a female vagabond dies after wandering around the countryside—but Varda uses other people’s memories to construct Mona’s identity, and the audience is invited to actively engage in the complex process of trying to put together the puzzle of Mona. Again Varda plays between fiction and documentary in her presentation of different testimonies. Some of them are inserted in the fictional story, while some are presented as documentary interviews. Thus, as an audience, we try to piece together the “real” picture of Mona by eavesdropping on what the characters say to each other or by gathering information from their direct address to the camera. The representation of Mona’s last moments is deliberately random. The fortyseven episodes are laid out in flashbacks, and the sequences in which the witnesses appear are organized in a way that ignores chronology. This narrative structure enables Varda to subvert the conventions of traditional narrative by deconstructing the patriarchal system with its voyeuristic gaze and by providing a space for a discussion of female sexuality that leads us to question what it means to be a woman in contemporary society. As Susan Hayward points out, “Male discourses (whether uttered by men or women) cannot produce [Mona’s] identity.”19 At the end of the film, we learn how she

19

Susan Hayward, “Beyond the gaze and intofemme-filmécriture: Agnès Varda’sSans toit ni loi(1985),”op.cit.,270.

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ended up dead in a ditch, but we never learn who she really is or why she was drifting alone in the first place. We don’t learn about her; instead we learn about the multiplicity of cultural and subjective attitudes that shape perception. In terms of narrative subversion, the film effectively deconstructs the genre of the road movie. Traditionally, it is a male who is on the move in a road movie, and his movements are often towards self-discovery. However, in Vagabond it is a young woman who is moving towards her death. Varda also deliberately subverts the use of the tracking shot, an icon of the road movie. Varda herself explained in her DVD commentary of the film that the tracking shots move from right to left instead of left to right because Mona is moving towards her death. Since we write from left to right, tracking from right to left defies social conventions. Mona herself defies all the social conventions attributed to a decent young woman: she is filthy and selfish, and thus she repels. Because she is completely outside convention, she is unlikable, and this in turn reveals the predominant social view of a drifter. In sum, both Cléo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond have complicated narrative structures that fragment the linear causality of classical Hollywood narrative. Also, on the discursive level, the two films challenge the conventional notion of femininity and the patriarchal ideology of dominant cinema. Furthermore, both films could be examined in 20 Cléo from 5 to 7 terms of what Teresa de Lauretis has called “narrative with a vengeance.”

20

In her book, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984),

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provides the visual pleasure of a beautiful woman, but the beautiful woman refuses to remain as a woman-being-looked-at and transforms herself into a subject of active looking; in Vagabond, Varda has consciously inverted Citizen Kane, the canonical art film Since feminine writing is about deconstructing dominant language, I now turn to the question of how Varda’s films violate or subvert classical narrative’s spatial construction visually; that is, how the spatial construction of Cléo from 5 to 7 and

Vagabond disrupt the classical narrative model of linear perspective. This examination brings into play the relation between “narrative and space” as discussed by Stephen Heath and others. In Cléo from 5 to 7, the protagonist walks through the streets of Paris and transforms herself from the “cliché woman” to a woman with an active look, and in

Vagabond, the protagonist journeys through rural France towards her death. One is about a woman in the city, and the other is about a woman traveling the bleak landscape of the countryside. Let’s see how spaces are represented in each film and how the filmic space in each film helps to create a specifically feminine filmwriting that subverts the masculine language of classical narrative. As I mentioned, the stories of two films are very simple: Cléo from 5 to 7 is about a beautiful singer overcoming her fear of death, and Vagabond is a story of a young female wanderer who has been found frozen to death in a ditch. In each film, however, Varda Teresa de Lauretis argues that she sees it (=feminist cinema) possible without “the stoic, brutal prescription of self-discipline, the destruction of visual pleasure” (156) and that “the most exciting work in cinema and in feminism today is not anti-narrative or anti-Oedipal.” She calls for “narrative and Oedipal with a vengeance” which seeks to “stress the duplicity of that scenario and the specific contradiction of the female subject in it.” (157)

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has created a complex film narrative that calls our attention to the film’s visual forms as well as its discursive function. As previously noted, the passage of time in Cléo from 5 to 7 is linear and continuous, but the film is structured as a series of episodes that look disjunctive because of various devices Varda uses, including chapter markings, inserts of various still images that interrupt the linear causality of point of view, jump cuts, and violation of the 180 degree rule. Varda also juxtaposes color shots with black-and-white shots at the beginning of the film to highlight the fictional nature of film. The film starts with a color sequence of tarot cards being displayed on a table. With the overhead camera fixed on what’s being displayed on the table, we hear the conversation between the card reader and Cléo, who has gone there out of desperation. The card reader foresees a fight and a journey in Cléo’s future. As we continue to hear what the card reader is saying, suddenly the screen switches to a black-and-white shot of the card reader herself asking Cléo, “Are you ill?” Looking desperate, Cléo answers, “Yes.” Color shots of the tarot cards and black-and-white shots of Cléo and the card reader alternate until the last card is read. The last card Cléo picks is the death card. 21 Cléo breaks down, but the cardreader tries to calm her down by saying that death can mean “a complete transformation of your whole being.” However, after Cléo leaves her office, the card reader tells her Here, the tarot cards as still images play a symbolic function of telling Cléo’s past, present, and future life. In Varda’s films it is common to see still images such as photographs, paintings, postcards etc. used as symbols or as inserts that momentarily interrupts the continuity of temporal and/or spatial progression. It is one of the devices she uses to tell a story visually. 21

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companion that she sees cancer and that Cléo is doomed. With this powerful beginning prefiguring Cléo’s fate, the film sparks viewers’ curiosity as to whether the fortune teller’s prediction will come true. At the same time, however, the film distances viewers from being sutured into the fictional narrative by juxtaposing color with black and white. The tarot card scenes are the only color scenes in the whole film; Varda explains this choice: From the first images of Cléo from 5 to 7 , the card reader’s colored deck tells Cléo’s future virtually, as a lie or a premonition…. Like 5a to short inserted a story, this beginning of Cléo from 7 isprologue in color. Or ratherinthat tablecloth and the cards are. The credits appear over them. The film is announced in color, what the card reader sees is a fiction, then we see Cléo’s terrified face in black-and-white, like the rest of the film. 22 Varda imagined the color of fear as white because she had read somewhere that “in Asia the color of mourning is white.”23 So she utilized white as a sensation. Her use of black and white as reality and color as fantasy also goes against a common use of color in film: black and white for the past, color for the present. However, according to Edward Buscombe, when color was first used in cinema, it tended to connote fantasy 22 “Dès les premières images de Cléo de 5 à 7 , les tarots colorés de la cartonmancienne racontent l’avenir de Cléo en virtuel, en mensonge ou en premonition…Comme un court prologue inséré dans le récit, ce début de Cléo de 5 à 7 est en couleurs. Ou plus précisement le tapis de table et les tarots. Le générique s’y inscrit. On annonce en couleurs le film, ce que voit la cartomancienne est une fiction, puis on voit le visage affolé de Cléo, en noir et blanc comme la suite du film.” Agnès Varda, Ibid., 62. (Translation is from Agnès Varda by Alison Smith, op.cit., 23.) 23

Ibid.

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and not reality: “[When] it first became technically feasible, color, it seems, did not connote reality but the opposite…[In] the first few years after the introduction of threecomponent of Technicolor (srcinally used in the Disney cartoon Flowers and Trees in 1932) the great majority of films employing the process were produced within genres not notably realistic in the sense of their being accurate representations of what ‘life’ is ‘like.’”24 Varda shot most of Cléo from 5 to 7 in black and white because of the limited budget she was working with (like most New Wave filmmakers of the 1960s); nevertheless, she used color to go against the current of her time, when black and white was often used to connote the past, to “revert” to the srcinal use of color in cinema. Varda uses art work and photograph-like shots frequently in the film to break the continuous movement of time and also of the characters. These inserts are often subjective shots of what Cléo sees or imagines. In fact, Varda’s inspiration for the film was a series of sixteenth-century paintings entitled Death and the Maiden by German painter Hans Baldung Grien (1484-1545): I imagined a character walking in the city. I thought of the master of Jacques the Fatalist. He became a female singer, wandering in Paris, panic-stricken by the fear of cancer, often accompanied by her “fatalist” governess. The fear of being fatally ill. Beauty therefore does not protect her, neither the mirrors nor the gazes of the others? The paintings of Baldung Grien, beautiful and frightening, very quickly became the sense of the film and its spirit: beauty and death. One sees women, beautiful in their blonde flesh, embraced by a skeleton who 24

Edward Buscombe, “Sound and Color,” Jump Cut, no. 17, 1978, 24.

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gives them a rough time or frightens them. In one of the paintings, the skeleton pulls the woman by the hair. It is the fear, the great fear, that of death, because cancer threatens. Cléo waits the result of a medical analysis. The fear awakes her. “Everybody wants nobody tension loves ofme,” she woman says… Everything I feel aboutme, the interior this sweet during the ninety minutes (from 5:00 pm to 6:30 pm), everything was inspired by these women and these skeletons of Baldung Grien. A small reproduction of one of his paintings was often hung on the wall of the place where we filmed. It is the force of painting to propose works that can become inspiration and continuous dream.25 Thus, it was a set of still images that generated a narrative for Varda. In many of Varda’s films, art images are inserted or referred to. In Vagabond, when the living Mona is being introduced for the first time, coming out of the sea after bathing, Varda herself narrates, “… it seems to me she came from the sea,” an obvious reference to Botticelli’s famous quattrocento painting Birth of Venus. Both Death and the Maiden and Birth of Venus portray a beautiful woman, an image that is linked to the issues of feminine representation and identity in art. It is interesting to note that it was these immobile,

“J’ai imaginé un personage marchant dans la ville. J’ai pensé au maître de Jacques le Fataliste. Il est devenu une chanteuse, déambulant dans Paris, affolée par le peur du cancer, souvent accompagnée par sa gouvernante fataliste. La peur d’être mortellement malade. La beauté ne protége-t-elle donc pas, ni les miroirs ni les regards des autres? Les peintures de Baldung Grien, belles et effrayantes, sont très vite devenues le sens du film et son ressort: la beauté et la mort. On y voit des femmes, belles dans leur chair blonde, enlacées par un squelette qui les malmène ou les effraie. Dans une des toiles, le squelette tire la femme par les cheveux. C’est la peur, la vraie grande peur, celle de mourir parce que le cancer menace. Cléo attend le résultat d’une analyse médicale. La peur la réveille. Tout le monde me veut, personne ne m’aime, ditelle…Tout ce que je sentais de la tension intérieure de cette femme douce pendant les quatre-vingt-dix minutes du film (de 5 heures à 6 heures 30), tout cela est inspiré par ces femmes et ces squelettes de Baldung Grien. Une petite reproduction d’un de ses tableaux était souvent punaisée au mur, là où nous tournions. C’est la force de la peinture de proposer des oeuvres qui peuvent devenir inspiration et rêverie continue.” Agnès Varda, Varda par Agnès, op.cit., 48. 25

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fixed images of women that inspired Varda to create visual narratives of women in movement. Cléo walks through the streets of Paris, and Mona of Vagabond wanders through the rural landscape. Although both films center on a female protagonist on the move, the direction of their movement is opposite: Cléo moves towards self-realization and transformation, while Mona moves towards death. It will be an interesting task to compare and contrast how Varda translates this different tone and atmosphere in visual terms. For example, Cléo mostly moves from left to right across the frame, whereas Mona’s movement is mostly from right to left, as explained earlier. Time also plays a crucial role in Cléo from 5 to 7 , as is evident from the film’s title that indicates a specific time duration. However, despite the film’s title, the film’s actual running time is ninety minutes: the film actually covers 5:00 to 6:30 p.m., leaving it to the audience to fill in the gap of the last thirty minutes of diegetic time. As Sandy Flitterman-Lewis has analyzed in great detail in her book, To Desire Differently: Feminism

and the French Cinema, Cléo from 5 to 7 is divided into thirteen chapters which are presented in chronological order, and in the process of this temporal progression, Cléo transforms herself from a woman-being-looked-at to a woman with her own look. The pivotal moment of her transformation occurs in the middle chapter: chapter 7. That is, at exactly forty-five minutes into the film, Cléo throws away her wig and goes out into the street alone, and thus opens herself to the world. If she has been a woman representative

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of conventional femininity in the first half of the film, she becomes a “transgressive” woman with her own active look and subjectivity in the latter half of the film. However, it is not only Cléo who changes in the latter half of the film. The style of the film, the visual language of the film, also changes. The film visually depicts Cléo’s two passages through Paris differently. In the first half of the film, Cléo is depicted as the cliché woman, oblivious to her surroundings and absorbed only in her beauty. To visualize her narcissistic self-absorption, the camera follows her and keeps her strictly in the center of the frame. According to David Bordwell, in classical filmmaking, “the 26

human body is made the center of the narrative and graphic interest,” and centered composition is a way to shape the story action for the spectator. Thus, conventional perspectival space is constructed to convey visually Cléo’s conventional femininity. Moreover, in many places she visits or passes on the way from the fortune teller back to her apartment—e.g., the hat shop, café, the streets—she is surrounded by mirrors. In this half of the film, the mirrored images of her beautiful face give her self-assurance against her fear of cancer.

26 David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960, New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, 50. Also in his book, Narration in the Fiction Film (London: Routledge, 1997), Bordwell accounts how films mobilize spatial perception and cognition for storytelling purposes calling attention to Albertian perspective and the problems of spatial “position.” Among other things, Bordwell explains shot/reverse shot as a technique that creates an ideal positionality for the spectator. In Cléo from 5 to 7, even in dialogue scenes between two persons, shot/reverse shot is seldom used. The two persons talking to each other are often placed within one frame or an empty shot of an object is inserted between shots of each person. The eyelines are not matched, either.

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However, in the second half of the film, in which she becomes aware of others surrounding her, the camera often takes her subjective point of view. Further, she is often decentered in the frame. Since Hollywood’s practices of composition are based on a powerful model of post-Renaissance painting’s centered composition, classical filmmaking considers edge framing taboo.27 Thus, Varda’s decentering of her main character within the frame breaks with this classical model of composition. Cléo’s first real awareness of others occurs in the Café du Dome. After Cléo plays her song on the jukebox, the camera follows her as she wanders around the café, listening to the conversations of others. The constantly moving camera and the film’s abrupt alternations between Cléo’s subjective point of view and the camera’s objective point of view disrupt the unified subject position of the audience. When Cléo leaves the café and walks out into the streets, the camera alternates between her subjective point of view and the “objective” point of view. However, the rhythm of this alternation, both temporal and spatial, is broken by the photograph-like shots of various people Cléo remembers. These insertions disrupt the linearity of the narrative. Thus, there are two kinds of subjective shots presented in this sequence: images of what Cléo sees in the street and inserts of images of people she remembers. While the camera captured Cléo as the focal point of the framing in the first half of the film, the camera captures her as only one face among many in the latter half of the film. Also, in the first half, her image 27

Ibid., 50.

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in the mirrors is centered and unified, but in the few mirror scenes in the latter half of the film, her image is fragmented and broken. In this way, Varda has rendered the transformation of subjectivity in purely visual terms. The representation of a woman character in the urban space of Paris is also important in Cléo from 5 to 7 because Cléo breaks away from the women characters in Paris featured in other New Wave films, all made by male directors. According to Susan Hayward, the woman in Paris of French cinema (the younger woman) has for the most part fallen into one of two categories: She finds herself as the “‘deviant” (temptress, whore, fallen woman, liar, cheat, murderer), even in comedies (neglectful mother, for example)— or she is represented as in distress (suicidal—possibly mad—so still deviant really), or confused either by being in the city or in mortal danger. Rarely is she represented as heroic. Rarely does she express her own subjectivity… Rarely, does the woman occupy a voiced position, does she become in a sense a truly female modernist flâneur with power to walk through the city on her own terms (much as the male flâneur did before her.) Only two films of woman as female modernist flâneur spring immediately to mind: Cléo walking

5à7 through and ParisFlorence as she faces deaththe in Agnès (1961), roving streetsVarda’s of ParisCléo at denight searching for her lover in Louis Malle’s Ascensceur pour l’échafaud (1957). In both instances it is their subjectivities and subjective experience of the city that we are privy to.28

Susan Hayward, “The City as Narrative: Corporeal Paris in Contemporary French Cinema (1950s-1990s),” Spaces in European Cinema, ed. Myrto Konstantakos, Exeter: Intellect, 2000. In her essay, “From Feminine Masquerade to Flaneuse: Agnès Varda’s Cléo in the City” ( Cinema Journal, Winter 2001), Janice Mouton also argues that by wandering through the streets of Paris, Cléo transforms herself to a flaneuse, a knowing subject. 28

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Thus, Varda distinguishes herself from other New Wave directors (except Louis Malle) by deconstructing the conventional image of women in the city as represented in both dominant Hollywood cinema and the “modern” French New Wave films. Significantly, in Cléo from 5 to 7 , the city is represented both as the space in which Cléo becomes aware of others and as a place of anxiety. The objects she sees in the streets provoke fear of her own death and mutilation, and the people in the café are all absorbed in their own conversations. She is awakened by this fear of death and by the realization that nobody in fact cares about her (or the song she has recorded, which she is playing on the jukebox). In this regard, it is significant that it is in a park, with its tranquil and natural surroundings, that she meets Antoine, with whom she begins a genuine relationship of mutual understanding. With Antoine, Cléo can talk about the fear she could not share with her rich lover when he visited her apartment in an earlier scene. A soldier on leave from Algerian war, Antoine accompanies her to the hospital where she discovers she does have cancer but it is treatable, and where she overcomes her fear of death. She comes to equate love with an acceptance of others, and her transformation from a narcissist to a woman with empathy for others is completed. Her new, open attitude of embracing the Other corresponds to the notion of feminine writing. One sequence that seems stamped with Varda’s authorial signature is the long radio news sequence in the taxi scene, which takes place during the first half of the film. After buying a hat, Cléo and Angèle take a cab to Cléo’s apartment. The driver turns on the radio, and the newscaster reports various items of international and national news,

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from American shampoo to the Algerian war. This long sequence appears to have nothing to do with the progression of the story. However, the Algerian war news has two functions: first, it is a political comment by Varda as a French filmmaker during the time of Algerian war, and second, it sets up Cléo’s transformation. Cléo is not at all interested in this news coverage, but later on in the film, she becomes aware of the Algerian war through her meeting with Antoine. The visual rendering of this taxi sequence is striking. For the whole duration of this long sequence, the camera is fixed on the radio at the center of the frame in what Bordwell calls “sonic perspective.” Since Cléo and Angèle are sitting on either side of the backseat, this shot is not a point of view shot from either of them. The film seems to offer a “sonic or verbal spectacle” instead of the “visual spectacle” of classical cinema, and in the process, Varda makes her political statement about the Algerian war. “During the eight-year war with Algeria (1954-62) not a single film on the Algerian question was granted a visa…In the 1960s, films which tried to address this conflict, or the role of the army in any context, were effectively 29

blocked [by censorship].” Here, Varda has cleverly succeeded in incorporating both issues—the Algerian war and the army—into the film via the seemingly objective and distanced vehicle of a radio news broadcast. Varda’s authorial stance is more evident in Vagabond, for which she provided the voiceover narration from an omniscient point of view. The film starts with the death of a 29

Susan Hayward, French National Cinema, London and New York: Routledge, 1993, 40.

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young vagabond woman who has left no trace as to her identity. The police conclude she died of natural causes: she froze to death. After the police have wrapped her body in a plastic body bag, the camera switches to a shot of a beach, and Varda’s narration begins: No one claimed the body, so it went from a ditch to potter’s field. She had died a natural death without leaving a trace. I wonder if those who knew her as a child still think about her. But people she had met recently remembered her. Those witnesses helped me tell of the last weeks of her last winter. She left a mark on them. They spoke of her, not knowing she had died. I didn’t tell them. Nor that her name was Mona Bergeron. Ithe know sea.30little about her myself, but it seems to me she came from This is the only narration used in the entire film. The film does not tell the audience it is Varda’s voice, but as we can figure out from the narration, it is definitely the voice of the filmmaker. The narrator “I” is the one who met with those who witnessed Mona’s last days and is the only one who knows Mona’s last name. It is the voice of the author who tries to put together the pieces of the puzzle that is Mona. And the narration also tells the audience how Mona’s identity is going to be reconstituted— through the memories of the people she met during the last few weeks of her life. Before the narration, the narrative unfolds in chronological order, although there are inserts of puzzling shots that disrupt the film’s linear perspective. However, as the

30

The translation is from the English subtitle of the DVD version of Vagabond.

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narrative begins to reconstruct Mona, temporal and spatial linearity are both radically broken. There are eighteen witnesses who offer their observations and memories of Mona. Since the narrative starts and ends with Mona’s death in a circular structure, the overall chronology of the film is backward. It is an inverted chronology that is disrupted along the way with insertions of episodes and chance encounters she had. These random encounters break down narrative causality; the witnesses do not appear in chronological order. Also, many different modes of address—e.g., direct address, indirect address showing two or more witnesses talking to each other—are employed. Interweaving verbal testimonies and visual representations of these testimonies disrupts temporal continuity. Witnesses testify, and that testimony is re-enacted on screen, but sometimes the re-enactment occurs before the oral version and sometimes afterwards. Visually, Varda shows a certain foregrounding of space, and this challenges the supremacy of narrative causality. For instance, she often inserts empty shots of inanimate objects or bare landscape. According to Bordwell, in classical narrative, space is subjugated to narrative and character. However, in Vagabond, space is often foregrounded, as in the films of Ozu. The most prominent visual technique Varda uses in Vagabond is the tracking shot of Mona in movement. In the tracking shot as used in classical narrative, the camera moves with the character in motion to keep him/her at the center of the frame.31

31

David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, New York: McGraw Hill, 2001, 224.

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However, the tracking shots in Vagabond often foreground and emphasize space and place rather than the character of Mona. Tracking shots begin without her; she comes in and then disappears from the frame; each shot begins and ends on some wayside object, giving the audience a space for meditation. Also, Mona is not always kept at the center of the moving frame. Thus, Varda does not use the tracking shot to reframe her character in a perspectival composition. The tracking shot either overtakes Mona or is overtaken by her, and sometimes, the tracking shot continues even after Mona has left the frame. As she did in Cléo from 5 to 7 , Varda also violates many rules of classical cinema, such as the 180 degree rule, the axis match, and movement match, in Vagabond. As I have examined in the case of La Pointe courte, Cléo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond, Varda as a filmmaker does not set out to make classical narratives that are, according to Teresa de Lauretis, patriarchal. Also as a female author, Varda distinguishes herself by challenging and subverting both the narrative content and the visual style of classical cinema. Her films are good examples of how the notion of “writing” can be adapted and translated into the visual medium of film. Also, her integration of documentary material into fictional structures in both Cléo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond suggests the new uses for improvisation that Varda has emphasized in her concept of cinécriture. She calls Cléo from

5 to 7 a “subjective documentary” that “reconciles two aspects of reality that interest me:

Bordwell and Thompson explain “mobile framing” as one resource of framing that is specific to cinema. In the tracking shot, the camera as a whole does change position, traveling in any direction along the ground, however, the figures remain in the same basic relationship to the frame.

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the very premeditated and reconstituted aspect and the documentary style, real life, things caught in the moment.” By following Cléo into the streets, the film captures certain aspects of Paris, its streets and its people, but it does so “through the completely subjective view of a young lady who feels sick.”32 For Varda, even documentaries are never objective because they are the result of the filmmaker’s selection during the editing process. This play with the mixing of documentary and fiction is a constant mark of Varda’s feminine cinécriture. 2 Writing the Body: Inscription of the Feminine For me, “being a woman” is above all having a body of a woman. A body that is not cut into more or less exciting pieces, a body that is not limited to the socalled erogenous zones (and classified by men), a body with refined zones…33 --Agnès Varda

In espousing her idea of feminine writing, Hélène Cixous asserts, “Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement,” 34

32

The quotations of Varda’s words are from the DVD 4 by Agnès Varda, Criterion Collection, 2008.

“Pour moi, ‘être une femme’, c'est d'abord avoir un corps de femme. Un corps qui ne soit pas découpé en morceaux plus ou moins excitants, un corps qui ne soit pas limité aux zones dites érogènes (et classifiées par les hommes), un corps à zones raffinées . . . ” Agnès Varda, “Propos sure le cinéma par Agnès Varda,” ed. Mireille Amiel, Cinéma 75, no. 204, Décembre 1975, 48. 33

34

Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,”op.cit., 245.

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and she asks women to “write your self. Your body must be heard.” 35 Women’s feelings and experiences are emphasized, and the female body is the medium through which a new mode of writing will emerge and displace masculine language. Specifically, she associates the repressed female body with women’s history: [W]oman is body more than man is. Because he is invited to social success, to sublimation. More body hence more writing. For a long time, still, bodily, within the body she has answered the harassment, the familial conjugal venture of domestication, the repeated attempts to castrate her… Now, I-woman am going to blow up the Law: a possible and inescapable explosion from now on; let it happen, right now, in language.36 Thus, Cixous places particular importance on the body, the very site of repression and oppression by patriarchy. She argues that because the female body and sexuality have been denied in silence and negation, opening up the body will be the creative source of feminine writing. This is what she defines as the “jouissance” that unleashes the unconscious and the feminine imaginary. Feminine jouissance drives the woman to reaffirm her body, which has always been censored, and to rebuild her identity as an independent entity. Hence, feminine writing is about “writing the body.” In this section of the chapter, I will examine six of Varda’s films which, I argue, most clearly exemplify feminine cinécriture that inscribes the female body in the text: 35

Ibid., 250.

36

Hélène Cixous, “Sorties,” op.cit., 95.

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L’Opéra Mouffe (1958), Daguerréotypes (1974), Réponse de femmes (Women Reply, 1975), One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (L’une chante, l’autre pas, 1976), Jane B. par Agnès V. (Jane B. by Agnès V., 1987) and The Gleaners and I (Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse , 2000). Except for One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, these are all documentary films. L’Opéra Mouffe, Réponse de femmes and One Sings, the Other Doesn’t are all concerned with maternity: L’Opéra Mouffe is a short documentary about a marketplace in Paris which Varda shot while she herself was pregnant with her first child; Réponse de femmes is a short TV documentary that specifically asks, “What does it mean to be a woman?”; and One Sings, The Other Doesn’t is a fiction film that depicts women’s struggle for abortion rights in 1970s France. Daguerréotypes is a documentary Varda shot a year after she gave birth to her second child, Mathieu; her wish to stay near Mathieu prompted her to invent a new and srcinal way of filming. According to Varda, the initial concept of the film came from the idea that “women are attached to the house.”37 Because she had Mathieu at home, Varda did not want to go far from home to shoot. So she thought of a “new umbilical cord” that would keep Mathieu within a close distance to her. She pulled an electrical line from the meter of her house to use for the lighting equipment and measured it. It was eighty meters long. So she decided to shoot Daguerréotypes within this distance.38

37

Agnès Varda, “Propos sure le cinéma par Agnès Varda,” op.cit., 40.

38

Agnès Varda, Varda par Agnès, op.cit., 250.

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As briefly noted in the previous section, Varda frequently uses or references still images—photography and painting—to reconstruct and/or deconstruct traditional images of women, as well as to disrupt conventional narrative construction. In particular, Jane B. par Agnès V. and The Gleaners and I, both feature-length documentaries, provide excellent examples of Varda’s utilization of pictorial references in creating a visual universe in which she questions and explores feminine identity. Moreover, one of the most striking elements of these two documentaries is that Varda inserts herself into the narratives: she literally “puts herself into the text,” as Cixous demands in her call for feminine writing. Varda is actively present within the film as a film director asking questions and filming the subject(s) of each documentary. In Jane B. par Agnès V., she is a “camera painter” who draws a portrait of the actress Jane Birkin in sketches and “tableaux vivants” inspired by paintings of Goya, Titian, and Salvador Dali. She consciously inverts traditional paintings in her “camera drawings” to critique the images of women those paintings contain. In The Gleaners and I, Varda herself re-enacts Jules Breton’s painting of a woman gleaner, suggesting that by making the film, she has become the ultimate gleaner of images: la glaneuse in the French title of the film. In this way, both films illustrate the ways in which Varda's cinécriture applies most specifically to documentaries, even as they also constitute examples of feminine writing in film.

L’Opéra Mouffe is a seventeen-minute black-and-white documentary that blends an ethnographic chronicle of the rue Mouffetard, better known as la Mouffe, with

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surrealist fantasy sequences made up of subjective shots of things Varda, the pregnant filmmaker, imagines. The film is silent and is composed of ten small chapters. It does not have any diegetic sound, not even ambient sound. Instead, its images are accompanied by music, songs, and inter-titles that explain the theme of each chapter. In fact, it is presented in the form of theater and, more specifically, an opera. It starts with a curtained stage and ends with an inter-title that simply says, “A curtain” (un rideau). As the film opens, we see a woman in the nude sitting on a bench with her back towards us. In fact, we see her through a sheer curtain, which sets up the film as a presentation on stage. The image of the woman lasts through the credit sequence, at the end of which the curtain actually goes up to begin the opera. The “opera” begins with a still photograph-like image of a naked pregnant woman sitting sideways towards the camera; it is the woman in the credit sequence. The shot does not show her face, and the background is completely dark so that the contour of her full belly is accentuated. The next shot is a close-up of her belly, followed by a medium shot of the woman, now lying down. The camera focuses on the rhythmic breathing of her belly. In 1958, these shots of a naked pregnant woman must have been a very audacious and an unusual element in cinema. These images of the pregnant woman function as an announcement that the protagonist of the film/opera is a pregnant woman. After the shots of the woman’s pregnant belly, the film cuts to a shot of a big pumpkin at the market and then to a close-up of the pumpkin which resembles the woman’s belly. The seller cuts the pumpkin in half with a knife and takes out the seeds.

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The comparison is a little shocking; however, it is only one of a number of images Varda links to pregnancy. The cross-sectional view of the halved pumpkin reminds us of the shape of a uterus. It seems to reflect the fear of disembowelment pregnant women might have. The film is divided into nine small chapters marked by inter-titles that explain the theme of the sequences to come: “the lovers”, “on nature”, “on pregnancy”, “some of them”, “dearly beloved”, “greetings” “on drunkenness”, “on anxiety”, and “on desire.” Since the film is an “opera,” each chapter except the one on anxiety begins with a song that conveys the theme and the tone of the chapter. The lyrics are sometimes ironic; for example, the chapter “some of them” is composed of images of old people on the streets, but the song goes, “They were new born babies/ someone, some other, some of them.” The old men and women are shown looking straight into the camera. The lyrics reflect what Varda felt towards these old people. According to Varda, la Mouffe in 1958 was a poor and dirty street crowded with tramps. She explains that she went to the market in la Mouffe (called la Bouffe) nearly every morning with a folding chair and a borrowed camera. She climbed on the chair and filmed in 16mm. She was experiencing a contradiction stemming from her pregnancy: hopefulness for her unborn child alongside a consciousness of this world of poor, drunken people without hope. She felt tenderness towards them and began to imagine them as babies: “All the people there, the old ones,

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the one-eyed people and the tramps, all had been babies, the newborns often loved and who were kissed on the stomach and had their backsides powdered …”39 The film conveys a strong feeling of a pregnant woman who is filming the poor people on the streets; it is filled with tenderness. In fact, Varda, who subtitled the film, “Diary of a pregnant woman,” calls it a “subjective documentary”: a documentary about la Mouffe and its people from a pregnant woman’s perspective. 40 She wanted to film something personal when she observed that pregnancy brought about a change in her outlook and sensibility. She also describes it as her “Threepenny Opera;” hence the title,

L’Opéra Mouffe. The film also reminds one of such silent documentaries as Jean Vigo’s À propos de Nice (1930) which documents the people and their daily routines in the city, a carnival, and social inequalities. Also the two films are similar in that both blend documentary realism and surrealism. Images of a dove trying to move out of a glass bowl, broken light bulbs, a hatching egg inside that broken light bulb, a hatched chick in a glass are all subjective shots of the pregnant woman. There is a dream-like sequence in which a young woman runs in a gothic setting. There is an interesting juxtaposition in the “tous ceux-là, les vieux, les borgnes et les clochardes, tous avaient été des bébés, des nouveaux-nés souvent aimés à qui on avait embrassé le ventre et talqué le derrière…” Ibid., 115. This change in the outlook and sensibility resonates with my own experience of pregnancy during which I began to see more babies and children on the streets (which I hadn’t noticed before) and I began to think of people as somebody’s son or daughter that brought tender, if not sentimental, feelings. 39

Varda writes, “[I]t is for me a study, a subjective documentary… The film is to answer a question: what can be the vision of a pregnant woman (feelings) in the neighborhood of la Mouffe?” Ibid., 230. 40

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chapter entitled, “On desires.” After a series of displays of food at the market such as chickens, fish, shells, livers, and intestines, which evoke feelings of disgust, a pregnant woman comes out of a flower shop, smells a rose and starts eating it as if it were made of chocolate. Is this image a documentary of the real or an imaginary shot? In this way, the film blurs the boundaries of the dichotomy between the inner world and outer reality. L’Opéra Mouffe defies the rules of conventional documentary by blending subjective shots that depict the inner thoughts and feelings of Varda, the pregnant woman who is filming the people. It defies the conventional “goal” of documentary, which is to capture “objective” truth. Further, the inter-titles fragment the film, rendering its narrative non-linear. By transmitting her sensations as a pregnant woman—by “return[ing] to instincts,”41 to borrow her expression—Varda made a personal film that is unique in its conception and its style. Varda had wanted to find a “form of cinema” for the new sensations she felt as a pregnant woman, and the result is a film that mixes images of the reality of la Mouffe with subjective images of her dreams and sensations. In creating a film almost literally through the lens of pregnancy, Varda engages in a cinécriture that is also feminine writing as Cixous defines it; Cixous finds in women’s specific experience of pregnancy and childbirth the potential to find a different relationship to the Other:

41

Ibid.

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We are not going to refuse ourselves the delights of a pregnancy, which, moreover, is always dramatized or evaded or cursed in classical texts. For if there is a specific thing repressed, that is where it is found: the taboo of the pregnant woman (which says athousand lot aboutways the power thata seems invested in her)or . . not . here are a a of living pregnancy, of having having relationship of another intensity with this still invisible other a relationship of another intensity…Bring the other to life. Women know how to live detachment; giving birth is neither losing nor increasing. It’s adding to life an other. 42 Writing in 1975, Cixous warns against a certain feminist tendency to negate pregnancy:

The relation borne to the child must also be rethought. One trend of current feminist thoughts tends to denounce a trap in maternity that would consist of making the mother-woman an agent who is more or less the accomplice of reproduction: capitalist, familialist, phallocentrist reproduction. An accusation and a caution that should not be turned into prohibition, into a new form of repression. 43 Varda’s ‘instinctual’ filmmaking also evokes Kristeva’s notion of “jouissance,” the pre-Symbolic delights and pleasure associated with the maternal body, i.e. the semiotic body: Language as symbolic function constitutes itself at the cost of repressing instinctual drive and continuous relation to the mother. On the contrary, the unsettled and questionable subject 42

Hélène Cixous, “Sorties,” op.cit., 90.

43

Ibid., 89. (Italics in srcinal)

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of poetic language (for whom the word is never uniquely sign) maintains itself at the cost of reactivating this repressed instinctual, maternal element. 44

Réponse de femmes also breaks the taboo against showing the body of a naked pregnant woman. Varda made this film in 1975; she was one of seven women—among them, a sociologist, historian, feminist activists, and three filmmakers—Varda, Coline Serreau, and Nina Companeez—whom Antenne 2 TV asked to contribute to an anthology film made in recognition of UNESCO’s designation of 1975 as “The Year of the Woman.” Each woman was asked to make an eight-minute film addressing the question, “What does it mean to be a woman?” Varda entitled her segment, “Our Body, Our Sex” (Notre corps, notre sexe), with the goal of showing and speaking about the female body the way she wanted to. In a studio, she cast a group of women of different ages, including a pregnant woman, and had them express their thoughts on their bodies, their sex, and the commercial exploitation of the female body. However, they do not talk freely among themselves; instead they talk straight into the camera, addressing the audience and in a manner of reading a statement. In fact, the film itself is a feminist statement on the issue of the female body. The first two-thirds of the film were shot in the studio, and the women –and in some shots a group of men—are shown against a blue screen with no background

Julia Kristeva, “From One Identity to an Other,” Desire in language, eds. Leon S. Roudiez, Alice Jardine, trans. Thomas Gora, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980, 136. 44

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settings. In this part of the film, the women speak scripted lines Varda wrote, while the last one-third of the film consists of Varda conducting “Woman on the Street” interviews. Therefore, even in this short TV documentary, Varda combines fictional or structured documentary with the “real,” spontaneous responses of the women in the streets. Further, like L’Opéra Mouffe, the film is divided into small segments that are marked by intertitles: “Our body, our sex,” “The woman,” “Women,” “Do all women want to become mothers?” “What’s a real woman?” “What is a woman’s body?”, “Shot censored by the Penal Code,” and “How do we live our sex?” The film starts with a shot of a newborn baby girl playing with her feet, and the narration begins, “To be a woman is to be born female.” It is a voice of one of the women in the studio. Next comes a shot of a young woman standing before the camera naked. She says, “To be a woman is to live in a woman’s body.” Extreme close-ups of her breasts and her genitals follow as she declares, “I’m not just a sex and breasts.” Later on, in the section entitled, “Do all women want to become mothers?” a young pregnant woman appears on screen, laughing and dancing naked with her full belly. She says, “I feel beautiful, full and desirable.” At the same time, however, Varda opposes two different opinions about motherhood in this section. While the pregnant woman says she wants to become a mother, another woman says she doesn’t. What society wants of women is spoken in a man’s voice: “Give us sons, soldiers, workmen, scientists; give us daughters, cooks, women workers, mothers,” reflecting a strict division of gender roles being imposed by male power; this line is accompanied by a

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shot of a group of men. Then, the pregnant woman says, “That’s fine by me, I love children. I don’t care about society. I am giving birth to a child.” The other woman strongly disagrees, “Not me.” The voice of the man returns, representing the dominant discourse that considers motherhood the mark of a “real woman”: “A woman who has never known motherhood isn’t a real woman.” However, he is immediately challenged by a woman who says, “Is a man who has not known fatherhood less of a man? What about Chevalier and Einstein? Mermoz? Balzac? Mozart?” Thus, masculine discourse is revealed to be vulnerable. In another shot, two old women, standing in front of a life-size nude photo of three aged women, complain, “Men don’t give us the right to grow old.” Therefore, the documentary breaks the taboo on showing naked women: naked pregnant women, naked old women, and shots depicting women’s genitals. Varda had to cut out some scenes depicting woman’s naked body before the film was aired on TV. Even with the cuts, however, some viewers complained after the broadcast that it was inappropriate to show naked women on TV during a timeslot when children were still awake. Thus, the very conditions of the film’s distribution testified to the repression in public discourse of the female body and female sexuality. The film also exposes the dual standard that patriarchal society imposes on women. A woman says, “We are told, ‘hide yourself, cover your sex,’ and then we are told ‘show yourself, your body sells.’” Here Varda employs a tableau vivant of a woman that explicitly portrays the dual standard applied to a woman’s body: A woman poses

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before the camera, half of her body covered with chador-like veil and cloth and the other half naked, the hand of her bare arm holding a red telephone. The naked half represents the exploitation of women’s body for commercial products and prostitution, and the covered half represents the manner in which the female body is veiled and hidden according to the cultural codes. It is a striking image that also reflects Varda’s artistic background in art history and photography. The film goes on to show pornographic photos of women and magazine commercials that exploit women’s body to sell products; during these shots, we hear women saying in unison: “Each time I see a poster like this I think it’s absurd to constantly see naked women. It feels like I’m on the poster.” The women continue to shout, “Each time a woman is undressed to sell a product, it’s me they undress, it’s me they display, it’s me they criticize, it’s me they buy, it’s me they order by phone, it’s me they pay for by check or cash, it’s me they offer as fodder for men’s desire,” expressing the perception created by these images that men consider all women the same. The film ends with a dialogue between the voice of a man (representing society) and the women in the studio. The man threatens not to desire women anymore unless they stop complaining, and the women demand that men change if they still need women and love. The film concludes with the women’s chorus: “I am a woman. Women must be reinvented.”

Réponse de femme reflects and responds to feminist discourses in 1970s France. In 1970, feminists viewed motherhood as the major cause of women’s oppression in

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capitalist society and argued that women must reject pregnancy and motherhood. Moreover, as Claire Duchen points out, “[f]rom 1970 to 1975, the analysis of motherhood was almost exclusively tied to the campaign for free, legal abortion on demand, and the diffusion of information about, and free availability to all women of contraception.” 45 Thus, the “‘the right to control our own bodies” became a central issue for feminist activists. However, in the latter half of the ‘70s, attempts were made to find new ways to accept motherhood without its being either destiny or slavery, the two extreme analyses of motherhood in France. The scene in Varda’s film in which two women show opposing views of motherhood reflects this ongoing discussion among women: should motherhood be prized as an experience specific to women or should it be condemned for being part of their ideological oppression?

Réponse de femmes does not raise the issue of abortion, but a year later in 1976, Varda made a fiction film in which the struggle for abortion rights is the central theme:

One Sings, the Other Doesn’t. Whereas Varda calls L’Opéra Mouffe a subjective documentary, she describes One Sings, the Other Doesn’t as “a documented fiction on the struggle of women between 1969 and 1976.” 46 It is a fiction film; however, the events and problems the two women protagonists experience draw a realistic picture of this period 45

Claire Duchen, Feminism in France: From May ’68 to Mitterrand, op.cit., 51.

“une fiction documentée sur la lutte des femmes entre 1969 et 1976.” Agnès Varda, Varda par Agnès, op.cit., 110. 46

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of the women’s liberation movement in France. In particular, as I have elaborated in Chapter I, the two protagonists participate in the 1970s struggle for abortion rights triggered by the Bobigny trial. The struggle is reconstructed in the film with both protagonists actively involved, one as a singer who sings militant feminist songs such as

My body belongs to me (Mon corps est à moi), the other as a staff member of a family planning center. Varda emphasizes the importance of the Bobigny struggle in her interview with Cahiers du cinéma in 1977: “If there is a struggle told in this film, it is the struggle for contraception, for the sexual or corporal freedom of women. In the history 47

of this struggle, Bobigny is more important than ‘68.” As the film begins, Varda herself introduces the film in a voice-over narration, stating that the film is about “women, men, love, music, marriage or not, children or not and friendship; it is about life,” and then adding, “It could also be subtitled, ‘Women are made, not born’ as our great Simone says, Simone de Beauvoir.” During the credit sequence in the beginning of the film, a series of black-and-white photos of women are shown on screen to accentuate the film’s theme of women and the female body. Then the film begins in 1962 in Paris when Pomme, a seventeen-year-old student, visits Jerôme’s photography shop and finds that her ex-neighbor, Suzanne, is living with Jerôme. She finds out because Jerôme is a photographer who takes portrait photos of neighborhood “S’il y a une lutte racontée dans ce film c’est celle pour la contraception, pour la liberté sexuelle ou corporelle des femmes. Dans l’histoire de cette lutte, Bobigny est plus important que 68.” “Propos recueillis par Jean Narboni, Serge Toubianan et Dominique Villain,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 276, mai 1977, quoted from Ibid., 255. 47

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women, including his lover Suzanne. Pomme spots photos of Suzanne on the wall of Jerôme’s photoshop and comments that all the women in his photos look sad. In fact, it turns out that twenty-two-year-old Suzanne has two children and is struggling with economic difficulty. She is pregnant with a third child and is considering abortion. Pomme lies to her parents to get money for the abortion, and Suzanne has the abortion in Switzerland, but she comes back sterilized. Jerôme kills himself, and Pomme leaves her home and her abusive father to become a singer. The two girls are separated, but they write each other postcards detailing their lives and emotions. Pomme falls in love with an Iranian man and goes to live in Iran. She becomes pregnant but comes back to Paris ten years later. She and Suzanne meet again, and together they are engaged in the woman’s struggle of the mid-1970s. One Sings, the Other Doesn’t is one of Varda’s more conventional narrative films; however, it provides a vivid portrait of women in the 1970s who stood up to claim their right to control their own bodies.

Daguerréotypes is an eighty-minute color documentary Varda made in 1974 about the street on which she had lived since 1951. Specifically, the film documents the little shops and shopkeepers on rue Daguerre in Paris. The idea of this documentary was in part prompted by the fact that she wanted to stay within a certain distance of her second child, Mathieu. Varda shot Daguerréotypes a year after Mathieu’s birth, and her concerns as a mother led her to invent a new and srcinal way of filming. As previously noted, Varda came up with the initial concept of the film from the idea that “women are

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attached to the house.”48 Because she had one-year old Mathieu at home, Varda did not want to go far from home to shoot. Consequently, she thought of a “new umbilical cord” that would keep her and Mathieu close to each other. The new umbilical cord is the electrical line she pulled from the meter of her house. She connected the electrical line to her lighting equipment and stayed within its length of eighty meters. Thus, although this documentary is not about maternity or pregnancy, the ideas of filming within the range of a “new umbilical cord” and of women being “attached to the house” reflect Varda’s concern for women’s conditions, limits and possibilities. As for its actual content, the documentary pays attention to merchants of small establishments who are marginal in the capitalist system. In this respect, the film fits more into the notion of “writing the Other,” another important or more important element of feminine writing. Therefore, I will discuss the film more in detail in the next section. As previously mentioned in Chapter II, Varda often uses her own voice-over narration to assert her authorial presence. However, in Jane B. par Agnès V . and The

Gleaners and I, she goes one step further by appearing on screen and “writing” her own body. Both films take the form of a cinematic essay in which the filmmaker herself is present and active. Jane B. par Agnès V . is a documentary about actress/singer Jane Birkin, and The Gleaners and I is a film in which Varda meets and interviews modern-day scavengers. While these films are “about” other people, they gradually turn into self48

Ibid., 40.

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portraits as well, in which Varda explores her self-awareness as an auteur. Here, I will focus particularly on her techniques for inserting herself into the narratives of these films and specifically on the process by which she turns them into self-portraits. Jane B. par Agnès V. is a “portrait-in-cinema” of Birkin, the actress. Varda thought about making a film about a woman and immediately thought Jane Birkin. The fact that Birkin had reached the age of forty particularly appealed to her because the age of forty is a sort of end of youth. So the film starts with Birkin recalling her not-so-pleasant thirtieth birthday, when she was alone and vomiting from drinking bad wine, and ends with her fortieth birthday party. The film also intermingles documentary and fiction. The documentary part is composed of Birkin’s real-life story: her past is shown with photographs; Birkin cooks in her kitchen, and even opens her bag and shows what she has in it. She talks about her father, her scandals, and her late husband, Serge Gainsbourg. The fictional part is composed of a series of mini-fictions in which Birkin acts a given part. Since she is an actress, these mini-fictions are also showing part of her life as an actress. These mini-fictions cast Birkin in diverse and multiple roles. She assumes the role of different Janes and Joans: Calamity Jane, Jane and Tarzan, and Jeanne d’Arc (even though she is a British). She is also cast as Laurel in a little black-andwhite silent parody of Laurel and Hardy; as a Spanish dancer (even though she does not like Spanish dance); as a mythic muse; and as an art dealer. In the film, Varda and Birkin constantly discuss what Birkin would like to do and what Varda would like Birkin to do,

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and this free association of ideas and improvisations shapes the way these mini-fictions are arranged. Because Birkin actively participates in the film by stating her ideas and desires about the roles she wants to play, Jane B. par Agnès V. can be considered both her portrait by Varda and her self-portrait. It is also, however, Varda’s self-portrait. Varda frequently appears on-screen with or without Birkin, often with her camera. Her off-screen presence is also prominent because of her voice-over narration, and in the documentary sequences, she is the one who poses the questions Birkin answers. Moreover, in Varda’s portrayal of herself as an auteur in this film, painting plays a crucial role. Indeed, in Jane B par Agnès V.., Varda explicitly sets out to create a cinematic portrait in a painterly fashion, stating that she wanted to “shoot a film as a painter paints a picture.” Thus, at the beginning of the film, Varda announces the rules of the game to Birkin. She must look into the camera, which is part of Varda herself, thus establishing the painter-model relationship. The camera is the brush, and Varda paints Jane, who looks at her and answers her questions. This painterly approach is against the rules of dominant cinema, which forbids looking directly into the camera. Moreover, Varda claims that she made this film with a freedom similar to that of a painter. It took fourteen months to shoot because filming took place between Birkin’s other engagements. While Birkin is busy, Varda works and reworks at the editing table, as a painter does with a canvas. During this process of touching, retouching, and erasing, Varda came up with new ideas and inspirations for the next shooting session, which was

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not yet written. In fact, like most of Varda’s films, the film was made without a prewritten script. At the same time, Varda herself and the camera, which is her brush, often appear onscreen, reminding the audience of her presence. Varda’s self-consciousness as a cinepainter is most evident in a scene in which the camera and the director are reflected in a round mirror. As Alison Smith points out, the round mirror in the scene reminds us of the Jan van Eyck painting Arnolfini Portrait (1434) and Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas (1656), both of which have a mirror at the back reflecting the figure of the painter or the 49

model. The idea of self-portrait is even more prominent in The Gleaners and I. This is a self-reflexive film in which Varda often comments directly on the art of filmmaking. She comments as well on the relationship between art and self-portraiture: while her voiceover narration describes how she discovered many of Rembrandt’s self-portraits during a visit to Japan, she claims that art “is always self-portrait.” In this instance, Varda not only inserts herself into the film but also “films” her body. A long segment of the documentary focuses on Varda herself, especially on her aging body. She comments in her narration that she is now old and that death is around the corner. With her small digital camera in one hand, Varda films the other hand. Thus, she shoots close-ups of her old, wrinkled hand while holding the small digital video 49

Alison Smith, Agnès Varda, op.cit., 33-42.

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camera in the other hand, and in one scene, the digital camera films Varda combing her hair. As Mireille Rosello points out, in conventional compositions of a woman sitting at a dressing table brushing her hair, the woman is young and beautiful, and her hair is long and abundant, not grey. Therefore, Varda rewrites the motif of the woman combing her hair in a radical way.50 Furthermore, Varda shows something that has been absent in conventional cinema because of its undesirable quality: an old female body. With her close-ups of her wrinkled hand, marked with age spots, and her grey hair, “she questions both the cultural definition of female beauty and the cultural imperative that makes beauty mandatory in our representational universe,” and tries to “search for new visual and narrative grammars of old age.” 51 The very subject of her documentary, gleaning, also strikes a chord with the notion of feminine writing in terms of questioning “the solidarity between logocentrism and phallocentrism—bringing to light the fate dealt to woman, her burial—to threaten the stability of the masculine structure that passed itself off as eternal-natural.”52 As Varda explains while showing Millet’s and Breton’s paintings of women gleaners ( Les glaneuses), gleaning was a practice exclusively reserved for women, the picking up and collecting of leftover crops from the fields after the harvest. It was a generous act on the

50 Mireille Rosello, “Agnès Varda’s Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse: Portrait of the Artist as an Old Lady,” Studies in French Cinema, vol. 1, no. 1, 2001. 51

Ibid., 34.

52

Hélène Cixous, The Newly Born Woman , op.cit., 65.

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part of the farmer to offer his neighbors crops that had been left behind. Traditionally, gleaning was women’s activity; however, it has long been forgotten. Varda sheds a new light on this forgotten practice and tries to find out what has happened to the spirit of gleaning in today’s consumerist society. As her film shows, modern-day gleaners are either those who have to gather food from trashcans to survive or those who choose to scavenge for ethical reasons or for materials to create art works. As is indicated by the French title of the film, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (Men gleaners and the woman gleaner), modern-day gleaning, or picking up leftovers, is no longer a gender-specific practice. In fact, all the gleaners Varda interview are male, but they could be described as “feminine” because they live as outsiders of the system and thus are marginalized. Therefore, Varda links women with these marginalized men. Some of these gleaners even question the mechanism of a capitalist system that drives the food industry to throw away perfectly edible food and vegetables. Fairly early in the film, when she re-enacts Breton’s painting of a woman gleaner, Varda mentions that among paintings of gleaners, Breton’s is the only one showing one woman gleaner alone. Varda stands proudly beside Breton’s painting with a bunch of wheat on her shoulder, just like the woman in the painting, and announces, “There is another woman gleaning in this film, that’s me.” She then adds that she gladly drops the wheat and picks up the camera to glean images. In describing her project as “film[ing] myself with one hand” and in actually filming her free hand, she gives the impression of looking at herself as if she were a curious animal. It is her own identity

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that she hopes to glean. In this way, The Gleaners and I is transformed into a cinematic self-portrait.

Jane B. par Agnès V. and The Gleaners and I are also films in which Varda engages in “writing the body” through cinematic techniques that defy the conventions of mainstream cinema. Besides inserting herself into the films to assert her authorial presence and to turn them into self-portraits, Varda uses paintings to deconstruct and/or reconstruct the traditional image of feminine beauty. Given Varda’s emphasis on cinematic textuality with her coining of the term cinécriture, the application of Cixous’s literary theory to her work may seem questionable. However, Varda’s extensive use of visual culture references in Jane B. par Agnès V. and The Gleaners and I offers the basis for this translation of the literary into cinematic. So what role does painting play in these films? In Jane B. par Agnès V., Varda uses classical paintings to critique and rework the traditional image of feminine beauty in patriarchal society. The film opens with a tableau vivant of a classical portrait: Titian’s 1538 painting Venus of Urbino. Actually, the first shot is not an exact reproduction of the painting. We will see later the whole picture reproduced as another tableau-vivant, but here only part of the painting is reconstituted. Varda has selected just the background characters and décor from the srcinal painting and then reworked them in such a way that the faceless, secondary character in the srcinal painting is now sitting in the center of the frame talking to us. It is Jane Birkin. She is recounting her thirtieth birthday; she was alone in England in a hotel room, she drank bad sherry, felt sick, dragged herself to

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the toilet and vomited. The content of her story is in strong contrast to the calm and beautiful setting of the tableau vivant, implying that such classical portraits might not reflect the true inner feelings of the persons portrayed. The film ends with the same tableau vivant, but there, Birkin is celebrating her fortieth birthday. Later we see the whole picture in tableau vivant. Even here, however, it is not a faithful reproduction of the painting but actually a combination of three different paintings: Titian’s Venus of Urbino and Francis Goya’s 1800 sister paintings of The

Clothed Maja (La Maja vestida) and The Nude Maja (La Maja desnuda.). Birkin re-enacts Venus and Maja, respectively. The intimate tracking shot caresses Jane’s nude body, rendering it abstract, like a sublime landscape. Here, the woman’s body is not placed within a landscape but becomes the landscape itself. Varda’s portraiture is here intimate but not sexual, as is the depiction in the srcinal paintings by male painters. Instead, here we have a woman’s portrait by a woman, as is indicated by the film’s title, Jane B.

par Agnès V. At the end of the film, there is a second reconstitution of the same paintings. However, this time, Birkin comes back as the maid, and Venus is portrayed by another actress who looks more like the Venus in the srcinal painting. Birkin expresses her resentment towards the class differences between her mistress (the noble Venus) and herself by cursing her mistress with the wish that she die and rot. Birkin releases a swarm of flies that attack the tableau vivant and mar the whole painting. With this striking image of plague, the classical ideal of feminine beauty is attacked and denied.

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Right after this scene, the real Birkin says that it is not perfect bodies that are beautiful but bodies with faults, and that she is always moved by scars. At the end of this minifiction of tableau-vivant, Birkin is greeted by Varda, the film staff and others to celebrate her fortieth birthday. These tableaux vivants are especially significant in two aspects. First, the maid, who was sitting with her back towards us in the srcinal painting, not only becomes the main character with her own voice in the tableau, but she also becomes the active agent who destroys the image of the perfect beauty of patriarchal society. This transformation of the maid reflects Varda’s constant attention to the marginalized Other in her films, a subject I will examine more in detail in the next section of the chapter. Second, there is something that Venus, Maja, and Jane Birkin all share: scandal associated with the nude body and provocative eroticism. Birkin caused a scandal when she appeared nude in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-Up in 1966 and again three years later when she and Serge Gainsbourg released the song, “Je t’aime… moi non plus”(I love you… me neither), which was immediately banned from broadcasting for its sexual explicitness. Titian’s Venus, counter to the traditional image of Venus with her modest and passive beauty, stares straight at the viewer, unconcerned with her nudity. According to art historian Rona Goffen, it is Titian’s most famous Venus but at the same time his most disputed. The absence of Cupid and other traditional mythological trappings from the painting caused art historians to question her identity. Also her direct gaze, interpreted

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as a “sexual invitation,” caused it to be labeled “pornographic.” 53 Finally, Goya’s The

Nude Maja is said to be “the first totally profane life-size female nude in Western art” with its depiction of female pubic hair. And because of this perceived “profanity,” the identity of the model is still debated, as is the identity of Titian’s model for Venus of

Urbino. (Later, Manet reworked Titian’s Venus into his painting Olympia, using a prostitute as his model, thus once again causing a big scandal.) These paintings caused scandals and dispute over their models’ identities because of the depicted women’s active and powerful looking, which was traditionally denied to ancient goddesses and noble women. Therefore, by bringing these paintings alive through the figure of Jane Birkin, by rolling these three women from different times and places into one, Varda raises the ongoing question of feminine identity, the mysteries of identity, which is the same issue she explored in her fiction film Vagabond in 1981. In her narration for Jane B. par Agnès V., Varda says, “beauty is scandal,” thus emphasizing the particular – and limiting – relationship between beauty, power, and feminine identity that patriarchy has constructed. Moreover, as a modern-day Venus and Maja, Jane actively expresses her desires about how she wants to be represented in Varda’s portrait of her. As previously noted, the film alternates between documentary segments chronicling Birkin’s real life and fictional episodes that, while prompted or inspired by her stories and desires, are

53

Roan Goffen, Titian’s Women, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1997.

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created by Varda. In these fictional sketches, Jane takes different roles as an actress, and her public image as a star is contrasted with the “real” Birkin, again troubling and exploring the meaning of feminine identity. Thus, both Jane B. par Agnès V. and The Gleaners and I are examples of the cinematic visualization of “feminine writing.” In Jane B. par Agnès V ., Varda creates a “cinematic portrait” that reworks the traditional portraits of patriarchal society by breaking their clichés of feminine beauty. In The Gleaners and I, she sheds new light on the old practice of gleaning, which traditionally was carried out solely by women but is now no longer gender-specific. Varda “writes” or “cine-writes the body” in both films with her filming of Jane’s body and her own, and she “writes” or “cine-writes the Other” with her attention to the maid in Jane B. par Agnès V. and to the leftovers and outsiders of contemporary society in The Gleaners and I. Furthermore, her frequent use of still images of painting and photography fragments and disrupts classical cinema’s narrative model of temporal and spatial linearity, thus opening up the possibility of an alternative film language. As an end note to this section of the chapter, I briefly call attention to another aspect of Varda’s filmmaking that embodies the characteristics of feminine writing: her films not only write the body but also write sensations belonging specifically to women. As elaborated earlier, the subjective documentary L’Opéra Mouffe expresses a pregnant woman’s contradictory feelings of hope and anxiety. In addition, Varda’s fiction film

Cléo from 5 to 7 conveys Cléo’s particularly female reaction to the fear of death. In the

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first half of the film she equates her beauty to her life, using the mantra that “as long as I’m beautiful, I’m alive” to fruitlessly try to shake off her fear and anxiety. Further, Varda’s 1987 fiction film, Kung-Fu Master, vividly depicts a forty-yearold woman’s boredom and emptiness, followed by her excitement over new feelings of love and passion when she falls in love with a fourteen-year-old boy. In this film, Jane Birkin plays Mary-Jane, who hopelessly falls for Julien, her daughter’s classmate; his boyishness is represented by his penchant for the video game, Kung-Fu Master. This brief love story between a middle-aged woman and an adolescent inverts the MayDecember relation usually depicted on screen between older men and young women or the Lolita complex, a sexual attraction to younger girls by adult males.

3. Writing the Other: Varda’s ‘Cinema of Marginality’ In “Coming to Writing,” Hélène Cixous states that “writing is a gesture of love,”54 and that love signifies an open attitude toward the Other. “What is the Other?” she asks in The Newly Born Woman. “If it is truly the ‘other,’ there is nothing to say; it cannot be theorized. The ‘other’ escapes me. It is elsewhere, outside: absolutely other….But in History, of course, what is called the ‘other’ is an alterity that does settle down, that falls into the dialectical circle. It is the Other in a hierarchically organized Hélène Cixous, “Coming to Writing,” “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays, trans. Deborah Jenson et al., Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1992, 42. 54

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relationship in which the same is what rules, names, defines, and assigns ‘its’ other.” 55 While in the masculine schema of recognition, “there is no place for the other, for an 56

equal other, for a whole and living woman,” feminine writing seeks “the possibility of extending into the other, of being in such a relation with the other that I move into the other without destroying the other” and looks “for the other where s/he is without trying to bring everything back to myself.”57 This embracing of the Other celebrates differences, multiplicity, and heterogeneity. For Julia Kristeva, “feminine” equals marginal. Therefore, her notion of the feminine extends beyond women to include all other groups marginalized by the dominant, as they all face the same struggle: As long as it has not analysed their relation to the instances of power, and has not given up the belief in its own identity, any libertarian movement (including feminism) can be recuperated by that power and by a spirituality that may be laicized or openly religious. The solution?. . . Who knows? It will in any case pass through that which is repressed in discourse and in the relations of production. Call it ”woman” or “oppressed classes ofthe society,” without other.58it is the same struggle, and never the one

55

Hélène Cixous, “Sorties,” op.cit., 71.

56

Ibid., 79.

57

Hélène Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?”op.cit., 55, 5n.

Julia Kristeva, “La femme, ce n’est jamais ça,” Tel Quel, 59, Automne 1974, 24, quoted from Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory , op.cit., 164. 58

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Toril Moi identifies Kristeva’s definition of femininity as “that which is marginalized by the patriarchal symbolic order” and asserts, “Kristeva’s emphasis on marginality allows us to view this repression of the feminine in terms of positionality rather than of essences.”59 And what is perceived as marginal depends on the position one occupies at a given time. Men can also be in a feminine position marginalized by racism, (neo-)imperialism, and by their sexual preference.60 Further, in Kristeva’s view, marginality is a potentially liberating force. Cixous’s idea of the feminine as an openness to the Other and Kristeva’s notion of marginality are significant in understanding Varda’s cinécriture as feminine writing because Varda’s oeuvre is characterized by her constant attention to the marginalized people of our society. Writing the Other or giving voice to the Other is a consistent component in her work, whether the film is documentary or fiction and whether it is about women or not. Throughout her career, Varda has made films that show her concern for the world of minority communities: the fishermen whose livelihood is threatened by pollution in La Pointe courte; the old and poor residents of rue Mouffetard in L’Opéra Mouffe; the little shopkeepers of rue Daguerre in Daguerréotypes; the Chicanos

59

Toril Moi, Ibid., 166.

Hélène Cixous links the oppressive binary oppositions to racism and imperialism. In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” she calls women the “dark continent” and references Apartheid to show that gender, racism, and imperialism are structured by the same binary system. She writes to women, “…you are Africa, you are black. Your continent is dark. Dark is dangerous.” (247) 60

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and their culture being pushed aside by American culture in East Los Angeles in Mur

Murs; and people who live by scavenging garbage in The Gleaners and I. Between 1963 and 1969 Varda made five films which portrayed political revolutionaries and people of the counter-culture. In 1962 she went to Cuba, where she took 4,000 black-and-white photos and animated 1,500 of them to make the documentary short, Salut les Cubains (Hi there Cubans), a homage to Cuba and its revolution. In 1967 she made a short documentary, Oncle Yanco (Uncle Yanco), about her uncle, a bohemian painter living on a boat in San Francisco Bay. In that same year she was involved in the collective project, Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam), with other French filmmakers such as Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais. 61 In 1968 she filmed a report on the Black Panther rallies in the U.S., Black Panthers, interviewing their leaders and followers about their cause and goals. Finally, in 1969 she made a fictionalized documentary, Lions Love, with four celebrities of the American counterculture. She made the last four films while living in California, where she was exposed to American feminism, the Black Power movement, and the youth counter-culture. Moreover, in 1970, she made a feature film for TV, Nausicaa, a love story between a French student and a Greek intellectual in France. This film was not aired because the film criticized the current Greek military regime.

Varda’s episode was not included in the final cut of the film, however, her name is included in the credit for having participated in the collective process. Some of her shots were used by other members of this group. 61

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Varda has argued that we should be open to differences: I often hear this: people who grumble when one says there are differences cultures and there areI believe fundamental differences toinknow. Should we that abolish them? that people are limited. I am open to lots of things: I was in Cuba, I made a film on Cuba, I tried to understand the Afro-Cuban music; I was in Los Angeles, I tried to understand these Mexican-Americans people call Chicanos and their mentality; I was in China in 1957 when it was not in fashion, … 62 Her openness to the Other is not limited to the subjects she chooses for her films. It is also manifested in her documentary approach to all of her filmmaking. As previously noted, Varda takes a documentary approach to her fiction films, which allows for improvisations and the unexpected—the Other—to enter the narrative; it is an open-textual process. Also, the rich intertextuality in Varda’s films corresponds to the notion of feminine writing in that it is concerned with the openness of texts and multiplicity of meanings. In particular, photography and painting play a crucial role in her filmmaking, and this intertextual practice celebrates multiple voices. In short, it is an embrace of the Other on a formal level. For Kristeva, intertextuality is not merely a “study of sources” but “the transposition of one (or several) sign system[s] into another; “J’entends beaucoup cela: des gens qui rouspètent quand on dit qu’il y a des différences dans les cultures, il y a des différences fondamentales à savoir. Est-ce qu’il faut les abolir? Je crois que les gens sont limités. Je me suis ouverte à des tas de choses: j’ai été à Cuba, j’ai fait un film sur Cuba, j’ai essayé de comprendre la musique afrocubaine; j’ai été à Los Angeles, j’ai essayé comprendre des Mexicains américains que l’on appelle les Chicanos et leur mentalité; j’ai été en Chine en 57 alors que ce n’était pas la mode…” Agnès Varda, “Le Film a venir les detours de l’inspiration,” Agnès Varda, Revue Belge du cinéma , no. 20, été indien 1987, 6. 62

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but since this term has often been understood in the banal sense of ‘study of sources,’ we prefer the term transposition because it specifies that the passage from one signifying system to another demands a new articulation of the thetic – of enunciative and denotative positionality.”63 Therefore, intertextuality is a deconstruction in that it involves the destruction of the text’s old position and the formation of a new one. In this section of the chapter, I will examine Varda’s films which demonstrate an openness to the Other. Further, to explore the intertextual connection of cinema and photography, I will analyze her films in which photography plays a central role. Here, I will explore how her work breaks down the binary oppositions of the two visual media (the moving image and the still image) to generate multiple narratives and meanings. Throughout her career, Varda has never been a stranger to photography or marginality. As previously noted in Chapter 1, Varda was a professional photographer before she became a filmmaker. Her first film, La Pointe courte, demonstrates her experience as a photographer in its complex mise-en-scène and shot composition. Further, as the only woman making films during the New Wave period and insisting on using an artisanal mode of production, Varda was—and has remained—at the margin of French cinema. Varda herself declares her own sense of marginality:

Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984, 59-60. 63

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A priori, I am a born-marginal. When I made La Pointe courte in 1954, I was neither in the official cinema nor in the unofficial cinema… In the subject, its treatment, the form of production, I was marginal…My entire career can be considered as marginal. 64

And what I made, I most often made it alone. In terms of cultural references and heritage, she describes herself as a “mélange” because she was born in 1928 in Belgium, the daughter of a Greek father and a French mother. She spent her early childhood in Belgium and then lived in Sète (the town where she filmed La Pointe courte) before moving to Paris. Thus, she reports that her cultural references are not French but eclectic: while she reads mostly French literature, she is influenced by Flemish, Italian, Egyptian and Greek painting and the art of the Far East.65 As a filmmaker, she prefers to film real people: “Nothing excites me more than to find in real life the models and the characters to film… or not.”66 Indeed, most of her fiction films such as La Pointe courte, Cléo from 5 to 7 , Le Bonheur, Lions Love, Vagabond, and Kung-Fu Master, feature real people in their real situations. The use of fishermen and their families in La Pointe courte gives the film a documentary feel that is reminiscent of Italian Neorealism even though Varda was not aware of Neorealism at the time; in Le “A priori, je suis une marginal-née. Quand j’ai tourné La Pointe courte en 1954, je n’étais ni dans le cinéma officiel ni dans le cinéma officieux….Dans le sujet, son traitement, la forme de production, j‘étais marginale…ma carrière entière, je peux la considérer comme marginale.” “Agnès Varda: ‘A priori, je suis une marginale-née’,” interview with Françoise Puaux, La marginalité à l’écran, CinémAction, no.91, 2e trimestre 1999, 101. 64

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Agnès Varda, “Le film à venir des détours de l’inspiration,” Ibid.

“..mais rien ne m’excite autant que de trouver dans la vie réelle des modèles et des personnages pour les filmer…ou pas.” Agnès Varda, Varda par Agnès, op.cit., 142. 66

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Bonheur,Varda cast the actor Jean-Claude Drouot as the film’s protagonist and then cast Drouot’s wife and children as the protagonist’s family. Similarly, Lions Love features Gerome Ragnai, James Rado (the composers of the musical Hair) and Andy Warhol actress Viva as the three protagonists of this cinema-vérité style fiction film, while feminist filmmaker Shirley Clarke plays her fictionalized self; Jim Morrison and Varda herself appear in this film as well. In Vagabond, the witnesses to Mona’s last days are also mostly non-actors; Varda wrote their testimonies according to what they would have really thought of Mona by doing research and interviews with them before writing her script. Finally, in Kung-Fu Master, Varda cast actress Jane Birkin’s daughters as her character’s daughters in the film, and Varda cast her own son, Mathieu, as the teenager with whom Birkin’s character falls in love. Varda’s strategy of intermingling the real and the imaginary raises the fundamental question of where art begins and where it ends. Her documentary Daguerréotypes is simultaneously about both the little shopkeepers in rue Daguerre and the past and present of photography. As the film begins, a magician (a real magician who performs a show on rue Daguerre and plays a central role in the documentary by bringing all the shopkeepers together to his show) appears on screen and explains what daguerreotypes are: the first portrait photographs Louis Daguerre produced, beginning in 1839. Unlike today’s photography that is printed on paper, daguerreotypes resulted from images being exposed directly onto the mirrored surface of silver plates. Two museum curators explain daguerreotypes in detail, and the film shows examples of daguerreotypes. Then, Varda begins her narration in the

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first person, explaining how she came to choose her neighbor shopkeepers as the subject of her documentary. Specifically, she was fascinated by one of the shopkeepers, the old woman of the perfumery shop “Chardon Bleu” (Blue Thistle). This shopkeeper rarely spoke and had a dreamy but sad look, as if her mind were elsewhere dreaming. In addition, Varda simply wanted to go in the little shops. When a magician came to perform, she decided to make his performance the center of the film. All of the shopkeepers featured in her film are present at the magician’s performance, so the show provided a smooth link for Varda to introduce each shopkeeper and to visit their shops; she introduces most characters at the café where the show took place and then shows their work in their shops. Varda filmed the everyday routine, the quotidian, of the shopkeepers with an observing camera not designed to disturb their daily rhythm, although Varda added her thoughts to the finished film. Most of the merchants work in couples, and Varda asks each husband and wife about their love story: how and when they met. She also asks how and when they opened the shop, and what are their dreams and plans. These are ordinary stories, but because they are ordinary, the film becomes a history (not History) of marginal people. The film gives voice to them and chronicles their everyday life. At the end of the film, Varda asks each couple to pose in their shop for portrait shots. She has created moving daguerreotypes—photos-vivants—of them. In this way, Varda has deconstructed the meaning of daguerreotypes of the past, which were precious

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possessions of the privileged class, and created moving portraits of the marginalized people of the present. Contemporary reviews of Daguerréotypes particularly note Varda’s tenderness towards the shopkeepers. In Télérama, Claude Manceron sees the films as offering, “An hour of life. The suspended respiration. The irresistible tenderness towards all these people that we did not know an hour earlier.” 67 Jacques Siclier, in Le Monde, describes the film as, “A spectacle of the reality where the merchants and the strollers of the corner became characters for Varda, under the curious and warm look that she has for her ‘creatures.’ No ‘populist’ picturesque: but a sort of social fantastic born from the repetition of daily gestures, from an immobility of the habits and manners of being.”68 Varda herself described Daguerréotypes as portraying “the mysteries of everyday exchange” (Les mystères de l’échange quotidien ). At its conclusion, Varda asks about the film she has just made: “Does it all form a reportage? An homage? An essay? A regret, a reproach, an approach? Anyway, it’s a film I sign as the neighbor.”

Salut les Cubains is also an experiment with photographs: specifically, experimentation with animating still photographs. In 1962, three years after the Cuban

“Une heure de vie. La repiration suspendue. La tendresse irrésistible envers tous ces gens que nous ne connaissions pas une heure plus tôt.” Claude Manceron, Télérama, no. 1404, 8 décembre 1976, quoted from Agnès Varda, Ibid., 251. 67

“un spectacle de la réalité où les commerçants et les promeneurs du coin sont devenus des personnages de Varda, sous le regard curieux et chaleureux qu'elle a pour ses "créatures." Pas de pittoresque "populiste”: mais une sorte de fantastique social qui naît de la répétition des gestes quotidiens, d'un immobilisme des habitudes et des façons d'être. . . ,” Jacques Siclier, Le Monde, 2 mars 1979, quoted from Varda par Agnès, Ibid. 68

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Revolution, Varda was invited to Cuba by the Cuban Institute of Cinema. Varda found Cubans and their music fascinating, and their form of socialism surprising and joyous. She took 4,000 photos of Cubans dancing, singing, working in sugarcane plants and so on, and then spent six months editing them together into a documentary film. The documentary is composed of 1,500 still photographs re-filmed and animated. The photos are linked by Varda’s narration, commentary by French actor Michel Piccoli, and above all Cuban music. This animated “photo album” is educational in that it tells the history of the Cubans’ struggle against the dictator Batista. It successfully conveys the people’s excitement immediately after the Revolution. The photos’ still images—preserved moments of the past—are revived in the present by cinematography for present-day audiences. Thus, Varda uses cinematography both to give a new life to photography and to manipulate time.

Ulysse (1982) is a fascinating twenty-two-minute reflection on cinema, photography, time and memory. It is a first-person documentary in which Varda appears in person and looks back at a time past. One day in 1982 Varda was struck by a photograph she took in 1954 and decided to make a film about it. This black-and-white photo consists of a little naked boy sitting on a pebble beach, positioned in the middle of the photo, with a man, also naked, standing to his left, looking towards the sea with his back to the camera. In the foreground at the right corner lies a dead goat. The boy, named Ulysse, was a neighbor boy and Varda’s favorite model at the time. The man was an Egyptian named Fouli Elia, whom Varda hadn’t seen since taking the photograph.

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She decides to trace him and finds out that he is now the art director of the magazine

Elle. The film begins with a shot of the photo and Varda’s voiceover narration, explaining when and how she took the photo and who the models were. It was on Sunday, May 9, 1954, and the man and the child had never met before that day. Then the film switches to color, and there stands Fouli Elia naked behind his desk in his office, books on the desk covering his genitals (one of Varda’s humorous jokes!) Varda gives him the photo and asks if he remembers it. He doesn’t especially remember the photo, but he remembers certain things: that he never saw the boy walking because he had to be carried; that Varda often took pictures of dead things and not beautiful landscapes; that she had made him and the boy pose without clothes. Varda shows him other pictures of him; however, he doesn’t remember them at all, even though he has a memory of some of the clothing and shoes he wears in them. He even says he doesn’t remember his former self in the photo: “I don’t want to remember,” he says, his expression a blank. Varda’s meeting with the boy, Ulysse Llorca, now a thirty-six-year-old bookshop owner, married with two daughters, is more shocking. He does not remember anything about the photo. The film shows the photos Varda had taken of his family during the time in the 1950s when they were neighbors on rue Daguerre. Ulysse’s family was a Spanish family in political exile; the film shows family portraits and other photos of Ulysse and his mother Bienvenida which take the audience back to the past in black and

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white. However, when Varda hands him the photo taken on the beach, he responds that he does not have any memory of it at all, even though he had drawn a picture of that very photo. Varda shows him the picture he drew, but it sparks no memory. Ulysse has to imagine his childhood through the photo. Consequently, Varda concludes that the photo is a fictitious image for Ulysse, while for Varda herself, it is fact. Varda turns to Bienvenida, the mother, who has more vivid and painful memories of the photo. She doesn’t quite like the photo, not because of its image but because of the memories associated with it. Ulysse was at the beach because he was suffering from coxa plana, a hip-bone condition that might paralyze his leg, and needed to stay a season by the sea. His condition was the reason he had to be carried from place to place, as Fouli Elia remembered. In contrast to her son’s blank face in reaction to the photo, Bienvenida bursts into tears while remembering the time pictured. Ulysse says he doesn’t remember the photo but remembers well his body in pain at the time and his having to be stretched out for therapy at home for nine months. Thus, Varda demonstrates that the photo’s image brings out different emotions and memories from each person. Towards the end of the film, there is a sequence in which a group of children talk about the photo and Ulysse’s drawing. Varda has given them the photo and the drawing to elicit their immediate reactions. The sequence is amusing, and at the same time it offers a significant reflection on the issue of truth and representation. The children’s observations and interpretations of the photo and the drawing are innocent yet sharp. A

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boy says, “It is not during the holiday because not many people are on the beach”; another says, “The man has taken his pants off to go for a swim.” The boys share a meaningful smile when referring to the subjects’ nudity; one of them says, “If I were him, I wouldn’t go in for nudism.” They observe that the goat is dead even though its eyes are open. When they look at the drawing, though, they see the goat as a dog, a doe, a cow, or even a pregnant cow. Thus, the representation of a representation results in a totally different “truth” and meaning. The meaning of a text is multiple and never fixed. When an older boy comments that he likes the photo better than the drawing because it’s more human and real, Varda’s voiceover narration asks, “What was the real that day I went to the beach?” She researches newspapers and newsreels of May 9 1954, in an effort to insert the photo into “official” history, even as she also works to insert it into her own personal history. In 1954 she was taking photos for an exhibition, and two months after she took the photo, she began shooting her first film, La Pointe courte. Thus for Varda, 1954 is a year she can’t forget. However, her personal stories and the “official” history she researches do not appear in the photo itself. Varda states, “The image is there, that’s all” (L’image est là c’est tout.) But at the same time, her film demonstrates that you see what you want in the photo. 69 Varda’s own interpretation of the photo, however, resonates with French feminists’ interpretation of Lacan’s Symbolic order: “The other day I saw in it the clichés of a childhood. Torn between the image of This idea of the subjective nature of memory is the central theme in Vagabond in which every witness of Mona saw her and remembers her according to his or her own desires. 69

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the upright father (the future) and the image of the mother, prone and big-bellied [goat].” Ulysse’s future lies in the identification with the father and the abandonment of the mother. Ultimately, then, in Ulysse Varda has used an image of a photograph to spin out a philosophical cinematic essay which explores the boundaries between the real and the imaginary and between photography and film, and which contemplates truth, time, and memory. In 2004, Varda re-released Salut les Cubains and Ulysse as two of a triptych of short films entitled Cinévardaphoto. The third film in the triptych is a new documentary

Ydessa, les ours et etc..(Ydessa, the bears and etc..) As the title implies—cinema-Vardaphotography—the three films were directly inspired by photography. They are all essay films in which Varda herself narrates her own experience: of Cuba ( Salut les Cubains); of her investigation of a photo taken twenty-eight years earlier (Ulysse); and of the strong emotion she felt at a photo exhibition (Ydessa, the bears and etc.). Within the triptych, the films are presented in chronological order: first Salut les Cubains (1962), then Ulysse (1982), and finally Ydessa, les ours et etc… (2004). Therefore the triptych is also a look back at Varda’s own trajectory as a filmmaker who has never abandoned photography for cinema and who relentlessly tried to find ways to combine the two visual media in her work. These films demonstrate how, throughout her career, she has utilized in her filmmaking photographic images that touch and move her; the films demonstrate as well instances where her filmmaking is about the emotion and sensation that

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photography evokes. Through her films, a moment of the past frozen in a photograph gains a new life and new meanings in the present.

Ydessa, les ours et etc. is a film inspired by a photo exhibition entitled, “The Teddy Bear Project” by Canadian curator, collector and artist Ydessa Hendeles. Hendeles has been collecting vintage teddy bears and photos of people holding teddy bears for decades, and the exhibition displayed about 4,000 of those photos. Ydessa is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. In her film, Varda introduces this eccentric artist and explores the wide variety of photographs covering the walls of the exhibition. Varda organizes the photos by means of themes of her own design: family photos with a teddy bear; children taking photos of teddy bears; men and women’s sports teams with teddy bear mascots; girls with big ribbons in their hair holding teddy bears, soldiers with teddy bears, and so forth. Her attention to the marginalized also manifests in one scene in which she stoops to show the photos hanging at the bottom of the wall. She says, “Very few people bend down to see these photos. They think it would be the least interesting photos to be at the bottom, but far from it.” She then shows photos from this bottom row, which include such intriguing and shocking images as children with guns, some of them pointing their guns at the teddy bear. Another shock comes at the end of the exhibition. In a large hall next to the hall where the photos are exhibited, there is an installation of Adolf Hitler’s life-size statue kneeling down on the floor, with his back towards the entrance of the hall. The installation is meant to be seen after visitors have seen the teddy bear photos. Varda’s

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camera pans around this installation and shows a close-up of the statue’s grim face. Then visitors’ reactions are told through interviews. As one of the spectators of the exhibition uttered, “The moment people see Hitler, the photographs they have seen lose their innocence.” And a German woman says she feels guilty. During the sequence in which visitors talk about their shocking experience, the image of Hitler is superimposed onto the images of the visitors to imply that the trauma is still haunting the collective memory. As her own response to the shock, Varda shows a series of photos of children with their Nazi fathers and teddy bears, and contrasts them with those of Jewish children. Then Varda offers an interpretation of the ubiquitous teddy bear of 1930s and ‘40s childhood: it was a reassurance for the people who lived through this traumatic period. The teddy bear made them feel safe. Of course, the narrative of the exhibition and that of Varda’s documentary are fictional ones; however, they are effective in triggering new ways to perceive history and the personal lives of the people who lived through the trauma. Through her exploration of these photos, Varda has “written” a cultural studies essay film on teddy bears. Varda connects this idea of teddy bear with the children’s book, Otto, which tells a story of a teddy bear named Otto. She introduces the book by showing its pages on screen and by summarizing its story. Otto was a link between a Jewish boy, David, and a non-Jewish German boy, Oscar. When the police take David’s family to a concentration camp, David gives Otto to Oscar. The city is destroyed by

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bombs, and Otto is left in the ruins. A black American G.I. finds Otto. The G.I. is shot, but the teddy bear prevents his wound from being fatal. The G.I. takes Otto to America. One day, Oscar –now an old man—discovers Otto in an antique shop, buys it and tells his story to a newspaper. David reads the story, and the two friends are reunited. The story of Otto resonates with the historical meaning the teddy bear acquired in Varda’s film. Further, the film deconstructs the fictional world the photographs had created—a world where everyone looked happy and secure, where a teddy bear was a simple toy— and reveals the historical trauma behind the love for teddy bears. As previously noted, Varda uses not only photography in her films but also paintings to trigger interesting narratives that link the past and the present. The Gleaners

and I is one such film. Inspired by Millet’s painting, The Gleaners, Varda explores the meaning of modern-day gleaning in this film. The Gleaners and I can be viewed and analyzed in terms of feminine writing precisely because it is a film about challenging masculine language in film and because it embodies the notion of “writing the body” and “writing the Other.” Varda’s insertion of herself in the narrative and filming of her body have been discussed in the previous section; therefore, here I will concentrate on the writing of “the Other” and the intertextuality to be found in The Gleaners and I. In The Gleaners and I , Varda herself travels through rural and urban France to observe modern-day gleaning. She begins her film by introducing Millet’s famous painting, The Gleaners, while reading the dictionary definition of “gleaning” in voiceover. She then explores modern-day “gleaning” or “scavenging” by actively meeting and

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interviewing people who are forced to or who choose to live on the waste. In fact, the film reveals gleaning to be a complex phenomenon by presenting us with multiple portraits of gleaners, recyclers, and salvagers. However, Varda is not interested in authorized and official recyclers so much as in marginal gleaners who forage through dirty bins for their food. By interviewing these modern-day gleaners, Varda gives a voice to the marginalized. Indeed, the film contributes to transforming our perception of the Other; at one point, Varda spots a young man taking fruits and vegetables from a supermarket’s garbage. At first blush, this young man appears to be a person whom viewers are likely to frown upon or pity. However, surprisingly, he turns out to be the most giving person in the film. He sells magazines in the street and scavenges food from trashcans during the day, but at night he volunteers his time teaching French to new immigrants—the Other. Thus, Varda’s film contributes to the transformation of viewers’ perception of the Other. In a sequence devoted to the gleaning of potatoes, Varda offers the viewers a glimpse into the mechanism of contemporary consumer society. The sequence shows that potatoes go to waste on an unimaginably large scale, not because of imperfect harvest techniques but because of the criteria the food industry has established for “acceptable” potatoes—that is, potatoes that look good on display. Potatoes are sorted according to size; those that are too big or too small are thrown away, and “good” potatoes are not edible potatoes but ones that will fit into a plastic container to be displayed on supermarket shelves. It seems no coincidence that among the dumped

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potatoes, Varda finds heart-shaped potatoes which she takes home and turns into works of art, watching them decay and filming their metamorphosis. She does not consume these heart-shaped potatoes but gives them a new function, a new identity; thus, her act of cinécriture is also about embracing the Other (the thrown away) and about transformation. The heart-shaped potatoes also seem to symbolize the “love” Cixous emphasizes in her description of feminine writing. When Varda sees heart-shaped potatoes among the tons of newly harvested potatoes discarded as garbage, she contacts the French charity restaurants known as “restaus du coeur” and informs them of the existence and the location of the potatoes, and thus shares in the pleasure of feeding the needy. The charity members come with a truck to “glean” large numbers of potatoes, and Varda invites us to experience the pleasure of sharing this altruism. As Varda’s film reveals, the meaning of gleaning has changed from generous giving and sharing on the part of the giver (the owner of the field) to scavenging waste others have thrown away. Varda herself revives and then transforms the woman gleaner—she becomes “la glaneuse” of the title—into a filmmaker who gleans images to create a film, a work of art. As “la glaneuse,” Varda invites the audience to share the pleasure of gleaning images and visions to create something different: a delightful film she describes as a “wandering-road-documentary”70 in which her humor and playfulness, together with the unexpected surprises she encounters on the way, convey

70

Agnès Varda, “Filming the Gleaners,” www.zeitgeistfilms.com

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to the audience a sense of freedom and jouissance. One sequence that is one of the most delightful surprises in the film is the discovery of a painting that “contained both the humble stooping of Millet’s The Gleaners and the proud posture of Breton’s Gleaner.” After discovering the painting purely by chance in a “finds” shop, Varda assures the audience that, “Honest, this is no movie trick, we really did find these Gleaners [the painting] purely by chance”; this very line suggests our mutual recognition that movies are constructed. Another scene that demonstrates both Varda’s playfulness and her comment on cinema is one in which she plays at capturing huge trucks in her hands while riding along on a highway. Her hand seems like a metaphor for camera, which can capture larger-than-life objects and stories with a small lens. While watching a young man transform yogurt containers into flowers and plastic bottles into mobiles, she even asks herself, “Where does play end and art start?” thus raising an important issue in a playful manner.

The Gleaners and I displays a rich intertextuality, another characteristic of Varda’s cinécriture. As was mentioned earlier, the films starts with Millet’s painting in which figures are frozen while “stooping,” a posture that plays a crucial role in Varda’s exploration of modern-day gleaning and scavenging. A dictionary provides the definition of “gleaning,” and Varda also asks a lawyer to read France’s historical penal code so as to explain what was allowed and what was not allowed in the srcinal practice of gleaning. She even uses rap songs as the soundtrack for the scene in which

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she shows heaps of garbage and scavengers who stoop to pick up food, as if to suggest that the act of scavenging could be an act of resisting the dominant system. Indeed, one young man stubbornly sticks to his way of life—living on waste—because he thinks it is unethical to give in to a system that propagates excessive waste. Above all, Varda’s cinécriture can be thought of as an embodiment of feminine writing in film because it is about “transformation.” The Gleaners and I is a film about transforming our perception of the Other, about transforming “waste” into a necessity of life and means of sharing, about transforming “junk” into beautiful works of art, and about transforming random images and encounters into a film. It is a film that celebrates openness, embracing the Other, and the transgression of conventions that opens up new possibilities of inventing something new. Varda’s own account of the filming of The Gleaners and I most clearly displays the similarities between her cinécriture and Cixous’s feminine writing: I wanted to glean images as one jots down travel notes, and feel free boxing to showglove a funny dog Iits met on theOr way it wearing a red around neck?). the(why Dardisoverflowing: Free to linger over a painting by Van der Weyden. To observe couples. But always coming back to the gleaners, trying to win their confidence, listen to them, converse with them rather than interview them, and film them. My intention became clearer to myself throughout the shooting and editing stages. Little by little, I found the right balance between self-referential moments (the gleaner who films one of her hands with the other) and moments focused on those whose reality and behavior I found so striking. I managed to approach them, to bring them out of their anonymity. I discovered their

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generosity. There are many ways of being poor, having common sense, anger or humor. The people I have filmed tell us a great deal about our society and ourselves. I myself learned a lot as I was shooting this film. It confirmed my idea that documentaries are a discipline that teaches modesty.71

71

Ibid.

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CONCLUSION

In 2003, at the age of seventy-five, Agnès Varda took up the art of video installation. Her first installation, “Patatutopia,” was presented at the 50th Venice Biennale. The title is a combination of “Patate” (potato) and “Utopia”—a play on words typical of the titles of Varda’s films—and the idea of the project was born during the shooting of The Gleaners and I in 2000. The installation featured the heart-shaped potatoes Varda had discovered while filming The Gleaners and I. On three big screens, it showed images of the potatoes decaying and germinating. The art of video installation became another medium in which Varda could explore new ways to intermingle photography and cinema, and reality and fantasy; it was also a new medium in which she could reproduce and replicate her films. In 2006, Varda brought together ten video installations in a Paris exhibition entitled L’île et Elle (The Island and She—also a sonic play of “il et elle”: he and she). The installations had a common theme: the island of Noirmoutier, a place where Varda and her late husband Jacques Demy got married and spent most of their summer and winter vacations. Among the ten installations is The Widows of Noirmoutier (Les Veuves de

Noirmoutier), which presents fourteen widows on fourteen video screens. Varda herself is included as one of the fourteen widows. On a beach scattered with seaweed, Varda

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sits on a pink chair with her back towards the sea, looking at the camera. Next to her is an empty blue chair. This image became the poster for L’île et Elle.1 This image of a woman alone is, in fact, one of the recurrent themes in Varda’s films. Many of her films feature a woman rebellious and in solitude. Cléo (Corinne Marchand) in Cléo from 5 to 7 faces the fear of death alone. She has no one to share her anxiety with, not even her rich lover. She is able to reach real mutual understanding with Antoine, the soldier, but he has to leave for Algerian war. Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire) in Vagabond wanders around the countryside in solitude. She refuses to talk, and as Varda explains, Mona is an embodiment of the word “No”: “The first day a baby signals no, it begins to create its personality. Then the child says no, he affirms it…All my work on Mona, in Vagabond, is focused around her stubbornness in saying no, including to those who want to help her.” 2 The film is dedicated to Nathalie Sarraute, whom Varda herself imagined as a woman “walking alone in a winter countryside” 3 and described as “an absolute rebel.” Mary-Jane (Jane Birkin) in Kung-Fu Master is a forty-year-old divorced mother of two daughters. She is not in distress but feels lonely and isolated. Perhaps from the regret that she does not have a son, Mary-Jane falls in love with

1

Agnès Varda, L’île et elle, Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2006.

“Le premier jour où un bébé fait signe que non, il commence à créer sa personnalité. Puis l’enfant dit non, il s’affirme…Tout mon travail autour de Mona s'articulait autour de son obstination à dire non, y compris à ceux qui voulainet l'aider.” Agnès Varda, Varda par Agnès, op.cit., 26. 2

3

Ibid., 172.

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fourteen-year-old Julien, a classmate of her daughter and an avid player of the video game Kung-Fu Master. In Une minute pour une image (One Minute for One Image), a TV series which shows a photograph accompanied by a one-minute commentary, Varda introduces and comments on two photographs which feature a rebellious woman. One is “Algerian Woman,” taken by Marc Garanger in Algeria, 1962. It is a black-and-white portrait photo of an old Algerian woman which Varda retrieved from the Army archives. The photographer had been drafted into the army, and the woman had to pose for him for the obligatory ID card. She had to remove her veil. Varda’s comment: “The violence against both individuals is particularly visible in the incredible defiance of the woman. Her messy hair gives the impression of pain, emotion, agitation; the tightness in her face, her bitter frown and the startling anger in her expression all say NO. She may take an order, but she will not be subjugated.” The other photo is also taken in the 1960s. It is Marc Riboud’s “The Girl with the Flower” taken in Washington, D.C. in 1967. It features a striking image of a silent confrontation between a young woman and soldiers. Varda’s comment: “On one side are war, helmets, bayonets and men, voluntarily or not, being soldiers. On the other side is peace, a radiant flower and a woman in a flowery blouse. A woman resisting, calmly and silently resisting.” In her 1984 short fiction film, 7P., cuis., s. de b… (7 bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom), there is a scene which reminds one of Hélène Cixous’s comparison of Perceval and Eve, one who accepts the law and the other who transgresses it. It is a complex film both in

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its story and style; however, it is mainly a story of a family of eight – the parents and six children – living in a mansion with seven bedrooms. In one scene, the family is having dinner. When one of the boys stands up from the table and begins to play ball, the father slaps him on the face and orders him to sit down. At that moment, Louise, the eighteenyear-old daughter, stands up, defiantly saying, “I’m not hungry.” When her father tells her to sit down, she retorts, “I’m an adult now. I won’t obey you like a soldier.” Furthermore, she looks at her older brothers and says, “You boys can do as Dad says if you want to. But I’m leaving home. I want to be free.” The oldest brother responds, “Any call to freedom is somehow a challenge to us. But the study of civilizations, and our future in society as outlined by our father, force me to ignore my sister. Her cry is a vain protuberance, a false note, the cackling of hens.” Louise looks at him with a scornful smile. Throughout the film, Louise dreams of leaving home and being free. As the only woman filmmaker in the French New Wave movement, Varda herself identifies with other “only woman among men.” She writes in her book, Varda 4

par Agnès, “I know well another impression, that of being alone among men.” She identifies with Nathalie Sarraute, who was the only woman in the nouveau roman group and who wrote Portrait of an Unknwon Man in 1948 well before the nouveau roman literary movement began in the 1950s. Varda notes that she is touched by a photograph of a group of surrealist artists in which Gisèle Prassinos, the only woman, is surrounded by 4

“J’ai bien connu une autre impression, celle d’être seule parmi des hommes.” Ibid., 30.

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men. Varda also mentions a photo collage by Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte as an image that particularly fascinates her and which resonates with her life. In the image, a painting of a nude woman who is surrounded by the lines “je ne vois pas [la femme] cachée dans la forêt” (I don’t see the woman hidden in the forest). This image is framed by photographs of male surrealist artists with their eyes closed. This collage was published in the journal La Révolution Surréaliste (Surrealist Revolution) in 1929. As Dawn Ades points out, “the woman is presented as the guide to the unconscious, the incarnation of the marvelous, symbol of the psychic life.”5 It is an image of woman as the symbol of the unconscious place in which the revolutionary potential to explode the repressive reality lies. Indeed, Varda’s work shows the influence of surrealism. As early as in 1957, Ô

Saisons, Ô Chateaux (O Seasons, O chateaus), a twenty-two-minute tourist documentary commissioned by the Tourist Bureau, includes quasi-surrealist fantasy sequences; the 1958 documentary L’Opéra Mouffe includes surrealist shots which convey the inner psychology of a pregnant woman; and the fiction short 7P., cuis., s. de b… evokes surrealist inspirations. In 1965, she was invited by surrealist poet and novelist Louis Aragon and his wife Elsa Triolet to make a short documentary about Elsa’s childhood; in this film, a narrator recites Aragon’s poems. In Jane B. par Agnès V., there is an interesting

Dawn Ades, “Notes on Two Women Surrealist Painters: Eileen Agar and Ithell Colquhou,” Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 3, no. 1, Women in art, April 1980, 41. 5

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scene in which Varda implicitly critiques Salvador Dali’s penchant for money. In a minifiction, Jane Birkin is an art dealer and Philippe Léotard is a painter. The two are looking for the money they had hidden somewhere in the studio. They look through art books trying to come up with a name that evokes the word “money”—Manet, Monet etc.—but to no avail. Then Léotard suddenly remembers that Dali had been nicknamed “Avida Dolars” (avid for dollars) – André Breton criticized Dali for “selling out” – and sure enough, he finds the money in an art book about Dali. The scene conveys Varda’s own critique of the commercialization of art, especially surrealism, which srcinally aimed to be revolutionary. In Une Minute pour Une Image, while commenting on a surrealist photo, “Self-Portrait” by Juan Fontcuberta, Varda refers to surrealism as “a space and a time to dream beyond reality’s extraordinary precision. A space around reality and its images.” Also, Varda created Jane B. par Agnès V. with free association not confined by the rules of dominant filmmaking. In fact, she made all her films, even the fiction films that tend to be more structured, without a fixed scenario. Varda’s filmmaking is always an open textual process in which she embraces improvisation and random encounters. Because Varda does not write the whole script before filming, she has often had difficulty in securing funding for her films. However, instead of compromising, she resists defiantly. Even though the lack of funding prevented her from making films as often as she would like and from realizing films she had planned, she continues to work in an artisanal mode with a small crew. The figure of a woman in solitude and in a quiet resistance is the very image of Varda herself. And surrealism, with its

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revolutionary spirit, has inspired her to enjoy a total freedom in her filmmaking, where she often employs free association of ideas and improvisation. Jane B. par Agnès V. , 7P.,

cuis., s. de b…, and L’Opéra Mouffe are excellent examples of this free flow of the creative imagination. Her sense of humor, playfulness, and total freedom constitute a cinematic jouissance that is not governed by the established rules of filmmaking. From her fascination with defiant women in solitude and with the spirit of surrealism, it seems natural that Varda has consistently devoted her artistic energy to breaking with clichés, to de-mystification, to the elaboration of female identity and subjectivity, and to giving voice to the marginalized Other. As I elaborated in Chapter IV, Cléo in Cléo from 5 to 7 breaks with the cliché of femininity by becoming an active woman looking; Mona in Vagabond breaks with the cliché of femininity by being filthy. Mona de-mystifies the image of Venus: while she comes out of the sea, she is far from the mythic image of Venus. She is dirty, smelly and on the move towards her death. It is significant to observe that in Cléo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond, both of which deal with the issue of female identity and subjectivity, the female protagonists find real connection only with a man of marginalized status. Antoine, the soldier who has to go back to the Algerian war, is the only person to whom Cléo can reveal her real name and her anxiety about a possible cancer; in Vagabond, the Tunisian immigrant is one of two persons (the other being Mrs. Landier, the plant scientist) with whom Mona communicates. These connections imply that women and other marginalized groups

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share commonalities as minorities of dominant society: that is, as “feminine” subjects, to borrow French feminists’ notion of the feminine. Not only the subject but also the style of Varda’s films defies classification. She moves freely between documentary and fiction, oftentimes skillfully mixing the two; between photography and cinema; between short films and long feature films; and among 16mm, 35mm, digital camera, TV and video installation. She started her film career at the margin of French cinema, and she remains an avowed independent filmmaker; moreover, she has never stopped making films that are srcinal and innovative. For more than five decades, Varda has created an oeuvre that is unclassifiable and a style that is idiosyncratic. Her practice of cinécriture goes counter to the conventions of classical cinema and opens up new possibilities for feminine filmmaking. Agnès Varda, who started her film career as an isolated pioneer at the margin of French cinema, has created a body of work that sets a model for a “feminine” filmmaking that embraces and writes the Other. Varda has opened up new possibilities to link women and other marginal groups through her art of filmmaking. Varda’s films and her practice of filmmaking offer excellent models for feminine filmmaking. However, since the possibility of feminine filmmaking is not confined to films made by women, expanding the study of feminine filmmaking to other filmmakers, both men and women, seems ripe with the promise of what it could reveal about the realization of feminine narratives on film.

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FILMOGRAPHY *All films written and directed by Agnès Varda

La Pointe courte, 1954, 89 min., b/w 35mm, fiction film. Ô Saisons, Ô Chateaux, 1957, 22 min., color, 35mm, short documentary. L’Opéra Mouffe, 1958, 17 min., b/w, 16mm, short documentary. Du Côté de la Côté , 1958, 24 min., color, 35mm, short documentary. Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cléo from 5 to 7), 1961, 90 min., b/w, 35mm, fiction film. Salut les Cubains, 1963, 30 min., b/w, filmed photographs in 35mm, short documentary. Le Bonheur, 1964, 82 min.. color, 35mm, fiction film. Les Enfants du Musée, 1964, 7 min., b/w, TV, short documentary. Elsa la Rose, 1965, 20 min., b/w, 16mm, short documentary. Les Créatures, 1965, 105 min., b/w and color, 35mm, fiction film. Loin du Vietnam, 1967, 120 min., b/w and color, collective documentary. Oncle Yanco, 1967, 22 min., color, 35mm, short documentary. Black Panthers, 1968, 28 min., b/w, 16mm, short documentary. Lions Love, 1969, 110 min., color, 35mm, fiction film. Nausicaa, 1970, 90 min. (never shown), color, 35mm, fiction film. Daguerréotypes, 1974-1975, 80 min., color, 16mm, feature documentary. Réponse de Femmes, 1975, 8 min., color, 16mm, short documentary. Plaisir d’Amour en Iran, 1976, 6 min., 35mm, short fiction film.

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L’Une chante, l’autre pas (One Sings, the Other Doesn’t ), 1977, 120 min., color, 35mm, fiction film. Quelques Femmes Bulles, 1977, 58 min., color, video, fiction film. Mur Murs, 1980, 81 min., color, 16mm, feature documentary. Documenteur, 1980-1981, 63 min., color, 16mm, fiction film. Ulysse, 1982, 22 min., color, 35mm, short documentary. Une Minute pour Une Image, 1982, TV series of 170 2-minute spots. Les Dites Cariatides, 1984, 13 min., color, 16mm, short documentary. 7 P., cuis., s. de b…(A Saisir) , 1984, 27 min., color, 35mm, short fiction film. Sans Toit ni Loi (Vagabond), 1985, 105 min., color, 35mm, fiction film. T’as de Beaux Escaliers…Tu sais, 1986, 3 min., color, 35mm, short documentary. Jane B. par Agnès V., 1987, 97 min., color, 35mm, feature documentary. Kung-Fu Master, 1987, 78 min., color, 35mm, fiction film. Jacquot de Nantes, 1990, 118 min., b/w and color, 35mm, fiction film. Les Demoiselles ont eu 25 ans, 1992, 63 min., color, 16mm, feature documentary. L’Univers de Jacques Demy, 1993, 90 min., color, 35mm, feature documentary. Les 100 et 1 Nuits, 1994, 100 min., color, 35mm, fiction film. Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I), 2000, 82 min., color, digicam, feature documentary. Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse deux ans après, 2002, 63 min., color, digicam, feature documentary. Le Lion Volatil, 2003, 12 min., color, 35mm, short fiction film.

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Ydessa, les ours et etc., 2004, 44 min., color, 35mm, feature documentary. Quleques veuves de Noirmoutier, 2006, color, 35mm, feature documentary. Les Plages d’Agnès, 2008. (in post-production)

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