Agnes Varda between Film, Photography, and Art 9780520968202

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Reinterpreting Varda: The Mother of the New Wave Reframes Its Histories
2. Complicating Neorealism and the New Wave: La Pointe Courte
3. Filmic and Feminist Strategies: Questioning Ideals of Happiness in Le Bonheur
4. Reconsidering Contradictions: Feminist Politics and the Musical Genre in L’une chante, l’autre pas
5. The Limits of Documentary: Identity and Urban Transformation in Daguerréotypes
6. Melancholy and Merchandise: Documenting and Displaying Widowhood in L’île et elle
7. Varda Now: Autobiography, Memory, and Retrospective
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Agnès Varda between Film, Photography, and Art

Agnès Varda between Film, Photography, and Art Rebecca J. DeRoo

university of california press

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2018 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: DeRoo, Rebecca J., author. Title: Agnès Varda between film, photography, and art / Rebecca J. DeRoo. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed. Identifiers: lccn 2017007722 (print) | lccn 2017011585 (ebook) | isbn 9780520968202 (ebook) | isbn 9780520279407 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780520279414 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Varda, Agnès, 1928—Criticism and interpretation. | Women motion picture producers and directors--France--Criticism and interpretation. Classification: lcc pn1998.3.v368 (ebook) | lcc pn1998.3.v368 d47 2017 (print) | ddc 791.43023/3092—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017007722 Manufactured in the United States of America 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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For my parents

Contents

Acknowledgments

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

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Reinterpreting Varda: The Mother of the New Wave Reframes Its Histories

1

Complicating Neorealism and the New Wave: La Pointe Courte

19

Filmic and Feminist Strategies: Questioning Ideals of Happiness in Le Bonheur

49

Reconsidering Contradictions: Feminist Politics and the Musical Genre in L’une chante, l’autre pas

70

The Limits of Documentary: Identity and Urban Transformation in Daguerréotypes

84

Melancholy and Merchandise: Documenting and Displaying Widowhood in L’île et elle

115

Varda Now: Autobiography, Memory, and Retrospective

143

Notes

161

Bibliography

205

Index

227

Acknowledgments

Many wonderful people and institutions have helped me bring this book to fruition. I am deeply grateful to Agnès Varda, and her daughter Rosalie Varda, for so generously sharing time, ideas, collections, and the CinéTamaris archives, making this project possible. I am indebted to Anita Benoliel, Cecilia Rose, Stéphanie Scanvic, and Julia Fabry for facilitating my research at Ciné-Tamaris and for their ever-warm welcome. The interpretations offered here are, of course, my own. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my mentors, colleagues, and friends who offered scholarly sources and insights, read work in progress, and supported and encouraged me. They have strengthened this project in more ways than I can ever describe. My sincere thanks go to my editor Raina Polivka, the University of California Press staff, and the two anonymous manuscript reviewers for their rigorous and helpful readings. I am grateful for opportunities to present early versions of this work at conferences and lectures, and for stimulating discussions that have enriched this book. For generous funding of my project in its early stages, I thank the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Association of University Women. An American Philosophical Society Franklin Research Grant and Faculty Development Grant from Rochester Institute viii

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of Technology supported subsequent archival research. I am grateful for the RIT College of Liberal Arts Faculty Research Grant, Faculty Development Fund Grant, and Publication Cost Grant, which supported archival research, permissions, and reproductions for various components of the book’s extensive illustration program. The Paul and Francena Miller Fellowship supported a fruitful semester of research leave to bring the manuscript to completion. The outstanding research librarians and interlibrary loan staff at Rochester Institute of Technology and Bryn Mawr College offered invaluable assistance in tracking down hard-to-obtain sources. For sharing their documentation and collections with me and assisting in my research endeavors, I thank the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, BNF Département des Estampes et de la Photographie, Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA), Bibliothèque du Film, Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Archives Françaises du Film du CNC, Bibliothèque Forney, Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine, Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, and Institut National de l’Audiovisuel. These collections were critical to developing my interpretations of the connections between Varda’s work and histories of cinema, art, photography, and visual culture. I honor pioneering critics and scholars and contemporary colleagues for establishing and ever expanding the literature on Varda’s oeuvre. In this project, I have sought to represent patterns in this literature and the range of scholarly interpretation, both past and present. When possible, I have used English translations of sources; I have used English film subtitles for consistency with occasional minor alterations. Other translations, unless indicated differently, are my own. I use Varda’s French film titles and English translations. It was a delight to work with Jurij Meden, Curator of Film Exhibitions at the George Eastman Museum, in putting together the 2016 film retrospective Agnès Varda: (Self-) Portraits. Facts and Fiction. I warmly thank the College of Liberal Arts at Rochester Institute of Technology, the George Eastman Museum, and colleagues for undertaking this collaborative project. Special thanks go to my chairs and colleagues in the Department of Performing Arts and Visual Culture and the Museum Studies Program,

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and to the deans of the College of Liberal Arts at RIT for their enthusiasm and collegial community. I thank my undergraduate and graduate mentors for their intellectual example and unflagging support. I am so thankful for my husband and son, who have accompanied me with love throughout this project. I thank my extended family for their ever-present caring and kindness. I dedicate this book to my parents with love and gratitude.

1

Reinterpreting Varda the mother of the new wave reframes its histories

At the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, Agnès Varda received the Palme d’honneur, a lifetime achievement award, which recognized her directorial career spanning more than six decades (fig. 1). The Palme d’honneur recognizes directors who have not previously won a Palme d’Or in competition at Cannes but whose work has had global impact. Past recipients include Woody Allen, Manoel de Oliveira, Clint Eastwood, and Bernardo Bertolucci. Varda is the first French and female director to receive this distinction. Indeed, she is one of the most important and prolific female and feminist filmmakers worldwide. Varda began her directorial career in 1950s Paris by founding her own production company and today also creates multimedia visual art exhibited globally. As this book will argue, working in dialogue with multiple aesthetic media and traditions has always been central to her practice. This Palme d’honneur recognition occurred within the wider context of the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, which was dubbed by critics the year of “women in the spotlight.”1 Organized as a response to concerns about the under-representation of women at the festival and in the field of cinema more broadly, the festival was planned to highlight women’s accomplishments. In many respects, Varda’s award makes sense in this context. Yet 1

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Fig. 1. Agnès Varda receives the Palme d’honneur at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, accompanied by actor Jane Birkin, who presented the award, and Master of Ceremonies Lambert Wilson. Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP/Getty Images.

little of her diverse career was acknowledged at the Cannes festival or during the presentation of the award at the closing ceremony. Actor Jane Birkin (who has starred in Varda’s work) bestowed the award, and Varda gave an acceptance speech, evoking some of her most famous films. The festival used one film sequence to represent her career, from her 1961 fiction film Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7). It depicts a moment when the character of Cléo, a blonde pop star, reclines in her bed in a negligée, as she gazes provocatively at her male lover (fig. 2). In some ways, this selection makes sense—Cléo is Varda’s most famous film—a critical and box office success in its day that continues to be screened, televised, and streamed in the present. Cléo screened in competition at Cannes in 1962 and was re-presented fifty years later under the rubric of Cannes Classics, attesting to its vibrancy and legacy. It is an iconic film, made at the height

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Fig. 2. Cléo (Corinne Marchand) gazes at her lover in Cléo de 5 à 7. Photograph by Liliane de Kermadec, © Ciné-Tamaris, 1962.

of the French New Wave movement of the 1950s and ’60s, and was used by Cannes to invoke Varda’s long-standing reputation as the innovative “mother of the New Wave.”2 The New Wave movement was one of the most celebrated film movements of the twentieth century.3 Critics and scholars typically view François Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows) (1958) and Jean-Luc Godard’s A Bout de Souffle (Breathless) (1959) as formally

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marking the beginning of the movement, with Varda’s first film La Pointe Courte (1954) praised as an important precursor, anticipating the hallmarks of the movement. Critics from the Cahiers du cinéma, the journal most prominently associated with the movement, were articulating a platform that came to define the New Wave as a rebellion against the established tradition of cinéma de qualité (quality cinema) and the subordination of the individual director within the larger state-subsidized studio system. Cahiers critics cast the New Wave as a young generation of directors opposing big-budget studio productions and literary adaptations, instead favoring more economical, improvisational filmmaking, often shooting on location and experimenting with film form and genre. Cahiers critics praised directors for their personal experimentation with cinema and its languages, which was considered aesthetically radical but otherwise cast in largely formal, apolitical terms.4 This notion of individual expression via film form as on par with the other arts—articulated in both theory and practice—made the New Wave a central moment of canon formation in the history of modern cinema.5 Cléo was made in 1961 at the height of the New Wave (which spanned from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s). The film portrays a female pop star awaiting the results of a biopsy, who, in crisis, breaks with expectations and roams the streets of Paris seeking solace with the individuals she encounters (presented as “chapters” of the film).6 Varda’s playful, creative camera, which follows Cléo’s trajectory through contemporary Paris, and her experiments with cinematic narration and editing were seen to exemplify hallmarks of the movement—the expression of the individual director and experimentation with film form. This has made Cléo an iconic New Wave film, and the sequence at Cannes recognizes and affirms this history. Yet the choice of the sequence from Cléo illuminates another set of dynamics. In subsequent decades, as part of a broader reconsideration of the cultural politics of the New Wave, both the film and Varda herself have come to be interpreted as feminist. Scholars focus on the transformation of Cléo from passive, erotic object to active subject. For example, in the first half of the film, the camera and the gazes of other characters linger on Cléo’s body, conveying her passivity as an object. In the film’s second half, point-ofview shots represent her increasing agency as an active, seeing subject.7 Yet

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Cannes chose an earlier sequence, a moment of Cléo’s objectification, without hinting at the character’s, or the film’s, feminist trajectory. In fact, the selection of the sequence at Cannes reinforces gendered notions of creativity often associated with the New Wave, underscored in Geneviève Sellier’s revisionist study, Masculine Singular: The French New Wave.8 (Varda is the only female director associated with the movement.) Sellier explains that the audacity of masculine New Wave directors was often associated with the depiction of “modern,” scandalously sexual and objectified representations of female characters that were seen to challenge normative roles for women as wives and mothers. Yet Cannes selected a sequence that seems to naturalize this gender dynamic of the movement without overtly acknowledging it. Perhaps this is because the blonde starlet is also part of Cannes’ identity. Vanessa Schwartz and others have demonstrated the importance of paparazzi and press photographs of actresses such as Brigitte Bardot in the 1950s and 1960s in marketing French film and the festival. Photographs and footage from the 1962 festival depict the star of Cléo, Corinne Marchand, from the moment of her arrival at the local train station, and feature her and other actresses strolling and posing on the beach. The selection of the Cléo sequence at the festival rehearses often unacknowledged notions of the New Wave and Cannes’ priorities. In the publicity leading up to the 2015 Cannes festival, the organizers described their decision to honor Varda that year: “Her work and her life are infused with the spirit of freedom, the art of driving back boundaries, a fierce determination and a conviction that brooks no obstacles. . . . Simply put, Varda seems capable of accomplishing everything she wants.”9 Marking the year of “women in the spotlight,” their comments portray Varda in a triumphant manner, as a free, motivated individual who overcomes obstacles—but this celebratory characterization obscures the many challenges Varda faced—and worked to make visible. Unlike the typical acceptance speech, in which the awardee thanks those who have contributed to his or her success, Varda’s remarks expressed gratitude for a “palme of resistance and endurance,” and acknowledged “all the inventive and courageous directors who aren’t in the spotlight.”10 Whereas the festival attempts to gloss over obstacles with the prize and its narrative, Varda makes them visible with her statement.

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The Palme d’honneur is in itself somewhat paradoxical. On the one hand, it distinguishes filmmakers of unrivaled accomplishment, but on the other it recognizes figures whose work has never before been considered most worthy of the juries’ recognition in competition. It demonstrates the problems with retrospective canonization; it does not explore why Varda has not been recognized previously in Cannes’ Palme d’Or competition, but claims association with her success by recognizing her influence. Moreover, the Palme d’honneur given in the year of “women in the spotlight” and the appellation “mother of the New Wave” recognize her importance, albeit in terms that are gender dependent and that identify her outside the norm. Even though she made her first feature film just a few years before Godard and Truffaut and was only a few years older,11 the title “mother” suggests she is connected to the movement yet also out of synch. In contrast, this book sees as revelatory the contradictions and tensions that persistently surround critical reception of Varda and her work. It makes visible the disciplinary lenses applied to her work and examines the unspoken social or critical assumptions that inform these perspectives. Varda’s own statement of “resistance and endurance” in her Cannes acceptance speech suggests the dynamics surfaced in this study. But Varda hasn’t always been so direct in articulating her position. Rather, as this book shows, across her career Varda inserted politics and social commentary covertly, by orchestrating a range of tacit visual references that are not explicitly acknowledged in her films’ narratives. Thus, this book is not about Cléo as a New Wave film, which has been the subject of many interesting studies. Rather, I aim to bring to light alternative, but no less important, characteristics of her oeuvre. Historically, critics were baffled by Varda making a feature-length film and embarking on a directorial career without cinematic experience or training. Unlike many of her New Wave colleagues, she did not write as a critic or openly participate in the theoretical debates of the period. Although she is sometimes viewed as part of the Left Bank (the more political arm of the New Wave movement), she has often been cast at the fringes of the critical and directorial culture associated with the Cahiers du cinéma.12 I demonstrate that through her work she participated in this context in many ways that have not been acknowledged, and that her films’ dialogues with a variety of visual traditions and media further complicate these narratives.

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In recent years, Varda has been producing autobiographical film and artwork, and in 2012, she released a comprehensive DVD box set. Thus, audiences today are familiar with her earlier work in photography and her training in art history as well as her cinematic work and contemporary multimedia art.13 As a result, there is a flourishing interest in exploring her career.14 Yet more work is needed to understand her engagement with a range of aesthetic traditions and the politics this raises, which I argue is a core characteristic of her oeuvre that reframes some of the central narratives of modern cinema.15 In fact many of the contradictions of her career stem from trying to fit Varda into conventional film categories and canons. Her distinctive way of working didn’t fully fit historical critical narratives that viewed the New Wave in depoliticized terms of personal experimentation with film form; by examining these aspects of her work, I rethink and reframe some of these well-established narratives. Proceeding chronologically, from the beginning of Varda’s career in the 1950s to the present, this book focuses on moments where Varda’s invocation of different artistic traditions within film opens onto complex commentary on broader aesthetic, theoretical, feminist, and political discussions.16 I reinterpret some of her best-known films, but also focus attention on other less familiar works that merit further consideration. I reassess individual works with the goal of interrogating Varda’s visual dialogues to reconstruct the cultural politics of the periods in which they were made. This process of reading new strands of meaning across Varda’s oeuvre relies on a richly interdisciplinary approach. The result is a new cultural history of Varda and her work that makes clear how she actively engaged and subtly broadened some of the most advanced aesthetic and political discourse of her day. Many of Varda’s sophisticated commentaries on controversial issues of her time have receded from view in the biographical frameworks in which her work often has been considered. The range of her engagement in her work with cinema, art history, photography, and visual culture has not been fully recognized.17 This decontextualization of Varda’s work has been compounded by the frequent emphasis on her exceptionality within her fields of practice.18 In contrast, I view Varda’s work as a projection of cultural history that illuminates multiple disciplines, including art history, cinema studies, visual culture, and modern French history.

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Each chapter focuses on one of Varda’s works and questions its familiar interpretations as well as standard assumptions about Varda that have been drawn from these works. I analyze visual references in the films, connecting them to wider cultural politics of the time. In the process, I explain how earlier interpretations of her oeuvre sometimes reiterate the very expectations of the field that Varda sought to challenge. Yet in revising conventional and historical understandings of Varda and her place, I take the misreadings and misunderstandings of Varda as essential to understanding the reception history of her work because they reveal the critical, institutional, and social assumptions of the period and field. I approach Varda as constructing a complex and subversive artistic dialogue that drew art of the past into the present so as to mediate and elucidate a broad range of controversial social and political concerns. Thus, this book is not a traditional director study. Rather, it is an attempt to understand the histories that have produced a figure such as Varda, reconciling the multiple images of her as a filmmaker that have emerged over time, and interrogating those perceptions and their sources in order to comprehend more fully both Varda and the varied contexts in which she has worked. In the twenty-first century, Varda’s multimedia artwork has received considerable attention.19 For example, her 2006 multimedia art installation L’île et elle occupied the entire Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris. Varda’s expansive exhibition combined film, photography, objects, and interactive environments to explore her relationship with the island of Noirmoutier, where she regularly vacationed with her late husband, Jacques Demy. The complex and evocative installation explored diverse themes including the commercialization of this once quaint community, Varda’s own memories of her husband and marriage, and her more recent experience of widowhood. While I analyze her multimedia installation in chapter 6, this book is decidedly different in its interests: I attend to how her films reference other aesthetic media in both direct and more nuanced ways. My study analyzes how Varda’s multimedia investments significantly predated her current multimedia artwork. Varda’s art exhibition in the twenty-first century has been represented as though it is a departure or evolution from her earlier work, whereas I believe that she has worked across her career within multimedia dialogues, even if she wasn’t as actively engaged in multimedia production.

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A central argument of this book is that Varda draws on a range of visual references in her films—evoking photography, cinema, art, and visual culture. Varda trained in art history at the Ecole du Louvre, and studied photography and practiced as a photographer before turning to film in the 1950s. Her cinematic work reveals a rich knowledge of these traditions; dialogue among them is a core characteristic that unites her diverse work across the long trajectory of her prolific career. In her recently released DVD compilation of her films, she describes the progression of her career in terms of the “three lives of Agnès,” calling herself “photographer, filmmaker, and visual artist.” This chronology narrates a largely sequential identity—her practice in photography in the late 1940s and ’50s before becoming immersed in cinema in the 1950s and ’60s, and her visual art practice in the twenty-first century. Yet, as I argue in the pages that follow, her work always moved between these various modes of artistic thought. In revealing Varda’s cinematic engagement with a range of aesthetic traditions, I open up her works’ complex artistic strategies and contributions to contemporary cultural politics. I undertake this task not with the aim of reconstituting the canon of her work or that of New Wave film more broadly. My focus is instead on providing a series of close readings that draw out how Varda has consistently merged aesthetics and politics in ways that are complex, innovative, and under-recognized. With the global waning of celluloid film projected in theaters, and “film” appearing across a variety of platforms and media from digital incarnations to the art museum as well as visual artists working in film, video, and moving image work, there is a proliferation of interest in “intermediality” in the fields of cinema studies and art history.20 Varda’s work presaged this concern, perhaps explaining why these dimensions of her practice can be seen now, when they were overlooked historically. I propose that Varda shows us how to pursue intermediality without losing sight of the rich distinctiveness of artistic media, traditions, and experience.21 Varda doesn’t collapse film, photography, and objects; rather, she films them, restages them, and otherwise portrays one medium within another to underscore their differences. She puts diverse media and conventions into dialogue to comment on them, with an understanding of their various histories and properties. She shows us what they can (and

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Fig. 3. Shot of Jean-François Millet’s Les Glaneuses (The Gleaners) (1857) being photographed by a museum visitor in Varda’s Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse (2000).

cannot) capture; she lets their conventions and histories shape her representation of her subjects and the expectations of her audiences even as she plays with or subverts those conventions.22 This study contributes to a broader movement to explore these important and productive sites of intersection between cinema studies and art history that invigorate and mutually strengthen these fields.23 For example, Varda’s 2000 documentary Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse (The Gleaners and I) weaves together references to the histories and conventions of painting to reflect on social problems. The work portrays abundance coexisting alongside a hungry population. It reflects her selfconsciousness as an artist—considering traditions in which under-represented populations were depicted and also distorted. The film announces its relation to a tradition of painting in its title and in the beginning of the film, as was well documented in the film’s enthusiastic reception. Yet it is worthwhile to examine closely brief sequences that encapsulate the com-

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Fig. 4. Shot of a contemporary gleaner seeking discarded food after a Paris outdoor market in Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse (2000).

plexity of Varda’s reflection on different aesthetic traditions, their histories, their reception, and their power dynamics and politics. At the beginning of the film, Varda looks up the entry for “gleaners” in the dictionary. She shows the page with a reproduction of Jean-François Millet’s The Gleaners (1857)—illustrating how this painting has become inherited knowledge for understanding the subject—and she proceeds to film it on exhibition in the present at the Musée d’Orsay (fig. 3). Although Varda does not describe the painting in detail, she uses its subjects and history to establish her film’s central themes and politics. Millet represented gleaning, a practice in rural life of the period often carried out by impoverished peasants who would walk the fields and pick up stray grains after the crops had been harvested. Millet used a painterly style of realism, a movement to depict present-day subjects not traditionally deemed

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worthy of beaux-arts painting. The foreground of Millet’s painting portrays peasant women stooping to gather—or glean—the remains of grain from the already harvested field. The modest bundles held in their hands sharply contrast with the abundant harvest, gathered on carts in the background.24 Rather than rendering the details of poverty, Millet aestheticized the impact, using muted colors, round, rhythmic poses, and soft contours to render the figures more poetic. When his painting was shown at the Paris Salon of 1857, an officially sanctioned exhibition, however, it shocked many viewers. Some critics were sympathetic to the impoverished figures, while others viewed them as ugly and potentially threatening, following the uprisings in the revolution of 1848. By foregrounding Millet’s painting, Varda prompts us to question the wider social situation of hunger coexisting alongside abundance. Varda uses Millet’s painting to encapsulate themes she explores in her film—a contemporary society of seeming excess contrasted with urban and rural poor engaged in forms of present-day gleaning. Near the beginning of the film, Varda cuts to an interview with a woman who explains that she used to glean, but today efficient agricultural machinery leaves little remaining in the fields. As we see, today’s gleaners are more likely to gather the dumped and discarded rather than the unharvested. These individuals seek unmarketable food abandoned in agricultural fields or left behind after outdoor city markets have closed, bending in poses that recall the painting (fig. 4). Varda reminds us of this artistic model for representing gleaners and its distortions, while also diverging from it. Varda presents individuals ranging from a man in rubber boots roaming the streets and demonstrating the still usable elements of trash, to squatters arrested for raiding and vandalizing grocery store dumpsters, to charity workers gathering food in fields for organizations that provide meals to the hungry and homeless, to a young man with a master’s degree who, after finding his food for the day, volunteers at the shelter where he lives by teaching French language courses for recent immigrants. The title, Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse, The Gleaners and I, underscores Varda’s role in creating this representation. Varda frames herself as a glaneuse (a gleaner in the feminine singular form of the word), traveling through Paris and rural France to gather images: documentary footage and interviews as well as her personal reflections as she meets individuals

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seeking discarded leftovers on principle or by necessity. Varda explores the flexibility of the hand-held digital camera, which allows her increased personal involvement, working to reduce the physical and metaphorical distance between herself and her subjects, yet she underscores the lack of parallel in the comparison: gleaners of daily sustenance versus a director gleaning images for her art film documentary.25 As The Gleaners and I demonstrates, part of Varda’s ongoing project is making visible under-represented social groups and controversial social problems. She invokes conventional identities to challenge and destabilize them. Referencing different media in dialogue and dissonance fits with Varda’s interests in surfacing identities, particular places, social groups, and even herself, while always underscoring the insufficiency of the representation. Across her work in documentary and realist registers, Varda presents complex meditations on the power dynamics between herself as a filmmaker, her represented subjects, and her audiences. In so doing, she calls upon her viewers to recognize partiality, reject complacency, and take responsibility for constructing meaning. This is perhaps the reason why The Gleaners and I has been described within the genre of the essay film. While the specific characteristics of the essay film are the subject of debate (and scholars acknowledge that the genre is difficult to classify), it is typically understood to combine avantgarde or fictional registers in tension with documentary conventions so as to destabilize the authority of the traditional documentary and its associated notions of truth, objectivity, and completeness.26 The essay film draws on documentary but creates a heterogeneous form, assuaging a consistent narrative. It often invokes a subjective voice and conveys ambiguous, multivalent meaning. This resonance with the essay film bespeaks Varda’s interest in working with and destabilizing the documentary genre, an interest that continues across her career, though working in tandem with different cinematic, aesthetic, and documentary conventions. Here, I take up the challenge—investigating the specific historical registers Varda invokes—both documentary and fiction. I analyze how they act in dialogue and tension, and how they convey the work’s politics. In The Gleaners and I, the political subject of gleaning is explicit and has been duly noted in the film’s reception.27 A central contribution of this book is to surface the political investments—and the art historical

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references that point to them—that have not been recognized. I argue that across Varda’s career in many of her works the politics are present but unspoken, communicated through unacknowledged visual images. These references reveal Varda’s deep engagement with, and expansion upon, advanced aesthetic and political debates of her day. Throughout the book, I show how these commentaries are not didactic, but instead subtle and complex, and they shift over the course of her oeuvre. Varda’s message emerges from layered visual references, the products of Varda’s critical reflections about her role as mediator and filmmaker. Her work is important today because it makes us conscious of her—and our own—process of interpreting meaning and situating ourselves politically. Ultimately it serves as a model for a socially responsible engagement with art and society, by both artists and audiences. Each chapter of the book closely analyzes a single film, drawing from Varda’s work in both fiction and documentary, from the beginning of her directorial career in the 1950s to the present. These readings illuminate core characteristics of her films and the different contexts in which she worked. I explore how Varda employs artistic references to engage with larger cultural debates. My analyses are conceived thematically as interventions in central aspects of her career and reception. My contention throughout this study is that Varda’s early work enables us to reframe received histories of both the New Wave and her feminist aesthetics and international activism of the mid-1960s and ’70s. I believe that the latter frequently have been misunderstood and must be considered in relation to her ongoing dialogue with her New Wave cohort. I investigate the documentaries across her career, which slyly defy conventional expectations of the genre and their own stated objectives in order to pursue activist agendas, including continued feminist engagement. I consider how in the twenty-first century she expands documentary into the three-dimensional site of exhibition, by creating multimedia art installations. Chapter 2 takes up Varda’s first film, La Pointe Courte (1954), which is often read as a forerunner of the New Wave due to her creative camerawork, development of an inventive narrative structure, location shooting, and the film’s production outside the cinematic industry. I show how she represents an impoverished fishing village, evoking the neorealism that had currency in French film culture. I excavate how Varda draws on

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photography and painting in the composition of her shots, using innovative cinematic and theatrical techniques both to invoke neorealism and to question some of its central premises. Chapter 3 considers Le Bonheur (Happiness) (1965), made at the end of the New Wave period, showing how it illuminates Varda’s increasingly feminist politics and histories of the New Wave. I investigate how she utilized specific imagery from women’s magazines and advertising to engage and expand upon trans-Atlantic feminist debates about the situation of housewives after the Second World War, as well as social class and gender considerations of the time. Chapter 4 demonstrates Varda’s increasing embrace of feminist aesthetics and activism in relation to the Brechtian theories that became significant in French film culture of the 1960s and ’70s. It focuses on L’une chante, l’autre pas (One Sings, The Other Doesn’t) (1976–77), a musical fiction film about two female friends set against the rise of the women’s liberation movement. Through archival excavation of Varda’s sources, I argue that the film’s perceived incongruity was intentional, an expansion of advanced filmmaking theories and strategies, in dialogue with influential Brechtian texts and contemporary feminist debates. A central thread running throughout Varda’s work has been its destabilization of the boundaries between the fiction film and the documentary.28 In chapter 5, I consider how Varda destabilizes documentary conventions in her “non-fiction” film. Daguerréotypes (Daguerreotypes) (1976) has been celebrated as a sentimental and apolitical depiction of shopkeepers on her Parisian street. Excavating the film’s photographic and filmic citations and sources, I show that through the locus of her street, Varda critically explores the controversial modernization and increasing gentrification of the city under Prime Minister, and later President, Georges Pompidou in the 1960s and ’70s, by referencing a range of photographic and filmic conventions to evoke both the limits and the necessities of documentary practice. Varda’s multimedia installation at the Cartier Foundation (2006), the subject of chapter 6, integrates her critical self-consciousness about documentary genres with the three-dimensional, immersive site of the exhibition. This exhibition is the culmination of her continuing filmic work exploring themes of documentary, mortality, and her relationship with her

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late husband, Jacques Demy; it also represents Varda’s new career as a celebrated visual artist in the twenty-first century. Varda’s most recent work represents a new direction in her career-long exploration of documentary and self-reflexive cinematic practice. Her approach is unexpected but readily contextualized within her oeuvre: Varda’s refusal to be easily positioned, either politically or cinematically, has been a constant in her complex career. The last chapter considers the most recent phase of Varda’s career and addresses gestures of retrospective (that is, attempts to sum up the director’s legacy) and consecration (that is, film establishment canonization and celebration of her work). I focus on her cinematic self-portrait, Les Plages d’Agnès (The Beaches of Agnès) (2008), the 2012 DVD compilation of her films, and the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. I argue that in her most recent activity, Varda expands the conversation rather than offering a summary of her career. In The Beaches, she presents a range of personal materials and work that had not been widely known to that point, while she simultaneously deploys qualities pejoratively associated with old age (such as nostalgia and forgetfulness) to destabilize the documentary. I believe that Varda asserts control over her legacy with her latest work. By conflating her career and her life, she asks viewers to reconsider both simultaneously, resisting the conventional ways both she and her films have been categorized and previously understood. This book, and the new perspective on Varda’s oeuvre that it offers, were shaped in large part by my extensive archival research both in Varda’s personal papers and in important collections associated with art, avantgarde film, and history in France. The archival dimension of my project is unprecedented in the scholarship on Varda. Working in Varda’s archives and those of her production company, Ciné-Tamaris, I perused uncatalogued boxes and files spanning her career of more than six decades. I was invited to watch Varda film on location, edit her work in progress, and walk through and discuss her art installations. This privileged access to Varda’s archives and the opportunity to learn from her creative process were enhanced by her generous interest in my work. As I pored over documents, she would come by, asking me what I was working on, and then spontaneously pull a relevant document from a box in the corner, or leave me a file of footage the next day. This historical documentation, opportunities to observe her contemporary creation, and Varda’s guidance through

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it, were crucial to my research. In addition to formal interviews I conducted with her, we shared countless informal conversations that have shaped my research and interpretations in profound ways.29 One day, over a lunch discussion and while responding to a string of my questions, she confessed that she felt “mise à nu,” which means “exposed” but also “naked.” With her characteristic humor, she added, “and I don’t like striptease.” While Varda has been actively involved in documenting and interpreting her work across her career, she has also at times intentionally evaded direct commentary on her work and has cultivated an impression of cinematic naiveté, particularly surrounding her early career, the success of which is apparent in the repetition of this claim.30 In this respect, my deep and sustained investigation of the archives, supplemented by formal and informal conversations with Varda, has enabled me to approach standard histories of Varda’s work and the avant-garde movements it engaged from new vantage points and to fill various gaps that allow me to reshape our understanding of these movements. I navigate between past and present understandings of this history in part through critical reflection on the question of why Varda has so often avoided discussing the aesthetic sources and political motivations of her work. I believe that at times Varda strategically promoted myths of her own naiveté and separateness, in part as a means to evade interviewers’ frequent inquiry into whether her work resembled that of her husband or that of male colleagues, such as Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais. Claiming naiveté was a means to counter inappropriate implications that her work was derivative and a strategy to avoid discussion of the controversial politics informing many of her films.31 I give weight to the written and spoken word of Varda’s own commentary on her work, and the unvoiced but still articulated visual commentaries that draw connections between her works and the canon of historical painting and photography as well as popular images derived from magazines. I excavate the controversial social and political concerns that she originally invested in her films, viewing her ambivalence as revelatory of the very real material and practical obstacles she faced. The beginning of my project coincided with Varda’s own investigation of her archives in preparation for her cinematic self-portrait, The Beaches of Agnès (2008). I viewed an early version of the film when she screened it at her studio—with fellow director Chris Marker, critics, and members of her

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family also in attendance—and Varda subsequently invited me to watch her edit parts of the film. Observing her edit different versions of her life story, I realized that she tells certain stories across her career—a habit that is of course part of human nature. But one senses that Varda is more aware than most of this tendency, and that she does so with a higher degree of intentionality than is the norm. Recognizing this has encouraged me to question some of the stories she has told most often and which continue to be repeated in current scholarship as statements of fact.32 As I discuss in greater detail in the book’s chapters, through recurring rhetorical strategies employed in interviews and in her autobiographical work, we can see Varda’s occlusion of the political intentions behind her work as well as her strategic shaping of the “facts” surrounding her life and oeuvre. Indeed, Varda herself now hints that we should question some of the stories she’s told since her cinematic debut. In The Beaches of Agnès, for instance, she is interviewed by her colleague Chris Marker (deceased since the film). Marker was secretive about his identity and thus represented in the film by a cartoon cat—Guillaume—and his voice disguised. It’s a robotic, almost monotone voice, conveying how often these questions have been posed. He asks: “Were you a cinephile?” (cinephilia being a hallmark of the New Wave directors that was cultivated, for example, via the Cinémathèque Française, ciné-clubs, and critical writing of the period). Varda offers her familiar response: “No, I wasn’t a cinephile. I’d only seen about 10 films by the age of 25” (the age when she wrote and directed her first film in 1953–1954). And she has the cartoon cat slowly roll his eyes in disbelief as she does so. Varda invokes a familiar story of her marginality and cinematic naiveté, but by registering doubt she playfully destabilizes the myth, inviting us to question it. Investigating the myths, misunderstandings, and contradictions that continue to be repeated in the critical and scholarly reception of Varda— rather than glossing over them by retroactively canonizing her, rehearsing traditional canons into which her work does not entirely fit, perpetuating stories of her marginality and naiveté, or simply asserting her uniqueness—enables me to excavate Varda’s imbrication and complex engagement in artistic and cinematic traditions as well as her sophisticated commentaries on contemporary cultural politics.

2

Complicating Neorealism and the New Wave la pointe courte

In 1954, Varda set La Pointe Courte, her first film, in the small Mediterranean fishing community of La Pointe Courte, near Sète. This feature-length fiction film used a novel structure, alternating between 10-minute stories of the impoverished village and of an anonymous bourgeois couple visiting from Paris. The couple talks at length to determine whether to stay together, and is depicted with geometrically composed shots and unexpected camera angles to convey the pair’s disagreements and reconciliations (fig. 5). Meanwhile, in naturalistic scenes, local fishermen struggle to maintain their trade against health inspectors concerned with water contamination; a child dies of disease; and a young man and woman seek her family’s permission to date. Beyond these fictional stories, across the film we see sequences of villagers doing daily labor and activities—men working in the fishing trade or water jousting (a local tradition on summer Sundays), and women shucking shellfish and hanging laundry to dry (see fig. 7). Varda filmed on site and used nonactors, residents of the village; the opening credits attribute the film’s authorship to Varda “and the inhabitants of La Pointe Courte,” suggesting a realist or authentic representation of the people and place. Critics of the period praised the film for its creative camerawork and production outside the film industry, while understanding Varda as a 19

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Fig. 5. The composition of the shot conveys the couple’s conflict in La Pointe Courte. © Agnès Varda, 1954.

perhaps naïve but radical director making a first film without knowing cinema or film criticism. By the late 1950s and early ’60s the film came to be seen as a forerunner of the French New Wave movement—an understanding that endures in the present. This chapter considers how this important interpretation came to be established in critical terms circulating at the time—notions of highly personal expression in film form. Critics and scholars have also observed neorealist elements in Varda’s film but have not pursued this connection, owing to Varda’s denials that she knew of the movement or cinema more broadly when she made her first film.

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This chapter will show that the film’s modes of representation are more complex, and examine how such interpretations have obscured the film’s fundamental aesthetics and politics. Specifically, I demonstrate how in many ways the film did draw on neorealist conventions while also challenging their central premises. When Varda made La Pointe Courte in 1954, the neorealist movement was waning, though it retained currency in French film culture through screenings, networks of ciné-clubs, and ongoing critical debates. The Italian neorealism movement had blossomed in the mid- to late 1940s and early 1950s— following the liberation of Italy and the end of the Second World War—and was associated with showing the social and economic hardships in daily life during this period of recovery.1 Influential critics—including the French film critic and theorist André Bazin, one of the most visible proponents of the movement (and who would come to be the first major advocate of Varda’s film)—often interpreted neorealist films within a humanist framework, arguing that these sensitive representations of workers cultivated viewers’ understanding of and empathy for them. The movement was praised for its frank, faithful portrayals of the struggles of workers, impoverished subjects, and particular regional communities, often played by nonactors and members of the communities themselves and shot on location— characteristics associated with documentary or authenticity. Because these subjects had not been often represented in feature film of the time, the movement was frequently seen by critics as opposing the middle-class melodramas that proliferated before and during the Second World War.2 Varda’s decision to film the inhabitants of a poor fishing village on location on the Mediterranean coast, far from the Parisian metropole, where workers (in a fictional story) struggle to maintain their traditions in the face of increasing regulation by higher governmental authority (and presumed pollution from nearby growing cities, tourism, and industry) in many ways fits within the themes and practices of the neorealist movement.3 This period following the Second World War in France was marked by the waning of traditional ways of life in light of modernization and the rapid migration of large populations to cities; the film’s contrast between the visiting Parisian couple and the villagers appears to convey these tensions. Critics saw the portrayal of the couple as formally composed and “stylized,” but that of the villagers as realistic, simple, and straightforward, so

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they paid less attention to interpreting how the villagers are represented. But as this chapter shows, the representations of workers and social class are central to the film’s politics. Varda, I argue, evokes neorealist conventions according to which we expect to have workers made visible and familiar. Yet she challenges these conventions with references to Renaissance painting and vernacular photography, reminding us as viewers that the workers (and the relationship between the workers and the bourgeois couple) are not simple or straightforward. Furthermore, Varda reflects on the power dynamics involved in the making and viewing of the film—issues that would be often obscured in humanist discussions of neorealism. While the opening credits announce that it is a film “by Agnès Varda and the inhabitants of La Pointe Courte,” Varda suggests that we question how much the film’s workers and villagers speak for themselves, and whether we as viewers can truly see and hear them.

la pointe courte a s f o r e ru n n e r o f t h e n e w wav e La Pointe Courte came to be seen as a precursor of the French New Wave in part because of its production outside the film industry. At the time, aspiring filmmakers often followed an apprenticeship process in the studio system or used new forms of subvention for making short films. Varda did neither. In a 2008 interview, Varda recalls that she made La Pointe Courte, at age 25, with little money and under “unthinkable conditions. . . . In the 1950s, to be a director, first you had to be an apprentice, then third assistant director, second AD, first AD, and then at 40 or 50 you became a director. But I just suddenly wrote a script at 25. I’d never been an AD, never gone to film school, and I knew nothing about cinema. I never even went to the movies. In my mind I just suddenly saw this film that would be good to make.”4 Varda wrote the scenario on weekends while working during the week as a photographer for Jean Vilar’s Théâtre National Populaire in Paris.5 Varda, having grown up near La Pointe Courte in Sète, made extensive photographic studies on location (and sketched them in the shooting script) and transcribed local stories and dialect. Her budget for the film was approximately 7 million old francs ($14,000) at a time when film budgets often exceeded 150–200 million old francs (and co-productions reached up

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to 250 million).6 She recalls: “I looked for money . . . [but] no one backs films like that.”7 She inherited some money and received a loan from her mother. Still lacking the funds necessary to produce the film, she proposed that actors and technicians form a cooperative, working for shares.8 Varda acted simultaneously as “producer, director, author, [and] head of the cooperative.”9 Louis Stein was the cinematographer, and later, Alain Resnais agreed to be editor, with assistance from Anne Sarraute (daughter of novelist Nathalie Sarraute and later Chris Marker’s editor). Silvia Monfort and Philippe Noiret from the Théâtre National Populaire agreed to play the couple. Residents of La Pointe Courte—nonprofessional actors—agreed to participate, volunteering their time and allowing Varda to film in their homes. The film was made on location at La Pointe Courte, with a production team of seven people, in August and September of 1954.10 Varda explains that Resnais had the idea to show the film first to critic André Bazin, who became an important advocate.11 Bazin exerted tremendous influence in French film circles through his participation in ciné-club screenings and debates, his co-founding of the Cahiers du cinéma, and his ongoing criticism and theoretical work. He was well known for his praise of neorealist films as well as for advocating the idea that films represented the personal vision of the director. Bazin helped Varda arrange a special screening during the Cannes Film Festival in 1955, explained how to advertise it in Le Film Français, and invited influential film professionals; he praised her film as a “revelation of the festival.”12 Yet Varda explains, “No distributer would distribute the film.”13 Because the film was made without the authorization of the Centre National de la Cinématographie, it could not be distributed commercially; it was screened restrictively and at cinema clubs. The film’s Paris premier was held at the Studio Parnasse in 1956,14 and Bazin continued to promote the film. Despite this restricted screening, however, La Pointe Courte was immensely influential. Varda says, “All the Parisian intellectuals came— Truffaut of course, Marker, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras. The whole Parisian intelligentsia came out because they’d heard about it.”15 By the late 1950s, La Pointe Courte had come to be recognized as anticipating the hallmarks of the New Wave film movement.16 In particular, La Pointe Courte’s highly stylized aesthetic was championed by Bazin, among others, for representing the expression of the

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individual “auteur” (defying conventions of state-subsidized, studio productions).17 The film was praised for its creative camerawork and seen to embody the notions of the “auteur” and “caméra-stylo [camera pen]” advanced by Alexandre Astruc and others—concepts that came to be associated with the New Wave.18 For example, Varda composed her shots of the couple with bold geometry (such as fences bisecting the frame), contrasts between bright light and shadow, and unexpected high camera angles to portray the couple’s disagreements. Critic Jean de Baroncelli asserted: “La Pointe Courte proves that for the generation of Madame Varda, cinema has become a means of expression in the same ways as the pen or the paintbrush. . . . A first work by a woman of talent, La Pointe Courte is also the first bell of an immense carillon.”19 The caméra-stylo— the idea of the director’s creative expression via cinema being equal to the author or visual artist and the idea of the director being able to exercise individual creativity—was seen at the time as a reaction against the “tradition of quality” (cinéma de qualité) and the dependence of the director on the screenwriter and larger studio system.20 Bazin also saw in Varda’s film “a total freedom of style, which creates the impression, so rare in cinema, that we are in the presence of a work that obeys only the dreams and desires of its auteur with no other external obligations.”21 The concepts of the auteur and caméra-stylo meant that the work was primarily viewed in terms of personal creativity and filmic expression—and would establish Varda as an innovative precursor or first member of the New Wave movement. By 1959, critic Jean Douchet proclaimed, “Agnès Varda: Young Cinema Owes It All to Her,” praising her for her individual aesthetic and for making her film outside the established channels of the industry; by the early 1960s, historian Georges Sadoul described La Pointe Courte as the awakening of the New Wave.22 This proved an important interpretation across Varda’s career, yet it occludes Varda’s work with other cinematic, photographic, and painting conventions as well as with the politics they convey.

play w ith n e or ea l is m in la pointe courte A theme of neorealism that also runs through the reception of La Pointe Courte merits further investigation.23 Varda’s scenes of the village were

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seen to operate in a realist or neorealist register, in contrast to the stylized, formally composed scenes of the couple. Many contemporary scholars compared La Pointe Courte with Italian neorealism, seeing Varda cultivate this aesthetic through location shooting in a Mediterranean fishing village, using nonactors (inhabitants of the village), and a “documentary,” “realist,” or “neorealist” aesthetic.24 Later in her career, Varda herself asserted that the film had a neorealist strand: “There are no dramatic events, just the juxtaposition of two worlds and two ways of seeing the world. One is carefully crafted in terms of framing and dialogue, and the other is more like Italian neorealism.” But she also claimed that this was inadvertent or coincidental, adding, “though I’d never seen those films at the time.”25 Elsewhere, Varda said that when she made the film she was not familiar with Bazin’s work on neorealism.26 Scholars since have frequently followed her lead, discerning neorealism in her approach while dismissing the possibility that she was working with that convention. For instance, Alison Smith asserts: “Her first film, La Pointe Courte (1954), an evocation of a Mediterranean fishing community, which also explores the contradictions of a relationship, made her a modest name as a young director at the fringes of Italian neo-realism (although she was totally ignorant of the movement at the time).”27 Or, for example, Kelley Conway observes: “It is as if Varda had been inspired by the workers’ performances in Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948) and had also anticipated Antonioni’s alienated couples in L’Avventura and The Eclipse. This mixture of acting styles is similar to the postneorealist cinema of Rossellini, notably Stromboli (1950) and Journey to Italy, films that also juxtapose urban northern intellectuals with southern rural laborers. . . . It is hard to argue, however, for a direct neorealist influence, since Varda was unfamiliar with the work of Rossellini or any other Italian directors at this stage of her career.”28 In fact, across her career, Varda has asserted that the inspiration for the innovative structure of her film was William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, with its alternating stories taking place in the same geographic location but not intersecting. Varda explains: “The intellectual basis of the film was William Faulkner’s novel The Wild Palms . . . it was composed of two very different things: the story of a couple struggling with their relationship and the story of two convicts. . . . What Faulkner did was extraordinary:

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he had a chapter about the couple, a chapter about the escaped convicts . . . with no link between them. . . . It could be seen as the clash between private life and social life, which can never be joined.”29 Scholars have often taken this reference to illustrate her literary, as opposed to cinematic, knowledge.30 But on careful inspection, Varda appears to invoke Bazin himself. Bazin praised Italian neorealism as the cinematic equivalent of the modern American novel, comparing the innovative narrative strategies of these films to novels by Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos. By comparing her film’s structure with that of Faulkner’s narratives, Varda described La Pointe Courte in terms Bazin used to champion Italian neorealism as modern cinema—and he, in turn, commended her film in those terms. He praised La Pointe Courte, calling it “a perfect example of a ‘modern avant-garde.’ ”31 He compared her to a novelist, and asserted that the film’s narrative “possesses the nuanced subtlety and above all the slow development of a novel,”32 noting, “we watch La Pointe Courte like we read a novel.”33 This suggests that Varda was not so naïve, but that she was drawing on the advanced cinematic discourses and practices of her day. Like The Wild Palms, the film alternates between two stories, in this case between 10-minute fictional sequences of the local fishing community and of the couple visiting from Paris. The husband grew up there, and returns after twelve years; his wife of four years arrives and they try to determine whether to stay together in lengthy exchanges. In the village, local fishermen attempt to maintain their trade in opposition to health inspectors concerned with water contamination; a child succumbs to disease; and a young man and woman seek approval to date. Varda and others claim that these stories are separate and have contrasted the social problems of the community with the emotional struggle of the couple as well as the two different styles in which they are depicted. The couple is associated with non-naturalistic acting, oblique dialogue—their emotions are conveyed through “aesthetics” and “stylization”34 (via symbolic composition and sound as well as a score of clarinets)—as opposed to the seemingly realist depiction of the villagers, naturalistic sound, and local music. Critics perceived contrasts between the bourgeois professional actors and the working-class community of La Pointe Courte; the composed shots of the couple representing their emotional relationship and a

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“sociological representation of a working-class milieu”; the verbose, literary nature of the couple’s speech and the more “natural” and “trivial” conversations of the villagers; and the extra-diegetic music (a clarinet score by Pierre Barbaud) that accompanies the sequences on the couple and the more naturalistic sound and local airs in the scenes of the villagers.35 Jean-Louis Tallenay, a critic who collaborated with Bazin, specifically compared the film to neorealism: “If one must find references in this work, one must search in neorealism”; particularly, in “Voyage to Italy (which is also the dialogue of a couple that comes undone and redone) and in La Terra Trema, a poignant revelation of the life of poor fishermen without romanticism. . . .” In La Pointe Courte the “two Parisians speak their language: an intentionally literary language, one of the rare texts in cinema that is truly written [écrit]; the dialogues between the inhabitants of the village appear recorded live, pithy, and raw. The images of the village cabins have the truth of reportage [photojournalistic reporting]; those of the two protagonists are full of symbolism and photographic recherches [meticulous, studied composition].”36 That is, beyond the fictional narrative stories of the village, critics and scholars have frequently insisted that Varda provides a “realist,” “authentic,” or “documentary” representation of local labor, customs, and “mentality.”37 Film scholar Frank Curot, for example, explains that the scenes of the fisherman and villagers have [a] realist and regional character, which is remarkable in comparison with the majority of films conceived and produced in Paris and taking Sète as décor de tournage [film set or backdrop] and the inhabitants as extras. A documentary authenticity appears through different elements of the film: the dialogues capturing local ways of speaking (not only the meridional accent, but also the vocabulary and turns of phrase), in its everydayness and even in its crudeness. The filmed persons exude their character from themselves, from their social circumstances, from their work experience, and their collective mentality. These situations, these conflicts were developed by the director and the inhabitants of La Pointe Courte, as indicated in the opening credits. The cinematic experience attests to the undeniable interest brought to a regional place, to people, to faces, to gestures, to activities, to problems, to traditions of a small community living in a singular, almost insular, place. With her attentive gaze, Agnès Varda honestly anchors her fiction in a local reality. . . .38

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Similarly, Bazin compared Varda’s film to those of Roberto Rossellini and Luchino Visconti, praising it in terms he associated with neorealism: he valued the human frame—the specific social setting; it was not filmed in an abstracted studio set but on location in the community of La Pointe Courte.39 Yet there are odd things that critics could not understand in the ostensibly neorealist portrayal of the village. Bazin, for example, wrote: “the author adopted a paradoxical tendency toward stylization in realism. All is simple and natural, and, at the same time, minimal [dépouillé] and studied [composé]. Perhaps I don’t always agree with . . . this tendency in the images. Perhaps Agnès Varda could not forget . . . her talents as a photographer.”40 Critics saw “aesthetics” and “stylization”—unusual compositional and photographic elements lurking in and disturbing what they believed to be realism; they saw this as a fault, not a strategy. Yet close examination of the film’s visual register reveals that Varda both invoked elements associated with neorealism and subtly challenged them. For example, depth of field was often associated with neorealism, and Bazin advocated its use for establishing social relations and conflict. At times, La Pointe Courte appears to use depth of field to do so. For instance, there is a meeting of fishermen in a darkened shack on shore to discuss how to address the claims of water contamination. They debate whether to organize and have their own tests done to try to contest a restriction on fishing, given that the nearby pond is where the most valuable shellfish can be found and an important part of their livelihood. After this, a fisherman leaves and walks outside. We see a long shot of a fisherman placing a net on his boat with a lengthy wooden flexible pole extended toward shore as he prepares to go out to fish. Yet here, Varda creates a playful scene—not advancing the story of the fishermen, but drawing our attention to how the illusion of depth of field is created. She uses a still shot of the boat from the shore, with nets and equipment in the foreground, an oblong view of the boat in the middle ground, and water in the background (with the horizon line obscured from view) (fig. 6). The end of the wooden pole, which points toward the camera, waves up and down—it is radically foreshortened and evokes a range of orthogonals (from the upper to the lower portion of the shot)—converging near the central “vanishing point”41 of the image. On the ground the diagonal

Fig. 6. As the fisherman prepares his boat, his flexible wooden fishing pole waves up and down, suggesting orthogonals and the construction of depth of field. The shot is then “interrupted” by another fisherman crossing in front of the camera; his pole reads as a horizon line, bobbing out of synch with the waves and boat behind it. La Pointe Courte, 1954.

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shadow from a wooden pole on the left appears mirrored by a wood plank and rope on the right, which also read as orthogonals, pointing toward the vanishing point: a small wooden pole extending from the back of the boat (and occasionally obscured by the fisherman’s head). Then another fisherman walks in front of the camera (right to left, perpendicular to it), carrying a lengthy net and pole over his shoulder. He quickly moves past the camera, yet for 10 seconds we see the close-up of the wooden pole crossing the immediate foreground—extending horizontally—playfully evoking a horizon line bouncing up and down—blocking from view the vanishing point and humorously bobbing out of synch with the waves and boat in the background. And then the end of the pole moves past and out of view at the end of the shot (see fig. 6). Here Varda does not focus on the “social geography” or the material struggle of the fisherman; we do not see the process of how they fish or how they continue to address this social conflict. While one fisherman prepares his boat, he is distracted from by the waving pole. Then the shot is “interrupted” by the fisherman walking in front of the camera and the horizontal pole in the foreground, blocking the view of the fisherman and boat and depth of field. Varda played with conventions—such as how we read a rod in front of the camera as a horizon line because of the way depth is compressed in a two-dimensional image. She combines a fixed camera shot (suggesting a photograph or a painting) and cinematic movement within it—the swinging pole evoking orthogonals or the man with the pole in the foreground walking into the shot and back out. Here, Varda reminds us that she is not presenting “life as it is” but understanding how we interpret the medium and humorously breaking conventions of composition—and interrupting what might otherwise be scenes of labor. Varda’s orthogonals playfully evoke techniques of Renaissance painting, specifically linear perspective. Varda has said that Silvia Monfort’s hairline and long neck reminded her of the women in Piero della Francesca’s paintings.42 Important here is that the Renaissance artist was celebrated for using geometric forms and developing methods of rendering linear perspective in his paintings (and written work).43 Varda wittily invokes and thwarts this rendering of space. She references Renaissance painting techniques to draw attention to the construction of depth of field and the cinematic illusion.

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two way s of s eein g? Varda and subsequent critics describe the film as telling two stories that do not intersect, even though they share the same space: one about the local residents of La Pointe Courte, the other about the visiting couple. In contrast to the neorealism associated with Varda’s portrayal of the village, scholars see Varda employing “formalism” or “aesthetics” in her representation of the couple. It is difficult to access the characters in ways we might expect, such as dialogue, expression, or gesture, and scholars have spent considerable effort seeking to interpret their relationship. Some have seen elements of their surroundings representing the emotions of the couple, and many find a story of mutual understanding and reconciliation. But in insisting that the couple’s and villagers’ stories are separate, they overlook how the villagers also serve as symbols for the couple’s relationship. And when we see the villagers representing emotional dynamics of the couple, we question the notion that the film represents a reconciliation. Varda does not represent the couple with naturalistic conventions. In fact, the characters remain unnamed and are simply referred to as “him” and “her” in the script.44 In a 1961 interview she asserted: “I wanted [the couple] to seem artificial [faux]. I didn’t want people to identify with them. So I wanted them to have a certain tone, to say things in a literary fashion. . . . It is obvious that a couple explaining themselves to one another does not speak like that. I wanted this fabricated [way of speaking] to be represented theatrically, if you like. It is a theater of the couple.”45 She directed Noiret and Monfort (two actors from Vilar’s theater company) to use non-naturalistic acting styles, using few gestures or facial expressions to convey the emotion and conflicts of the couple. They tend to sit or stand still, and seem to recite verbose dialogue with little variation in tone—so much so that some critics disparaged the actors’ rigidity.46 The dialogue is often oblique. On arriving in La Pointe Courte, the woman asks her husband, “my face hasn’t changed, has it?” Only later does she say, “you cheated on me, and I tried to cheat on you”—a line that passes so quickly amid otherwise lengthy dialogue that audiences of the 1950s sometimes missed it and felt they could not understand why she was upset.47 Varda herself later explained: “I didn’t want the actors to act or to express feelings, . . . [but] to speak their dialogue as if reading it.”48

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Contemporary scholars read this approach as influenced by the work of Bertolt Brecht, which Varda encountered while working as a photographer for Vilar’s Théâtre National Populaire. Conway, drawing on the work of Emmanuelle Loyer, explains that in this period Vilar was “aiming for a style of acting that avoided the extremes of both the actor’s ‘complete disappearance’ into the character and a radical Brechtian distanciation between the actor and character.”49 Others describe the lack of emotion and the “atonal” music that accompanies these scenes as creating a distancing effect.50 But whether or not they found the recited dialogue or absence of expressive acting to be Brechtian, critics from the time and since have explored how Varda turns to composition and sound to convey the dynamics of the couple. For example, critics and scholars frequently note how the film portrays the couple in conflict (before their supposed reconciliation) with wooden fences or other architectural elements on the shore bisecting the frame, separating them (see fig. 5).51 Indeed, critics and scholars have read the characters’ conflict as conveyed by clashing elements: the man, the son of a shipbuilder, associated with wood, and the woman, from Paris, associated with trains and metal. For instance, upon her arrival, the man shows the woman his childhood home and the shipyard where his father worked. However, he has just insisted, “What I’ve found here is mine alone” and cannot be shared with her. A shrill metallic sound rises in intensity while the “camera zooms out on Monfort, revealing her confused-looking face and silhouette,” the noise conveying her “disarray,”52 after which we see it is the noise of a man using a sander to work on a wooden-frame boat. Shortly thereafter, as they walk through a field, she is about to tell him she thinks they should separate. A train appears suddenly, the two characters waiting stiffly and silently beside the tracks, as it creaks and grinds, barreling straight at the camera, with the intense close-up shot and the grating metal sounds conveying the emotional intensity of her response. Many conclude that this conflict is temporary: that the couple come to know each other better through their time at La Pointe Courte, that the woman gains an understanding of her husband’s childhood home, and that they are happily reconciled at the end of the film. Bazin asserts, “The couple spins its own destiny. . . . At the end of this dreamy quest, [the cou-

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ple] finds itself newly reunited.”53 The established reading of the couple’s eventual harmony is also based on a more literal interpretation of the narrative: at the end of the film, the couple leaves for Paris together. Part of this reading comes from the breakdown of the alternating structure of the stories at the very end of the film. The couple and the villagers are present at the jousting tournament and the ball, interpreted as festive and happy events for both groups. Scholars also read the sequence of the couple on the beach in the last third of the film as it shifts to the fish caught in nets as a shift to more harmony in the relationship (fig. 7). We see the two members of the couple facing each other on the beach—with the fishermen visible between them in the background. The camera moves from the couple to the fishermen, who enter the water. A high-angle long shot shows the fishermen beginning to lay nets and thrash the water, while the couple in the foreground walks out of the shot. The camera returns to fishermen laying nets in the water. In the next shot we see fish being pulled from nets and flailing in a box, and there is a musical hold, in a minor key. The camera then returns to a shot of the fishermen from above, and the couple walks into the frame again on shore, looking at the nets, with another musical hold adding emphasis. Curot, for example, reads this scene as a successful fishing excursion signifying man’s harmony with nature, joined with the couple’s reconciliation—humanist themes. (This fits with his overall reading of a more positive representation of both the village and the couple over the course of the film.) In contrast to the polluted and heavily policed pond, he says, here the water takes on a positive cast, as a “source of plentiful food.” He sees this “harmony of man and nature” as a “metaphor [for] the newfound harmony between the couple.” He describes the shots of pulling in the nets and collecting fish in a box as representations of “a successful fishing expedition.”54 Curot notes with some confusion, however, that this scene is filmed with “coldness and distance” and “doesn’t have the rhythm, vivacity, or fullness of the famous tuna fishing scene in Stromboli.”55 He also remarks that Varda’s treatment differs from that in other neorealist films, where the events are filmed from a subjective point of view to evoke either the characters’ subjectivity or the social stakes of the event. Indeed, the camera moves oddly from the couple’s conversation to the fishermen. Curot seems to have difficulty explaining the move and unusual camera angle.

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Fig. 7. The couple (Philippe Noiret and Silvia Monfort) talking on the beach while fishermen work. La Pointe Courte, 1954.

He concludes that the circularity of the net (as opposed to the earlier angular elements separating the characters) echoes their “regained understanding” and that “the happy atmosphere of the lovers’ reconciliation” corresponds to “the fruitful fishing and leads to the general harmony of the final sequence (the celebration).”56 But Varda signals that this scene is not primarily intended to explicate the fishermen. We see them working during one of the couple’s sequences, accompanied by the music associated with the couple. We do not know who the fishermen are, there is no narrative consequence for the fishing, and, as Curot notes, Varda films them with coldness and distance. A new source helps to explain Varda’s unusual composition of shots here and suggests that the surroundings, including the fishermen, in fact symbolically represent the couple. The composition of Varda’s shot references Piero della Francesca’s Portrait of Federico da Montefeltro and His Spouse

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Fig. 8. Piero della Francesca (ca. 1420–1492), Portrait of Federico da Montefeltro and His Spouse Battista Sforza, ca. 1465. Tempera on wood. Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Photograph courtesy of Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

Battista Sforza (ca. 1465) (fig. 8). Piero’s diptych painting—also referred to as Portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino—has long been noted for its unusual combination of portraiture with landscape.57 The duke and duchess are portrayed in profile in the foreground, with a landscape (rendered in aerial perspective) in the background. The subjects face one another, signifying their eternal love. The couple’s characteristics are echoed in the landscape, which symbolizes their positions and title: patterns on the duchess’s dress resemble patches of land, and the outline of the duke’s chin is echoed by the curve of a hill. By referencing this painting, Varda signals that we should consider how the filmed couple is represented by their surroundings—albeit not so much by physical resemblance, as by symbolism. And Varda’s unusual shot of the fishermen from above evokes the aerial perspective of fishing boats in the painting.58 We can thus see this scene as symbolic of the film’s couple, although it is not about their harmony, but about their problems. It conveys an

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ongoing sense of misunderstanding and makes their decision to leave for Paris together appear extremely tenuous. This beach scene suggests that the woman is trapped: the fish thrashing in the net suggest a woman caught up in a relationship, accommodating herself to her philandering husband. She had come to La Pointe Courte to tell the man that they should separate, but here she begins to abandon the idea; in the next scene she says: “I came to leave you, but there are better things to do. I came to make noise, and silence has won out.” Far from agreement, it suggests her being stifled. Her reason for staying with him appears to be less a desire for reconciliation and more inertia, uncertainty, and a lack of will to change. This, too, is communicated in their body language in the earlier sections of the film: she makes an oblique statement about their relationship and pauses, he takes her by the arm and leads her in another direction. One senses that she is upset and registering a problem, but he repeatedly pulls her back in. We can also see this dynamic at work in the sequence of the couple watching the Sunday water jousting on the canal. As with the fishing scene, scholars and critics frequently read this as a depiction of a harmonious relationship: here, the man and the woman are coming to know one another better and are becoming more involved in the life of the village, leading to their reconciliation. In these last scenes, the alternating structure between the villagers and the couple seems to break down; critics and scholars often see increasing moments of happiness for the village and for the couple in the jousting and ball sequences. Instead, I read them as representing the continued misunderstanding between the couple, suggesting that they do not come to fully understand one another or happily reconcile—and that the ending is a more tenuous and ambivalent one. The couple sits with the audience on the side of the canal, watching a Sunday water-jousting competition, a long-standing local tradition and tourist attraction in La Pointe Courte.59 Jousters stand on elevated wooden platforms at the back of gondola-like boats, each armed with a lance and wooden shield. As oarsmen propel the boats toward each other, each jouster uses his lance to attempt to knock his opponent off his boat and into the water. At the same time, each jouster attempts to protect himself from his adversary with a wooden shield and maintain his balance. Musicians on boats play flageolets, harkening back to earlier traditions.

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The jousting scene is intercut with a little drama of misunderstandings. In a shot of the audience, the woman sees a child with an ice cream cone. The film briefly cuts to the jousters. Then the man notices that her chair is empty, tries to spot her in the audience, and upon not finding her, looks downcast. He pauses in his seat and hangs his head, with a crestfallen expression. He looks at the empty chair, which we see in a close-up; then the film cuts to the jousting match. She returns, carrying two ice cream cones. She smiles at him, gives him one, and raises her cone as if offering a toast. He looks at his cone and gives it to a child seated nearby, rebuffing her affectionate gesture. That night he tells her he thought she had left him, but here the jousting comments on their relationship. After the shot of her empty chair, the film cuts to a shot of a jouster’s lance aimed at Raphael, a villager, who is briefly knocked off-kilter but regains his balance.60 The film cuts to the opponent’s lance, which appears to come toward us; the lance moves past us, and we hear the sound of the impact as it rams a jouster’s shield. Then there is another cut to a lance and a jouster advancing; Raphael repels him with his lance, knocking him into the water. We see boats with oarsmen rowing and musicians playing flageolets, then another jump cut to a jouster being hit with the lance with a loud blow to his shield. Varda uses repeated jump cuts, with the camera placed slightly below the defending jouster, to suggest emotional bombardment and self-protection as the jouster tries to shield his heart and chest from the adversary’s lance. This is the film’s only sequence with jump cuts, and it jolts us. At the symbolic level, it is clear that neither member of the couple understands the other. Near the end of the film, she says that she is “resigned, reassured, and delighted,” and he says that he knows that in several days she’ll start suggesting the break-up all over again, an indication that the relationship is not as harmoniously resolved as it might first appear. Though Varda uses the villagers to comment on the couple, using scenes of workers to represent a fictional bourgeois couple seems like an odd thing to do. If this were neorealism, we would expect the local activity to further illuminate this community of people and place (as Curot sought to read the fishing scene); if this were Brechtian, we might expect the artifice of the representation broken to focus on broader politics or class struggle. Instead, we see the couple watching the villagers, but the couple

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themselves do not seem to see or fully understand the local people or the locale, and this is how Varda’s politics start to become visible. The Parisian woman is an urban outsider; he is engrossed in his memories of what was. This is conveyed through their dialogue during the jousting: he says every Sunday they joust; she asks how people could watch it every week (not understanding the custom, thinking it would be repetitive and dull); he says, “if you knew the jousters as I do, their passes and little tricks” and then catches himself and says, “it’s a sight I’ve always known, and it enchants me.” In other words, he starts to claim knowledge, but then admits that he views it through the lens of nostalgia. Their dialogue represents their difficulties comprehending the local people and place. The couple’s inability to see the villagers is literalized in the ball scene at the end of the film—another scene that critics have read as harmonious, because the couple and the villagers share the same space during a happy event.61 The couple appears oblivious to all around them—caught up in the discussion of their relationship, they stare ahead unseeing (despite being jostled and knocked by dancing couples).62 Elsewhere, the couple does not seem to see the landscape. Near the beginning of the film, she stares ahead, focused on their conversation, not paying attention to where she is walking. She steps in a puddle and laughs, asking, “but where are you taking me to?” The camera detaches from the couple and turns to pan the landscape from above—we see abstract patterns in the ground—scraggly grass, shadows and dark pits in sand, and crisscrossed tracks. It is not a “beautiful” landscape as some have claimed—but one that evokes confusion via abstract composition. In fact, such views of the villagers and village can also make the audience feel disoriented, a theme explored in the next section.

local airs Beyond commenting on the couple, what is the role of the villagers and village in this film? On one level, they seem to represent a neorealist desire to make visible local work, poverty, and traditions through long takes— shucking shellfish, hanging laundry, ship building, fishing, water jousting—though they remain unexplained. The villagers also act out fictional

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stories: the death of a child; the fishermen struggling to maintain their trade in opposition to health officials; and the young couple Anna and Raphael—originally forbidden to date by her father—coming to be allowed to dance at the ball at the film’s end. These fictional stories seem to fit with neorealism; the idea of a slice of life, a local community of nonactors shot on location, and the themes of love, death, and struggle against higher authority have been interpreted as themes to which audiences relate. Delphine Bénézet, for example, asserts: “By privileging experiences common to most of us, such as the loss of a loved one (Daniel), the frustration felt when one is being constrained (Raphael and Anna), and the joy of being together (the joutes [jousting tournament], the men’s meal and ball), Varda makes this community approachable and endearing. The audience may not know the details of the villagers’ psychology very well . . . but by the end of the film, there is a sense that we know and understand the daily challenges and joys of these people. . . . Everyone can relate to them.”63 But the opening credits suggest the representation is more complicated and challenging to decipher. We see the opening credits on what appears to be a photograph—a close-up of a wooden board. It foreshadows the wood that will be associated with the male shipbuilders and symbolically with the main male character (the son of a shipbuilder). The wood also evokes the geography of La Pointe Courte—a knot resembles the pond, with the rings around it suggesting waves of sand on beaches (and wooden splinters in the upper left evoke trees and shrubs in the sandy landscape). It appears to be a photograph, but after the credits, the camera turns, panning—showing it to be a wooden chair with wooden walls behind it in the space of the village. Then, with a tracking shot, the camera slowly advances down a narrow street (fig. 9). The rousing “local airs” of the credits cease, and more naturalistic, subtle sound begins. Laundry blows on a line strung across the street, with the rectangular white towels fluttering in the breeze, as if curtains being partially raised to permit our view. Varda’s tracking shot advances down the impoverished street (which is nonetheless rendered aesthetic with the beautiful billowing laundry dancing in the frame). With this tracking shot, Varda sets us up as outsiders, trying to make sense of this unpeopled place with vague voices and sounds. We see only the exteriors of people’s

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Fig. 9. The opening credits appear over what at first seems to be a photograph of a wooden plank. After the credits, the camera turns, revealing it to be a wooden chair; then the camera slowly advances in a tracking shot down a narrow street. La Pointe Courte, 1954.

homes and hear the faint, indistinguishable voices of the local inhabitants, seemingly all behind closed doors.64 We occasionally hear the clatter of silverware and undefined speech and noises. (Is it seagulls? Traffic in the distance? Is the creaking metal sound from the shutters flapping in the wind or a boat docked nearby beyond our view?) Instead of an establishing shot setting up a sense of a place and main characters, here things are disorienting and not what they first seem, visually or aurally. The text of the opening credits also establishes contradictory expectations. Appearing over the “photograph” (the shot of a wood plank that turns out to be a chair), the credits begin with the two stars: “Silvia MONFORT and Philippe NOIRET [performing] in La Pointe Courte [the film].” The

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actors’ last names appear in capitals, as is frequent in French convention. “Scenario and realization by AGNES VARDA” (all in capitals) and then— “and the inhabitants of La Pointe Courte” (the place is capitalized, the inhabitants not) (see fig. 9). “Scénario” in French can include the screenplay—dialogue and shooting directions. “Réalisation” means making it happen or accomplishing the film. Varda lists herself in all capitals (signifying it is her film), but then also suggests inhabitants’ co-authorship, conveying generosity in acknowledging the villagers. Yet the inhabitants are unnamed (and in lower case) by comparison. Whereas the named stars perform in the film, this credit implies that the villagers appear in some sort of authentic self-representation. The local inhabitants do play characters in the film, such as an aging fisherman “Uncle Jules,” or Anna and Raphael—the young couple who wish to date, but these performances are not credited. Similarly, Barbaud—the composer who wrote the musical score for the scenes of the couple—is credited, whereas the local musicians (who perform later in the film and whose music is heard during the opening credits) are uncredited, and the music is not specified beyond “local airs.” In fact, Varda plays on the meanings of “local airs.” Most straightforwardly, the phrase conveys the idea of the music or tunes specific to this community—the lively local music we hear. But the film leaves it undescribed and unnamed for outside audiences. We do not know what it represents for the community; in fact, it positions us as outsiders or tourists. At the same time, “air” can mean “breeze.” At the beginning of the tracking shot, proceeding down the narrow street, Varda abruptly switches from one local air to another—from the lively, disproportionately loud local tune of snare drums and clarinets, to the more naturalistic muted (dubbed) sound of wind blowing; we hear the “local air” that blows the laundry and shutters, animating an otherwise unpeopled and still scene, with the indistinguishable voices of people occasionally wafting through and muffled by the wind. “Air” can also mean a general atmosphere or ambiance, or it can suggest having the look or appearance of something (i.e. “he had a confused air”). So “local airs” suggests the seeming external appearance of the local people and place to outsiders who aren’t certain how to read them. On one level, the credits “scenario and realization: AGNES VARDA and the inhabitants of La Pointe Courte”—suggests an authenticity, as if

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Fig. 10. Varda’s sketch of the fisherman in the film’s shooting script. © Agnès Varda.

this is the local inhabitants’ representation of themselves, or at least suggests that the film represents specific people and places. But the multiple ideas of “local airs” without further specific histories also suggests a general atmosphere or seeming appearance, a kind of touristic generality of the local representation (ambiance). The credits and opening shot suggest the authenticity of the representation while also calling it into question. Varda also interrogates notions of neorealist fidelity and empathy by referencing a distinctive photographic register. Moving from her representation of the village to her representation of a villager, a fisherman mending nets, she reflects on the power dynamics of neorealist representation. Varda deliberately and carefully composed this shot as a photograph: evidence from her archives reveals that she made advance photographic studies, drawing the composition of this shot into her shooting script, and her photographic records of the making of the film show her arranging the net and scene (figs. 10, 11).

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Fig. 11. Photograph of Varda arranging the scene during the making of La Pointe Courte. © Ciné-Tamaris.

In her sketch we see a wealth of precise details: the fisherman’s hat, pipe, and wooden clogs; he’s seated on a wooden chair, mending fishing nets. That is, though this is only one shot in a continually moving film, she references a particular genre of photography: petits métiers, or minor trades.65 This genre proliferated in the mid- to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and continued in the period following the Second World War.66 These photographs often represented traditional practices and depicted persons at sites of work.67 Varda invokes what would have been a familiar subject and composition—an open wooden door, with a fisherman inside mending a net, wearing a hat, wooden clogs, and mended clothing, and smoking a pipe. In part the minor trades photographs were motivated by preservationist ideas—the notion of documenting local practices disappearing in the face of modernization, and capturing vernacular practices—people and

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labor—that might not otherwise be part of the visual archive. This interest in capturing local practices resonates with aspects of twentieth-century Italian neorealism—location shooting, nonactors, and specific communities expressed a will to portray people and places that would not normally be represented in feature-length film. But in the mid- to late nineteenth century or early twentieth century, the minor trades photographs were based on the pseudo-science of physiognomy and were often considered to be authentic documents or records of types of labor and workers. This photographic practice entailed a belief that one could capture a person “typical” of a social category and make him or her “legible” to the observing audience. Scholarship of the last four to five decades has underscored the fabrication and distortions of the minor trades images, as well as the power dynamics involved in their making and circulation.68 Typically, photographers and studios from outside a community would make them, often posing the subjects to invoke stock characters and subjects. Middle- and upper-class people, rather than the social groups or workers depicted, would frequently buy the images. Revisionist scholarship has also emphasized that these representations often rendered poverty, labor, or laborers aesthetic and non-threatening for the middle- and upper-class audiences that consumed them. It is a genre associated with authenticity and preservation, then, but also with fabrications of representations of people, labor, and groups for audiences who would not necessarily recognize the distortions given their social and geographic distance. Varda questions the conventions and connotations of both this genre and neorealism: what they capture (or cannot), and what expectations they set for an audience. In doing so, she also points to the power dynamics among the represented subjects, makers, and audiences. Like the minor trades, the local dialogue in Varda’s film is an attempt at authenticity69—going to the provinces, making records—but also involves editing in Paris and fabrication. Both raise the issue of the unfamiliar audiences accepting the images and speech as authentic, not recognizing the distortions in attempts to make the subjects legible to them. Varda had grown up in Sète, near La Pointe Courte, and returned there in summers. Over time, she befriended the fishermen of La Pointe Courte, who told her family stories, and she obtained their permission to write them down. Although the film’s stories of the villagers are fictions, Varda explained

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that they were based on families’ actual stories, and she invested significant time listening to local speech and transcribing the dialogue and dialect.70 In a 2008 interview, Varda explains, however: We just had no money to shoot with sound, so we shot without sound. We didn’t even have basic direct sound recording. We wrote down what was said. I’d written down the dialogue, and because [Noiret and Monfort] were theater actors, they followed the script. But the fishermen and their families always missed a word or two, so we had to write it all down. Then we tried to read their lips and dub their lines. We couldn’t bring them to Paris, so we decided to have their voices dubbed by people in Paris who had that kind of accent or who could imitate it. The fishermen were upset when they saw the film because they didn’t recognize their voices. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t their voices.71

Some of the specific detail and dialogue are preserved in the script, but other particularities of what the people said are lost, dubbed over; we can see that their lips do not quite move in synch with the dialogue. And Varda calls attention to this. After the shot of the fisherman with the nets that resembles a minor trade photograph, another fisherman comes to speak to him. The visitor asks him to speak louder—saying he’s gone deaf—and explains it’s terrible, when he goes to the movies: “I [can] tell their lips moved but that’s all”—he can’t understand what they’re saying. With this, Varda hints at the way the villagers’ mouths occasionally move out of synch with the dubbed dialogue and at our inability to make out what they say, encouraging us to be reflective as well. The end of the film once again reminds us that we are outsiders or tourists—only understanding the general or surface, not the local and specific, and it plays on the idea of “local airs” to do so. The final shot is closely cropped—it shows four musicians, their eyes level with the camera (fig. 12). Whereas shortly beforehand we see the musicians playing at the ball, surrounded by local people dancing, here the musicians face the camera head on. Two play drums and two play clarinets, returning to the music (the unspecified local tune or air) from the opening credits and shot, suggesting both local authorship and our lack of access. The musicians wear costumes: white clothing and straw hats associated with the jousting festivities and ball—which are both local customs and tourist events, though we do not know the significance.

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Fig. 12. Musicians play local airs in the film’s final shot. La Pointe Courte, 1954.

Three musicians look directly at the camera with little facial expression, fixing our gaze. One stares directly at the camera, while two others’ eyes dart around searchingly. When they finish playing, the two clarinetists put down their instruments, whereas the drummers pause and hold their pose, before “FIN” appears on the screen.72 In contrast to her earlier play with depth of field, there are literal and figurative qualities of “flatness” conveyed by the shot. Due to the wall behind the musicians, there is shallow spatial depth; even the stage floor appears tilted and flattened. The musicians have a “flat” lack of expression (which seems out of character with the rousing music and celebration). Varda suggests this is a surface impression of the people, rather than in-depth understanding. This final shot unmasks the illusion of realism and underscores the artifice of the scene—they perform for us and acknowledge the camera rather than pretending this is life caught unaware. Whereas neorealism can have a picturesque quality— inviting audiences to curiously inspect and explore and potentially empa-

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thize in a humanist way, here we are stared back at in silence; we are unable to decipher the expressionless faces or eyes roving over the camera and are made uncomfortably aware of our own voyeurism. Although scholars and critics have recognized the importance of the film as heralding in the New Wave with its stylized cinematic practices and work outside the industry, such interpretations obscure the film’s combination of aesthetics and politics.73 Sociologist Philippe Mary explains that by advancing notions of personal expression in film form, critics “position[ed] themselves against that sector of cinephile critics, on the Christian Left or within the Communist Party, who tend[ed] to impose political or ideological principles on their judgments.”74 Varda draws attention to dynamics of social class that such discussions avoided. La Pointe Courte does, in a neorealist framework, bring interest to particular people and places, but Varda works against the conventions associated with realism and authenticity as well as the humanism often associated with Italian neorealism; she undercuts the notion that we can comprehend the local people and place and shows this is not a rendering of things as they are. We are disoriented and confronted with the fact that we see the villagers superficially. The film’s couple are an urban outsider, a Parisian woman who sees a local fisherman as “this guy” (“ce type”) or the jousts being all the same— not understanding the differences or nuances; and a former village man who has come back after a 12-year absence and wants to hold on to the memories of what it was, although villagers tell him things have changed. Varda uses the couple to remind outside audiences not to be nostalgic or to imagine that such rustic villages exist in ways we might be tempted to assume.75 Throughout the film, the couple does not truly see the villagers, and Varda suggests that neither do we: we observe the couple sitting and talking with workers laboring in the background, while we watch the film, removed from the labor too. She implicates audiences in uncomfortable ways, and reminds us we have a social position and location as well. She self-consciously evokes what could be seen as the presumption of the filmmaker and viewers to interpret others. An exchange when the couple sits on the beach exemplifies this idea. The female character says to her husband she knows him so well, she could live in his place. The husband disagrees, saying that knowing

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gestures and mannerisms is one thing, but “knowledge is something else.” His statement applies to their incomprehension of one another but also suggests Varda’s commentary on neorealism. In other words, we see and hear details of the villagers’ labor, local customs, and dialect—but what do we truly know? In elaborating this question of not knowing, Varda suggests an analogy between the Parisian couple, the audiences of the musicians, the audiences of the minor trade photographs, and the audiences of her film. All of these audiences, including ourselves, have the leisure to watch workers toil and also possibly have the presumption to think we have a window into understanding those we might be tempted to see as intriguing local folk. If she draws upon photography and music (as well as local dialects, the presence of villagers themselves, and non-studio filming) to signal an on-location representation of a community, Varda plays with perspective and flatness to challenge the seeming realism, reminding us of the construction and that these are flat, superficial appearances. Scholars and critics sometimes found the villagers’ conversations and lives only “simple” and “trivial.” Yet Varda refuses to reduce villagers to their roles. Varda directed the two professional actors that play the couple to act non-naturalistically, to avoid disappearing into character; more subtly, she makes a related gesture with the villagers. Whereas Varda represents the emotions of the bourgeois couple symbolically (in part via the villagers), she ultimately refuses to explain the inner lives of the villagers, underscoring that they exceed their filmic representation and respecting their complexity, reminding us that she does not presume to understand them and neither should we. Here Varda prompts us to notice the limits of the representation and also the power dynamics at work. We will see this self-reflexivity about the relationship between the depicted subjects, the creator of the images, and the audience across Varda’s nonfiction work. Yet an equally significant strand of her oeuvre has been her exploration of feminist issues, a theme that runs throughout this study and is the focus of the next two chapters.

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Filmic and Feminist Strategies questioning ideals of happiness in le bonheur

Although Le Bonheur won the Silver Bear at the 1965 Berlin Film Festival and the 1965 Louis Delluc Prize, it has been Varda’s most misunderstood film, often criticized for its seemingly antifeminist themes and opacity. In brilliant, highly saturated color, Le Bonheur presents a blissfully happy family’s life, in which a housewife, Thérèse, is earnestly satisfied with her domestic duties (fig. 13). Her husband, though happy too, soon begins an affair; when he reveals his adultery to his wife, she commits suicide that same day. For viewers, an even greater shock comes when, approximately three months after Thérèse’s death, Emilie, the mistress, accepts François’s proposal and seamlessly takes Thérèse’s place, and the family’s life continues as apparently “happily” as before (fig. 14).1 A review in the New York Times observed: “Still confounding critics more than forty years after its making, Le Bonheur could qualify as either the most drippingly sentimental film ever made or the most dryly ironic. Internally, the film offers no clues.”2 Notwithstanding its relatively recent publication, this review is emblematic of the film’s critical reception over the past decades. Critics have condemned the film’s aesthetics: the “insipidness” of its color, “banal” dialogue, and “sickly-sentimental” characters.3 In recent decades, even as feminist film historians have recognized Varda as a 49

Fig. 13. The film’s opening credits show the happy family strolling in the countryside. Le Bonheur, 1965.

Fig. 14. In the final scene, the reconstituted family visits the countryside again. Le Bonheur, 1965.

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pioneer feminist filmmaker,4 Le Bonheur’s storyline has presented a problem with its “unforgivably” cruel treatment of the main female character, which continues to “offend by its uncritical portrayal” of a patriarchal family structure and love affair, and has conferred upon Varda a reputation for “idealism and conventionality . . . an inability to be socially critical.”5 Critics and film historians have focused primarily on the storyline of Le Bonheur, either praising the film for its beautiful tragic-romantic celebration of extramarital love or condemning the film for its disregard of conventional morality.6 While critics and scholars have considered the possibility that the film might be ironic, their focus has concentrated primarily on the ironies at the film’s surface (its clearly controversial “happy” ending and the assorted clichés in its sentimental dialogue).7 What has been neglected in the study of Le Bonheur is a sustained examination of Varda’s visual strategies and how they challenge not only the film’s plot but also its ostensible subject—the enduring nature of domestic love. This chapter will argue that Varda’s irony is visual rather than narrative; Le Bonheur’s visual rhetoric dismantles its sentimental storyline. When Le Bonheur was released, the daily toil of the French wife and mother had been glamorized by popular periodicals such as Elle and Marie Claire. This chapter uses archival excavation of imagery from such magazines to explain how Varda applied their imagery to the subjects, characters, and poses of Le Bonheur in order to interrogate contemporary representations of domestic harmony (fig. 15). Varda’s innovative visual rhetoric silently challenges the dominant narrative and constructs the film’s ironies, prompting spectators to actively question feminine ideals. Varda also engages with two influential texts: Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949)8 and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963, translated into French in 1964),9 references that have not been previously noted.10 Varda employs explicit imagery from these texts in order to explore, like Beauvoir and Friedan, the challenges of pursuing feminine fulfillment through traditional routes. Beauvoir and Friedan examined the “hidden” politics of private life; they addressed women’s return to the home and the rising birthrate in France and the United States after the Second World War, and revealed the power dynamics at work in the distribution of household labor that were ignored in popular representations of marital and maternal bliss. But Le Bonheur expands on these texts,

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Fig. 15. With a moment’s pause, Thérèse (Claire Drouot) reads a popular women’s magazine. Le Bonheur, 1965.

considering the ways that social class and gender constrained the choices available to women, particularly housewives. Of course in subsequent decades Beauvoir’s and Friedan’s texts were widely critiqued. But Varda’s involvement with them in the mid-1960s was both politically radical and aesthetically innovative—and previously unacknowledged. While pursuing feminist critique of popular culture, Varda continued her engagement with New Wave colleagues. Now an established director, her most recent feature film, Cléo de 5 à 7 (1961), had garnered critical acclaim and box office success. Cléo had been backed by New Wave producer Georges de Beauregard; it was creatively and improvisationally filmed on the streets of contemporary Paris (featuring cameos of New Wave contemporaries); and, as the story of a fictional young blonde pop star, it fit in many ways with how the New Wave was being championed. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the New Wave had been formally identified as a movement and was often associated with the explosion of popular culture being marketed to a generation of French youth (drawing on its contemporary and sometimes sexualized female subjects). Cléo was cele-

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brated as fresh, modern, and formally innovative in the context of the New Wave, and in subsequent decades it has been heralded by scholars as an important feminist film (due to the transformation of the female character from a passive, erotic object to an active subject).11 Yet Le Bonheur has been perceived quite differently: in 1965, when the New Wave movement had waned, the film’s aesthetic was sometimes seen as problematic and, later, the narrative interpreted as antifeminist. I reconsider these assertions. Revisionist film scholar Geneviève Sellier has argued that the New Wave’s engagement with popular culture took on gendered dynamics, with male directors often associating popular culture with female characters in their films in contrast to themselves as creators of elite cinematic art.12 Viewed in this framework, we can see Varda in Le Bonheur questioning this gender dynamic while using a sophisticated, subtle strategy, veiling her feminist critique. This chapter uncovers her strategy as well as uncharted territory in feminist film of the 1960s, perceiving new complexities in the feminist positions of the period and recognizing Varda’s participation in a sophisticated, trans-Atlantic discourse that investigated the organization of domestic life after the Second World War.

the ideal of the serving hand To understand the underlying critique of popular representations of womanhood that is woven into Le Bonheur, a close examination of the film’s imagery is required. To begin, let us focus on a short sequence of brief shots of closely cropped images of Thérèse’s hands as she carries out her daily routines. Although the sequence lasts less than a minute, it has a tremendous impact on the overall significance of the film. It occurs twenty-one minutes into the film, following longer scenes of François (who is, notably, filmed in three-quarter shots, as an integral person) at work. The sequence focuses on Thérèse’s arms and hands as she conducts her daily work: rolling out dough, ironing her son’s clothes, putting the children to bed, and so forth (fig. 16). The film cuts from task to task, showing approximately two or three seconds of each activity. Upon first viewing, this sequence might seem unremarkable—a representation of her daily domestic work, evoking the passage of time and Thérèse’s

Fig. 16. Shots of Thérèse’s hands as she carries out her daily tasks: rolling out dough, ironing her son’s clothes, and putting the children to bed. Le Bonheur, 1965.

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industriousness. But the similarity of Thérèse’s hands to the imagery in women’s magazines is striking, and once the connection is made, it becomes evident that the film’s agenda in using this imagery is entirely different: where the magazines glamorize domestic chores and represent an ideal to emulate, Le Bonheur interrogates such idealizations of happiness, suggesting the detrimental effects of housework on women. For audiences in the 1960s, the images of hands in this sequence would have been oddly familiar from other contexts. A number of critics recognized that the film adopted popular culture aesthetics, with its highly saturated color and images of happiness evoking advertising and women’s magazines. Jean-Louis Bory contended that “one would think [Varda] made the film for the readers [lectrices] of Elle magazine.”13 Pierre Philippe, writing for Cinéma, saw Varda striving to emulate high-art motifs and color palettes in the film’s aesthetic, but unconsciously falling into crass, feminine, commercial genres: department store window displays and the Bon Marché department store catalogue.14 In contrast, Susan Hayward has persuasively argued that Varda’s stylized use of color was subversive and deliberate.15 Indeed, Varda wanted to critique Elle magazine, not glorify it. Particular sources for these images exist—what I will term the image of the “serving hand”: the hand of the mother and wife, cropped from the complete body of the woman. This serving hand was frequently used for advertising domestic products in women’s magazines, such as Elle and Marie Claire. As Evelyne Sullerot and Kristin Ross have demonstrated, these magazines enjoyed thriving success during this period.16 Their articles and advertisements often featured a middle-class housewife who had married early, borne her children young, and become consumed in providing a smooth and serene home environment for her family. Although often appearing in serving roles, these women’s hands— and by implication, their owners—were intended to represent the fulfillment available to women in domestic life. None of the critical literature on Le Bonheur connected the film sequences of housewives’ hands to one of the dominant advertising devices of the day or tried to reconcile them with the film’s content. In fact, the film borrows the image of the serving hand for an ironic purpose; it serves as the key to Varda’s visual counternarrative, which contests traditional notions of domestic harmony that the film seems to advance. In order to understand how Varda manipulates

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Fig. 17. Detail of an advertisement for an iron from a 1963 women’s magazine featuring the housewife’s “serving hand.”

the motif of the serving hand, it is vital to examine how these advertisements operate visually. These women’s magazine advertisements make a direct appeal to the reader as an individual, emphasizing the positive effects of the product when used for the reader’s own family. They imply that in choosing a particular product, women demonstrate love for their families. A 1963 advertisement for an iron from a popular women’s magazine, for instance, juxtaposes a close-up of a woman’s hand ironing with a blurred image of a child playing in the background, suggesting that the mother’s work is done out of devotion to her family (fig. 17). Frequently the advertisements’ illustrations and text appealed to women’s discernment and savoir-faire. A 1962 advertisement for cheese, in which a mother’s hand feeds her smil-

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Fig. 18. Detail of an advertisement for cheese from a 1962 women’s magazine, featuring the mother’s “serving hand.”

ing baby a spoonful of soft cheese, suggests that the mother is making her child happy and also knows what is best for him or her (fig. 18). This is reinforced by the caption, which emphasizes nutritional benefits and implies that the mother must have taken great care in selecting the best product for her child. To complement this advertising, the magazines often featured articles that emphasized housewives’ skills by again using the convention of close-up images of women’s hands to demonstrate the series of steps involved in cooking a meal or completing odd jobs around the house. For example, a 1961 article on making candy describes the detailed steps necessary to prepare the recipe properly (fig. 19). Illustrations demonstrate the housewife’s specialized skills and suggest that she derives a feeling of accomplishment from completing these tasks: precisely what Beauvoir attacks as a myth of domestic labor in The Second Sex. Beauvoir contends that the accomplishment derived from these tasks

Fig. 19. Recipe showing the detailed work of the housewife’s hands, featured in a 1961 women’s magazine.

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was fleeting, meaningless, and even dangerous, because it implied that a housewife could only find happiness through pleasing her husband and children. The character of Thérèse in Le Bonheur differs from the model middleclass housewife portrayed in the magazines; she is working class and works from home as a dressmaker. Nonetheless, in many respects, she resembles the ideal homemaker: her life revolves around caring for her family. The connection between the film and the women’s magazines is seen not only in the construction of the character of Thérèse, however, but also in the specific images through which her character is portrayed. In the striking sequence of brief shots of Thérèse’s hands, the film subtly deviates from the magazine images it references (see fig. 16). For instance, the film shots depict simple activities, not the detailed, complex steps portrayed in women’s magazine features. Whereas the hands depicted in the magazine articles use a variety of implements to blend ingredients and prepare a recipe, in the film Thérèse’s hands enact basic gestures. Also, in the series of shots, the same gesture is often repeated: for example, Thérèse’s hands roll the rolling pin back and forth several times over a lump of dough. By depicting the repetition in the activity, Varda presents the tasks as dull and unfulfilling. Whereas the magazine text and images imply the woman’s sense of responsibility and expertise, the film portrays only simple duties with no such flattering commentary. Furthermore, all but one of the shots omit the images of smiling family members, which are used in the magazine ads to convey the housewife’s success, evidence of a job well done. Varda borrows the gesture of hands at work, but by isolating them withholds their emotional appeal, creating the effect of hollowness rather than happiness. Lastly, Varda’s serving hand imagery jumps from one activity to another in a sequence of shots that show no beginning or end to each task and thus convey the sense of continually rushing from chore to chore. For example, the film cuts abruptly from Thérèse’s hands watering a plant to her hands ironing her son’s clothing. Instead of glamorizing housework as the advertisements do, these filmic techniques convey the sense of constant, perpetually unfinished domestic work, which undermines a sense of accomplishment and portrays aspects of housework that the advertisers sought to conceal. Betty Friedan, who had been studying the rhetoric of

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comparable advertisements in 1950s and 1960s America, explained that such advertisements were designed to make a housewife feel like a noble protector of her family and make housework “a matter of knowledge and skill, rather than a matter of brawn and dull, unremitting effort.”17 Yet advertisers themselves privately noted, as seen in the following quotation from Friedan’s interview of an anonymous advertising executive, that a housewife’s work often delivered few rewards: “her time-consuming housekeeping is not only endless, it is a task for which society hires the lowliest, least trained, most trod-upon individuals and groups. . . . Anyone with a strong enough back (and small enough brain) can do these menial chores.”18 The film’s focus on Thérèse’s disassociated hands when conducting these repetitive chores suggests her mental vacancy during domestic routines. Significantly, this focus on housewives’ hands is repeated in the last five minutes of the film. When Emilie, François’s mistress, takes Thérèse’s place in the home, she is similarly represented by a sequence of shots of anonymous hands fulfilling chores that strikingly resemble those of the first wife. For example, Emilie’s hands iron the daughter’s dress, feed the son, and tuck the children into bed (fig. 20). This sequence occurs between other scenes of happy family life and work, and thus ostensibly conveys a return to order and tranquility. Yet what this return baldly implies—that Thérèse’s and Emilie’s roles in this family are similar to the point of being indistinguishable—is surprising (if not shocking) given the film’s storyline. The first wife (a supposedly integral feature of the family) is easily replaced, with hardly any disruption of domestic harmony. Here the dialogue between the magazine advertisements and the film is striking, and Varda’s critique of popular images of femininity deepens, extending from exploring the strenuous nature of housework to suggesting how this work—and more specifically, the glamorization of this work—may hinder the development of an individual identity. To trace Varda’s broader critique, we must again return to the advertisements that the film references. Take, for example, the depersonalization that is a common feature of these ads, which withhold the identity of the owner of the serving hands. One could argue that this depersonalization has a specific purpose: to promote the viewer’s identification. For instance, the hand in the advertisement for an iron implies that the housewife’s lovingly performed tasks enable the lives of her family members and

Fig. 20. Shots of Emilie’s daily work (after she has joined the family) that echo the images of Thérèse’s hands: ironing the daughter’s dress, feeding the child, and tucking the children into bed. Le Bonheur, 1965.

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encourages readers to pursue this model (see fig. 17). In Le Bonheur, Varda portrays a similar depersonalization via the replacement of Thérèse’s hands with those of Emilie. But in the case of the film, the “anonymity” is staged and false, since the viewers know who conducts the tasks in the early sequences (Thérèse) and who carries them out later (Emilie). The film exposes not only the false nature of this depersonalization (that someone real is always doing these tasks), but also the hidden subtext of these types of advertisements: the implication that these activities do not in fact require unique, individual skills. Here, Varda draws attention to the strangeness of using a pair of disembodied hands to represent a whole woman, and so the repetition of the imagery at the end of the film, in which the hands now stand in for Emilie instead of Thérèse, conveys a cynical critique: the importance of a woman in a family is tied to her role rather than to her individuality. By suggesting this lack of individuality, Varda connected with a line of feminist thought pioneered by Beauvoir. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir explored the disappointment that might develop when women internalized their expected roles as housewives and mothers. In these roles, Beauvoir asserted, a woman “suffers from being reduced to pure generality. She is the housekeeper, the wife, the mother. . . . But modern Western woman wants, on the contrary, to feel that people distinguish her as this housekeeper, this wife, this mother. . . .”19 In sum, for Beauvoir women could express little of their individuality within the roles of wife and mother. According to Varda’s film, the message propagated by women’s magazines—that family life was the path to love and satisfaction—was not only problematic but dangerous, because a woman who strove only to achieve family life could lose herself to such an extent in her role that she could one day be easily replaced. In Le Bonheur, if Thérèse corresponds to the traditional homemaker, then Emilie represents what was termed in women’s magazines of the late 1950s and 1960s the “modern woman,” an “evolution of the housewife” seen as free from the drudgery of the previous generation: she had a career, embraced popular culture, and was more sexually liberated.20 Emilie identifies with popular culture: on her apartment walls she displays posters of movie stars, including Brigitte Bardot and Marilyn Monroe (fig. 21). Furthermore, she works outside the home, lives inde-

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Fig. 21. François (Jean-Claude Drouot) and Emilie (Marie-France Boyer) meet to pursue their affair; pop culture posters decorate her apartment. Le Bonheur, 1965.

pendently in an apartment, and pursues an affair with a married man, with no promise of marriage. As Thérèse’s opposite, Emilie appears to be her own woman, with an independent mind and a sense of her own desires. When François asks her to marry him, she hesitates, explaining that she is afraid of “taking someone else’s place.” But after a moment of doubt, Emilie accepts his proposal, with the words: “You are my happiness. You and your life.” Le Bonheur implies that romantic love is deceptive for the modern woman, requiring a sacrifice of self that leads to the same destiny as for the traditional homemaker. The repetition at the end of the film underscores this destiny, creating a cyclical plot structure and enhancing the film’s irony. The final scene of the film echoes and inverts the first image of the film, presented during the opening credits: the happy family holds hands, walking toward the audience, with summer sunflowers blossoming in the foreground. The final scene portrays the family (with Emilie, rather than Thérèse) holding hands and walking into the distance, surrounded by the brilliant colors (and dying leaves) of autumn (see fig. 14). The film’s final scene is suffused

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with gold: the couple’s golden sweaters echo the sunlight on the autumn leaves. There is a literal and figurative gilded quality to the family’s life, rendering visually Beauvoir’s abstract concept of “gilded mediocrity”: [W]hat bourgeois optimism has to offer the engaged girl is certainly not love; the bright ideal that is held up to her is that of happiness, which means the ideal of quiet equilibrium in a life of immanence and repetition. . . . A gilded mediocrity lacking ambition and passion, aimless days indefinitely repeated, life that slips away toward death without questioning its purpose—this is what they meant by “happiness.”21

Varda also suggests the duplicitous aspect of the gilded, proper domestic life. The counternarrative silently undermines the golden quality of the final scene because Varda has portrayed the results of this type of unquestioning happiness.

do me s tic l a b or v er s u s pa i d la b o r Visual juxtapositions throughout the film reinforce the disparities between François’s and Thérèse’s work. For instance, in one view of life at home, a sliding door functions as a split screen, dividing the image in two (fig. 22). On the left (in the bathroom), François is shaving, preparing for a night at the movies with Thérèse; on the right (in the dining room), Thérèse finishes feeding the children dinner and clears the table. She then comes into the bathroom and (rather than tending to herself ) puts away François’s toothbrush, toothpaste, and cup and hangs up his washcloth and towel. This simultaneous depiction of their activities contrasts their different domestic roles and emphasizes that the home is not a domestic retreat for Thérèse, but a site of labor and a continuous “second shift” after the workday has finished. The film goes on to assert that not only is the nature of the husband’s and wife’s work starkly different, but their different working conditions promote a supportive environment for the husband, and a detrimental one for the wife, hindering the development of her individual identity. (François is shown working in three-quarter shots, as an integral person; in contrast to Thérèse and Emilie, his hands are not severed from his self.) The film

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Fig. 22. Contrasting domestic responsibilities: François shaves while Thérèse feeds the children dinner and clears the table. Le Bonheur, 1965.

makes direct comparisons between François’s and his wives’ labor by cutting back and forth between them. In one scene at the carpentry shop, François and his colleagues chat and have lunch. The next scene shows Thérèse at home interrupting her sewing to check on her children. By juxtaposing François’s and Thérèse’s work, Varda underscores the difference between the types of labor and work situations: François’s carpentry is public, he has colleagues, and he has structure; leisure with lunchtime and time off at night. The scenes of Thérèse (and later Emilie) illustrate what Friedan and other feminists at the time called “life behind the scenes” or the “invisible labor” of housework. The work takes place in the domestic sphere; it can be isolating, and often, not socially recognized or valued. Yet Varda departs from Friedan and Beauvoir by maintaining the need, if not value, of housework. Both Friedan and Beauvoir were unapologetic in their dismissal of housework and were implicitly writing for educated women for whom a career offered an escape from domestic duties. Varda broadened these contemporary arguments by depicting working-class women and addressing the matter of the double shift. Moreover, Varda’s

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argument is a nuanced midpoint between magazines’ messages—that housework and childcare constitute housewives’ identity and lead to unquestionable happiness—and Beauvoir’s forceful critique—that housework is merely maintenance and bears no greater social good. Varda demonstrates how popular representations of housework circumscribe women’s identities, but she also acknowledges the social necessity of their labor. The character of François has a belated recognition of the importance of Thérèse’s home maintenance and caregiving: just after her death, François talks with his relatives at the wake, and they all decide that he will be unable to raise his children without a wife (the children will go to live with their aunt and uncle instead). Whereas François’s recognition is belated (perhaps in keeping with his character), the film has implicitly argued all along for the importance of housework by allotting it so much screen time. Throughout the film Varda allowed the camera to linger on scenes that would typically be omitted from a love story because they would be considered inconsequential: Thérèse shopping, cooking, and tending to the children. In fact, by cutting back and forth between shots of François’s and Thérèse’s (or Emilie’s) work, the film shows women’s “invisible” domestic labor and insists that the activity be considered on par with or at least comparable to paid work outside the home.

varda’s filmic and feminist strategies In order to understand Varda’s filmic and feminist strategies, it is vital to examine her position as a filmmaker and the context in which she worked. By 1965, when Le Bonheur was released, Varda had directed four short films and two feature-length films and held exceptional status as one of two or three female filmmakers in France who were gaining prominence.22 She was thirty-seven years old, and married to filmmaker Jacques Demy. By this time, the New Wave was seen to draw on characters and scandalously sexual subjects from popular culture, appeal to a new generation, and use creative, improvisational methods in opposition to literary adaptations, more traditional values, and big-budget studio productions often associated with the cinéma de qualité, or quality cinema tradition.23 (Truffaut had famously called the quality cinema tradition “daddy’s

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cinema”; he and other figures self-consciously positioned the New Wave movement as a younger generation of directors in rupture with the aesthetic practices and social values of the previous generation and established cinema.) And part of this New Wave identity stemmed from representing contemporary subjects and the popular culture that exploded during this period. Although Varda was certainly influenced by, and contributed to, the New Wave,24 her involvement with the movement has been at times misunderstood for multiple reasons: most of her films were produced outside the heyday of the movement (1958 to 1962); she did not participate in the theoretical debates of the Cahiers du cinéma; and as Geneviève Sellier and Susan Hayward have argued, as a female director, she received an ambivalent reception and had difficulty obtaining funding for her films.25 Although Varda used methods of the New Wave, including popular culture references and a nonlinear narrative, critics from the 1960s to the present have often remained silent on the commentary that these methods convey: namely, a resistance to clichés of uncomplicated “happiness” for women. Le Bonheur’s similarity to films by other New Wave directors has been often unacknowledged. In 1964, Jean-Luc Godard also addressed the situation of the contemporary housewife in Une femme mariée (A Married Woman). Geneviève Sellier has argued that male New Wave filmmakers, such as Godard, asserted themselves as creators of an elite culture, tacitly gendered masculine, over and against mass consumer culture, which was portrayed in their films by the figure of the alienated woman.26 In Une femme mariée, Godard filmed the main character as if recording her social and sexual alienation. As in Le Bonheur, women’s magazines were invoked—Godard’s main character also reads them—but as Sellier underscores, the New Wave had an ambivalent relationship with feminine periodicals: when “critics . . . wanted to condemn a film, they repeatedly referenced romance stories and women’s magazines.”27 Godard highlighted the gap between the magazines and reality and, most significantly, how the magazines operated to produce feminine alienation. If one accepts the dominant narrative or overlooks the irony in Le Bonheur, however, Varda seems reverently to do precisely that which Godard and other members of the New Wave interrogated, both in terms of her aesthetic (which critics saw as crassly commercial, emulating advertising and women’s magazines)

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and the sentimental subject of the happy family (which is the stock material of feminine periodicals). Whereas Godard appears as a detached observer, Varda seems to participate fully, inhabiting this “feminine,” popular culture in order to uncover its failings. Because Varda entered clichés of domesticity in order to challenge them, Le Bonheur has been dismissed as a product of the feminine culture it questioned. Critic Pierre Philippe went so far as to call the film “the most recent, ignoble work de dame Varda,” implying that this was an “ouvrage de dame,” a pejorative term for “women’s work,” suggesting it belonged to a minor, feminine genre.28 If critics such as Philippe did not recognize the film’s visual irony, Varda herself has done little, until recently, to evoke the film’s surprising radical subtext.29 In the 1960s, Varda even denied her feminist approach. In this era preceding the women’s liberation movement, film had not been widely used in France as a medium for addressing feminist issues. When asked whether the title of her film was ironic, Varda baldly refuted the claim, insisting that the film simply explored individuals’ aptitudes for achieving happiness.30 She was clearly reluctant to discuss the feminist subtext of her film. Irony thus functioned as a sophisticated strategy in a climate where there was little support for feminist issues to be openly presented in fiction film: Varda criticized clichés of feminine satisfaction while avoiding the negative repercussions of such a radical viewpoint. Yet this tactic of avoidance opened the possibility that Le Bonheur’s feminist counternarrative could be overlooked. Even those familiar with contemporary feminist conversations may not have recognized that Varda’s vision was more inclusive than some of the most prominent feminist texts of the time: she directed attention to the precarious position of working-class women within the organization of the household. To the very end, however, the film’s working-class women appear happy and do not acknowledge the irony of their situations: it is for the viewer to recognize the distinction. As a result, viewers then and now have mistaken the film’s interrogation of contemporary roles for an endorsement of them. By tracing the imagery in Le Bonheur to contemporary women’s magazines and feminist debates, I have sought to excavate the broader themes in the film, in particular its critique of idealized representations of love and femininity. If the messages that women were receiving from the popular press were that their happiness depended primarily on love, marriage,

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and homemaking, then Varda offers this cautionary caveat: there are no easy prescriptions for happiness; that is, happiness is not an automatic by-product of marriage and motherhood. Nor is happiness a static state of being. Happiness is a theme that deserves, perhaps requires, examination. Le Bonheur prompts us to question ideals of feminine happiness through the image of the serving hand. If viewers did not recognize or contextualize the image, however, they might also have failed to notice that Varda employs it self-consciously and subverts it through visual irony. Since Le Bonheur’s characters do not acknowledge the film’s irony, the film asks a great deal of its viewers, asking for their participation in deciphering what the characters cannot: a feminist critique.

4

Reconsidering Contradictions feminist politics and the musical genre in l’une chante, l’autre pas

Varda’s career is often presented as a series of contradictions.1 Proclaimed the “mother” of the New Wave film movement, her importance is widely recognized, and she is the only female filmmaker of this generation to achieve such broad recognition. Yet most of Varda’s films were produced outside the New Wave’s heyday2—before and after—and though they are theoretically and conceptually sophisticated, she did not participate in the prominent intellectual debates associated with French film, particularly those of the Cahiers du cinéma;3 she is often discussed independently of the advanced filmmaking practices and critical debates of her New Wave generation.4 Varda’s subject matter further distinguished her from her colleagues, as she explicitly addressed feminist politics. In particular, her film L’une chante, l’autre pas (One Sings, The Other Doesn’t, released in 1977), has been often neglected by scholars who see it as a retreat from her more experimental films, even while praising its feminist politics.5 This chapter excavates Varda’s sources and reveals her innovative approach— demonstrating how L’une chante engaged avant-garde intellectual debates and cinematic strategies—and questions apparent contradictions in Varda’s career. While working in a variety of genres and on multiple scales across her oeuvre, Varda has maintained her concern with gender and its 70

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representation. What might appear as a new direction in her career is in fact a new angle of approach, a set of strategies for pursuing her abiding interests by other means. L’une chante, l’autre pas, a mix of musical and melodramatic genres, is set against the rise of the French women’s liberation movement and details the lives of two fictional characters and their increasing feminist awareness and political activism (fig. 23). Although made shortly after abortion was legalized in France, the film reconstructs the struggle for reproductive rights, from feminist protests to an important legal case to the establishment of family planning clinics. While many film critics and feminist scholars have praised the film’s feminist storyline as progressive in terms of content, they have criticized the structure of the film as an unwieldy juxtaposition of melodramatic and musical genres.6 The unexpected musical numbers have been particularly disparaged, with critics claiming they undercut the seriousness of the film’s feminist message.7 The perceived result is a film that is ultimately incongruous. Yet incongruity, I will argue, was precisely Varda’s strategy. The elements of L’une chante that were interpreted as conventional or incompatible with one another are in fact complex and carefully considered. In particular, Varda adapted specific Brechtian theories circulating in progressive film theory and practice, and participated in current feminist debates. Although Brecht’s ideas had been applied as a reflection on filmic form in France in the 1960s,8 following the 1968 protests and calls to politicize culture, Brecht’s text “The Modern Theater Is the Epic Theater” acquired particular prominence as a means of rethinking the dialogue between film and audience. The text was famously quoted in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1972 Tout va bien (All’s Well) and was reprinted that year in the Cahiers du cinéma, crystallizing the journal’s political and aesthetic stance.9 Whereas Brecht’s effect on the work of Godard has been widely studied, and his influence on modern cinema is well established,10 Varda’s interaction with Brecht merits further investigation.11 In fact, L’une chante adopts a number of strategies from Brecht’s “Modern Theater” essay:12 image, word, and music work independent of, and in tension with, one another in order to reveal the mechanics of the filmic illusion and prompt spectators’ critical reflection on social realities beyond the film screen. But unlike other French filmmakers of her New Wave

Fig. 23. Poster of L’une chante, l’autre pas (1976), featuring Pomme (Valérie Mairesse) (left) and Suzanne (Thérèse Liotard) (right). © Ciné-Tamaris.

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cohort, Varda employed Brechtian methods to thematize and debate feminist issues in her film.13 Whereas critics and scholars have focused on L’une chante’s narrative, calling it a retreat from the formal experimentation of her earlier work,14 Varda’s Brechtian approach reframes and reconfigures this narrative. This chapter will analyze how Varda invokes and dismantles the conventions of the Hollywood musical via a Brechtian approach, offering a new interpretation of the film as well as Varda’s “exceptional” position as a filmmaker. Though many critics have assumed that the film is a feminist story with a “happy ending” that is finished and resolved given the gains of the early 1970s women’s liberation movement, Varda in fact used a heterogeneous form and Brechtian strategies to revisit these ostensibly “resolved” issues.

reworking the musical genre Though the Hollywood musical was considered unfashionable in its birthplace by the 1970s, avant-garde filmmakers in Europe investigated the genre as a cultural and functional reference point. The sociopolitcal issues that Varda addresses in her musical become even more significant because she frames them in a genre in which we would typically expect the opposite: absurd instead of serious, frivolous instead of provocative.15 Varda manipulates the genre associated with romance, entertainment, and the happy ending in two ways: she challenges its idealization of heterosexual love and contrasts the antinaturalistic musical numbers with the neorealism of the narrative. Whereas critics have disparaged the superficiality and sentimentality of the musical numbers or argued that they sit uneasily with the film’s feminist message,16 Varda was in fact, like her colleagues Jacques Demy and Jean-Luc Godard, remaking the genre of the Hollywood musical, examining and inverting its codes and conventions, and deliberately thwarting audience expectations.17 In particular, Varda challenges the idealization of the heterosexual couple that the Hollywood musical takes as its premise and foundational structuring device. Rick Altman, in his authoritative study The American Film Musical, articulates the intentionally formulaic structure of the Hollywood musical, arguing that it “suggest[s] that the natural state of

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the adult . . . is in the arms of an adult . . . of the opposite sex.”18 Accordingly, the American film musical begins with a gender dichotomy with the male and female characters possessing opposing traits, which are adapted to fit those of their counterpart over the course of the film, ending in reconciliation and the reestablishment of the social order. In L’une chante, there are no obvious oppositions between the characters that reach an easy resolution through romance or love. In contrast, Varda’s film privileges the bond between two female friends—Suzanne and Pomme—which outlasts their relationships with various male partners, subverting the heterosexual imperative that drives conventional Hollywood musicals.19 Pomme and Suzanne’s relationship shifts throughout the film’s timeline, addressing a variety of feminist concerns, creating a plurality of feminist examples for the film’s audiences, and ultimately refusing to resolve easily. Once a social outcast, Suzanne escapes poverty in the relative security of a stable job running a family planning clinic and relationship; Pomme, on the other hand, leaves her middle-class milieu, drops out of school, marries, divorces, and eventually settles on a nontraditional lifestyle, traveling on the road with her daughter and feminist band. Varda refuses to resolve neatly the characters’ stories, emphasizing the continued necessity of feminist activism. Rather than perpetuating a myth of the “American courtship ritual”20 that typically ends well, as Altman describes Hollywood musicals, Varda portrays the women’s personal and political struggles, placing her musical numbers in pared-down settings with minimal costumes, in contrast to Hollywood song-and-dance spectacles. She inserts political and social commentary in the least likely place—the musical numbers that typically represent a utopian ideal and serve as entertainment and escapism. Whereas the Hollywood musical features love, romance, and the union of the couple, Varda addresses social and political issues around sex, pregnancy, birth control, and single parenting, topics that would be omitted from a typical musical of the period. As Susan Hayward contends, these topics “would never have got past the gates of the Hollywood dream factory.”21 Varda’s lyrics,22 which often include French puns, may be playful, but they make direct political points nonetheless. Varda invokes the musical genre to challenge from within its idealization of the couple.

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femi n is m thr ou gh br echt i a n m e t h o d s Varda inverts the conventions of the Hollywood musical, expanding on Brechtian strategies advocated in “The Modern Theater Is the Epic Theater.” Brecht argued that typically music enhances the text and spectacle, promoting the spectator’s emotional identification with the characters and passive absorption into the narrative. Brecht called for the elements of word, music, and spectacle to work against one another so that the spectator finds it impossible to view them passively in the customary manner as entertainment and is instead encouraged to reflect critically upon what he or she is watching. Instead of blending into a seamless whole and lulling the viewer into what Brecht termed complacent absorption, Varda’s musical numbers are discomfiting and unsettling. In fact, some of Varda’s songs seem jarring, given the gravity of their contexts. The number “Amsterdam sur eau” (“Amsterdam on the Sea”) is especially disconcerting; it occurs when a group of women, either recovering from or awaiting abortions, decide to take a sight-seeing cruise around Amsterdam’s canals (fig. 24). They are “taking, if you please, a cruise for abortionees.” The scene is set in the early 1970s, when women were forced to travel abroad for abortions, since the procedure remained illegal in France until 1975. Interspersed with shots of the women on the boat are shots of sunny tourist sights of Amsterdam and views of the abortion clinic. Varda exploits both the absurdity of the premise and the gravity of the situation in the simplistic rhymes of the lyrics. Pomme sings: Sliding under Amsterdam’s bridges on a Dutch sightseeing boat go the knocked-up, screwed-up ladies, the damsels and mamselles afloat. The awkward and idiot madams sadly abused by their Adams. We’re taking, if you please, a cruise for abortionees.23

Varda’s strategies in this sequence are numerous: she creates a radical contradiction between the serious situation, conveyed by the images of

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Fig. 24. Pomme pauses during “Amsterdam on the Sea.” L’une chante, l’autre pas (1976).

downcast women and the abortion clinic, and the playfully rhyming lyrics. At points, the lyrics are romanticized, presenting an idyllic view of the situation: “we laughed and spouted away, unafraid of ridicule”24 but then challenged by the shots of physically and emotionally drained women sitting motionless on the tour boat, followed by a shot of the women’s dormitory, where grim, pale women recover from their abortions in cramped, spartan quarters. These images are also contested by the shots of tourist clichés: brightly colored boats and bicycles along the canals. The lyrics compete with the image, and then the images begin to compete with each other, allowing for no single, resolute view. After Pomme sings, “Amsterdam on the sea, I’ll remember the tulips and bikes, you see,”25 the film cuts to the room at the clinic in which abortions were performed, showing the doctor and medical equipment used for the procedure. Clearly Pomme is more likely to remember the procedure than the tourist clichés. Yet the words insist on the clichés, which are obviously incongruous with Pomme’s experience. Similarly, Varda presents tourist stereotypes, emphasizing the fact that we are viewing clichés, and nothing more,

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thereby encouraging the viewer to distrust the visual and to recognize that what we see is not the reality of the character.26 Furthermore, we do not follow the characters’ experience and cannot identify with them emotionally, another Brechtian trait.27 Varda displaces the focus from emotional identification with the character to reflection on the social reality that women were leaving France to have this procedure performed. They were able to travel to Amsterdam under the auspices of the MLAC, Le Mouvement pour la liberté de l’avortement et de la contraception (Movement for the Legalization of Abortion and Contraception), in which Varda herself participated.28 By invoking the group within the film, Varda makes visible this feminist organization, which sought to change the legal system. Additionally, this is clearly not the “spectacle” that we would typically associate with a Hollywood song-and-dance number. There is no choreography and almost no movement on the part of the characters. Pomme sings, sitting in a stationary position on the tour boat, flanked by two immobile women. Instead of the escapism we would traditionally associate with a musical number, we see a “factual” presentation of characters traveling to Amsterdam for safe and licit abortions, including an actual clinic, doctor, and medical equipment as the setting. Varda adapts additional Brechtian strategies in Pomme’s performance of “La femme-bulle” (“The Bubble Woman”), a song about pleasure in maternity at Suzanne’s family planning clinic. Brecht called for drawing attention to the theater’s apparatus in order to shatter its illusionism and provoke the spectator’s critical reflection on the performance;29 Varda similarly emphasizes the construction of the film’s illusion: in addition to the outrageous props of rainbows and bubbles (familiar from musicals), we see, in a departure from the musical genre, Pomme’s stagehands, and as Brecht advocated, the interplay between the performers and the audience (fig. 25).30 Pomme leads Orchid in the song: Oh it’s good to be a bubble It’s beautiful to be a balloon a workshop for molecules a beautiful ovule . . .31

A woman in the audience interjects: “Your song is ambiguous. It suits the right-to-life movement [mouvement du Laissez-les-vivre]. Ultimately,

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Fig. 25. Pomme (Valérie Mairesse) and Orchid (Joëlle Papineau, Micou Papineau, and Doudou Greffier) sing “La femme-bulle” in L’une chante, l’autre pas, 1976. Photograph © Ciné-Tamaris, 1976.

you make women who don’t want to have kids feel guilty.” Pomme responds, “I don’t say ‘have kids,’ I say when you’re pregnant, you should feel things yourself and not listen to the state or church or family benefits office. I use various images of women to show how I feel and sing about it.”32 By interrupting Pomme’s song with a serious question, Varda avoids a single perspective on the issue of maternity.33 Instead, the debate seeks to encourage viewers to actively examine various positions, including their own.34 The performers’ audience is composed of nonactors, and Varda includes their uncoached reactions, again prompting spectators to reflect on their relation to the performance. Furthermore, we can see that the flight into fantasy and idealization with rainbows and clouds is frankly artificial and orchestrated by the workers who support the backdrop. The excessiveness is not earnest (as critics believed), but intended to call into question the spectacle.

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In the final third of the film, Varda exploits a Brechtian device, interrupting the film’s narrative with a brief sketch that provides a political and theoretical framework for understanding situations that the characters confront in the narrative.35 Varda invokes Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times36 with a parody of a male and female worker (played by Pomme and a member of her troupe) on an assembly line. The backdrop in front of which the performers mime production borrows its icon of a factory from activist posters circulated throughout France in May and June 1968 to protest the oppression of workers under capitalism, immediately signaling this political context. Varda broadens the issues raised by the ’68 activists with a feminist critique of domestic labor, participating in the efforts of the Mouvement de libération des femmes (women’s liberation movement), to focus attention on the gendered division of unpaid labor in the home.37 When the mimed scene begins at the factory, the female and male roles are virtually identical: both Pomme and her “husband” enact the same routine, their mechanization conveying the organization of their labor. A member of Orchid pretends to play the prerecorded piano music, evoking the musical accompaniment to silent films. As Pomme and her husband mime production on the assembly line, their gestures are punctuated by percussion. At home, this symmetry ends, and a banner reading “les moeurs domestiques” (“domestic habits”) is unfurled. (Brecht favored the use of intertitles to signal the politics that the audience should anticipate.)38 Pomme assumes all domestic responsibility. Two dolls representing children are posed on chairs: the husband hands his to his pregnant wife, who takes care of them both. He remains absorbed in his newspaper while his wife mimes washing dishes, hanging laundry, and sweeping the floor (fig. 26). Her domestic work is stripped of emotional connection and sentimentality, and appears as mechanical and alienated as her work in the factory. Orchid playfully interprets the politics of housework with the lyrics: Poor mama a double shift she’s working it’s underpaid and exhausting. Friedrich Engels once did say that in the families of today

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Fig. 26. “Domestic Habits,” with Valérie Mairesse, François Wertheimer, and Joëlle Papineau (center). L’une chante, l’autre pas (1976).

the bourgeois is the man the proletarian is the woman. He was right, daddy Engels, he was right ’cause at home father is the bourgeois the proletarian is ma . . . .39

Here, Varda references Engels’s analysis of the division of domestic and industrial labor, which was widely cited by feminists in the 1970s,40 as it incorporated issues of both gender and social class to understand women’s oppression. Varda, in dialogue with contemporary feminist discussions, investigates women’s productive labor in both the workplace and the home.41 As the skit illustrates, at the factory the husband and wife are similarly exploited, performing routinized labor. Unlike her husband, however, Pomme is exploited in both factory and domestic situations, yet

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holds even less power in the home, where her work is unpaid and unrecognized. This skit provides commentary on the larger narrative, which illustrates the domestic responsibilities that Pomme and Suzanne are expected to assume. (In their early relationships, Suzanne and Pomme are expected to bear the weight of domestic duties; as the film progresses, they question the distribution of this labor.) Whereas critics have targeted Pomme’s specific skits and lyrics as unrealistic or as a simplification of feminist issues, this simplification and antinaturalism was in fact deliberate—intended to catalyze viewers’ reflection rather than encourage straightforward acceptance of the material. Varda seeks to avoid a single feminist framework, adapting an open-ended Brechtian form with friction between music, image, and text to present multiple feminist perspectives for audiences’ consideration.

an “exceptiona l” d ir ector ? reconsidering varda in context Varda’s career is characterized by contradictions: she is acknowledged as influential, yet has been often discussed outside the critical debates that defined French filmmaking practice. L’une chante in particular was described by scholars as a retreat from her more experimental filmmaking.42 Yet Varda exploits specific Brechtian techniques circulating in advanced film and criticism to investigate feminist politics that had rarely been addressed in French film. The production and reception of L’une chante provides an opportunity to question Varda’s reputation as a filmmaker—specifically the outsider image that Varda herself promoted. Varda distinguished herself as the only prominent female filmmaker of her New Wave generation—and, in doing so, continually countered implications that her work might be, in some way, derivative or imitative. (How Jacques Demy, her husband, or other colleagues had influenced her work was a common interview question.) In response, Varda consistently denied cinematic influences, and was similarly unforthcoming during this period regarding theoretical concerns. The latter denial, however, was also a case of business sense: in order to acquire funding for her film she deemphasized its politics. In fact, she had tried unsuccessfully to obtain funding for an

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earlier, more radically political version of L’une chante: Mon corps est à moi (My Body Is Mine). (The title is taken from an issue of the feminist periodical Le torchon brûle.) This project, also a musical, began with striking female factory workers quoting Marx, Lenin, and Beauvoir and included a number featuring can-can dancers wielding strollers, who sang about difficulties obtaining contraception and medical complications associated with illegal abortions, such as hemorrhaging.43 This script was even more directly political and subversive than that of L’une chante, and its Brechtian motifs more disruptive. In its political subject and Brechtian approach, Mon corps est à moi was explicitly in conversation with Godard’s film Tout va bien (All’s Well), and the Cahiers’ Brechtian discussions of the period. (Godard’s film also portrayed a fictional factory strike, but feminist politics play a minor role in the events.) When Varda submitted Mon corps est à moi to the Commission of the CNC,44 it was denied an avance sur recettes (an interest-free loan) and no producer would agree to take on the film. Over the next two years, Varda rewrote and redesigned the script as L’une chante, making the musical numbers less disjunctive and the feminist ideas less radically presented: the striking female factory workers were eliminated in favor of featuring the enduring friendship between two women.45 When submitted to the Commission in 1974, this version received an advance loan for twenty-five percent of the budget, yet producers again declined to finance the project. Varda decided to produce the film herself through her company, Ciné-Tamaris, and sought funding over the year following through co-productions. She raised an extremely modest budget of three million francs (equivalent to the budget she’d had to produce short films),46 and filmed for twelve weeks in 1976, after which the film was edited, and then distributed by Gaumont. Mon corps est à moi, had it been produced in the early 1970s, would have been concurrent with Tout va bien and thus perhaps critics might have more readily noted its bolder Brechtian strategies and intersection with contemporary filmic practice. L’une chante’s theoretical concerns were not identified by audiences. Though critics noted the tensions between musical and melodramatic genres, and between the film’s music, spectacle, and political subjects, they did not identify these elements as Brechtian. In fact, these techniques were sometimes perceived as directorial miscalculations rather than self-conscious strategies. Even critics at

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the Cahiers du cinéma did not recognize the Brechtian strategies Varda employed in L’une chante to feminist ends. (In the Cahiers of the mid1970s, social commitment was conceived most frequently within frameworks of class struggle, rather than gender politics.)47 Varda interweaved theoretical ideas circulating in film circles in France into a Hollywood genre associated with light, fanciful entertainment,48 creating a feminist film that because of its politics and advanced aesthetics was challenging for critics to comprehend. Perhaps we can conclude that Varda’s use of Brechtian theories added aesthetic dimensions to ongoing feminist debates, even though the film’s critical reception may have been different from Varda’s expectations. Nonetheless, L’une chante elicited response. It had wide-ranging impact, reaching a much larger audience than was typical for artistic films.49 L’une chante was analyzed in film journals as well as in a broad array of newspapers, magazines, and feminist periodicals in France and abroad, which debated Varda’s representation of nontraditional family roles and issues (such as abortion) that had been rarely broached in film. In addition to its distribution by Gaumont, the film was advertised and discussed at family planning clinics, women’s groups, and Socialist Party offices as part of feminist consciousness-raising efforts.50 Perhaps the film’s most significant achievement was provoking debate on topics such as single parenting and reproductive rights, demonstrating that despite the recent legal gains under the impetus of the women’s liberation movement, these issues continued to require examination and reflection, even further social change. Varda’s reluctance to provide a single solution to feminist issues mirrors her refusal to employ a single narrative thread or to resolve the story neatly with a happy, uncomplicated ending. Her film reminds us of the aesthetic and political significance of speaking in the plural, confronting and continually undermining viewers’ expectations, and denying closure. This insistence on the conflicted nature of social experience and the importance of gaps and fissures in film narrative would prove central to her documentary film on Paris, treated in the next chapter.

5

The Limits of Documentary identity and urban transformation in daguerréotypes

Daguerréotypes (Daguerreotypes) is a 1975 documentary film about small, family-run shops on the Parisian rue Daguerre, the street where Varda lives and works.1 Although the film is a departure in genre from L’une chante, close inspection reveals a continuity of concerns—with the politics of place, the nature of social identity, and the interrelations among film, photography, and dramatic spectacle—that link this film to Varda’s earlier ones. The struggle to maintain a way of life in the face of social and economic pressures evident in La Pointe Courte is now investigated in the capital of French modernity, Paris. Similarly, the blurring of genres and the citation of earlier practices in the visual arts once again enable Varda to stage a dialogue between her concerns and works by previous artists. In Daguerreotypes, Varda depicts the daily lives of Parisian shopkeepers. The film is composed of long takes of the shopkeepers maintaining their small stores and having simple exchanges with customers. These scenes are interwoven with Varda’s voiceover comments and brief conversational interviews with the shopkeepers, during which she remains off screen. A recent film poster depicts the film’s shopkeepers, including the driving instructors, drug store owners, haircutters, bakers, butchers, and tailors (fig. 27). Critics from the 1970s to the present have frequently described the 84

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Fig. 27. Recent film poster of Varda’s Daguerréotypes, presenting the neighborhood driving instructors, drug store owners, haircutters, bakers, butchers, tailors, accordion instructors, plumber, grocers, and a visiting magician. © Ciné-Tamaris.

film as a “charming” documentary. Françoise Audé, for example, describes it as Varda’s “affectionate portrait of her neighbors” and “a pleasant film.”2 Scholars and critics have often misunderstood this film as a sentimental photographic portrait album of Varda’s neighbors, because they were misled by the film’s title, which they understood as simply referencing nineteenth-century photographs by Louis Daguerre, one of the early inventors and practitioners of portrait photography (and for whom her street was

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named).3 As a result, many have overlooked the film’s references to other photographic and filmic sources and have regarded the film as nostalgic or apolitical. Archival research, however, uncovers previously unknown sources for Daguerreotypes, sources that illuminate the film’s engagement with contemporary politics, in particular, urban modernization and the transformation of everyday life that this entailed.4 This chapter argues that the title is a pun referencing the “types” of people who live on the rue Daguerre and the documentary tradition of typology, that is, mid- to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs of what were considered different “types” of workers.5 This double meaning of the film’s title—referencing both a tradition of documentary photography and a specific neighborhood in Paris—telescopes Varda’s ambitions for this project. Through the microcosm of her street, the rue Daguerre, she develops a vigorous critique of the policies that “modernized,” radically renovated, and gentrified Paris in the 1960s and 1970s; she presents the film as part of a broader history of artistic commentary on urban reorganization and resistance. At the same time, she offers a complex meditation on documentary traditions across the media of photography and film. Excavating previously unacknowledged connections between Varda’s film and other documentary practices reveals both her political engagement—specifically, her response to the immense renovation of Paris under President Georges Pompidou—and her innovations in the documentary genre. When Varda references typologies and later conducts interviews— both established traditions of documentary—she challenges the idea that we can know and understand the film’s subjects through these conventions.6 Furthermore, Varda interweaves scenes of workers’ daily life with staged scenes of a magician, using his tricks to question the line between fact and fiction. In so doing, Varda subtly suggests that we might see her as a magician and the film as a fabricated object, distinct from the “reality” it seemingly depicts.

engag in g u r ba n pol itics Before turning to Varda’s film and its investigation of everyday urban life, it is important to understand the changes in the fabric of Paris that threat-

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ened the shops on the rue Daguerre. Pompidou’s urban renewal occurred within the broader context of what is often termed les trente glorieuses: the thirty years of economic expansion following the Second World War. Varda engaged ideas circulated by contemporary artists and intellectuals associated with the Situationist International (an avant-garde group that promoted radical politics and cultural intervention), which criticized these transformations, including state-led modernization, the growth of multinationals and chain stores, and rapid population influx to cities.7 Philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre argued that this state-led and developer-driven postwar transformation of urban space was a key element in increased state control and the growth and survival of capitalism, a reconfiguration of the built environment that would further empower the owner class and entrench economic inequalities.8 To Lefebvre (who associated with the Situationist International for a time) and other critics in the movement, a major effect of these urban changes was the compartmentalization of people’s activities, and the social and spatial segregation of working-class and immigrant populations. The renovations often targeted poor, working-class, and immigrant neighborhoods deemed ripe for “renewal,” gentrifying these areas and forcing the poorer residents into newly developed housing projects in the suburbs.9 Lefebvre saw this major modern expulsion of the poor and workers from the city as echoing an earlier episode, which occurred under Baron Haussmann, the city planner charged by Emperor Napoleon III with “modernizing” Paris from 1852 to 1870.10 Haussmann destroyed rundown, overcrowded neighborhoods in the city center, forcing poorer residents to the outskirts. This urban restructuring was also a response to the worker uprising in the Revolution of 1848 and was used to disperse radical groups that had organized against the government, in part by creating wide streets that could not be easily barricaded during an uprising. In place of dense housing and narrow, idiosyncratic streets, Haussmann designed grand boulevards with standardized building facades, which became sites of housing for the growing upper middle class of professionals as well as sites of shopping, leisure, and entertainment, encouraging economic development and commercialism. Lefebvre compared the contemporary “renovation” of Paris with changes made under Baron Haussmann in the nineteenth century, describing both as “authoritarian

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and brutal spatial practice[s] . . . [of ] dispersion, division, and segregation.”11 He believed that these large-scale changes could best be understood through analyzing the details of daily life, wherein larger state-led modernization efforts, urban structures, work routines, and patterns of consumption were lived and could thus be critically perceived.12 In Daguerreotypes, Varda engages Lefebvre’s critique of the transformation of the city under Haussmann and, later, Pompidou, and the cost it exacted from working- and middle-class residents of neighborhoods like her own. Moreover, like Lefebvre, Varda recognizes that the burdens of everyday urban life are experienced unevenly, due to gender, age, race, class, and other social categories. Varda’s filmic depictions subtly suggest this unevenness—she represents a broad spectrum of her neighbors, ranging from post-colonial immigrant laborers to comfortable middle-class shop owners—and lays bare the often unacknowledged divisions of labor and urban experiences.

ph o togra phic a n d f il mic t y p o lo g i e s Among the important components of the film are posed shots, lasting several seconds, that depict shopkeepers and workers on Varda’s street. Archival research reveals sources for these shots: late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs ostensibly documenting “types” of workers, a category of photographic subjects known as typologies. For example, a late nineteenth-century image of a knife sharpener offers a striking parallel to Varda’s contemporary depiction of this labor (figs. 28, 29). These photographs were called petits métiers, or minor trades (as opposed to professions); they depicted laborers and artisans at work and were often labeled with captions indicating subjects’ occupations.13 Despite more modern clothing and accessories, the knife sharpener on the sidewalk clearly evokes the tradition of trade typologies, a connection made clear by the way that Varda composes her shot. These nineteenth-century images of the minor trades were intended as easily legible representations of the work people did as well as the social groups to which they belonged. For example, a viewer at the time would identify this figure by the image caption, and by the figure’s particular tools and clothing, such as the

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grinding stone and blade and his worker’s overalls and cap. These historical images were often considered to be objective, even scientific. They were based in part on the nineteenth-century pseudoscience of physiognomy, which proposed that inner character was legible from external physical traits, as well as on practices of reading social position from clothing and accessories.14 These practices were often paired with assumptions about the supposedly lesser abilities and intelligence of people who belonged to the working classes and colonial populations, ideas that Varda ultimately challenges. Scholarship of recent decades has demonstrated that these nineteenthcentury minor trade typology photographs served a range of intentions; they were, for example, a means of attempting to identify, classify, and thereby control what the upper classes sometimes considered a potentially dangerous population of workers. However, they also served a nostalgic purpose as “folkloric” representations intended to preserve the memory of traditional trades at a time when these manual professions were being rapidly replaced by mechanized production processes in the course of industrialization.15 In figure 28, from 1899, created by documentary photography pioneer Eugène Atget, the knife sharpener is set off against the modern storefront, subtly evoking the ways in which long-standing street trades were gradually being effaced.16 Atget depicted practices that had survived the nineteenth-century renovation of Paris under Haussmann, but through city restrictions were being forced out of the public space of the street, evoking workers’ struggle over urban space. By referencing Atget, Varda suggests that we see her work as part of a larger history of artistic commentary on urban reorganization and resistance. Varda clearly evokes Atget’s photograph in her film, in the shot of the knife sharpener that appears on-screen for several seconds. The posters in the background advertise the visiting magician’s act, foreshadowing the film’s second half, in which a magician performs staged tricks and subtly suggests the artifice of the present scene, Varda’s staging of the knife sharpener in the street. In representing individuals and labor that often fell outside the traditional genres of fine art, her shots convey an interest in the tradition of minor trade typologies. Yet Varda’s fleeting, severalsecond shots, with the characters’ voices muted, evoke the limitations of these historical photographs and suggest that much is lost and silenced in such momentary glimpses.

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Fig. 28. Eugène Atget, Rémouleur (Knife Sharpener), 1899.

Varda repeatedly references and challenges this photographic tradition of typologies in posed images of shopkeepers within her film. Her subjects hold their poses for awkwardly long stretches in the same manner as they would for an old-fashioned photograph that required a long exposure. This can be seen clearly in the film shot of the butcher and his wife who minds the store, posing at their meat counter in a still, frontal arrangement (fig. 30).17 Varda begins and ends the shot with an uneven fade, evoking the opening and closing of an old-fashioned photographic camera’s lens. With the frontality of the subjects behind their modern hygienic meat counter, the image of the couple appears clinical and pseudoscien-

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Fig. 29. Posed shot of the knife sharpener on the rue Daguerre. Daguerréotypes, 1975.

tific. As in the earlier typologies, there is little spatial depth; Varda creates the sense that the butcher and his wife are flattened and compressed between the cuts of meat. The shallowness of Varda’s shot suggests the representational and metaphorical flatness of the typologies of minor trades, conveyed by the lack of spatial depth in the images’ compositions and the attention to their subjects’ superficial traits. Varda makes the ideological purposes of the minor trades photographs visible through the flatness of her own images. In Varda’s film shot, which lasts several seconds, we sense the unnatural stillness as the subjects try to hold their poses. Their slight gestures, like the butcher’s nervous breath, do not escape our attention, and their awkwardness and discomfort in turn make us, as viewers, uncomfortable and selfconsciously aware of our own voyeurism. The discomfort mounts when we consider the juxtaposition of the couple alongside the precisely labeled and commodified cuts of raw meat. In this way, Varda metaphorically evokes the

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Fig. 30. Posed shot of the local butchers. Daguerréotypes, 1975.

labeling and classifying of bodies and flesh—and the commercial sale of these images—in the minor trades pictures. Her shot conveys the dangers of dehumanization that can come from trying to make subjects legible and classifiable in these minor trade typologies.

documentary and the unevenness of daily life Despite Varda’s background in photography,18 the dialogue between photography and film—exemplified in the shot of the butchers—remains largely unexplored. Yet it is by evoking different forms of documentary photography and film in tension with one another, as she does here, that the depth and complexity of Varda’s meditation on documentary practice become visible. Daguerreotypes is an exploration of the representative potentials, limi-

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tations, and ethical pitfalls of documentary. Varda conducts this exploration on two interconnected levels: by generating a dialogue between traditions of documentary photography and film; and by presenting an incisive critique of social policy and urban planning in late twentieth-century Paris. Having examined the typologies tradition of documentary photography with, and against which, Varda works, I will now explore another source: the documentary film tradition of cinéma vérité, in which she participated. Cinéma vérité developed internationally in the 1950s and ’60s. The movement was pioneered in France by figures such as Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, and it continued to flourish in the 1970s. The term translates literally as “cinematic truth” or “truthful cinema”—it may sound as if the movement purported to capture objective reality—yet it involved complex meditations on the possibilities of filmmaking.19 The movement was facilitated by technological advances, such as smaller, more mobile cameras, and higher-speed film that could use natural light, which allowed for shooting on location, smaller film crews, and greater improvisation. Filmmakers associated with cinéma vérité sought to highlight the subjective processes of filming, editing, and viewership, and to explore the ethics of those practices. These issues took on particular importance in France during the massive worker strikes and social movements of 1968, during which more than nine million workers went on strike and protested in the streets of Paris and across the country. These protests drew attention to the under-representation of workers and other marginalized social groups in mainstream media and culture.20 Varda has a documentary aim in Daguerreotypes: to record her neighbors’ ways of life, social networks, and vanishing traditions and to document artisanal practices that were quickly becoming outmoded by the 1970s. For example, Varda depicts the neighborhood baker, who singlehandedly bakes his bread from scratch each day. His soiled clothes, floursmudged face, and drooping posture convey the arduousness of his work (see fig. 45). However, Varda also draws on the tradition of cinéma vérité to develop self-reflexive filmic techniques to dismantle documentary conventions: to convey the impossibility of producing—or our obtaining—a complete, objective knowledge of the people depicted. Although never explicitly acknowledged, the shopkeepers in Varda’s film are part of a broader urban struggle related to the renovation of Paris

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Fig. 31. Construction of the Montparnasse Tower in Paris in 1971. Keystone-France/GammaKeystone via Getty Images.

in the 1960s and ’70s. These business owners are trying to keep their family-run shops afloat in the face of the increasingly popular department stores of the newly erected Montparnasse mall and the broader patterns of consumer culture surrounding them. Beginning in the 1960s, French Prime Minister (later, President) Georges Pompidou supported a massive and highly controversial project to renovate large portions of Paris. This immense urban project involved the building of the Montparnasse Tower adjacent to the rue Daguerre, figuratively overshadowing Varda’s street (fig. 31). The 59-story building, which was granted exceptions from city ordinances and building codes, combined a massive office tower, suburban and urban rail lines, and chain stores within a shopping mall, which would gradually render obsolete a number of the small, independent shops that Varda depicts. Although named only in passing—Varda mentions that her street is a two-minute walk from the Montparnasse Tower— the tower and the broader urban transformation that it symbolized are the targets of the film’s critique.

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The construction of the Montparnasse Tower between 1969 and 1973 was often viewed as emblematic of Pompidou’s larger urban modernization project, which he self-consciously positioned within the broader history of urban reorganization in Paris, stating that he followed a tradition of builders, including “Haussmann, [who] destroyed even more than they built.”21 And indeed, the Montparnasse project involved demolishing an old train station and an adjacent neighborhood of worker and immigrant housing. Pompidou said that while he regretted the destruction, it was necessary to make way for the new.22 The restructuring of Paris as a business center was crucial to Pompidou’s plan to make France an “internationally competitive” economic power.23 The tower was financed by an American syndicate and rapidly became a symbol of the “Manhattanization” or “Americanization” of France, of multinational investment embodied by the chain store.24 In addition to interrupting the vistas of historic Paris, this high-rise tower and complex also disturbed the patterns of daily life. As the city center was becoming increasingly gentrified, working-class and immigrant populations continued to be pushed out of the city into low-income housing projects in newly developed suburbs.25 Understood within the context of Montparnasse construction, Varda’s representation of the rue Daguerre no longer seems quaint and nostalgic. Rather, the film can be understood as an indictment of urban modernization and the violence it did to the lives of workers and small-shop owners in Paris. Amid criticisms of the sterile and efficient high-rise office tower, the rue Daguerre appeared to many at the time as a counterpoint to Pompidou’s vision. Only blocks away, it was described by critics as one of the few streets in Paris that still had a “village atmosphere.”26 Varda cultivates a sense of interconnectedness—by filming meetings and personal relationships between shopkeepers, such as the drug store owners visiting the neighborhood butcher. Yet Varda’s criticism is neither overt nor explicitly directed at the Montparnasse development project. She critiques this process of modernization and gentrification in a subtle, indirect way, by showing the people who will be affected by it and evoking a way of life that will become impossible to sustain. Critiques of Paris’s renovation at this time encompassed a range of political persuasions. Louis Chevalier, an ardent preservationist and professor at the Collège de France, attacked the Montparnasse Tower and

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Pompidou’s modernization project in his influential 1977 text The Assassination of Paris, an expansion of previously published essays. Chevalier was a particularly prominent voice in French culture at the time, and his nostalgic interpretation of the destruction of Paris helps to explain both the tropes Varda referenced and sought to challenge. For Chevalier, such shopping complexes: “gobble up all the shops in the neighborhood—the grocery store, the bakery, the butcher shop, from the first to the last; that is to say [they] devour the joy, the life, the expected and the unexpected, the particular structure of a place, the variegated colors of the streets which, henceforth, are sterile, fatally boring, [and] ruined commercially.”27 Chevalier believed that modernization, new patterns of consumption and automobile culture, and pressures from immigration and increased population had propelled the decline of Paris, and he wished to preserve vanishing aspects of French culture.28 In Daguerreotypes, Varda depicts traditional practices and trades associated with French identity and culture, such as the accordion teacher and the baker’s wife who moved to Paris from the countryside (see fig. 27). For example, Varda includes long takes of the neighborhood baker weighing, kneading, and baking baguette loaves in a wood-fired oven, which convey the skill and difficulty of his labor. At other moments, she includes shots of the local accordionist, playing traditional French songs on the street. Varda evokes scenes laden with nostalgia and connotations of national identity. Unlike Chevalier, however, Varda continually destabilizes the nostalgia— and the right-wing political agenda that it sometimes served in 1970s France—by portraying alongside these endangered traditional practices, a variety of modern ones. For instance, she depicts North African immigrants who work the late shift at the neighborhood grocery store, or the neighborhood driving instructors (see fig. 27). Varda offers an expansive definition of modern labor—one that includes recent immigrants and recent trades, rather than a nostalgic lament for a France of the past.29 And, in the posed shot of the driving instructors, Varda is not reluctant to communicate her social critique with a sense of humor. She creates a visual pun with the signage in the image: the thin instructor with an angular face stands in front of a pointed sign and the rotund instructor stands next to a rounded sign (see fig. 27). With this, she makes a playful reference to her subjects’ physiques, reminding the viewer of the ridiculous-

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ness of trying to interpret physical signs of outward appearance, as in the minor trades typologies. Varda subtly shows the unevenness of the everyday—the unacknowledged divisions of labor and social hierarchies in the shops and the street. In Varda’s posed, still shots of workers, all the shopkeepers appear within their stores, except one: a worker from the corner grocery who emigrated from Tunisia (a former French protectorate) in the early 1970s. He is posed at home, a reminder that he does not own the store in which he works (fig. 32). Here Varda evokes a different tradition of photographic typologies. While many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographic typologies represented minor trades, others depicted “scènes et types,” ostensibly depicting scenes of cultural customs and ethnic types. In French North Africa, this often took the form of crudely staged scenes, evocative of harems, portraying partially undressed women as sexualized and submissive, as in the historical postcard depicted in figure 33. Varda invokes and challenges these exotic colonial-era stereotypes, with the ridiculousness of her shot: the male shopkeeper in the pose of the odalisque, not partially undressed but wearing red pajamas. In contrast to the interior scene of the postcard (staged with a crude backdrop and props), Varda depicts the shopkeeper within his own modest apartment—what would be called in colloquial French the “maid’s quarters,” prompting viewers to reflect on the economic disparities and racial discrimination experienced by contemporary immigrant laborers.30 Furthermore, Varda subtly documents unacknowledged gendered divisions of labor throughout the film. Varda repeatedly portrays businesses run by husbands and wives: men bake bread or carve meat in their shops while their wives tend to purchases.31 For example, Varda intercuts scenes of the butcher carving meat with scenes of his wife minding the store and making change. Through Varda’s interviews with the shopkeepers, it becomes evident that men have chosen their careers and trained for them, while women’s careers were chosen for them through marriage. In her most developed representation, Varda creates an affectionate portrait of an elderly woman who has suffered memory loss and is no longer able to work in the family’s drug store (unlike the saleswomen in the neighboring shops). For example, she hovers at the store’s front door (fig. 34), while her husband tends to the customer inside (Varda’s

Fig. 32. The grocer at home. Daguerréotypes, 1975. Photograph © Agnès Varda.

Fig. 33. Historical postcard portraying a North African woman as odalisque (ca. 1900). Collection of the author.

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Fig. 34. In the Blue Thistle drug store, “Mrs. Blue Thistle” quietly wanders and hesitates by the front door. Daguerréotypes, 1975.

daughter Rosalie), mixing and selling perfume in recycled bottles (fig. 35). Whereas the nineteenth-century typology tradition of photographing and labeling workers sought to create legible, purportedly objective representations of work and identity, Varda focuses on a woman who cannot be defined by labor. Varda’s film refuses to reduce individuals to social identities: she represents characters who are ultimately unable to be encompassed by such categories and their depiction in photography and film. In this way, Varda resists conventional patterns of documentary photography and film, whereby a viewer who belongs to a privileged social group may gain a false sense of insight into disenfranchised people’s lives and cultures. Rather, Varda reminds us that we cannot truly know the subjects of her film and underscores the limits of our understanding.

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Fig. 35. In the Blue Thistle drug store, “Mr. Blue Thistle” sells perfume to his customer (Rosalie Varda). Daguerréotypes, 1975.

In the same way that Varda insists on complicating the right-wing association of workers and shopkeepers with a romanticized “old France,” she also refuses to turn her subjects into idealized heroes of the left.32 Varda notes that, at the outdoor market at the other end of her street, people sell political newspapers and discuss politics. But at her end, she reports that “no one talks about [politics.] Besides, it’s bad for business.” In her interviews with these less politicized shopkeepers, such as the butcher’s wife, Varda subtly suggests concerns about the growing culture of chain stories and mass-market consumer goods that was increasingly eroding the economic viability of their shops. When Varda asks the butcher’s wife about her dreams, she replies, “got no time for them”; when asked about what she does on her day off, she says, “television and sleep.” The television behind the butcher’s wife creates a frame within the frame, and Varda cuts to it in the middle of the interview, suggesting the importance

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Fig. 36. Still from Varda’s interview with “the butcher’s wife.” Daguerréotypes, 1975.

of television in promoting a politically passive and consumerist culture (figs. 36, 37). Boxes that once contained new appliances stacked next to the television evoke the shopkeeper’s participation in broader patterns of mass consumer culture that will ultimately bring about the demise of many of the small shops on the street. Varda’s shot of the television frame and consumer appliances briefly references the work of the most prominent member of the Situationist International, Guy Debord’s 1967 treatise and 1973 film The Society of the Spectacle, a critique of contemporary consumer culture and commodity fetishism.33 Moreover, figures such as Lefebvre, who associated with the Situationists for a time, argued that the streamlining of work—and urban space to facilitate it—robbed meaning from time off or rest periods, which were simply organized around the needs of work and consumption and contained little passion or free play.34 Varda evokes this idea in the interview

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Fig. 37. Shot of the television from Varda’s interview with “the butcher’s wife.” Daguerréotypes, 1975.

with the butcher’s wife, whose Sundays are spent sleeping and watching television. Yet for Lefebvre, desire and fantasy were seen as potential sources of resistance to the stultification and passivity cultivated by increasingly standardized work routines, urban space, consumer culture, and daily life. Although the butcher’s wife says she has no time for dreams, Varda visually suggests by the op-art sculptural balls bobbing above her head like thought bubbles, that there may be a realm of subconscious dreaming or desire that is being repressed, but that may constitute potential resistance.35

varda’s self-reflexivity and subjects Varda acknowledges the social differences between herself and her subjects through the visual metaphor of a magician or entertainer who

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appears across the film. This aspect of Daguerreotypes merits close investigation, as it is through these scenes that Varda reveals the complexity of her approach to documentary film. Here, she admits—even advertises— her subjective representation of these shopkeepers’ lives and lays bare the distortions of their representation in film. The association of Varda and the magician is established in the opening shot of the film. The magician, standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, addresses the film’s audience: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m honored to present a film titled Daguerreotypes . . . by Agnès Varda.” The magician alludes to Georges Méliès, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French magician turned cinematic “inventor” and director, who often appeared as a magician performing tricks in his films.36 Méliès developed a cinematic tradition associated with sleight of hand and trick of the eye— artifice and entertainment—distinct from the documentary tradition of early filmmakers Auguste and Louis Lumière. Varda’s opening shot of the magician draws attention to the fabricated, artificial nature of her film, as if it were one big spectacle or magic act. The film then cuts to an image of the stacked reels of Daguerreotypes in canisters, while the magician names the technical staff who collaborated on the project,37 reminding us of the subjective, creative, and therefore interpretive processes of filming and editing as well as the film as a fabricated object, separate from the “reality” it appears to depict (fig. 38). Varda shows the film canisters in her own makeshift shop window, reminding us of the commodity status of the film. Furthermore, we can glimpse a reflection of Varda, her daughter Rosalie, and the head camerawoman and camera assistant (Nurith Aviv and William Lubtchansky) in the image, further emphasizing their shadowy presence and influence in the film.38 The magician from the opening shot returns in the second half of the film, as Varda intercuts scenes of the shopkeepers gathered in front of the magician’s act, volunteering to serve as his assistants on stage. Varda thus explicitly associates photography and film with magic; she suggests her subjective role as a magician of sorts, conveying the power she wields over her subjects. For example, the magician hypnotizes the baker’s wife, inducing a trance-like, rigid state; he makes a woman’s face disappear and reappear in a magic box, a metaphor for the frozen nature of photographs and the

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Fig. 38. Shot of Varda’s window, combining opening credits, stacked reels of the film, and Varda’s reflection. Daguerréotypes, 1975.

photographer’s aesthetic control (figs. 39–41). As the magician uses the laborers in his act for entertainment, Varda uses the same workers in her film, to similar ends. If Daguerreotype’s goal as a documentary is to depict the life of laborers in order to educate the viewer, Varda, like the magician, reminds us that this effort is imperfect, and that the subjects are inevitably distorted and perhaps even exploited in the process. She prompts the viewer to recognize the subjects’ vulnerability: they do not control the documentary and are instead being incorporated into a larger narrative by the filmmaker and entertainer. After the magic show, they return to their places in the audience, and the magician, the master of illusion, takes the final bow.39 Yet unlike the magician, Varda uses the magic act to underscore the construction of the cinematic illusion and to prompt viewers to question it.

Fig. 39. The magician hypnotizes “the baker’s wife.” Daguerréotypes, 1975.

Fig. 40. The magician makes a woman’s face disappear in a magic box. Daguerréotypes, 1975.

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Fig. 41. The magician makes the woman’s face reappear in the magic box. Daguerréotypes, 1975.

the daguerre otype and cinematic practice In the film’s final shot, Varda invokes daguerreotype photography to continue to meditate on her cinematic practice and her relationships to her subjects. The shot shows the owners of the Blue Thistle drugstore walking home on the rue Daguerre, going inside, and closing the door (fig. 42). The closed door blocks the viewers’ gaze; behind it, we hear unintelligible voices, reinforcing the sense of these subjects existing off-screen. As the couple walks home, Varda speaks in voiceover, musing on the nature of this creation. Her narration prompts questions about the status of her documentary by alluding explicitly to daguerreotype photography: These color daguerreotypes, these old-fashioned images . . . the collective and almost stereotyped [stéréo-daguerréo-typés] portraits of some men [types] and women [typesses] of the rue Daguerre. . . .

Fig. 42. The drug store owners, “Mr. and Mrs. Blue Thistle,” walk home on the rue Daguerre. They enter their home and close the front door, blocking our view. Daguerréotypes, 1975.

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Does it all form a report? An homage? An essay? A regret, a reproach? An approach? Anyway, it’s a film, I sign as their neighbor, Agnès the Daguerréotypesse.

In French, Varda’s phrase “stéréo-daguerréo-typés” references two historical photographic practices: the daguerreotype and stereoscopic photography. Stereoscopic photography used two perspectives of the same scene, viewed together in a stereoscope, to create the illusion of threedimensional images, which some considered larger than life. Varda puns with the phrase, suggesting that her “stéréo-typé” images could be larger than life on film, or on the contrary, simply stereotyped and flat. Furthermore, she refers to the street shopkeepers as “types and typesses.” In French, “type” can convey different meanings: a person who is representative of a category or a person who is idiosyncratic and unusual. Again, she suggests the tension between the individual and the general. Because Varda invokes daguerreotype photographs in these closing lines, and because of the name of her street and her posed shots of shopkeepers, scholars have interpreted her film in the context of daguerreotype portraits. Yet within the film, Varda references the typologies of the minor trades, which were typically made with different photographic practices and represented different subjects. The minor trades photographs depicted typologies of workers and represented sites of labor using reproducible photographic processes, as opposed to the middle- and upperclass individuals who often appeared in daguerreotype studio portraits. I propose instead that Varda uses the idea of the daguerreotype as metaphor for her complex documentary practice. To unravel this metaphor, we must consider the specific properties of the daguerreotype. Unlike many historical photographs printed on photographic paper, daguerreotype photographs were made on copper plates with polished silver surfaces. The silver surface of the daguerreotype is highly reflective, like a mirror. A daguerreotype is a unique positive image, made within a camera, which is later developed, fixed, and placed in protective casing and glass.40 For the image to be visible, a daguerreotype must be angled properly. Depending on the angle viewed and the color of the surface reflected into it, the image can appear to change from a positive to a nega-

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tive image, as illustrated by the historical example shown in figures 43 and 44. The viewer’s own image may also be reflected in the mirror-like surface of the daguerreotype. In Varda’s closing voiceover, as we watch her subjects on the street, she references her role in the creation of the images, calling herself “Agnès the Daguerréotypesse.” Evoking the mirrored surface of the daguerreotype, Varda’s film employs self-referential techniques, particularly her use of her own reflection in the earlier shot of her shop window. Varda uses this phrase and her reflection to suggest that both her own and her neighbors’ identities are mutually and subjectively constructed in dialogue, rather than independent entities objectively captured in the documentary.41 Varda uses the seemingly fluctuating aspect of the daguerreotype, which can appear alternately positive and negative, to suggest that her depictions of her neighbors are nuanced, depending on one’s perspective. Varda evokes her fluctuating and complex relationship to her subjects as well as the audience’s subjective role in their interpretation. The notion of the mirrored surface suggests that we as viewers should question our own perspective and role in the interpretation of the film’s meaning. This idea is reinforced with the film’s parting questions about its own nature: is it an homage, an essay, or a reproach? Varda suggests possibilities, but also leaves the viewer to answer these questions. In conclusion, I would like to consider Varda’s re-release of Daguerreotypes on DVD, for which she added new material in Pain, Peinture, et Accordéon (2005). In particular, I examine how she returns to the same sites and her shots echo those of the earlier film, evoking how the street and characters have changed. For example, in one sequence, Varda shows the current bakery on her street; the bakery from the 1970s has long since closed, and the neighborhood has gentrified. We no longer see a baker laboring by a wood-burning fire (fig. 45); the oven has been retained but now is decorative (fig. 46). Unlike the independently owned bakery in the 1970s, this shop belongs to a group of Parisian bakeries, and the store’s owner is not the baker. During the day, staff run the store, so the owner interacts less frequently with his customers or the community. The owner discusses the ornate, gilded paintings on the exterior, which were made by a contemporary artist to imitate nineteenth-century

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Fig. 43. [Unidentified Man and Woman]. Example of a historical daguerreotype. When viewed from different angles, it appears to fluctuate between a positive and negative image. Courtesy of the Image Permanence Institute.

paintings. Although Varda never explicitly says it, this vision of “old Paris” is one that has been sanitized and idealized (fig. 47). All the functionality, and accompanying grit, of the nineteenth century are gone. The past is present in a fake and fabricated frame, literally a false façade. Varda deliberately “clutters” her shot of the bakery’s idyllic exterior with street signage (a “no entry” sign on the upper left), a reminder of the car culture continually eroding the pedestrian commerce of the street and underscoring the contemporary urban context that the nostalgic façade seems to deny.42 Though not stated overtly, the bakery is emblematic of her neighborhood’s continued transformation and gentrification. Varda shows these ordinary

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Fig. 44. [Unidentified Man and Woman]. Example of a historical daguerreotype. When viewed from certain perspectives, it appears as a negative image. Courtesy of the Image Permanence Institute.

exchanges and interviews with shopkeepers—not grand theory but local moments of everyday life—to evoke broader patterns of social, economic, and urban organization, prompting viewers to question them. By overlooking or misunderstanding its historical references, selfreflexive techniques, and complex engagement with its contemporary urban context, critics and scholars have often viewed Daguerreotypes as a nostalgic or apolitical film. I have sought to demonstrate the ways Daguerreotypes operates on multiple levels—conveying both Varda’s political ambivalence as well as her negotiation and destabilization of conventions of documentary photography and film. On one level, she critiques the social cost of “economic progress” and the disappearing facets of Parisian life, and strives to preserve images of lives that might not otherwise survive in the visual archive. As I have argued, her representations of workers and

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Fig. 45. A shot of the neighborhood baker standing beside his wood-fired oven. Daguerréotypes, 1975.

shopkeepers open up a critique of the restructuring of Paris under Pompidou. However, this critique is determinedly not nostalgic; Varda does not advocate a return to an idealized past. She critically depicts social hierarchies and divisions of labor that exist in the present, and raises concerns about the broader growth of chain stores and shopping malls, which will ultimately bring about the demise of many of the shops on her street. At the same time, Varda brings together various conventions of documentary photography and film—from the typologies of the minor trades, to the interviews, to the self-reflexive magic show and cinéma vérité, to the reworking of the material in her DVD—and allows them to remain in tension with one another. In this way, Varda’s social critique diverges from the work of Lefebvre and the Situationist International. She refuses to become didactic or to turn to grand, overarching theories to encompass these conflicts. Instead, she continually reminds us of the limits of her own and

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Fig. 46. The shot of the bakery owner standing beside the oven in Varda’s Pain, Peinture, et Accordéon recalls the earlier shot of the baker in Daguerréotypes (1975). Pain, Peinture, et Accordéon (2005).

Fig. 47. Varda returns to the bakery, depicting the owner and the façade of his shop in Pain, Peinture, et Accordéon (2005).

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our knowledge of the subject. Her response remains insistently local; she suggests the subtle ways in which social differences are experienced in the microcosm of her street and focuses on the seemingly mundane details of everyday urban life to convey the complexity of the situation, actively engaging the audience to weigh the parts and piece them together. In this way, Varda provides a more complex view of the people on her street and the broader urban changes overshadowing their lives. She presents a profound, innovative meditation on the limits, as well as the necessity, of documentary practice.

6

Melancholy and Merchandise documenting and displaying widowhood in l’ île et elle

In 2006, more than thirty years after Varda completed Daguerreotypes, she created a multimedia installation for the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris that seems, at first glance, to mark a profound departure from her earlier film. Daguerreotypes offered a layered meditation on the development of documentary from daguerreotypes to film through a study of the modernization of the rue Daguerre neighborhood in Paris. Varda’s exhibition L’île et elle (The Island and She) takes as its subject the coastal community where she and her late husband, Jacques Demy, spent many summers, the island of Noirmoutier.1 Whereas Daguerreotypes was a film presented on television and at international film festivals, The Island and She was a multimedia installation that occupied two floors— the entirety—of the glittering Cartier Foundation building, a fashionable contemporary art venue owned by Cartier Jewelers (fig. 48). This chapter examines Varda’s exhibition at the Cartier Foundation, considering how her complex work addresses central debates in contemporary art institutions: how to engage audiences and to what ends? Here, I argue, Varda expands her self-reflexive documentary practice to the three-dimensional exhibition space, reflecting on the conventions of the institution and the ways in which audiences encounter the work—challenging conventions 115

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Fig. 48. Jean Nouvel, Building of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, boulevard Raspail, Paris, 1994. © Philippe Ruault.

in both regards. Varda’s exhibition raises questions about the context and culture surrounding the display of contemporary art by juxtaposing the emotional power of documentary film with the common consumerism of a tourist souvenir stand, thereby interweaving indexes of experience that create a productive dissonance. In the process, she evokes her own experiences and personal grief while evading a full disclosure of intimate details or emotions. If the 2006 exhibition encompasses new materials, new subjects, and a different historical moment, it also shows Varda’s ongoing engagement with the larger ideas that motivated Daguerreotypes. Here, Varda continues to work in dialogue with multiple media in order to raise critical, self-conscious questions about the documentary genre.2 We see her again develop a complex meditation on loss, identity, and place.

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Fig. 49. Exhibition poster featuring Varda in L’île et elle (2006), held at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris. © Agnès Varda.

At the Cartier Foundation’s entrance, posters immediately announce the exhibition as an expression of Varda as a widow: they display a still from Varda’s video, which depicts her sitting on the beach, next to an empty chair, evoking her husband’s absence (fig. 49). The exhibition’s title, L’île et elle, references her experiences on the island of Noirmoutier, a small maritime community and vacation retreat on the Atlantic coast of France, where Varda vacationed for decades with Jacques Demy, her late husband and fellow filmmaker. Furthermore, the title’s pun, playing off the French

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Fig. 50. Cabana stand selling sachets of sea salt for “le sel du marin,” an association for helping fishermen’s wives and widows. The cabana stand was located in the garden of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris. L’île et elle, 2006. © Agnès Varda

near-homophone “il et elle” or “he and she,” references her relationship with Demy and subsequent widowhood. The exhibition poster was taken from the installation’s central work, a film and video piece, Les Veuves de Noirmoutier (The Widows of Noirmoutier), which offers a powerful feminist meditation on women’s grief and features documentary interviews with widows on the island. But in order to view this work, museum visitors must travel through the first floor of the installation, which has a very different tenor. The first floor cultivates an atmosphere of tourism on the Noirmoutier beaches. In the garden outside the center, Varda designed a cabana selling souvenirs, resembling those in Noirmoutier (figs. 50, 51). We proceed through an installation of brightly colored plastic beach toys, Ping Pong, Tong, et

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Fig. 51. Detail of sachets of sea salt, sold for “le sel du marin,” an association for helping fishermen’s wives and widows. The cabana stand selling sachets was located in the garden of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris. L’île et elle, 2006. © Agnès Varda.

Camping, composed of inflatable toys, shovels, pails, beach bags, and flipflops.3 Short, projected video segments of swimming, ping-pong, and playing in the sand are projected onto an inflatable air mattress, which serves as a screen; alternating video images of brightly colored flip-flops appear inside a lime-green inflatable swim ring. With the bright, artificial colors, Varda deliberately creates a sense of cliché souvenirs. She evokes the dual meaning of “souvenir” in French as both a memory and an object or trinket, suggesting the ways in which the two associations might be conflated. The unnatural, highly saturated colors also convey the idealization of vacation memories, and how they are invested with nostalgia. The Cabane aux Portraits, or Portrait Cabana, also on the first floor, reinforces the associations with tourism in Noirmoutier. The structure

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Fig. 52. Installation view of Le Passage du Gois, 2006. © Agnès Varda.

was designed to resemble the cabanas in Noirmoutier (cabanas being local sites of work, seaside cabins, and tourist stands intended for vacationers). Varda’s cabana contains portraits, which present local residents against an artificially colored, cliché backdrop (men photographed before a boating scene, and women before a beach scene). We can glimpse their actual surroundings at the fringes of the image as well as details of their clothing, which provide clues as to their occupations (one woman in a smock, for example, appears to work at a water treatment plant). Yet the backdrops that evoke postcards or souvenir photo stands underscore that we see the “local inhabitants” through the lens of a tourist. To access the lower level of the exhibition, we traverse Le Passage du Gois, or Gois Causeway, a video projection of an old-fashioned route to the island. The video is projected in a hallway that evokes the narrow strip of land (figs. 52, 53). After waiting for the 6-minute time-lapse video of

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Fig. 53. Installation view of Le Passage du Gois, 2006. After the time-lapse video of tides completes its cycle, the barrier slowly lifts, allowing spectators to pass through the projection and access the lower level of the installation, which contains work on themes of grief. © Agnès Varda.

changing tides, a barrier lifts and we are allowed to enter the lower level of the exhibition, where the more emotional and personal work is on display, addressing themes of widowhood and grief. While the exhibition’s upper level evokes nostalgic vacation souvenirs and superficial tourist amusements, the lower level suggests “going deeper” both physically and emotionally or psychologically.4 The exhibition’s central work, The Widows of Noirmoutier, consists of a nine-and-a-half-minute projected film loop, depicting widows from Noirmoutier, dressed in black, arriving at the beach, circling a table together, pausing to gaze at the sea, and departing. Surrounding this projection are thirteen video monitors, running repeated footage of Varda’s interviews with individual widows, and one monitor that depicts Varda herself.5 The

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video monitors are matched with individual chairs and headsets, and spectators can move from chair to chair to listen to each widow discuss her experiences of grief (see figs. 54, 55). In Varda’s monitor, however, she cries quietly before the camera and her experience remains largely unspoken. The exhibition elicited a range of responses from critics: Jonathan Romney described it as an “eclectic installation” that is “gimmicky and contrived. . . . at points, this display could almost be a theme-park evocation of the Noirmoutier experience.”6 Other scholars and critics who have analyzed The Widows of Noirmoutier reached very different conclusions about the work’s meaning: some argued that the video loops imply that the widows are caught in the emotions of loss, suggesting traumatic repetition as the interviews are continuously replayed.7 Others have maintained that the work represents Varda’s emotional candor—an unexpectedly raw expression of her intimate grief that is mediated and enhanced by the multimedia dimensions of the exhibition— and praised Varda’s “astonishingly uninhibited display. . . . in a most intimate act of mourning.”8 Kelley Conway observed: “[Varda] remains silent with an expression of immense sadness that I intimately shared and that words could not express.”9 Such accounts acknowledge the vital emotional dimensions of the work and suggest that it enables us to understand Varda’s grief in an immediate, accessible, or heightened way. Continued examination, however, reveals how Varda’s artistic references and innovative forms of installation—in both The Widows of Noirmoutier and the exhibition at large—complicate a seemingly straightforward, if intimate, disclosure of the documentary footage. In L’île et elle, as in Varda’s earlier nonfiction films, including Daguerreotypes, she meditates on the theme of the conventional limitations of the documentary genre. Varda challenges the idea that a documentary provides a faithful record and that an interview can provide easy access to or a simple understanding of a subject’s life. With this in mind, I suggest that in her exhibition, Varda uses self-reflexive forms of installation to remind us of the limits of what we can see and know about the represented subjects, including herself. In so doing, she prompts us to rethink notions of widowhood and grief. The contrasts between the various elements of L’île et elle—The Widows of Noirmoutier, The Gois Causeway, the beach souvenirs—call attention to the institutional context of the exhibition as a whole. Between the intimacy of the widows’ exploration of melancholy and the inexpensive merchandise

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of the tourist stand, Varda prompts critical reflection on one of the most prominent venues for the display of contemporary art in Paris, the Cartier Foundation, and through this institution, initiates reflection on the broader culture of display surrounding contemporary art today.10 The Cartier Foundation does not call itself a museum; it does not emphasize exhibiting its permanent collection but instead features thematic exhibitions or artists’ installations. The institution is private, not run by the city of Paris or French national museum network (the Réunion des musées nationaux), but supported by Cartier Jewelers, and prefers to call itself a “contemporary art space.” It is emblematic of a broader trend toward greater corporate patronage of the arts in France—which has developed significantly over the last several decades—often viewed as an “American” model of corporate cultural sponsorship.11 The foundation aims “to promote contemporary artists and to project Cartier as a young, vibrant, and dynamic company through its association with contemporary culture.”12 It is an important destination for contemporary art and architecture tourism and is known for hosting exhibitions, events, and festivities that draw audiences associated with high art and fashion. The way in which Varda’s exhibition combines serious, emotional, and artistic content with issues of tourism, entertainment, and consumerism, helps us to understand the range of experiences that are part of many such art institutions.

the widows of noirmoutier: a f e m i n i s t recasting of widowhood The key to understanding the exhibition as a whole and its diverse investments is found in the culminating work, The Widows of Noirmoutier. At first, the widows may appear to be stuck in grief. In the central projection, the thirteen silent widows dressed in black slowly arrive at a bleak beach in Noirmoutier (figs. 54, 55). They mournfully circle an empty table that suggests a surrogate for a coffin or lost loved one.13 After several minutes, they gaze out at the sea and then depart individually. The audio features the continuous sounds of waves washing ashore, and a violin score composed by Ami Flammer in a mournful, minor key. In the interviews, it becomes clear that many of the women were married to sailors and lost

Fig. 54. Detail of Les Veuves de Noirmoutier polyptyque (2004–2005). © Agnès Varda.

Fig. 55. Installation view of Les Veuves de Noirmoutier (2004–2005). © Agnès Varda.

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their husbands to accidents at sea, lending a particular resonance to this scene on the beach. The women repeatedly describe their experience of widowhood in terms of “lack, absence, loss, and great emptiness.” They recount that they continue to have intense emotional relationships with their deceased spouses—even long after their passing and despite social pressures to move on. One widow asserts: “We say ‘my [other] half.’ . . . It feels like . . . living in half.” She explains that she was angered when she was asked, “How are you doing?” Or worse, “ ‘Are you doing better now?’ . . . Can one?” Yet within these accounts of grief and suffering, Varda represents various forms of the widows’ practical and emotional adaptability. One woman took over the family business of tending salt marshes; an unemployed mother at age thirty raised four young children despite abject poverty; while another widow, a high school teacher, began psychotherapy as a means to cope with being blamed for her husband’s suicide. Furthermore, Varda presents the widows’ continued attachment to their spouses as not simply being fixated on an absence but as a way of maintaining tender affection for the deceased while also experiencing new directions, new lives. In one interview, during which a widow appears outdoors, surrounded by trees, Varda uses visual metaphors drawn from nature and the widow’s account to suggest the woman’s emotional trajectory (fig. 56). As in many of the interviews, Varda combines several short segments of the conversation. We hear Varda off screen asking questions, reminding us of her presence and her own unspoken story. The widow explains: We were about to celebrate a year of marriage on the 23rd. . . . When my husband knew that the cancer had come back, he filled out the invitations but had trouble sending them. He said to me, “where will I be on the 23rd?” In fact, it was the day of his burial. He was able to bring us all together anyway. I think they call it a paper marriage, when married for only a year. . . . I didn’t even have that. . . . Home is still full of his presence, his scent. We ate beans two days ago that he’d bought at the market—it was still too soon. [Her voice cracks.] I keep thinking he’ll come back, but it’s a trick [une blague].

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Fig. 56. Interview with “Inès A.” in Les Veuves de Noirmoutier (2004–2005). © Agnès Varda.

Do I really feel I’m a widow? Yes, I feel amputated. Amputated from him. . . . There are words that hurt me. Five days ago I was invited to dinner, and was told: “We’ll be five couples together.” [She begins to cry.] Varda asks: The words “couple” and “together”? She nods and responds: I knew no one wanted to hurt me, but it hurt me anyway. Because it means that I now have to face the fact that I am a couple with a dead person . . . The man I love is dead. “If I buried his remains, I haven’t buried my love for him.” Yes, I believe love endures, in any case . . .14

The widow’s story conveys the chasm between her grief and the “good intentions,” albeit insensitivity, of others. The interview suggests that her

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Fig. 57. Shot of tree branches extending skyward in Les Veuves de Noirmoutier (2004–2005). © Agnès Varda.

time married (not even a “paper marriage”) is not proportionate to her immense love and sorrow. Varda reinforces the woman’s words through a visual metaphor of a tree. The woman describes her sense of widowhood as being “amputated, amputated from him,” which Varda echoes with a shot of a tree with its branch severed; a scar runs down the side of the tree in front of which the widow stands. Yet Varda conveys a quiet optimism when the woman describes how her love endures beyond her husband’s death. The sequence shows tree branches extending skyward in all directions and small plants beginning to sprout among fallen leaves scattered on the ground (fig. 57).15 Varda suggests new growth and new paths, a sense of life carrying on amid death. It is here that we start to see how Varda pushes us to reconsider the meaning of grief and our expectations of women who are in the process of grieving their dead spouses.

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Critics who have interpreted the work as showing widows stuck in a cycle of grief have perhaps too readily assumed a conventional understanding of mourning stemming from Freud: that is, the healthy subject experiences sorrow for a time, then lets go and moves on—an idea Sigmund Freud articulated in his influential 1917 “Mourning and Melancholia” essay.16 (This idea is often conveyed in the interviews as well, when we hear that the widows have been encouraged to part with their spouses’ possessions, avoid painful reminders, and move forward.) Varda illustrates something closer to Freud’s 1917 concept of melancholy: the widows incorporate the loved, lost object into their identities. For Varda, however, this integration of the deceased into the widows’ identity is a sign not of pathology but of transformation.17 Grief is not a condition that we either hold on to or let go of; rather, grief inhabits and transforms the subject. In this way, Varda participates in a broader, feminist rethinking of mourning and melancholy.18 Whereas Freud’s essay associated melancholy with a self-punishing inability to mourn properly, Varda recasts melancholy as a more common (and not dysfunctional) condition, an experience that, while painful, can produce strength and new life. Moreover, Varda suggests that this sort of “living in grief ” is perhaps more honest than the idealized vacation memories presented on the first floor of the exhibition. The installation’s central projection goes further in casting the women’s enduring grief and widowhood as a transformation rather than a kind of stagnation through its subtle (and previously unrecognized) reference to the work of another feminist artist: Suzanne Lacy’s 1984 performance Whisper, the Waves, the Wind (fig. 58). In Lacy’s performance, elderly women dressed in white walked in procession to a beach in La Jolla, California, where they gathered at tables and spoke about how they confronted challenges of aging with energy and ambition. Their conversations and prerecorded interviews were played for the audience, before the women processed out to the audience’s applause and cheers.19 Lacy explains that she designed the work as a celebration of women’s strength and engagement to counteract media images of elderly women as frail and useless. The setting—the bright sunshine, brilliant blue-green ocean, and signs of marine life—reinforced the impression of liveliness. Lacy explained: “[The women] reminded me of the place where ocean meets shoreline. Their bodies were

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Fig. 58. Whisper, the Waves, the Wind. Performance by Suzanne Lacy with Sharon Allen, 1984, La Jolla, California. Photograph by Edith Kodmur. © Suzanne Lacy.

growing older, wrinkled. But what I saw was the rock in them, solid with the presences of the years washing over them.”20 While Varda resists the triumphant, celebratory tone of Lacy’s work, she positions her work within this artistic lineage—and her invocation of Lacy’s performance can help us see how she challenges conventional understandings of grief and widowhood. In fact, the spectator’s experience of the central projection may change over the course of listening to the individual interviews. The repetition of the central film loop throughout the work prompts us to recognize that our perception of the widows is not simply repeated but a dynamic process (see fig. 55). Though at first the women may appear as frail widows in black overwhelmed by grief, spectators may come to see them as figures of strength for enduring pain, speaking publicly, and continuing on. In this way, the effects of Varda’s project resemble Lacy’s: challenging stereotypes of elderly women as frail, stagnant, withered, or even dysfunctional. Instead, the women embody fortitude and dynamic growth.

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varda as widow The questions remain: Where does Varda situate herself in this meditation on grief and melancholy? How does she prompt the viewer to understand her experience? Varda evades an easy or full resolution of these questions. She does not appear in the central projection. In contrast to the interviews with the widows in the individual monitors of The Widows of Noirmoutier, in Varda’s own monitor she uses imagery and song to evoke sensuality, emotion, and memory, but she does not speak directly about her experience; we may thus question interpretations that this work constitutes Varda’s candid expression of grief. (Her visual self-representation is emotionally resonant, but at the same time it is anything but clear or straightforward in its meaning—layered references to song and previous films stand in for the seemingly direct speech of the interview.) She appears in a contemporary, staged scene, crying silently before the camera, sitting next to an empty chair on the beach of Noirmoutier, with seaweed strewn around her at low tide (see fig. 49). The camera then focuses on a richly colored strand of seaweed washed gently by waves, and cuts to faded footage of seaweed and shore in the final sequence of her 1991 film, Jacquot de Nantes, as if triggering a memory (fig. 59). Varda completed the filming of Jacquot de Nantes, a film about Demy’s life, in 1989–90, just before he passed away. In this sequence, Varda sings Jacques Prévert’s “Demons and Wonders” as she films the shoreline, seaweed, and what appears to be a home movie of Demy on the beach, frail and aware of his impending death (fig. 60). This sequence begins with Varda on the beach in Noirmoutier in 2004, and then, with her song, cuts back to the earlier film of Demy. She sings: Demons and wonders, winds and tides, far away the sea has gone out. And you, like a strand of seaweed gently caressed by the wind, you move as you dream in the sands of the bed.

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Fig. 59. Still of seaweed washed by waves from Varda’s monitor in Les Veuves de Noirmoutier (2004–2005). © Agnès Varda.

Demons and wonders, winds and tides, far away the sea has gone out. But in your half-open eyes, two tiny waves remain. [Varda focuses on Demy’s frail face; he looks at her touchingly with watery eyes and then out to sea.] Demons and wonders, winds and tides, two tiny tears, two tiny waves to drown myself in.

The 2004 sequence conveys sensuality: the beautiful strand of seaweed is washed by frothy waves. In the 1990 sequence that follows, it appears as if

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Fig. 60. Varda’s monitor in Les Veuves de Noirmoutier (2004–2005) showing Demy in the final sequence of Jacquot de Nantes (1991). © Agnès Varda.

the camera is tossed about over the waves, as the lyrics describe the seaweed (and lover) being caressed by wind and sea.21 The figure of the sea and lyrics “far away the sea has gone out,” suggest Demy’s imminent death. The metaphor of “half-open eyes” underscores that he is still alive, but on the cusp of death. The phrase “two tiny waves to drown myself in” refers to the tears in his eyes as he looks at Varda and Varda “drowning” in grief (fig. 60). The film’s color is faded with age, evoking the moment’s distance in time, and the grainy, “home movie” quality reinforces the sense of intimacy and pathos. The source of the Prévert song that Varda sings has not been explored, yet it is critical for understanding the significance of the scene. The song was originally performed in Marcel Carné’s 1942 film Les Visiteurs du Soir (The Devil’s Envoys).22 Carné’s film is posed as a medieval fairy tale in which the hero chooses to love the heroine and suffer rather than collaborate with the devil and live “alone and miserable.” Furious, the devil turns the couple to stone during their embrace yet finds that their hearts continue to beat in unison at the end of the film.23 On one level, Varda’s

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reference to the film reinforces the idea, voiced by other widows, that love endures across time, persisting even in death. Varda’s sequence in The Widows of Noirmoutier ends with two personified clusters of seaweed connected by a strand, evoking the statue of the two figures in the final shot of Carné’s film, suggesting couples united across time, even in death.24 Yet if the allusion to Carné suggests the idea of romantic fulfillment that defies death, it also evokes an understanding of love as complicated and painful and that which is unspoken and unrepresentable. The Devil’s Envoys was made during the German occupation of France in the Second World War. Carné’s film uses the premise of the fairy tale (a time long ago and a land far away) to comment on the present situation indirectly via unspoken meanings. (In this case, love and pure hearts triumphing over evil as a metaphor of political resistance.)25 Carné’s film is about repression and projection—the stories and myths we illuminate on the screen to address things we cannot speak to or solve in reality. Those familiar with Varda’s and Demy’s biographies know the complicated history of their relationship: the couple divorced in the late 1970s, though they later reconciled. When Varda frames her relationship with Demy in the context of Carné’s fairy tale, she acknowledges elements of desire and idealization, reminding us that melancholia includes the fantasized representation of the lost person. Her monitor appears intimate, yet it leaves her experience unspoken and ambiguous. We may try to infer this experience through her visual and aesthetic references and through others’ stories that stand in ambiguously for her own, but we cannot piece together a larger, coherent narrative.26 This also recalls the widows’ silence in the central projection and the way in which their grief exceeds the words they have spoken in the interviews. This push and pull between revealing and concealing is reinforced by the way in which Varda directs the audience’s experience of the video monitors. The emotionally charged interviews about deeply personal losses are offered to the spectator through intimate forms of reception— individual headsets that promote the spectator’s emotional engagement (see fig. 55). In fact, viewers describe crying, tightness in their throats, and other emotional and physical reactions while watching the work.27 The seeming intimacy of the interviews might encourage viewers to feel they have a privileged window into the widows’ experiences. Yet while Varda

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Fig. 61. Varda’s salt installation in L’île et elle (2006). © Agnès Varda.

seeks to engage us emotionally, she reminds us of the limits of our understanding through the women’s silence, asking us to recognize the limits of what we can know and understand through the exhibition.

m elan choly a n d mer cha n di s e On the first floor, Varda designed a tourist souvenir stand resembling those at the Noirmoutier beach, selling sachets of sea salt, a specialty of the island, proceeds from which benefit the widows of sailors (see figs. 50, 51). These sachets reference another part of the installation: a room in which Varda exhibits a mound of salt (fig. 61). The scent of the salt adds another dimension to the viewer’s experience of the installation, suggesting the importance of scent to our memories of specific places and people. On the adjacent wall, Varda displays text that paraphrases a verse from the Bible (Matthew 5:13): “You are the salt of the earth. But if salt loses its savor, how will it become salty again?” In the biblical passage, Jesus urges Christians to be steadfast. Here, Varda seems to invoke Demy, who grew up in Nantes, on the Atlantic coast, and in interviews described how he

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sees himself and his films like the calm sea. Varda suggests that Demy is the salt of life and asks how her life might regain its savor without him. In contrast, the souvenir stand commodifies that salt. With these souvenirs we are reminded that we are tourists in relation to the island’s inhabitants (voyeurs to the widows’ grief ) as well as tourists at an art exhibition (making a purchase at what also functions as a museum gift shop). Though we may purchase the souvenir salt as a gesture of support, it remains an extremely modest gesture, underscoring the cultural and socioeconomic distance between many museum visitors and these women. Thus, the tourist stand and souvenirs prompt us to reflect on the conditions of viewing and make us uncomfortable within our roles as tourists and consumers of grief. Varda suggests an analogy between leisure tourism (the shack at the beach vacation destination) and art tourism (the gift shop), suggesting that strong emotion and consumer pleasures are not mutually exclusive; both are part of the experience. In fact, in size and shape Varda’s pile of salt resembles Felix GonzalezTorres’s conceptual sculpture “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991, which was composed of cellophane-wrapped candy and exhibited on museums’ floors, often in triangular or conical shapes (see fig. 62). The ideal weight of the candy was equal to the weight of his partner, Ross Laycock, who died of causes related to AIDS; the candy was gradually depleted as audiences had the choice to take and consume it each day.28 Although Demy’s death from complications related to AIDS was not revealed until the release of Varda’s 2008 film The Beaches of Agnès, she suggests this possibility with this artistic reference. Gonzalez-Torres’s work creates a tension between the gravity of the sculpture—the suggestion of a withering, dying, lover’s body—and sweet, shiny, tempting candy that the audience may take away and consume for enjoyment. I believe Varda implicates audiences in a similar way, with the pleasure of the tourist souvenir salt contrasted with the widow’s individual pain. Both works prompt an emotional conflict in the spectator: desire, consumption, and pleasure opposing awkwardness, guilt, and discomfort as we recognize our roles as spectators and consumers of others’ grief. Varda’s attention to relationships between art institutions and consumerism carries particular force given the site of her exhibition: the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris, supported by Cartier Jewelers.

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Fig. 62. Felix Gonzalez-Torres. “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991 Candies individually wrapped in multicolor cellophane, endless supply Overall dimensions vary with installation Ideal weight: 175 lbs Installation View: “More Love: Art, Politics, and Sharing Since the 1990s.” Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 1 Feb.–31 Mar. 2013. Cur. Claire Schneider. Catalogue. [Travels to Cheekwood, Nashville, TN. 21 Sept.–31 Dec. 2013] © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York Photograph by Peter Geoffrion

The company commissioned French architect Jean Nouvel to design the building, which opened in 1994. The exterior walls are almost entirely glass—there are two multistory façade walls on the front and back of the building, with the exhibition space in between. The glittering glass building housing the exhibition space—a design that evokes the jewels in which the company trades—also places visitors to the Cartier Foundation on display, promoting a “see and be seen” environment that brings together the worlds of contemporary art and high fashion (see fig. 48).29 Varda’s exhibition inaugurated the Cartier Foundation’s summer season, and the

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opening could be seen as a beach-themed event, further confounding the lines between art, tourism, and consumerism. Yet with the tourist stand, adjacent to the Cartier building, Varda evokes not the glamour of the runway but instead the low-brow entertainment of the boardwalk (see fig. 50). In this way, Varda references inexpensive entertainment and souvenirs, attractions that challenge the high art and fashion image that the museum seeks to cultivate.

documentary and distortion Varda develops this tension between modes of engagement in the Gois Causeway, the video projection onto translucent plastic strips and a barrier that blocks visitors’ access to the exhibition’s lower level and The Widows of Noirmoutier at “high tide.” At the moment when we approach the most profound area of the exhibition, Varda uses parodic humor— making this work deliberately low brow. When the time-lapse video returns to low tide, a warning light goes off, and a flimsy barrier slowly lifts, allowing us to pass through (see figs. 52, 53). The barrier is clearly brand-new: the paint is fresh, and shows no traces of wear, yet it is deliberately slow and made to appear as if it were old-fashioned, evoking what one critic views as amusement park theatrics.30 Moreover, we are reminded of how we wait in line for the gate to be raised to enter an amusement ride or timed attraction and prompted to recognize how we are moved through parts of the exhibition in highly controlled ways. Yet, as a spectator passes through the plastic strips, a different interaction with the installation transpires as the visitor’s body momentarily becomes the screen onto which the video is projected (see fig. 53). These images— image-light projections in the passage—bend and transform through time and space, and they change depending upon the person on to whom they are cast. The effect suggests not documentary permanence or stability (that is, a record of something that took place), but the way in which these images are mutable in the space of the installation. Varda recognizes that the ways in which we respond depend on our perspective and associations and the processing of our individual experiences—not on “an immediate comprehension” of the subject or a “correct” interpretation of the works.

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Key to the impact of this work is the way in which Varda maximizes the diverse potentials of multiple media. The time-lapse projection of the changing tides contrasts with the panoramic photographs that line the walls of the Gois Causeway, demonstrating Varda’s reflection on how different media function and what they can capture and represent. The panoramic photographs depict broad vistas of the landscape, yet they portray a past, fixed moment. In the photographs, the tide has gone out; we see crisp details of boats and rocks washed ashore that happened to be there on the particular day when the picture was taken. In contrast, the time-lapse video is lowerresolution and accelerated—losing particular details that might situate it at specific moments—suggesting the flux and flow of the cycles of the tides, the continual movement of time, the mutability of image and memory. This fluidity of image and memory contrasts with traditional notions of documentary as a faithful record or depiction of events that took place. Varda underscores the changeability of images and memories associated with Noirmoutier and her life with Demy, as opposed to documentary permanence and stability.31 At the end of the exhibition, coming back to the upper level, we encounter Ma Cabane de l’Echec (My Cabana of Failure), which was later renamed Ma Cabane du Cinéma (My Cabana of Cinema, sometimes translated as My House of Cinema). The work’s structure is designed to evoke the cabanas at the Noirmoutier seaside (fig. 63). The structure is composed of a metal frame; the cabana’s walls were created from hanging celluloid footage from Varda’s 1966 film Les Créatures, which was filmed in Noirmoutier and dedicated to Jacques Demy. The film featured actors Michel Piccoli and Catherine Deneuve—who starred in Demy’s most famous films. The film was reportedly a commercial failure in its time;32 here, Varda recycles the film as material to construct the cabana as installation art. We can see the materiality of 35-millimeter film and 24 frames per second. Light penetrates the film (not as projection, but here, hanging in the exhibition space, from ambient light). The work evokes Varda’s transition from cinema to installation art. She playfully calls it a new way to “dwell in her house of cinema”; in French, “house of cinema” would suggest an art film house or theater, but here Varda also suggests a different engagement with the medium—creating a literal three-dimensional house—as an installation art form. Along with the cabana, Varda exhibited reels of Les Créatures on an oldfashioned flatbed editor, used for editing celluloid film. The two main char-

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Fig. 63. Ma Cabane de l’Echec, which became Ma Cabane du Cinéma, 2006. © Agnès Varda.

acters of the film (Deneuve as heroine and Piccoli as hero) appear in the editor’s two screens in reverse, being rewound. Varda suggests an idea of a “couple,” reversing the film and going back in time, and makes us aware of how time is expressed via the medium.33 (One of the early films by the Lumière brothers—The Demolition of a Wall—shows a wall demolished, and then the film is reversed, so that the wall is “magically reconstructed.”) Varda presents two film reels of the main characters in the two screens of the editor that would ostensibly be spliced together through the process or “magic” of editing. Yet Varda underscores the impossibility of recapturing the past by using the medium to constitute images of the couple. While the Gois Causeway calls attention to the role of the audience in the experience of the art installation, My Cabana of Failure returns to the artist herself and her material—in this instance, celluloid, which makes possible the fantasy experience of viewing a film and which suggests the unreliability of the artist, even when she seems to be a documentarian. In Les Créatures, Varda combined seemingly documentary footage of the island

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with a fictional plot—a story of an author writing a novel about characters on the island. Throughout the film, it is impossible to distinguish “reality” from “fantasy”; the audience is left to wonder: is this an event that the writer experiences or a fictional event from his story? In 1969, Roger Ebert wrote: “Agnès Varda’s Les Créatures is a complex and nearly hypnotic study of the way fact is made into fiction . . . illustrating how fantasy, reality and style are simultaneously kept suspended in the mind of a creative writer.”34 By referencing this film within her exhibition, Varda suggests that her recent work should not be seen as a “documentary record” or a revelation of an intimate past. Rather, Varda prompts us to recognize that memory is an active process; she views the past subjectively to create the present, fabricating images and fictions of her life with Demy and their work as filmmakers. This and several other salient themes of the installation are reinforced and interwoven in the sequence of Demy on the beach, included in Varda’s monitor in The Widows of Noirmoutier (see fig. 60). He appears uncomfortable being filmed and is silent. Varda planned the shoot and Demy cooperated; but we can see what appears to be his discomfort in this intimate exchange of looks between himself and Varda being captured through the lens of the camera, and his likely awareness that it will reach other audiences, after his death.35 Similarly, Varda underscores the subjectivity of widows’ stories and husbands’ silence in her interviews with the widows. For example, widows hold their husbands’ photos, evoking the presence of the husbands in the widows’ lives as well as the fantastical dimensions of melancholia, a process by which each widow incorporates notions of what the lost person or relationship represented to her (see fig. 54). Varda visually juxtaposes the animated widow and still photographed subject; the contemporary scenes of the widow and the dated photograph. She conveys how the photograph as document is filtered through the widow’s melancholy and nostalgia. Seeing the silent, faded, photographed subject and the widow tell her story, it is clear it is her story—Varda’s tacit acknowledgment that Demy and the other widows’ husbands are characters in the women’s stories and fantasies. And in so doing, Varda evades self-revelation or summation—intentionally keeping her own and Demy’s life stories ambiguous and incomplete. At a time when multimedia exhibitions are championed as forms of audience engagement, Varda offers a complex and ambivalent meditation on

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the possibilities of documentary, installation art, and experience of contemporary exhibition spaces. On the one hand, by presenting widows who speak about their grief, and by dramatizing intimate feelings of loss, Varda encourages us to engage emotionally with a difficult subject (rather than keeping it at arm’s length or negatively judging the women). By evoking the carefree experience of a beach vacation, she invites us to take pleasure and amusement, but then makes us self-conscious about having done so in the environment of the art exhibition space. This exhibition is not merely a sentimental reflection on loves lost or a pleasurable day at the beach. Rather, there is a serious political motivation behind her prompting us to reconsider stereotypes of widowhood and grief, of amusement and relaxation. These critiques reflect her feminist commitments as well as her awareness of the institution in which she exhibits and the changing status of artistic venues and sponsorship in France. Varda promotes our emotional engagement—via headsets and intimate interviews and footage. Yet she tempers the emotional force of the documentary interviews with other parts of the exhibition, which are humorous or frivolous, recalling boardwalk-style amusements and summer vacations, rather than death and loss. Through her installation, she prompts us to recognize our distance from the human subjects and their grief, as well as the limits of our understanding. On the surface, the diverse experience that Varda makes possible in her installation—profound grief, emotional pain, amusement and entertainment, consumerist frivolity—might seem contradictory. Varda evokes these different dimensions, making us self-consciously aware of them and thereby establishing a set of circumstances within which we can reflect on their interrelationship within the exhibition and within ourselves. Varda mixes different modes of display to prompt us to reflect on our relationship to the institution and to the experiences it purveys. Throughout the exhibition—from the beach toys to the souvenir stands—Varda reminds us that we are tourists in relation to the island’s inhabitants and voyeurs of grief. We are continually reminded of how the experience is constructed— whether through the tourists’ gaze on the locals in the cabana photographs, the barrier that blocks our passage and then ushers us through on a timed cycle like an amusement park attraction, or the souvenir stand purchase that provides a means for expressing empathy with the island’s

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widows. And we are made to feel self-conscious, self-doubting, and even self-critical of having been convinced by the emotional draw of the show, whether taking pleasure in the ground-floor vacation setting as amusement and entertainment or sharing in the widows’ grief. Thus, Varda’s exhibition does not provide a simple solution for engaging audiences; it is self-conscious, even adamant, about its limits and prompts audiences to recognize them as well. In so doing, it requires that the viewers be active, that they do the work of making meaning, and that they do so in a way that exercises responsibility for the meaning that they produce.

7

Varda Now autobiography, memory, and retrospective

Varda’s refusal to be easily positioned, either politically or cinematically, has continued throughout her complex career. In its most recent stage, she raises new questions of legacy and history. With the release of her autobiographical film, Les Plages d’Agnès (The Beaches of Agnès) (2008), re-release of work on the DVD Tout(e) Varda (2012), and acceptance of the 2015 Palme d’honneur, a lifetime achievement award at the Cannes Film Festival, she continues to renegotiate stories of her life and career. Where others might sum things up, she has rejected reductive social and artistic categorizations. She challenges familiar understandings of her life and work by bringing new material to light and suggesting new avenues for interpretation. While this might be seen as disclosure or personal revelation, Varda insists on leaving interpretation ambiguous and in play. As I have argued in this work, Varda’s films invoke different media, and the conventions associated with them, across her career. They raise issues beyond the surface narrative—questions of identity and politics—and they explore documentary and self-reflexive cinematic practice. In The Beaches of Agnès, Varda again invokes various media within her film to explore questions of her identity, focusing on themes of age, gender, suppressed memory, and nostalgia. In dialogues at the Cannes festival and in her 143

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speech at the awards ceremony, she engages the celebration of her life’s work but also challenges it by raising broader questions about her place as a female filmmaker.

the beaches of agnès a s r e t r o s p e c t i v e In 2008, at age 80, Varda released The Beaches of Agnès—a complex artistic meditation on her life and career that she describes as an autoportrait, or self-portrait. Critics have sometimes criticized it as nostalgic,1 but their reaction stems in part from a not entirely misplaced expectation that the film would offer biographical truth. Varda makes herself the object of documentary scrutiny, seemingly revealing highly personal information, which many critics have accepted as her emotional candor or her life story revealed.2 Indeed, the filmmaker herself classifies The Beaches as documentary (and it has received international accolades in this domain, including a French César and an Oscar nomination in the category of best documentary).3 The film reviews her childhood, her career as a filmmaker and artist, the process of aging, life with her late husband, Jacques Demy, and her subsequent widowhood. It is roughly chronological, but continually moves back and forth between Varda speaking directly to the camera (in a poignant and seemingly personal manner) in the present and providing voiceover narration and clips of previous work, historical film footage and photographs, or family photos and film. Varda highlights her ongoing process of reconstruction and her enduring belief in the incompleteness of her own story. She renegotiates her own legacy, resisting simplifying her life into easy summary and therefore denying a conclusion to a career that has spanned more than six decades. This strategy is, if not expected, not entirely surprising, either. Varda is a feminist filmmaker who has been making films that complicate attempts to pin her down or associate her work with a single—or simple—position. It seems fitting, then, that Varda would choose to strategize once again and in doing so, cast her work and life into a particular kind of relief, toward the end of her career. In fact, Varda deliberately blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction, participating in a much larger mixing of modes once thought to be

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antithetical.4 She positions herself as both the film’s narrator and main character,5 underscoring the role of subjective memory in interpreting the past.6 Varda denies traditional conventions associated with the documentary genre: objective presentation, consistent historical reconstruction, and thorough exposition of the chosen topic. If conventional documentary often employs an overarching framework to give coherence to the portrayal of a biography and history, Varda withholds such a framework.7 If traditionally, history is narrated chronologically and as complete and separate from the present, Varda narrates from the point of view of the present, exploring the fragmentary and distorted nature of her retrieval of the past.8 In one shot, Varda shows the only remaining photograph of her entire childhood family. She explains that she has few memories of her childhood. At one point, she holds her photograph in front of her mouth— evoking both the stories left untold and the opacity of the image for a viewer without this context. Varda illustrates the fraught project of trying to create a historical reconstruction of one’s life, by emphasizing the uncertainty of her memory and her increasing forgetfulness. She captures the uncertainty of memory visually. Throughout the film, Varda revisits beaches that have marked her life. In the opening sequence, she stands in the sand, addressing the audience: I’m playing the part of a little old lady, pleasantly plump and talkative, telling her life story. . . . If we opened up people we’d find landscapes. If we opened me up, we’d find beaches.

In the stunning sequence that follows, Varda provides shots of a Belgian beach that she visited as a child, creating visual and spatial metaphors to suggest the incompleteness, instability, and distortions of memory, while also evoking the limitations of her project of reconstructing the past. Along with a childhood portrait, Varda mounts mirrors and empty frames, suggestive of self-portraits, on the beach. Through these frames, we see isolated portions of the landscape from multiple perspectives instead of a single comprehensive view. The visual fragmentation of the landscape serves as a metaphor for the film’s focus on decontextualized details from the past. Waves advance and recede on the beach, acting as visual metaphors for the constant flux of memory. Water, like memory, Varda

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suggests, is not a stable referent but a continually shifting entity. And mirrors set up on the beach reflect multiple and distorted images of Varda, refuting the notion of a single, static subject. Also reflected in the mirrors is Varda’s camera crew, making overt the often invisible apparatus of filmmaking. In the sequences that follow, Varda reassembles fragments from her life, combining a range of different materials—film footage, family videos, personal photographs, and interviews with her friends, colleagues, and family—which are clearly influenced by nostalgia and the self-conscious unreliability of memory. In fact, Varda finds the unavoidable gaps in memory—and the inevitable tangents of remembrance—as abundant a source of information as personal revelation. She returns to her childhood home in Belgium while admitting that she has few memories of the place (and she confesses in the voiceover that she filmed it poorly in any case). Instead, she films the home’s inhabitant—an older man with a child’s hobby, an extensive collection of toy trains.9 We are left to wonder at this conflation and also at the way in which Varda’s search for the past often leads us through the present. Throughout the film, Varda presents family photographs. A contemporary close-up shot of her age-spotted hand holding a photograph of herself and Demy together at home in the late 1980s conveys nostalgia—they are posed together, signifying their union—but also the passage of this moment (fig. 64). By depicting various visual media within her film, she sets up a tension between nostalgia and a sense of difficult issues that have been suppressed. Varda uses different strategies to convey personal and emotional content. Some personal revelations are acknowledged straightforwardly in the film. Varda and her circle had previously suppressed the circumstances of Demy’s death; directly addressing the audience, she acknowledges that he died of complications from AIDS in 1990. Yet at other moments (such as her earlier separation from Demy), Varda relies on segments from her fiction film to stand in for her story. To describe their complex relationship, Varda includes segments from her 1981 film Documenteur, which was made during the period of their separation (fig. 65). In voiceover narration, Varda explains that Sabine Mamou, a film editor, and Varda’s son Mathieu, agreed to play the main characters, Emilie

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Fig. 64. Agnès Varda holding a photograph by Rosalie Varda of Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda in Les Plages d’Agnès (2008). © Ciné-Tamaris.

and Martin. As we see them walk by the Los Angeles beaches, Mamou’s arm draped maternally around Mathieu’s shoulder, Varda asks: How to describe Sabine Mamou? . . . She was a film editor. She agreed to play Mathieu’s mom. A mother and her son. Emilie and Martin. In retrospect, I see she was another me.

Varda then cuts to another segment of Documenteur, when Emilie confides to a friend on the telephone she has separated from her husband. When the friend asks, “are you alright?” Emilie replies with a succinct and emotional “no.” By moving from Varda’s contemporary self-narration to the dialogue of the earlier film, Varda creates a disjunctive combination of truth and fiction. She publicly acknowledges her marital separation during this period, while she protects her privacy by relying on fiction films and contributes to the continued distortion of the relationship between artist and oeuvre. On a narrative level, Varda explains that she and Jacques shared a household and bed, presents idyllic family photographs of themselves as a couple,

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Fig. 65. Les Plages d’Agnès (2008) includes sequences from Documenteur (1981), with Sabine Mamou and Mathieu Demy playing the roles of mother and son.

and evokes a 1928 painting by René Magritte. This canvas, The Lovers, portrays a hooded couple embracing, with sheets that block their kiss; Varda recreates the painting by using hooded models in the courtyard of the home where she and Demy lived (figs. 66, 67). Their embrace conveys their attraction (and unlike Magritte, who depicts clothed lovers, Varda zooms out to show that these lovers are nude and clearly aroused). In both works, the impeded kiss suggests deep desire—as well as frustration and isolation— and the inevitable inability to know one’s partner fully.10 Varda uses a freeze frame at the end of the shot and changes it from color to black and white to suggest a photograph, implicitly working in tension with the idyllic blackand-white photographs throughout the film. By referencing Magritte’s Lovers, she suggests the possibility of a more complex and painful story. Across the film, she uses different media and aesthetic references to evoke ideas while leaving her story open-ended and ambiguous. I believe that Varda asserts control over her legacy. By representing her career and her life within a “documentary” but emphasizing the gaps and distortions of memory and possible suppressions, Varda invites viewers to reconsider both simultaneously. She resists the conventional categories

Fig. 66. A scene in Les Plages d’Agnès (2008) evokes René Magritte’s The Lovers, 1928.

Fig. 67. René Magritte (1898–1967) © ARS, NY. The Lovers, France, 1928. Oil on canvas, 21 3/8 X 28 7/8” (54 X 73.4 cm). Gift of Richard S. Ziesler. © 2016 C. Herscovici, Brussels / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. The Museum of Modern Art. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA/ Art Resource, NY.

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within which both she and her films have been categorized. By emphasizing the instability of memory and the fragmentary nature of the reconstruction, Varda also resists the closure that documentaries often provide and seeks to suspend a conclusion that might prevent further interpretations of her career and life. Despite the film’s insistence on the incompleteness of its reconstruction of the past, it also reopens consideration of Varda’s life and career. It makes sense that as she looks back at her career, she confronts the important narrative that has shaped reception of her work: the question of her position in the New Wave. Varda includes an interview with her colleague Chris Marker in which she tells a familiar story about the New Wave. As this occurs, she incorporates various images, including a reworking of another Magritte image, to question the surface narrative. Marker is represented by the cartoon cat Guillaume, who asks her about the New Wave in a robotic voice, conveying how often this question has been asked. He interrupts her stories and says, “Tell us instead about the beginning of the New Wave. Truffaut, Godard, Resnais, Chabrol, Rivette, Demy . . . And you, La Varda?” underscoring her feminine gender and her status as the only female director associated with the movement. Varda responds by telling a familiar story of how Jean-Luc Godard directed Breathless for the producer Georges de Beauregard to great success. Beauregard asked Godard, “ ‘Do you have another friend [copain] like you who makes cheap films that make money?’ Jean-Luc introduced him to Jacques Demy, who made Lola with Anouk Aimée.” On screen Varda cuts from the interview to two stills from the film with the film poster—displaying Aimée in character—a scantily clad cabaret dancer. Varda continues, “So Beauregard said to Jacques, ‘I want a stable of guys like you, do you know any?’ And Jacques said, ‘No, but I’ve got a girl, Agnès Varda.’ Beauregard said to me: ‘Do like your pals and make a cheap little black-and-white film.’ So I made Cleo from 5 to 7 with Corrine Marchand.” The film cuts to two stills and the film poster, which shows Marchand as the character of Cléo, the buxom blonde pop star, wearing a negligée. On the level of narrative, it is a familiar story—but on the level of image, Varda complicates it. During this conversation with Marker, Varda uses a composite image to underscore and reconsider the gendered narrative of creativity often associated with the New Wave. A photograph of Varda appears in the center, sur-

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Fig. 68. A shot from Les Plages d’Agnès (2008) evokes photographs of the Surrealist group around René Magritte’s Je ne vois pas la ( femme) cachée dans la forêt (1929).

rounded by photographs of other New Wave figures; for example, François Truffaut, Jacques Demy, and Jacques Rivette on the left, and Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, and Claude Chabrol on the right. Here Varda references an iconic surrealist work, which appears briefly earlier in the film: photographs of the Surrealist group around René Magritte’s Je ne vois pas la ( femme) cachée dans la forêt (I Do Not See the [Woman] Hidden in the Forest), which was published in a 1929 issue of the journal La Révolution Surréaliste (The Surrealist Revolution) (fig. 68). Varda adapts this image and the gendered dynamics of creativity it represents (fig. 69). Art historian Briony Fer emphasizes the gendered implications of the image: It shows the Surrealist group, photographed with their eyes closed, arranged around René Magritte’s painting I Do Not See The (Woman) Hidden in The Forest. Their common fantasy (which they see in their dreams) centers on the female body that is represented by the painting, where the nude stands in for the absent word in the sentence. She . . . denotes what is “hidden” in a “forest”— the obscure and tangled landscape of the unconscious. The woman as the poet’s “muse,” and the woman as “other,” are stock motifs in Surrealist thinking. . . . [T]he object of their fantasy is also . . . a painting, a representation, a fabrication even, compared with their own photo-portraits that surround it.11

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Fig. 69. Varda evokes photographs of the Surrealist group around René Magritte’s Je ne vois pas la ( femme) cachée dans la forêt with her composite image featuring figures of the New Wave and herself in the center. Les Plages d’Agnès, 2008.

Varda’s evocation of the surrealist image suggests that New Wave directors also were known for their masculine aesthetic daring conveyed through scandalously sexual representations of female muses. In her revisionist account Masculine Singular, Geneviève Sellier sees this practice as gendering the New Wave movement as masculine, and Varda revisits and questions these dynamics. She transposes the vertical image, from the surrealist journal, to the horizontal dimensions of the cinema screen. Varda occupies the center panel—displacing the erotic object—in a photograph whose scale dominates those of her colleagues. Whereas the photographs of the New Wave directors generally date from the period, Varda includes a more recent photograph of herself—signaling that it is a mature Varda engaging with this familiar story. Varda holds her finger to her lips in a symbolic gesture—evoking how her experience in the New Wave has been sometimes silenced, while also quieting the other directors, enabling other stories to be evoked within her film. Whereas the other directors have their eyes open, Varda’s are closed, signaling that she occupies the role of the creative artist and suggesting that the film is an imaginative

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vision, or as she calls it, a “reverie” or daydream. The film, in other words, represents her subjective vision rather than documentary “objectivity.” Varda’s film emphasizes the subjective, fragmentary, and partial nature of her presentation of the past, precisely so we can revisit and reconsider it. As a whole, The Beaches provides touchstones for reconceiving the cinematic narratives that have framed her career more broadly. As Varda resists the ways she has remembered, and been remembered, she rejects the traditional closure that the documentary offers. Varda has eluded easy categorization throughout her career; in The Beaches, one of her last feature films, she behaves no differently.

dvd box s et: tout(e) varda Whereas The Beaches presents brief segments from her films, in a 2012 Tout(e) Varda box set or coffret, she re-released her films on DVD. The set includes 20 feature films, 16 shorts, and bonus material, such as Varda’s own comments on her films. With the box set (released by Ciné-Tamaris and Arte Editions), Varda offered another retrospective of her career, even as she turned away from a final summation. Along with her films, it includes information on her recent art exhibitions, and prominently, her installation at the Cartier Foundation—helping to document her recent career as a contemporary artist. Like The Beaches, it was an effort to put out new material and provoke new interpretations, without being pinned down. The title is evocative, suggesting a conflation of creator and work. “Tout(e) Varda” would suggest “all of Varda’s work” or “all Agnès Varda,” (with the “e” in parentheses subtly reminding us of the creator’s feminine gender). But rather than calling it “complete works” she calls it a coffret or box set, resisting closure or summation. The box set packaging itself suggests multiple personae. The cover features caricatures of an elderly, stout, spectacled Varda (in a balancing act trying to hold up the letters in the title) (fig. 70). One side of the box presents stills from her films and the prominent figures that they featured—Catherine Deneuve, Sandrine Bonnaire, Jacques Demy, Michel Piccoli, Jane Birkin, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Gérard Depardieu, among others. Another side of the

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Fig. 70. Tout(e) Varda, 2012. Coffret intégrale vidéo (DVD Box Set). Cover illustration by Christophe Vallaux. Co-édition Ciné-Tamaris et Arte développement. © Ciné-Tamaris.

box features a well-known historical photograph of Varda behind the camera. It brings together images of Varda as an ambitious art filmmaker, the actors with whom she has worked across her prolific career, and the lowbrow caricature of the old woman, which she invokes to challenge. The box set includes a “surprise package,” the top of which re-presents the caricature of Varda as an elderly woman, with her bright white corona of hair surrounded by a mauve-dyed fringe, glasses around her neck, and a large purse slung over her shoulder. Depending upon how one opens or

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closes the box (and folds the flaps), her figure remains, but her face (and identity) disappear. Inside, there are low-brow games evoking the “surprise package” inside consumer products. One is a hidden picture game— “Where is Agnès hiding? And her cat?”—both evoking the stereotype of an old woman with her cat, on the one hand, and the cat that is the trademark of her production company, Ciné-Tamaris, on the other. (Instead of the iconic trademark of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer roaring lion, Varda has used her house cat as the symbol of her company.) Varda pokes fun at the stereotype and raises the question of where she is hiding or located in the coffret. In the online video advertising the box set, Varda appears between a life-size cardboard figure of the caricature of herself as an elderly woman (wearing the same dress) and the Tout(e) Varda box set presented on a display pedestal, depicting herself as distinct from, and unable to be encompassed by, these representations. Furthermore, a video interview accompanies this video advertisement, “Career Interview: Agnès Varda empties her purse!”12 (A bag contained objects that related to her films and prompted her to speak about her work and career.) She inhabits a stereotype to show its ridiculousness, poking fun at it—her career as an art film director has spanned more than six decades but she is presented as an elderly woman, pulling objects from her purse, telling anecdotes about the objects and her memories of the past. This too represents a moment of retrospective during which she confronts stereotypes, underscoring the ambiguity of identity and the incompleteness of the story. Simultaneously keeping her identity and career in play—a refusal to sum up or pin down— she asserts control over her legacy.

th e ca n n es f il m f es tiva l a s c o n s e c rat i o n Another moment of retrospection came with the Palme d’honneur, a lifetime achievement award from the Cannes Film Festival, and Varda took the opportunity to contest the broader context of the awards and the narrative within which the award was framed. The 2015 festival was touted as “the year of women,” and “women in the spotlight,” with a series of dialogues titled “Women in Motion” organized alongside the festival, also

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celebrating women’s contributions to film. The award represents the institutional canonization of a director and career, which consecrates a legacy. This recognition is given to a director who has had “global impact” but who has not previously received a Palme d’Or in competition at Cannes. Varda is the first female director to receive the Palme d’honneur. She received this honorary award at the closing ceremony, in the presence of the jury, led by the American directors and screenwriters Joel and Ethan Coen. Once again, Varda’s place can be seen to reveal institutional patterns and expectations; through a series of challenges, Varda illuminates a range of tensions in the event and in the field. The first challenge was the grounds for the award itself. In the publicity leading up to the event, the Cannes Festival explained: Varda is “an emblematic figure and artist resolutely apart. . . . Her work and her life are infused with the spirit of freedom, the art of driving back boundaries, a fierce determination and a conviction that brooks no obstacles. . . . Simply put, Varda seems capable of accomplishing everything she wants.”13 In her acceptance speech, Varda challenged this narrative. Varda thanked the festival’s officials, Thierry Frémaux and Pierre Lescure, for what she termed this “palme of resistance and endurance,” which she dedicated to “all the inventive and courageous directors who aren’t in the spotlight.”14 Given that critics had promoted this as the Cannes Festival with “women in the spotlight,” her word choice is significant. It suggests that many women are not yet in the spotlight. Varda also distinguished the symbolic nature of the prize, suggesting that material support is more important than formal awards. Varda underscored that other filmmakers who had received the award—Woody Allen (2002), Manoel de Oliveira (2008), Clint Eastwood (2009) and Bernardo Bertolucci (2011)—were directors whose films had earned large revenues and attracted large audiences—hers, she said, had neither.15 She described how her films had been shown at Cannes and mentioned that Demy had won a Palme d’Or for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg in 1964. Yet her comments suggest that she had never received equivalent support or endorsement for her films.16 Cannes’ celebration of Varda as an individual was part of a broader reflection on women’s place within cinema. The festival organized new events to help respond to ongoing concern about the under-representation

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of female directors and women in the film industry. Held alongside the festival screenings, these events sought to highlight the accomplishments of—and obstacles confronted by—women in film. Variety partnered with a United Nations panel on gender equality in which female actors and producers discussed a range of challenges faced by women in the film industry, including financial inequity, limited roles for actresses, and lack of support for work written and directed by women.17 “Women in Motion” was a special initiative—a series of dialogues with prominent directors, actors, and producers designed to highlight women’s accomplishments in film.18 Thierry Frémaux, the General Delegate of the Cannes festival, collaborated with Kering (a holding company for luxury brands including Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, and Alexander McQueen) to provide “additional prominence to the talented women of film and their outlook on cinema. . . . The Women in Motion talks . . . will also provide the profession with a unique opportunity to further discussions about the necessary advancement of the representation of women and their stories in the film industry.”19 Pierre Lescure, festival president, asserted: “Women in Motion [is] opening another chapter in the history of the Cannes festival and paving the way for the cinema of tomorrow, enriched by a greater variety of points of view and by the diversity of films.”20 Significantly, however, the talks were titled in English “Women in Motion” rather than using the French “mouvement,” which would have suggested a social movement or women’s movement for change. “Motion” leaves women’s status and the aims of the initiative ambiguous. (Women in Motion gave several awards to women in the film industry along with the dialogues, but there was no plan for substantial changes at the festival.21 And, as reporters noted, the number of women’s films screened in competition remained relatively stable.) Some appreciated the initiatives at Cannes. They considered it important that a female director’s work was selected to open the festival for the first time in twenty-eight years; that actor and filmmaker Isabella Rossellini headed one of the juries; and that Varda was the first female director to receive the Palme d’honneur.22 Yet Varda and many participants and critics felt that this was not enough; more was needed to enact significant change. BBC reporter Emma Jones summed: “But when only two of nineteen competition films are made by women this year, what’s

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really changing? . . . One woman has won the prestigious Palme d’Or in Cannes’ sixty-eight-year history. Many in the industry believe that more seismic shifts are needed to take place to perhaps produce another.”23 Varda spoke to Women in Motion about the discrepancy between the awards her work has received and the relative lack of financial support for her filmmaking: “I would rather have had money to finance my films than to have prizes . . . I didn’t make [a lot of ] money or have great success . . . but my work is respected and covered with prizes. I have medals, statues, bears, dogs, leopards, a whole bestiary of prizes! . . . But no producer gave me carte blanche . . . Even for making The Beaches of Agnès—[a] small film, documentary, self-portrait . . . as it was rather unusual [assez particulier], we had trouble and didn’t completely gather together all the money that was necessary.” Varda quoted the words of actor Frances McDormand the previous day: “ ‘We don’t need help, we need money.’ ” Varda continued: “Women need money because they have to make short or low-budget films [petits films], which are innovative, but with few resources. The real problem is that no one feels like giving them a whole pile of money [un vrai paquet d’argent].”24 Cannes bestows the award, yet Varda reminds the organizers it isn’t so simple: she states she has not had sufficient funding, and is still working to finance films. In other words, there is the opportunity to support her ongoing creativity, not simply to look back and honor her career. She and others at Women in Motion suggest that although it is much more difficult, broader systemic changes are needed beyond conversation, retrospection, and celebration. Despite the award and despite the dialogue about women’s diverse perspectives and contributions, following Varda we can see how in other ways the festival expected women to play traditional roles. Some of the greatest media attention surrounding the 2015 festival focused on the “high heels” scandal. Reports came in that women who attended wearing flat shoes— “some of whom were said to be older with medical conditions”—were turned away from red carpet screenings and told they would not be allowed entry without high heels, prompting outcry from festival attendees, journalists, and the public.25 (Black tie and evening wear are required dress for gala events, and although no footwear is specified in the festival guidelines, high-fashion glamour remains an important part of Cannes’

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celebrity, reputation, and market appeal.) The London Times arts correspondent Jack Malvern tweeted: “So much for the year of women.”26 Varda flouted this convention and these gender expectations, appearing on the red carpet and at the closing ceremony with actor and colleague Jane Birkin, both wearing pants, and Birkin sporting lace-up boots (see fig. 1). When presenting the award to Varda, Birkin did not wear an elaborate gown as did other actresses at the ceremony, but rather a black suit that resembled those of the male directors in the audience. While using a soft, breathy voice to present the award, Birkin wore glasses to “read” the announcement, symbolizing age. Moreover, Varda dyes the top of her hair an artificial and brilliant white, which is surrounded by shades of mauve, denaturalizing signs associated with age. Varda did not accept the award at the podium as is customary, but wore a clip-on microphone to address the standing ovation center stage. Both Varda and Birkin were “wearing the pants”—a nod to the fact that the prizes are predominantly awarded to male directors—while symbolizing their own cultural authority. Through the ceremony, Varda and Birkin challenged festival conventions, playing with cultural signifiers of gender, sexuality, and age. Even at this moment of the canonization of her legacy (Cannes being the international cinema institution par excellence)—Varda refuses to occupy the place ascribed to her. Across this book, my approach has been to view Varda and her career as a lens through which to make visible normally unspoken or naturalized assumptions and to question conventional narratives and practices in film history and institutions that shape its discourse. This book challenges established historical interpretations: Varda’s engagement with a range of aesthetic media, conventions, and practices does not easily fit into conventional cinematic narratives and institutions; her politics sat uncomfortably within critical discussions of the New Wave focused on form; and her reception reveals gender dynamics in the field of film at the same time as Varda challenges these with her work and politics. Her resistance to conventional classifications continues to reveal broader practices, narratives, and assumptions of contemporary culture.

Notes

1. reinterpreting varda: the mother of the new wave reframes its histories 1. Emma Jones, “Women in the Spotlight at Cannes Film Festival,” BBC News, May 16, 2015. Web. Accessed June 15, 2015. 2. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, for example, Jean Douchet would proclaim that “the young cinema owes it all to her [Varda],” and Georges Sadoul saw La Pointe Courte as the awakening of the New Wave. For a long time, this New Wave identity occluded the diversity of Varda’s oeuvre. La Pointe Courte, and its prominent place in historiography of the New Wave, are examined in chapter 2. See Jean Douchet, “Agnès Varda: Le ‘Jeune Cinéma’ lui doit tout,” Arts 726 (June 10, 1959); Georges Sadoul, Le cinéma français (Paris: Flammarion, 1962) 132; and Jacqueline Levitin, “Mother of the New Wave: An Interview with Agnès Varda,” Women and Film 1.5–6 (1974) 62–66, 103. 3. Studies of the New Wave are too numerous to name here. See, for example, André Bazin, Le cinéma français de la Libération à la Nouvelle Vague 1945– 1958 (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1998 [second edition]); Collin Crisp, Classic French Cinema, 1930–1960 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Lynn Higgins, New Novel, New Wave, New Politics (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996); Emma Wilson, French Cinema since 1950: Personal Histories (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999); Susan Hayward, French National Cinema (London: Routledge, 2005); Naomi Greene, The French New Wave: A 161

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New Look (London: Wallf lower, 2007); Richard Ivan Jobs, Riding the Wave: Youth and the Rejuvenation of France after the Second World War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); Richard John Neupert, A History of the French New Wave Cinema (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002 [2nd ed., 2007]); Kelley Conway, “ ‘A New Wave of Spectators’: Contemporary Responses to Cléo from 5 to 7,” Film Quarterly 61.1 (Fall 2007) 38–48; Richard Neupert, “The New Wave’s American Reception,” Cinema Journal 4 (2010) 139–45; Vanessa Schwartz, It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Antoine de Baecque, La Nouvelle Vague: Portrait d’une jeunesse (Flammarion: Paris, 2009); Peter John Graham and Ginette Vincendeau, The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks (London: Palgrave, 2009); Ginette Vincendeau, “The French New Wave at Fifty,” Cinema Journal 49.4 (2010) 135–38; and Orlene Denice McMahon, Listening to the French New Wave: The Film Music and Composers of Postwar French Art Cinema (Bern: Peter Lang, 2014). 4. See, for example, Philippe Mary, “Cinematic Microcosm and Cultural Cosmologies: Elements of a Sociology of the New Wave,” Cinema Journal 49.4 (2010) 159–66. 5. Of course, these arguments of cinema as the seventh art drew on a much longer history in France, including figures such as Louis Delluc and Germaine Dulac in the 1920s advocating cinema as an art form. The Cahiers critics, for example, incorporated ideas of cinematic writing articulated prominently by Alexandre Astruc in the late 1940s (discussed in chapter 2). 6. She meets Antoine, a French soldier on leave from the Algerian war, and she hears news of the war on a taxi radio. Revisionist scholarship has underscored Varda’s political engagement with this crucial contemporary event and movement for Algerian independence, which was unusual for its time, due to state censorship. (In one sequence, for example, when Cléo rides in a taxi, Varda captures African masks on display in the windows of a Rive Gauche gallery, a reference to Alain Resnais’s, Chris Marker’s and Ghislain Cloquet’s Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Statues Also Die), which was censored due to its critique of colonization.) Work by Ginette Vincendeau, Vanessa Schwartz, Emma Wilson, Susan Hayward, Kristin Ross, Lynn Higgins, Hunter Vaughan, Antoine de Baecque, and Geneviève Sellier and Noël Burch, among many others, represents the broad interest in forging beyond stylistic analysis and the terms of the original criticism to reread the New Wave in terms of personal and cultural politics; for example, exploring how Godard evoked torture in this period, or how Resnais invoked the war allegorically in Night and Fog and referenced it explicitly in Muriel (which was censored). See, for instance, Schwartz, 2007; Higgins, 1996; Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau, eds., French Film: Texts and Contexts (New York: Routledge, 2000); Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995);

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Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier, La drôle de guerre des sexes du cinéma français, 1930–56 (Paris: Nathan, 1996); Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier, Le cinéma au prisme des rapports de sexe (Paris: Vrin, 2009); Antoine de Baecque, Camera Historica: The Century in Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Emma Wilson, Love, Mortality, and the Moving Image (London: Palgrave, 2012); and Hunter Vaughan, Where Film Meets Philosophy: Godard, Resnais, and Experiments in Cinematic Thinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 7. See, for example, Hayward’s and Flitterman-Lewis’s groundbreaking interpretations of the film; the more recent monographs on Cléo by Ungar and Orpen; and Neroni and McGowan’s recent study of the film within the context of feminist theory. See Susan Hayward, “Ahistory of French Cinema: 1895–1991, Pioneering Film-Makers (Guy, Dulac, Varda) and Their Heritage,” Paragraph 15.1 (1992) 19–37; Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996 [orig. 1990]); Steven Ungar, Cléo de 5 à 7 (London: BFI, 2008); Valerie Orpen, Cléo de 5 à 7 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); and Hilary Neroni and Todd McGowan, Feminist Film Theory and Cléo from 5 to 7 (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). On theoretical models of spectatorship and identification, see, for example, Lisa Cartwright, “Moral Spectatorship: Rethinking Identification in Film Theory,” Moral Spectatorship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 8. Geneviève Sellier, Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema, trans. Kristin Ross (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). On gender politics and the New Wave, see among others, Alex Hughes and James S. Williams, eds. Gender and French Cinema (Oxford: Berg, 2001); Susan Weiner, Enfants Terribles: Youth and Femininity in the Mass Media in France, 1945–1968 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); John Erickson and Lynn Higgins, Gender and French Film since the New Wave (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 2002); and Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Sexism in the French New Wave,” Film Quarterly 62.3 (2009) 16–18; and Burch and Sellier, 1996 and 2009. 9. Quoted in “Cannes 2015: La 4ème Palme d’Or d’Honneur de l’Histoire remise à une cinéaste,” L’actualité cinéma sur Canal+, May 11, 2015. Web. Accessed June 15, 2015. 10. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are my own. When quoting filmic dialogue, I typically use English subtitles for consistency. 11. Vanessa Schwartz, “Who Killed Brigitte Bardot? Perspectives on the New Wave at Fifty,” Cinema Journal 49.4 (2010) 145–52. 12. Historians often subdivide the New Wave into two groups: the more politically engaged “Left Bank” filmmakers, including Varda, Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker, and the New Wave directors surrounding the Cahiers du cinéma, such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Varda’s creative exchange with

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Alain Resnais and Chris Marker is well established (for example, Resnais having been editor for her first film and Marker appearing in various guises in Varda’s more recent work), whereas Varda is viewed as having a more peripheral relationship to the Cahiers group. Neupert, for example, posits that “Varda would always have a tangential relation to the Cahiers critics.” Neupert, 2002, 63. I believe Varda was much more in dialogue with the Cahiers critics and directors than has been recognized and that these perceived divisions were much more permeable in practice. On Varda’s relation to the Left Bank, see, for example, Max Egly, “Varda-Resnais-Marker,” Image et son 128 (1960) 2–6; Richard Roud, “The Left Bank: Marker, Varda, Resnais,” Sight and Sound 32.1 (1962–63) 24–27; Richard Roud, “The Left Bank Revisited,” Sight and Sound (1977) 143– 45; and Neupert 2007. 13. These are portrayed vividly in her autobiographical film Les Plages d’Agnès (2008) and her televised series Agnès de-ci de-là Varda (2011), also featured in the 2012 DVD box set. Varda studied art history at the Ecole du Louvre and photography at the Ecole de Vaugirard. She was photographer for Jean Vilar’s Festival d’Avignon and Théâtre National Populaire between 1948 and 1960, and worked as a press photographer for Prestige Français, Marie-France, and Réalités in the 1950s and ’60s. Bastide provides an early account of Varda’s background in photography. See Bernard Bastide, “Agnès Varda photographe ou l’apprentissage du regard,” Etudes cinématographiques 179–186 (1991) 4–12. 14. The anthology developed from a conference at the Université de Rennes represents the recent interest in considering Varda as both “cinéaste” and “plasticienne.” See Antony Fiant, Roxane Hamery, and Eric Thouvenel, eds., Agnès Varda: Le cinéma et au-delà (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009). See also the recent exhibition catalogue, including texts by Dominique Blüher and Raymond Bellour: Musée d’Ixelles, Agnès Varda: Patates et Compagnie (Milan: Silvana, 2016). 15. As acknowledged below, there are of course films where her politics are overt (such as her Black Panthers or Uncle Yanko, which explored late 1960s California counterculture). Other films and exhibitions announce a dialogue among visual media (such as her 1988 film Jane B. par Agnès V., in which Varda restages Titian’s Venus of Urbino painting; her 1982 film Ulysses, which is framed as a meditation on a photograph; or the exhibitions of the last decade, which have restaged both this photograph and film). Varda also presents art historical inspirations for her films, such as the Hans Baldung Grien painting that shaped her depiction of Cléo and which is reproduced in her 1994 monograph Varda par Agnès or the repertory of gleaner iconography presented on the DVD of Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse. See, for example, Frank Curot, “Références picturales et style filmique dans Jane B. par Agnès V.,” Etudes cinématographiques 179–186 (1991) 155–172; and Sarah Cooper, Selfless Cinema? Ethics and French Documentary (London: Legenda, 2006) 77–93. My interest here is

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to show how these concerns were not limited to the works that self-consciously foreground them; instead, I focus on how Varda subtly and persistently engaged with diverse aesthetic traditions and political dialogues in filmic and other works produced across her long and prolific career. 16. This study is indebted to the foundational scholarship of Susan Hayward, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, and Alison Smith, which uncovered feminist strands in Varda’s most famous films. The 1991 issue of Etudes cinématographiques dedicated to Varda provides an early survey of her career, as does Varda’s 1994 Varda par Agnès, an important documentation of her work. More recently, Jenny Chamarette and Delphine Bénézet have approached Varda’s work through the lens of phenomenology and corporeality; Kelley Conway provides productive insights into Varda’s production methods and the financing of her best-known work; and T. Jefferson Kline’s translation makes a selection of Varda’s interviews available to an English-speaking audience. Betsy Ann Bogart and Orlene Denise McMahon contribute productive musical analysis of Varda’s films. Marie-Claire Barnet’s anthology, which appeared after the completion of my book, offers a welcome addition to this corpus. See Hayward, 1992; Flitterman-Lewis, 1996; Alison Smith, Agnès Varda (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Etudes cinématographiques nos. 179–186 (1991); Agnès Varda, Varda par Agnès (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1994); Jenny Chamarette, Phenomenology and the Future of Film (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012); Jenny Chamarette, “Between Women: Gesture, Intermediary and Intersubjectivity in the Installations of Agnès Varda and Chantal Akerman,” Studies in European Cinema 10.1 (2013) 45–57; Delphine Bénézet, The Cinema of Agnès Varda (London: Wallflower, 2014); Kelley Conway, Agnès Varda (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015); T. Jefferson Kline, ed., Agnès Varda: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015); Betsy Ann Bogart, Music and Narrative in the French New Wave: The Films of Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy, Doctoral Dissertation, University of California Los Angeles, 2001; McMahon, 2014; and Marie-Claire Barnet, ed. Agnès Varda Unlimited: Image, Music, Media (Cambridge: Legenda, 2016). 17. Recent exhibitions and film retrospectives of Varda’s oeuvre have cultivated interest in those works for which the politics are explicit in the narrative, highlighting, for instance, films on post-Revolutionary Cuba, the Black Panthers, or late 1960s California counterculture. For example, Varda/Cuba at the Pompidou Center (2016), Agnès Varda in Californialand at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2014), or the Varda retrospective I co-curated at the Dryden Theatre, George Eastman Museum (2016). In Ulysses (1982), Ydessa, Les Ours, et etc. (2004), and Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse (2000), Varda focuses the film on her encounter with photographs and works of art as a central theme. I analyze moments in her films where the visual references and politics they contain are communicated in both direct and tacit ways, and which require nuanced analysis to bring their critical, political content to the fore.

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18. Bastide and Bézénet, for example, read Varda as “feminine singular.” See Bénézet, 2014, 1; and Bernard Bastide, “Agnès Varda, une auteure au féminin singulier (1954–1962),” in Agnès Varda: Le cinéma et au-delà, ed. Antony Fiant, Roxane Hamery, and Eric Thouvenel (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009) 15–24. See also René Prédal, “Agnès Varda: Une oeuvre en marge du cinéma français,” Etudes cinématographiques 179–186 (1991) 13–39. Powrie and Reader explain that “Varda . . . beyond doubt is French cinema’s leading woman director. . . . and Varda for a very long time was—certainly so far as non-French audiences were concerned—seemingly the only one of her kind.” Phil Powrie and Keith Reader, French Cinema: A Student’s Guide (London: Arnold, 2002) 25–26. 19. Sources are too numerous to name here. On Varda’s art exhibitions, see for example, Agnès Varda, L’île et elle: Regards sur l’exposition (Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, 2006); Agnès Varda, The Beaches of Agnès Varda in China, 1957–2012, Cinema, Photo, Video Installation (Beijing: CAFA Art Museum, 2012); and Agnès Varda: y’a pas que la mer (Sète: Musée Paul Valéry, 2012). 20. For a synthetic overview, see Agnes Petho, Cinema and Intermediality: The Passion for the In-Between (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). Giuliana Bruno, Angela Della Vacche, and Raymond Bellour, among others, pursue cinema as a site of dialogue and encounter. The 2014 conference at the Philadelphia Slought Foundation, “The Death of Cinema, The Birth of Cinema,” for example, underscored that “film” has referenced a variety of media and practices across history, from early silent film to recent digital cinematography. See Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Angela Dalle Vacche, Cinema and Painting: How Art Is Used in Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996); and Raymond Bellour, Between-the-Images, trans. Allyn Hardyck (Zurich and Paris: JRP Ringier and Les Presses du Réel, 2013). 21. This study forms part of a larger movement within the field to consider how filmmakers have drawn inspiration from or worked with a variety of visual media, such as the 2015 Michelangelo Antonioni exhibition at the Cinémathèque Française and recent Chris Marker symposia, retrospectives, and exhibitions. Andrew Uroskie, among others, pursues Godard’s interests in visual art. Andrew V. Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). On Chantal Akerman’s cinema and art installations, see, for instance, Marion Schmid, Chantal Akerman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010); and Marion Schmid, “Self-Portrait as Visual Artist: Chantal Akerman’s Ma mère rit,” Modern Language Notes 131.4 (2016) 1130–1147. See also Ivone Margulies, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). 22. In Cinema and Intermediality, Petho focuses on what she calls “two templates”: a sensual mode engaging the spectator through haptic experience and a

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“structural gateway” that calls attention to media palimpsests, interpreting Varda’s work as a form of metalepsis. In this study, I do not propose a single paradigm or theory of intermedial relations and their effects, as my reading of Varda’s work differs according to her particular media or artistic references, their histories, the established modes of viewing and interpreting them, and Varda’s selfconscious manipulation of these. 23. For example, Beckman and Ma argue that as images and media “migrate across disparate contexts—operating as fields and effects as well as simply objects—medium specificity in turn asserts itself anew as an interdisciplinary question.” Karen Beckman and Jean Ma, eds., Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008) 4. 24. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, Nineteenth-Century European Art (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson, 2011) 289–91. 25. Yet at other times Varda aligns herself with the discarded to reflect on her position as an aging female filmmaker. She films her age-spotted hands, which resemble the texture and tone of heart-shaped potatoes, discarded in heaps due to their unconventional and unmarketable form. She also suggests an analogy with other discarded food commodities (which a gleaner points out are still healthy and usable but “past date”). At the same time she portrays the rotting potatoes producing new shoots and life. These potatoes come to be the subject of her art installations in the early twenty-first century (during which, in parodic fashion, she donned a potato costume, making the analogy explicit). The Gleaners and I, when released on DVD, also featured Two Years After, which continued to follow interviewees beyond the timeframe of the first film and included feedback from audiences in the form of letters. Two Years After explored her subjects’ emotional and critical responses to The Gleaners and I, as well as her own. In marked contrast to the “objective distance” associated with conventional documentary, Two Years After illustrates the dynamic relation between the filmmaker and her subjects: how their lives have changed since the film and also how the film has changed their lives. On the relations between filmmaker and subjects, interpreted through the lens of Levinas’s ethics, see Sarah Cooper, 2006; and Sarah Cooper, “Looking Back, Looking Onwards: Selflessness, Ethics, and French Documentary,” Studies in French Cinema 10.1 (2010) 57–68. 26. See Corrigan’s interesting interpretation of Varda’s The Gleaners and I as an essay film as well as Rascaroli’s study of the essay film, upon which Bénézet draws. Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Laura Rascaroli, The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (New York: Wallflower Press, 2009). 27. Sources are too numerous to name here. See, for example, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, “Varda: The Gleaner and the Just,” Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema, ed. Marcelline Block (Newcastle upon Tyne:

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Cambridge Scholars, 2008); and Emma Wilson, “Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse: Salvage and the Art of Forgetting,” in The Art of the Project: Projects and Experiments in Modern French Culture, ed. Johnnie Gratton and Michael Sheringham (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005). 28. Varda pioneered modes of blurring fact and fiction; today, modes of oscillating between fiction and nonfiction film have of course become widespread. Here I seek to explore the complex ways Varda combines—in both dialogue and tension—a wide range of specific fictional and documentary photographic, filmic, and artistic conventions. 29. The interpretations offered throughout this book are, of course, my own. 30. For example, Varda’s explanation of encountering the New Wave directors, the “Young Turks” of the Cahiers du cinéma, is often repeated in the literature: “I think Chabrol, Truffaut, Rohmer (who had a different name), Brialy, Doniol-Valcroze, and Godard were there that evening. I had trouble following the conversation. They quoted thousands of films and suggested all sorts of things to Resnais, they all talked fast, chatted brightly, and sat everywhere including on the bed. I seemed to be there by mistake, feeling small, ignorant, and the only woman among the guys from the Cahiers.” Neupert, 2002, 63. 31. Perhaps for this reason, Demy and Varda typically promoted the image of concurrent but separate careers. For example, a documentary from the 1960s shows each working in a different part of the household on his or her film—Demy with composer Michel Legrand on a film score and Varda finishing the filming of Les Créatures. In recent years—with the 2013 Demy retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française containing Varda’s photos of Demy on set, for example— Varda has suggested their presence in each other’s work. Her autobiographical artwork and films about Demy remain on many levels indirect and oblique. 32. Here, I think about core narratives repeated by Varda not necessarily as statements of fact, but as strategies of negotiation and survival, both of her art and of her intellectual and political investments.

2. complicating neorealism and the new wave: la pointe courte 1. Bazin notes that a small number of neorealist films were made before or during the war, but sees the movement coming into fruition following the liberation of Italy and Second World War. See “An Aesthetic of Reality: Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of Liberation,” translated and reprinted in André Bazin, What Is Cinema? vol. 2, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) 16–40. The history of this movement is of course complex and subject to debate. See, for example, Mark Shiel, Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City (London: Wallflower Press, 2006); and Lorenzo Fabbri,

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“Neorealism as Ideology: Bazin, Deleuze, and the Avoidance of Fascism,” The Italianist 35.2 (2015) 182–201. See also note 23. 2. Morando Morandini, “Italy from Fascism to Neorealism,” in The Oxford History of World Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 353–361. 3. The local characters act in fictional narratives, as has been widely acknowledged in the film’s reception. Yet study of the pond and community reveals the degree to which Varda’s scenario evoked contemporary conf licts. The pond or étang de Thau, which is the focus of fishermen’s struggle within the film, is in fact considered an exceptional ecosystem within France (and now considered cultural patrimony). The thriving shellfish practices in the 1950s were being threatened by pollution (from the growth of nearby cities, industry, and tourism), and were being heavily regulated due to fears of bacterial contamination. Local fishers organized efforts to protect the pond and their livelihood, which would lead to greater water monitoring and water treatment in the 1960s. Beyond the characters’ fictional stories, Varda was in fact evoking a vital local struggle: community practices faced with larger urbanism and tourism—a theme that recurs in her documentary films and that is explored in chapters 5 and 6. See Yves Fauvel, La pollution bactérienne des eaux et des coquillages de l’étang de Thau (Paris: Institut Scientifique et Technique des Pêches Maritimes, 1967); and Philippe Fassanaro and Robert Gordienne, Dictionnaire de l’étang de Thau (Sète: Le Dauphin Vert, 2010). 4. Varda presents this commentary on the Criterion Collection DVD. Agnès Varda and Alexandre Mabilon, Souvenirs et propos sur le film (La Pointe Courte): Entretien d’Alexandre Mabilon avec Agnès Varda (New York: Criterion Collection, 2008). 5. Varda worked with Vilar as a photographer for the Festival d’Avignon beginning in 1948 and as a photographer for the Théâtre National Populaire (TNP) in the 1950s. 6. Richard John Neupert, A History of the French New Wave Cinema (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002) 57. In a 2008 interview, Varda recollected that the film would come to cost about 10 million old francs. See Varda and Mabilon, 2008; as well as Collin Crisp, Classic French Cinema, 1930–1960 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) 86. 7. Varda and Mabilon, 2008. 8. Agnès Varda, undated radio interview on La Pointe Courte, quoted in Agnès Varda, Varda par Agnès (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1994) 227. She explains: “that meant: no one would be paid during filming. It was thirteen years before they were repaid for their work.” 9. Dominique Maillet, Philippe Noiret (Paris: Veyrier, 1989). 10. Agnès Varda, Varda par Agnès, 226. 11. See Agnès Varda, in Hommage à André Bazin (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1983).

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12. J.-L. Tallenay and André Bazin, “Six Films Hors du Festival,” Radio Cinéma Télévision 280 (May 29, 1955) 2–3. Doniol-Valcroze praised it as “the French film of the year that is most pure, the most disinterested.” Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, France-Observateur, January 5, 1956. 13. Quoted in Jean Clay, Réalités 195 (April 1962). Neupert explains that whereas many other directors who would come to be associated with the New Wave began by making short films (taking advantage of recent forms of subvention and using this as a route to obtain director status), Varda’s first film was feature length. Neupert writes: “Varda is a rare director in many ways: She entered cinema via still photography, and was one of a few women to direct French films in the 1950s, but she also followed an unusual trajectory in the sort of film projects she pursued. Unlike . . . most of the New Wave filmmakers, she made a feature film, La Pointe Courte, before she made short films.” Neupert, 2002, 57. On subvention and short film broadly during this period, see Dominique Blüher and Philippe Pilard, eds., Le court métrage français de 1945 à 1968: Créations et créateurs (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009). 14. Varda explains: “The Studio Parnasse agreed to present it to a specialist audience. . . . The theatre was crowded for a month. The press responded with warmth.” Quoted in Jean Clay, Réalités 195 (April 1962). Bernard Bastide explains that Varda’s production company had been registered with the CNC to produce short, rather than feature-length, films. Without sufficient resources to change the company’s status or a co-producer, theatrical distribution of the film was not possible. See Bernard Bastide, “La Pointe Courte, ou comment réaliser un film à Sète (Hérault) en 1954,” Cahiers de la Cinémathèque 61 (1994): 31–36. 15. Varda and Mabilon, 2008. At the time of the Paris premiere, Bazin continued to support the film whereas François Truffaut suggested that the film was “dry,” calling it “La Pointe Sèche,” Truffaut, 1956. 16. This film—shot quickly, inexpensively, and on location with natural lighting—was influential for the New Wave, which tended to be more improvisational and often shot on location, as opposed to the elaborate studio sets associated with the cinéma de qualité. 17. Bazin writes: “La Pointe Courte is a miraculous film. By its existence and its style . . . [it is] free in its conception of any commercial obligation. . . . Agnès Varda is a very young woman whose great talent we know as photographer of the TNP and who simply felt a need to make this film. Instead of searching for a producer according to the classic process, . . . [s]he convinced several colleagues to work in a cooperative, and that is how with little money, but much courage, imagination, and talent, La Pointe Courte saw day.” André Bazin, “La Pointe Courte: Un film libre et pur,” Le Parisien libéré, January 7, 1956. See also Geneviève Sellier, “André Bazin, Film Critic for Le Parisien libéré (1944–1958): An Enlightened Defender of French Cinema,” Paragraph 36.1 (2013): 118–132.

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18. Neupert explains: “Her first feature became an exemplary demonstration of Astruc’s concept of the caméra-stylo in practice. Agnès Varda thus became a highly significant precursor to New Wave film practices. . . .” Neupert, 2002, 56. The concept of the auteur has of course been widely critiqued in recent decades for overly emphasizing the individual director’s creativity at the expense of other social, historical, and economic considerations, though this was how Varda’s film was championed at the time. 19. Jean de Baroncelli, “La Pointe Courte,” Le Monde, June 9, 1955. He writes: “What did young women use to do on their vacations? Needlework, poems, or novels. Today they are making films, at least the most talented and passionate among them are.” 20. Others criticized the film, nonetheless using the caméra-stylo as the point of reference: Henri Agel, writing in the Cahiers du cinéma, disliked the “systemization” and “visual academicism” of the film, asserting, “The caméra-stylo is Astruc, but not Agnès Varda.” Henri Agel, “La Pointe Courte,” Cahiers du cinéma 56 (February 1956). 21. Translated in Neupert, 2002, 60. Scholars frequently quote Neupert to summarize the style of Varda’s film: “An elegantly restless camera, deliberate character gesture and motion, crisp use of shadow, long shot durations (the average shot length is sixteen seconds), and evocative depth of field make Varda’s film one of the most unusual and beautiful motion pictures of 1950s France” (62). 22. See Georges Sadoul, Le cinéma français (Paris: Flammarion, 1962); and Ginette Vincendeau, “How Agnès Varda ‘Invented’ The New Wave,” 4 by Agnès Varda (New York: Criterion Collection, 2007). Godard, for example, also recognized her importance to the new cinema. See Jean-Luc Godard, “Chacun son Tours: A l’école d’une camérawoman,” Cahiers du cinéma 92 (February 1959) 31–38. 23. What constitutes neorealism is, of course, still debated. Bazin himself insisted that neorealism as a movement could not be defined—one could only discuss approaches represented by different films and directors. See André Bazin, What Is Cinema? vol. 2, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); and, for example, Dan Morgan, “Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics,” Critical Inquiry 32.4 (Spring 2006) 443–481. 24. Raynaud, for example, praises the “documentary of the village” as the best part of the film and contrasts Varda’s “formal sensibility and taste for observation.” Annette Raynaud, “Pour les donner à l’autre,” Cahiers du cinéma 53 (December 1955) 45–46. 25. Varda and Mabilon, 2008. 26. Agnès Varda, in Hommage à André Bazin (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1983). 27. Smith continues: “Her approach to the construction of moving images was thus formed neither by learning from the professionals . . . nor from a stock of admired or despised precedents as was the case with the Cahiers group.” Alison Smith, Agnès Varda (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998) 1, 12. See

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also Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996 [orig. 1990]) 220. 28. Conway posits: “Varda did not participate in France’s rich postwar culture of cinéphilie. She was not a member of a ciné-club nor did she participate in the impassioned debates about realism. . . . She went to the cinema only once a year or so. . . .” “Unlike other directors associated with the French New Wave at that time, Varda did not have a vast storehouse of images and narratives from Hollywood or European films in her head. . . . ” Kelley Conway, Agnès Varda (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015) 10–11 and 18–19. 29. Varda and Mabilon, 2008. 30. For example, Conway suggests: “Varda’s acknowledged inspirations and citations—Faulkner and Brecht—situate her first film not so much in postwar French cinephilia. . . .” Conway, 2015, 15. Or, for instance, Neupert writes: “Her background in art, literature, and theater was so much stronger than her knowledge of film history or techniques, so it has always struck historians as somewhat bizarre that, in contrast to the wild cinéphilia of people such as Astruc, Melville, or the Cahiers critics, Varda initially began filmmaking from a rather naïve perspective.” Neupert, 2002, 57. 31. André Bazin, “Le grand prix du film d’avant-garde à Agnès Varda pour La Pointe Courte,” Le Parisien libéré July 14, 1955. 32. André Bazin, “La Pointe Courte,” La Cinématographie Française May 9, 1955. 33. Bazin, July 14, 1955. 34. See, for example, Martine Monod, “Naissance d’une cinéaste,” Les Lettres Françaises January 12–18, 1956. 35. Film scholar Frank Curot, writing in 1991, provides a summary of how this opposition has been perceived: “Agnès Varda decided to underscore the independence of the two fictions by adopting two different styles: an ‘ignoble’ style (simple and familiar) for the people of the village, an elevated style (visually and verbally noble, ‘ennobled’ by the two characters’ pictorial, theatrical, and literary nature). The first manner corresponds to a sociological representation of a working-class milieu, the second to a psychological analysis of a couple in crisis and who come from a more privileged social milieu. The difference between the nonprofessional actors (the fishermen) and the actors (the couple formed by Silvia Monfort and Philippe Noiret), the opposition between naturalistic, trivial dialogues of the people of the village and the introspective, literary verbosity of the couple, reinforce the paradigm. The music also delimits the two worlds: the repetitive and rather grating score by Pierre Barbaud continually accompanies the bitter-sweet exchanges of the couple. As extra-diegetic music, it opposes the local airs played by the jouster’s orchestra. But this music enters only in the last sequence and opening credits. . . . This contrast (music/absence of music) underscores the fundamental stylistic opposition and the realism [vérisme] of the

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sequences of the lower classes of La Pointe Courte.” Frank Curot, “L’écriture de La Pointe Courte,” Etudes cinématographiques 179–86 (1991) 87. Charensol, in 1956, saw the separation of the intellectual and community stories, and criticized the work as un-unified. See Georges Charensol, “La Pointe Courte,” Les Nouvelles Littéraires January 11, 1956. Bory’s uncertainty as to how to classify the film conveys the film’s unexpected combination of genres. Jean-Louis Bory, L’Express January 11, 1956. 36. J.-L. Tallenay, “La Pointe Courte,” Radio Cinéma Télévision January 22, 1956. 37. Bénézet describes: “From the pushing and pulling the fishermen do when raking the sand to gather shellfish, to the rhythmic movement of their netting shuttles which gives them time to pause, there are many images of their bodies at work. Their constant proximity, their knowledge of each other’s habits and their way of walking with and addressing others testifies to a life determined by the community and its practices. . . . As for the section in the village, they were inspired by and gravitate around the postures and attitudes of the locals who demonstrate in the flesh the social links that exist between them all.” Delphine Bénézet, The Cinema of Agnès Varda (London: Wallflower, 2014) 45. 38. Curot, 1991, 87–88. While Curot ultimately saw Varda composing scenes of the village, he summarizes how the characteristics of documentary and authenticity were seen to be conveyed. 39. Bazin, May 9, 1955. For example, the small fishing village in La Pointe Courte reminded him of Luchino Visconti’s La Terra Trema (1948), which focused on impoverished fishers in a small southern Italian community. Bazin also compared Varda’s film with Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy in its juxtaposition of the emotions of the couple and the human space, yet he asserted that in Varda’s film the stories of the couple and village remained separate. Bazin, July 14, 1955. 40. Bazin, January 7, 1956. Similarly, Monod saw “a certain aestheticism which weakens, rather than enriches” the film. Martine Monod, 1956. Jacques Siclier wrote: “as a photographer [she] has much talent; as a woman she has (too) much brain”; “comme photographe, beaucoup de talent; comme femme, beaucoup (trop) de cerveau.” Jacques Siclier, “La Pointe Courte,” Ciné-Tamaris Archives. 41. In linear perspective, the vanishing point is the place where the diagonals or orthogonals in the image seem to converge, often reinforcing the most important subject of the composition. 42. Varda, 1994, 44–45. For a beautiful reading of Piero’s Madonna del Parto as inspiration for Monfort’s character and themes of maternity in La Pointe Courte, see Emma Wilson, “Varda’s Hermitage: The Madonna del Parto and La Pointe Courte,” in Lucidity: Essays in Honour of Alison Finch, ed. Ian James and Emma Wilson (Cambridge: Legenda, 2016) 181–192. See also Smith, 1998, 15–18.

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43. See, for example, Margaret Daily Davis, “Piero’s Treatises: The Mathematics of Form,” and J. V. Field, “Piero della Francesca’s Mathematics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Piero della Francesca, ed. Jeryldene M. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 134–170. 44. This ambiguity of characters was, for example, employed in contemporary nouveau roman works of Alain Robbe-Grillet, and later, in films such as Hiroshima Mon Amour and L’Année Dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad). 45. Jacques Ledoux, “Interview with Agnès Varda,” Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, Radio-Télévision-Belge, 1961–62. Translated in Conway, 2015, 18. 46. See, for example, François Truffaut, “La Pointe Courte,” Arts January 11, 1956. 47. François Beloux, Fiche Filmographique, Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques, no. 125 (n.d.) 2. Varda explained in a recent interview: “I tried to avoid taking the easy way out, where you tell a story, you explain everything, and then it’s over.” Varda and Mabilon, 2008. 48. Varda, 1994, 44. Varda asked the actors to “jouer raide”—to act in a stiff, still manner, as if reading lines. 49. Emmanuelle Loyer, Le théâtre citoyen de Jean Vilar: Une utopie d’aprèsguerre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997) 171. Conway ultimately asserts: “Such austere performances result in the generation of little emotion in the viewers and instead encourage us to analyze the couple’s dilemma and try to understand the causes of their frustration with one another.” Conway, 2015, 17–18. Varda now relates the alternating structure of La Pointe Courte to Brechtian ideas she encountered while working for Jean Vilar, explaining: “I think it was bold and courageous to choose such a literary structure, one so radically opposed to the conventions of film and narrative. The narrative doesn’t flow smoothly. It’s jerky and uneven. It’s almost Brechtian. At the time, I was with Jean Vilar, listening to Brecht’s theories. It was ‘Brechtian distanciation.’ You start listening to the couple and then bam! Stop. Distance yourself. You see the fishermen, their social lives, the difficult economic conditions they live in, you start to get into it, and bam! Stop. Distance. Back to the couple. It could be seen as the clash between private life and social life, which can never be joined.” Varda and Mabilon, 2008. 50. See, for instance, Betsy Ann Bogart, Music and Narrative in the French New Wave: The Films of Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy, Doctoral Dissertation, University of California Los Angeles, 2001; and Orlene Denice McMahon, Listening to the French New Wave: The Film Music and Composers of Postwar French Art Cinema (Bern: Peter Lang, 2014). 51. See, for example, Curot, 1991, 91. 52. Bénézet, 50–51. This interpretation first circulated in ciné-clubs of the 1950s and ’60s. See Beloux, n.d., 1–4; Ecran du séminaire des arts, “Agnès Varda présente ses films La Pointe Courte, O Saisons, O Châteaux, L’Opéra Mouffe, Du côté de la côte,” Cinémathèque de Belgique January 24, 1961, 1–6; and Institut de Gand, “Viva Varda,” Bulletin du Ciné Club December 1959.

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53. Bazin, January 7, 1956. 54. Curot, 1991, 95. 55. Ibid., 96–97. 56. Ibid., 95, 98. 57. This is often considered an important early instance of Italian Renaissance painting that combines portrait and landscape. Northern Renaissance painters (to which Piero had access) combined portraits with landscapes, but typically separated them with architectural walls, whereas in Piero’s work there is no division between the figures and landscape, suggesting their interrelation. See Joanna Woods-Marsden, “Piero della Francesca’s Ruler Portraits,” in The Cambridge Companion to Piero della Francesca, ed. Jeryldene M. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 91–114; Anna Maria Maetzke, Piero della Francesca (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2013) 206–211; and Elaine Hoysted, “Battista Sforza, Countess of Urbino: An Illustrious Woman,” Renaissance Mothers, September 1, 2014. Web. Accessed June 30, 2016. 58. Whereas Piero della Francesca presents an unpeopled landscape (with water and boats in the distance), Varda uses the fishermen’s work to represent the couple. The duchess in the Piero della Francesca painting was thought to have died in giving birth to the heir to the title, and notions of her self-sacrifice were associated with the image. The portrait is believed to be modeled on the duchess’s death mask; this is one reason for the pale skin and the relative lack of facial features, as opposed to the portrait of the duke (though untanned skin was also typical of women of her stature). In fact, a sculpture, owned by the Louvre (where Varda studied), based on the death mask, shows the duchess with eyes closed. Hoysted, 2014. Varda appears to reference both images of the duchess—Monfort closes her eyes repeatedly in the shot (like the death mask), and she is in bright sunlight—evoking the pale duchess image. 59. Water jousting was not made a French national sport until 1960; at the time of Varda’s film, it was associated with regional identity. (Jousts continue today in La Pointe Courte.) 60. Raphael is a character in the stories of the village. He wishes to date Anna, but is prevented by her father. After the jousting match, Anna’s father says that he jousted well and permits them to dance at the ball that night. In these scenes of the joust and ball, the alternating stories of the villagers and couple merge with characters appearing at both events. 61. For example, Martine Monod argues that the couple “watches how the people live, they confront the landscape, work, and joys, and, simultaneously, themselves. Ultimately, they stay together.” Monod, 1956. 62. This is reinforced at the level of the soundtrack, which frequently isolates the dialogue of the couple from ambient sound. In a 2008 interview, Varda explained: “I also broke another rule—normally sound has perspective, growing

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fainter as people move away. At a distance, voices are almost inaudible. I decided the sound would always be in the foreground. When they’re talking as they walk toward the pond, it seems like it is a voice-over dialogue but it’s not, because you see them talking and the sound is in sync, but the sound stays loud and clear. No one did it back then or even later. I’m not sure it was a good idea, but that’s how I chose to do it.” Varda and Mabilon, 2008. 63. Bénézet, 2014, 57. 64. The camera will go inside in this 10-minute sequence. Following the credits and first shot, we see a health services inspector; the camera rotates around him, showing a fisherman coming from the shore. (The sequence begins and ends with deep focus moments that establish the conflict between local inhabitants and health inspectors.) The camera then pans exteriors—then we go inside— as various people alert one another to the arrival of the inspector. But the camera is often detached from characters and moves rather independently and unexpectedly—through a window to show a mother feeding children and her sick child Daniel in a back room, then outside to lumber and clotheslines, ending with a man’s encounter with the inspector on the street and conversation with a local man saying he had hidden things for him (evidence of illegal fishing). 65. Critics and scholars have noted photographic qualities in the film. Neupert, for example, compared the film to a photo album, given Varda’s use of still shots and long shot durations (62). Bénézet describes the film in terms of “snapshots” (55). I believe Varda draws on a specific photographic genre—the minor trades. In fact, sociological and historical studies describe the work of the area fishermen in terms of minor trades, or petits métiers. See, for example, Pierre Sécolier, Pratiques professionnelles, enjeux territoriaux et changement social: L’évolution et la mutation des petits métiers de l’étang de Thau (Brussels: Editions Modulaires Européennes & InterCommunications, 2009). 66. Depictions of the minor trades existed over centuries in manuscripts and lithographs. For historical accounts, see Victor Fournel, Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris (Paris: Adolphe Delahays, 1858); Victor Fournel, Les rues du vieux Paris: Galerie populaire et pittoresque (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1881); Victor Fournel, Les cris de Paris: Types et physionomies d’autrefois (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1889); for more recent commentary, see, for example, Pierre Perret, Les petitsmétiers d’Atget à Willy Ronis (Paris: Editions Hoëbeke, 2007); Michel Toulet and Catherine Zerdoun, Petits métiers d’autrefois (Paris: Gründ, 2014); and Bernard Escudero, Petits métiers dans les années 1950 et 1960 (GudensbergGleichen: Wartberg, 2014). 67. Other minor trades photographs were fabricated at studios, using models, costumes, and props. 68. See, for example, Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” in The Contest of Meaning, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993); Molly Nes-

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bit, Atget’s Seven Albums (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Lucy Hartley, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Sharrona Pearl, About Faces (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010). 69. In the spirit of neorealism, in Varda’s archival notes she specifies the ethnic composition of the different communities and the importance of distinguishing them in her film. The film was occasionally shown in the context of folklore, and critics at the time commented on the authenticity of the dialogue. Documents on La Pointe Courte, Ciné-Tamaris Archives. 70. Varda describes this process in her autobiographical film, Les Plages d’Agnès (2008). 71. Varda and Mabilon, 2008. 72. The band members’ pause is of course different from the freeze frame at the end of Truffaut’s 400 Blows, although both self-consciously call attention to the film as a medium of representation. 73. In particular, critics and scholars have made the connection to Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour, noting that both films take on the idea of a couple in a foreign setting working out their relationship. The connection is a direct one: Resnais was Varda’s editor, and himself acknowledged in Douchet’s essay his debt to Varda in the making of the film. Hiroshima Mon Amour— released in 1959, using a screenplay by Marguerite Duras—is a fictional story of a French actress, visiting Hiroshima to make a film about peace and the atomic bomb, and we see the rebuilt city and museums she “sees.” She has an affair with a Japanese architect and the theme of her—and our—not seeing is evoked throughout the film. In Resnais’s film, the anonymous French woman gradually tells her story, whereas the Japanese man never does; we are confronted with his relative silence and opacity, representing our greater inability to understand Hiroshima. Moreover, Resnais conveys it is the French character’s experience of the place, not the “real” Hiroshima that is always beyond our grasp. See, for instance, Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, “How History Begets Meaning: Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour,” in French Film Texts and Contexts, ed. Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (1990) 173–187; Emma Wilson, Alain Resnais (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); Emma Wilson, Love, Mortality, and the Moving Image (London: Palgrave, 2012); and Hunter Vaughan, Where Film Meets Philosophy: Godard, Resnais, and Experiments in Cinematic Thinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 74. Philippe Mary, “Cinematic Microcosm and Cultural Cosmologies: Elements of a Sociology of the New Wave,” Cinema Journal 49.4 (2010) 161. 75. There are often cranes or tanks from a refinery visible across the water; signs of modern life are present in the background, though they are not explicitly acknowledged in the film.

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3. filmic and feminist strategies: questioning ideals of happiness in le bonheur 1. An earlier version of this chapter appeared as Rebecca J. DeRoo, “Unhappily Ever After: Visual Irony and Feminist Strategy in Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur,” Studies in French Cinema 8.3 (Fall 2008) 189–209, reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd., www.tandfonline.com. 2. Dave Kehr, “Critic’s Choice: New DVDs: 4 by Agnès Varda,” New York Times, January 22, 2008, B3. 3. Louis Seguin, “Le Bonheur,” Positif 70 (June 1965) 56–57. See also Georges Sadoul, “Un règne heureux,” Les lettres françaises March 4–10, 1965, 8; RoparsWuilleumier argued that the prettiness of Varda’s images are undercut by Le Bonheur’s cruel ending (Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, L’écran de la mémoire (Paris: Seuil, 1970 [orig. 1965]) 172. 4. For a critical assessment of Varda’s reception as a feminist filmmaker, see Susan Hayward, “Beyond the Gaze and into femme-filmécriture,” in French Film: Texts and Contexts, ed. Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (New York: Routledge, 2000) 285–296. On Varda’s feminist activism, see Alison Smith, Agnès Varda (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998) 8, 9, 103, 104. For a recent interpretation of Varda through a lens of feminist phenomenology, see Delphine Bénézet, The Cinema of Agnès Varda (London: Wallflower, 2014). 5. Jill Forbes, The Cinema in France after the New Wave (London: British Film Institute, 1992) 87. See also A. S., “Le Bonheur,” Monthly Film Bulletin 32.379 (August 1965) 118. 6. François Chevassu, “Le Bonheur,” Image et son, revue de cinéma 184 (1965) 95–97; Jean de Baroncelli, “Le Bonheur,” Le Monde February 26, 1965, 14; Ginette Charest, “Léger et grave,” Objectif 34 (1965) 48; Anon., “Le Bonheur,” Variety (New York), March 3, 1965, 48; Maryse Corbin, “Le Bonheur,” Jeune cinéma 6 (March 1965) 40; Roy Armes, French Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) 197. 7. Ruth Hottell, “Including Ourselves: The Role of Female Spectators in Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur and L’une chante, l’autre pas,” Cinema Journal 38.2 (1999) 52–71; Paule Lejeune, Le cinéma des femmes (Paris: Editions Atlas, 1987); and Yvette Biró, “Caryatids of Time: Temporality in the Cinema of Agnès Varda,” Performing Arts Journal 19.3 (1997 [orig. 1991]) 1–10. Sandy Flitterman-Lewis’s groundbreaking text asserted that the film’s cyclical structure conveyed a critique of “patriarchal social relations.” See Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996 [orig. 1990]) 232, 234. 8. More recently, Varda has named The Second Sex as an influence. Rebecca J. DeRoo, interview with Agnès Varda, June 29, 2006.

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9. Varda is fluent in English and had access to The Feminine Mystique before it was published in French. 10. Varda recounts that she wrote the script for Le Bonheur in four days and filmed between July and November 1964. Agnès Varda, Varda par Agnès (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1994) 238. 11. See, for example, Hayward’s (1983) and Flitterman-Lewis’s (1990) pioneering accounts, as well as more recent monographs on Cléo: Valerie Orpen, Cléo de 5 à 7 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Steven Ungar, Cléo de 5 à 7 (London: BFI, 2008); and Hilary Neroni and Todd McGowan, Feminist Film Theory and Cléo from 5 to 7 (Bloomsbury: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). 12. Geneviève Sellier, La Nouvelle Vague: Un cinéma au masculin singulier (Paris: CNRS, 2005) 17–19. See also Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier, Le cinéma au prisme des rapports de sexe (Paris: Vrin, 2009). 13. Jean-Louis Bory, Ombre vive (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions [10/18], 1973) 229. 14. Pierre Philippe, “Crio de 5 à 7,” Cinéma 94 (March 1965) 108. 15. Susan Hayward, “Ahistory of French Cinema: 1895–1991, Pioneering Film-Makers (Guy, Dulac, Varda) and Their Heritage,” Paragraph 15.1 (March 1992) 32; Hayward, 2005, 220. On the use of color in Le Bonheur, see also Richard Neupert, “La couleur et le style visuel dans Le Bonheur,” in Agnès Varda: Le cinéma et au-delà, ed. Antony Fiant, Roxane Hamery, and Eric Thouvenel (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009) 79–90. On references to Jean Renoir’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, see, for example, Jean-Philippe Tessé, “Bliss,” Cahiers du cinéma 724 (2016) 26–27. 16. Evelyne Sullerot, La presse féminine (Paris: Armand Colin, 1963) 83; Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995) 78. According to a survey done by Elle magazine, by 1955, one in six women in France read Elle. See Ross, 1995, 209. 17. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell, 1963) 206. 18. Ibid., 205. 19. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Knopf, 1971 [orig. 1949]) 519. 20. On the figure of the modern woman, see Susan Weiner, Enfants Terribles: Youth and Femininity in the Mass Media in France, 1945–1968 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). On the 1960s increase in married French women working outside the home, see M. Guilbert and M. Colin, “La répartition par sexe,” in Traité de sociologie du travail, ed. Georges Friedmann and Pierre Naville (Paris: Armand Colin, 1962) 271. 21. Beauvoir, 1949, 447. 22. See the documentary on the making of Le Bonheur. Jean-Claude Bergeret, Agnès et le bonheur (France: ORTF, 1964).

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23. See, for example, Vanessa Schwartz, It’s So French!: Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Vanessa Schwartz, “Who Killed Brigitte Bardot? Perspectives on the New Wave at Fifty,” Cinema Journal 49.4 (2010) 145–52; and Antoine de Baecque, La Nouvelle Vague: Portrait d’une jeunesse (Flammarion: Paris, 2009). 24. Ginette Vincendeau, “How Agnès Varda ‘Invented’ the New Wave,” in 4 by Agnès Varda (New York: Criterion Collection, 2007) n.p. 25. Sellier, 2005, 57; and Hayward, 1992, 31. On Bodard’s decision to produce Le Bonheur, see Mag Bodard, “J’ai choisi le bonheur,” La cinématographie française 2080 (September 19, 1964) 5; and Philippe Martin, Mag Bodard, Portrait d’une Productrice (Paris: La Tour Verte, 2013). 26. Sellier 2005, 17, 19, 64, 188. 27. Ibid., 64. 28. Philippe, 1965, 109. 29. She admitted in an interview with the author, “I wanted to critique the idea of happiness in Elle magazine.” DeRoo, 2006. 30. Yvonne Baby, “Entretien avec Agnès Varda,” Le Monde February 25, 1965, 12; Bergeret, 1964.

4. reconsidering contradictions: feminist politics and the musical genre in l’une chante, l’autre pas 1. This work first appeared as Rebecca J. DeRoo, “Confronting Contradictions: Genre Subversion and Feminist Politics in Agnès Varda’s One Sings, The Other Doesn’t,” Modern and Contemporary France 17.3 (August 2009) 249–265, © Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France, reprinted by permission of Taylor and Francis Ltd., www.tandfonline.com, on behalf of the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France. 2. An important exception was, of course, Cléo de 5 à 7 (1961), which employs Brechtian motifs such as chapter headings to represent the pop star’s transformation from narcissistic identification with stereotypical images of feminine beauty to a socially mediated understanding of herself as subject. See Flitterman-Lewis’s groundbreaking analysis, To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996 [orig. 1990]) 277– 79. In her analysis of Cléo, Orpen, for example, explicitly invokes these Brechtian motifs, though they were not commonly discussed as Brechtian at the time: “The extreme linearity of the narrative is quite Brechtian and leads to moments of spectator distanciation and alienation (or Verfremdungseffekt), as indeed do the chapter headings.” Valerie Orpen, Cléo de 5 à 7 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007) 29.

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3. Varda was recognized by the Cahiers, in interviews and reviews of her films that appeared in the journal, but her involvement was limited to these interactions. See, for example, Jean Narboni, Serge Toubiana, and Dominique Villain, “L’une chante, l’autre pas (Entretien avec Agnès Varda),” Cahiers du cinéma 276 (May 1977) 21–26; and Danièle Dubroux, “Histoires d’F,” Cahiers du cinéma 276 (May 1977) 27–30. Smith and Neupert quote Varda’s description of her first meeting with the “Young Turks” of the Cahiers: “[J]e pourrais 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 citaient mille films et proposaient je ne sais quoi à Resnais, tous parlant vite, bavardant avec animation, assis partout y compris sur le lit. Moi, j’étais là comme par anomalie, me sentant petite, ignorante, et seule fille parmi les garçons des Cahiers.” “I think Chabrol, Truffaut, Rohmer (who had a different name), Brialy, Doniol-Valcroze, and Godard were there that evening. I had trouble following the conversation. They quoted thousands of films and suggested all sorts of things to Resnais, they all talked fast, chatted brightly, and sat everywhere including on the bed. I seemed to be there by mistake, feeling small, ignorant, and the only woman among the guys from the Cahiers.” Alison Smith, Agnès Varda (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998) 6–7; translated in Richard John Neupert, A History of the French New Wave Cinema (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002) 63. Neupert asserts that “Varda would always have a tangential relation to the Cahiers critics,” whereas Smith and Neupert position Varda closer to the Left Bank filmmakers Resnais, Demy, and Marker. Powrie and Reader’s important history references Varda’s apparently exceptional status: “Varda . . . beyond doubt is French cinema’s leading woman director. . . . and Varda for a very long time was—certainly so far as non-French audiences were concerned—seemingly the only one of her kind.” See Phil Powrie and Keith Reader, French Cinema: A Student’s Guide (London: Arnold, 2002) 25–26. See also René Prédal, “Agnès Varda: Une oeuvre en marge du cinéma français,” Etudes cinématographiques 179–186 (1991) 13–39. 4. Sellier describes Varda as the “lone woman filmmaker” associated with the New Wave. Geneviève Sellier, Masculine Singular, French New Wave Cinema, trans. Kristin Ross (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008) 61. See also Vanessa Schwartz, “Who Killed Brigitte Bardot? Perspectives on the New Wave at Fifty,” Cinema Journal 49.4 (2010) 145–52. 5. Flitterman-Lewis, 1996, 215–16; Smith, 1998, 108; and Jill Forbes, The Cinema in France after the New Wave (London: British Film Institute, 1992) 89–90. 6. Forbes, 1992, 89–90; Jean-Luc Douin, Télérama March 9, 1977; Henry Rabine, La Croix March 19, 1977; John J. Michalczyk, “L’une chante, l’autre pas,” Choix de films (1977) 690. 7. Françoise Audé, Ciné-modèles, cinéma d’elles (Lausanne: L’âge d’homme, 1981) 145; Monique Violet, Minute March 16, 1977; Françoise Oukrate, “L’une chante, l’autre pas,” Ecran 57 (April 15, 1977) 65.

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8. Scholars often divide Brecht’s immense inf luence on French cultural debates and cinematic practice from the 1950s to the 1970s into two phases: a more formal experimentation with technique from the late 1950s to 1968; and a highly politicized investigation of filmic form, production, and reception from 1968 to the late 1970s (evidenced, for example, in the work of Jean-Louis Baudry, Jean-Louis Comolli, and Jean Narboni). George Lellis, Bertolt Brecht, Cahiers du Cinéma, and Contemporary Film Theory (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1982) 160–62; Martin Brady, “Brecht and Film,” in The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, ed. Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 307–9. Brady identifies a number of factors that contributed to Brecht’s influence in this period, such as a highly publicized visit of the Berliner Ensemble to Paris and a French translation of Brecht’s collected works. Furthermore, prominent figures, including Roland Barthes and Jean-Luc Godard, as well as leading cultural journals, such as the Cahiers du cinéma, were investigating Brecht’s texts. Brady, 2006, 307–8. In contrast to the more formal implementation of Brecht’s methods to focus on anti-illusionist, anti-narrative strategies, after the protests of 1968, filmmakers and theorists adopted Brechtian concepts to respond to the calls to politicize culture. For instance, in 1968, Godard began to explore agitational filmmaking with the collective “Groupe Dziga Vertov,” with this work culminating in the 1972 film Tout va bien, which is a fictional story of a factory strike and uses as its guiding premise Brecht’s text “The Modern Theater Is the Epic Theater.” Lellis argues that this film and its analysis were central in articulating the Cahiers’ aesthetic and political positions in the early 1970s. Lellis, 1982, 137–142. On Jean Vilar’s production of Brecht’s Mother Courage, see Emmanuelle Loyer, Le théâtre citoyen de Jean Vilar: Une utopie d’après-guerre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997); and Emmanuelle Loyer and Antoine de Baecque, Histoire du Festival d’Avignon (Paris: Gallimard, 2007). 9. The Cahiers proclaimed: “Les théories de Brecht ont aujourd’hui une importance décisive, idéologiquement et politiquement, dans le champ du cinéma.” “Today Brecht’s theories are of decisive importance, ideologically and politically, in the field of cinema.” See in particular “Le ‘Groupe Dziga Vertov,’ ” Cahiers du cinéma no. 240 (1972) 5. See also Lellis’s synthetic study, 76–79, 137–142. Lellis also examines Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s contemporaneous interest in Brecht and the Cahiers’ discussion of their work. 10. Studies on these subjects are too numerous to cite here. See, for example, Hunter Vaughan, Where Film Meets Philosophy: Godard, Resnais, and Experiments in Cinematic Thinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Brady, 2006; Mike Wayne, ed., Understanding Film: Marxist Perspectives (London: Pluto Press, 2005); Pia Kleber and Colin Visser, eds., Re-interpreting Brecht: His Influence on Contemporary Drama and Film (Cambridge: Cambridge

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University Press, 1990); Robert Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature (Ann Arbor: UMI 1985); Lellis, 1982; Martin Walsh, The Brechtian Aspect of Radical Cinema (London: BFI, 1981); and Sylvia Harvey, May ’68 and Film Culture (London: British Film Institute, 1978). 11. Sources often invoke Varda’s use of Brechtian alienation devices in her first film, La Pointe Courte. See Flitterman-Lewis, 1996, 234, 237; Roy Armes, French Cinema since 1946, vol. 2: The Personal Style (New York: A. S. Barnes and Company, 1976) 100; Hubert Arnault, “Entretien avec Agnès Varda,” Image et son, revue de cinéma 201 (1967) 41. On ideas of Brechtian distanciation applied to La Pointe Courte (1954), see chapter 2. 12. John Willett, ed., Brecht on Theater: The Development of an Aesthetic (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964 [orig. 1957]) 33–41. 13. Although Tout va bien includes, for example, one female worker’s account of sexual harassment on the factory f loor, her voice is one among many in the film. On the contradictions in Godard’s representations of women, see, for example, Mulvey and MacCabe’s landmark essay and Sellier’s more recent analysis: Laura Mulvey and Colin MacCabe, “Images of Woman, Images of Sexuality,” in Godard: Image, Sounds, Politics, ed. Colin MacCabe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980) 79–104; and Sellier, 2008. On Brechtian devices in the work of Marguerite Duras, for instance, see Renate Günther, Marguerite Duras (New York: Palgrave, 2002) 30, 64. 14. Flitterman-Lewis asserts: “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 the dominant structures of representation, a challenge which forms the core of any alternative cinema.” She continues, “L’une chante, l’autre pas expresses an assertively feminist content through fairly traditional cinematic means.” Flitterman-Lewis, 1996, 215–16. Smith contends: “Compared with L’opéra mouffe, Cléo, and Sans toit ni loi, L’une chante, l’autre pas is a straightforward film. It is largely concerned with watching its protagonists, whose doings are narrated. . . . The time structure . . . is relatively traditional.” Smith, 1998, 108. 15. Important film musicals such as The Jazz Singer (1927), or more recently Dancer in the Dark (2000), have, of course, challenged racial and gender clichés. On Fritz Lang’s challenges to the musical genre via Brechtian methods, see Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: BFI, 2001 [orig. 2000]). 16. Audé calls the film “reassuring” and music “sugary”; she argues that the film has a “fonction rassurante” and the music is “charmante plutôt que mordante. . . . Tout cela est sucré . . .” Audé, 1981, 145. Forbes terms them “women’s movement jingles.” Forbes, 1992, 89. Oukrate describes the film as “the Women’s Liberation Movement done by Walt Disney” (“C’est Walt Disney au MLF”). Oukrate, 1977, 65.

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17. On Godard and Demy reworking the genre of the musical, in films such as Une femme est une femme (1961), Les parapluies de Cherbourg (1964), and Les demoiselles de Rochefort (1967), see, for example, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) 32–37, 223–29; Emma Wilson, French Cinema since 1950: Personal Histories (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999) 43; Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995) 98, 203–4; Powrie and Reader, 2002, 26; and Susan Hayward, French National Cinema (London: Routledge, 2005) 274. On musical conventions in Varda’s and Demy’s films of the 1950s and early 1960s, see Betsy Ann Bogart, Music and Narrative in the French New Wave: The Films of Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy, Doctoral Dissertation, University of California Los Angeles, 2001. See also Orlene Denice McMahon, Listening to the French New Wave: The Film Music and Composers of Postwar French Art Cinema (Bern: Peter Lang, 2014). 18. Altman asserts, “pairing off is the natural impulse of the musical,” achieved not only through the plot, but also via split screens, dance choreography, and/or the repetition of a melody. Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989) 31–32. Of course Altman was referring to the Hollywood musical’s popular years, from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s, when the conventions of romance and the happy ending became typical of the genre (268). 19. On “female friendship” films more broadly as a “challenge to heterosexism,” see Emma Wilson, “Identification and Female Friendship in Contemporary French Cinema,” in Gender and French Cinema, ed. Alex Hughes and James S. Williams (Oxford: Berg, 2001) 266. 20. Altman, 1989, 27. 21. My analysis here is indebted to Hayward’s assertion that Varda’s representation of “feminism in a popular culture structure (the musical)” is subversive. Susan Hayward, “Ahistory of French Cinema: 1895–1991, Pioneering Film-Makers (Guy, Dulac, Varda) and Their Heritage,” Paragraph 15.1 (March 1992) 33; and Hayward, 2005, 323. 22. Varda wrote the song lyrics, in collaboration with François Wertheimer and the members of Orchid (Micou Papineau, Joëlle Papineau, and Doudou Greffier), who wrote the music. 23. French lyrics courtesy of Ciné-Tamaris. “Glissant sous les ponts d’Amsterdam sur un bateau-mouche hollandais nous les éclopées de la baise nous les mamselles, nous les madames. Les maladroites et les niaises

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les distraites et les abusées. On a fait ne vous en déplaise la croisière des nanavortées.”

24. “On a ri, on a dégoisé, sans avoir peur du ridicule.” 25. “Amsterdam sur eau, tulipe et vélo, je m’en souviendrai.” 26. On the notion of the cliché, and the subversion of ideological aspects of a genre, see Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma I: L’image-mouvement (Paris: Minuit, 1983) 282–89. 27. Willett, 1964, 37. Brecht sought spectators’ critical awareness over emotional identification or “empathy.” Hayward argues, “To reproach Varda for lack of depth in characterizations is to miss the point.” Susan Hayward, “Varda’s Cinematic Language, A New Mythology for Women? Some Considerations on L’une chante, l’autre pas,” Centerpoint 3.3–4 (1980) 174. 28. Agnès Varda, interviews with the author, 2006 and 2008. 29. Willett, 1964, 34, 37. 30. Ibid., 37. 31. “Ah que c’est bon d’être une bulle Ah que c’est bon d’être un ballon un atelier de molécules un bel ovule . . .”

32. A woman in the audience interjects: “C’est ambigu, ta chanson. Tu pourrais aussi la chanter au mouvement du Laissez-les-vivre. Et, à la limite, tu donnes mauvaise conscience aux femmes qui ne souhaitent pas avoir d’enfants.” Pomme responds, “Je n’ai pas dit qu’il fallait avoir des enfants. J’ai dit, quand on est enceinte, il faut essayer de ressentir les choses soi-même, et ne pas écouter l’église, l’Etat, ou les allocations familiales. Moi je vais exprimer ce que je ressens à travers les images de femmes et les dire et les chanter.” 33. Ruth Hottell, “Including Ourselves: The Role of Female Spectators in Agnès Varda’s Le bonheur and L’une chante, l’autre pas,” Cinema Journal 38.2 (1999) 67. 34. This also appears to reference the exhibition practice initiated by thirdworld radical cinemas during the 1960s, such as the cinema nuovo in Brazil (itself deeply influenced by Brecht), which frequently stopped films halfway through so that the audience could debate their social and political messages. 35. See Brecht on the idea of a moral tableau performed by the characters. Willett, 1964, 38–39. 36. Brecht especially admired Chaplin’s “gestic way of performing,” with his silent, denaturalized, parodic gestures puncturing the film’s illusionism and

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thwarting character development, conveying instead the imbalances in social relations. See Margaret Eddershaw, “Actors on Brecht,” in The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, ed. Peter Thompson and Glendyr Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 281. Varda was undoubtedly also aware of the assembly line scenes in René Clair’s A nous la liberté (1931), a central reference point in the French tradition of the film musical, known for its self-reflexivity, irony, and social critique. 37. Rebecca J. DeRoo, The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art: The Politics of Artistic Display in France after 1968 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014 [orig. 2006]) 126–131. See also Claire Laubier, The Condition of Women in France, 1945 to the Present: A Documentary Anthology (New York: Routledge, 1990) 146–147; and Claire Duchen, Feminism in France: From May ’68 to Mitterrand (London: Routledge, 1986). 38. Willett, 1964, 38–39. Intertitles were of course used in New Wave films, including Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7 (1961) and Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962). 39. “La double journée pauvre maman c’est bien épuisant et c’est mal payé. Friedrich Engels l’avait dit dans la famille aujourd’hui l’homme est le bourgeois et la femme est le prolétariat. Il avait raison, papa Engels, il avait raison car à la maison l’homme est le bourgeois et la femme est le prolétariat . . .”

40. Linda J. Nicholson, Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) 39. 41. On Varda’s feminist activity in this period, see, for example, Mireille Amiel, “Propos sur le cinéma par Agnès Varda,” Cinéma 75 204 (December 1975) 50; Agnès Varda, Varda par Agnès (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1994) 106–9; Smith, 1998, 103–4; and Delphine Bénézet, The Cinema of Agnès Varda (London: Wallf lower, 2014) 143. Varda has signaled the importance of Shulamith Firestone’s and Kate Millett’s work for developing her feminist perspectives, investigating the family as the site where gender roles are learned, and emphasizing the family, sex, and love as sources of women’s oppression. See Audé, 1981, 140; Amiel, 1975, 50. 42. See, for example, Flitterman-Lewis, 1996, 216; Smith, 1998, 108; and Forbes, 1992, 89–90. 43. Mon corps est à moi, unpublished script, Ciné-Tamaris archives.

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44. For a summary of state aid to French cinema in this period through the CNC, see, for example, Anne Jäckel, “The Inter/Nationalism of French Film Policy,” Modern and Contemporary France (February 2007) 22–24. 45. Ciné-Tamaris, L’une chante, l’autre pas: Notes sur le film (Paris: CinéTamaris, 1977) 64. 46. Marcel Martin, “Entretien,” Le technicien du film 247 (April 15–May 15, 1977) 36. 47. Lellis, 1982, 6 and 160. Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni became the heads of the Cahiers du cinéma in 1968 and embraced a leftist platform, a Marxist-informed interest in issues of class struggle and the economies of cinematic production and consumption. Brecht’s work was frequently cited, and Godard was prominently praised for embracing these concerns. Williams explains that the Cahiers’ “key points of reference were Marx and Lenin, particularly as interpreted by Louis Althusser, who argued that notions of base and superstructure had to be rethought in terms of practices—economic, political, and ideological. This approach was informed in different ways by structuralism and semiotics . . . , Lacanian psychoanalysis, . . . the deconstructionist insights of Derrida and Foucault,” and Maoist principles, which were used to analyze cinematic production, distribution, and reception and the ideological effects of film form. During this period, Williams contends: “While Cahiers du cinéma certainly did its best to keep pace with feminist ‘counter-cinema’—the work of Agnès Varda, Coline Serreau, Chantal Akerman, and above all Marguerite Duras . . . the only contemporary film-makers deemed truly worthy of its consideration were the Dziga Vertov group and the team of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet.” See James S. Williams, “Debates 1960–2004,” in The French Cinema Book, ed. Michael Temple and Michael Witt (London: British Film Institute, 2004) 266–67. On the Cahiers’ political orientations during this period, see also Harvey’s extensive analysis. 48. On French cinema’s broader dialogues with Hollywood, see Carrie Tarr, “French Cinema: ‘Transnational’ Cinema?” Modern and Contemporary France 15.1 (2007) 4–6; and Vanessa Schwartz, It’s So French!: Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 49. One review published in 1978 notes that the film had already reached 350,000 viewers in France. Ruth McCormick, “ ‘One Sings, The Other Doesn’t’: An Interview with Agnes Varda,” Cineaste 8.3 (1978) 28. 50. See, for example, Jacques Siclier, Le Monde March 10, 1977; Pérez, Charlie Hebdo March 17, 1977; Norbert Multeau, Valeurs actuelles March 21, 1977; Janine Pradeau, “Agnès Varda: ‘Il faut essayer de faire un cinéma qui mette les femmes en situation de rétablir leur image’,” Femmes d’aujourd’hui April 13–19, 1977; Flora Lewis, “Varda: ‘Is There Such a Thing as a Woman’s Film?’ ” New York Times September 18, 1977; Françoise Condat and Danyèle Dulhoste, “Agnès Varda,” Parents 99 (May 1977) 118–9; and Sue Clayton, “One Sings, the Other Doesn’t,” Spare Rib 75 (October 1978) 36–37.

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5. the limits of documentary: identity and urban transformation in daguerréotypes 1. The film aired on the German television channel ZDF in 1975, followed by the French channel TF1 in 1976; it was screened at select international film festivals, winning the 1975 Prix du Cinéma d’Art et Essai. 2. Roger Ebert calls it “a charming and compassionate documentary.” Roger Ebert, “Saint Agnès of Montparnasse,” Chicago Sun Times February 28, 2009. Françoise Audé describes it as “un film plaisant.” She asserts that Daguerreotypes does not achieve sociological exactitude, politics, or realism, “l’exactitude sociologique, politique ou réaliste”; the film is “Agnès Varda’s monologue about people she likes, done in her own way”; “un monologue d’Agnès Varda sur des gens qu’elle aime bien à sa manière.” Françoise Audé, “Opéra mouffe (1958), Uncle Yanko (1967) et Daguerréotypes (1975),” Positif no. 218 (1979) 74–75. Claude Manceron notes the “irresistible tenderness” (“la tendresse irrésistible”) of Varda’s depiction of her neighborhood’s inhabitants. Claude Manceron, “Daguerréotypes,” Télérama no. 1404 (1976). Varda describes the decision to depict her adjacent shopkeepers, who could be reached with the length of her camera’s electrical cord, in Agnès Varda, “Propos sur le cinéma,” Cinema 75 204 (December 1975), and Agnès Varda, Varda par Agnès (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1994). 3. Vincent Canby describes Daguerreotypes as “Miss Varda’s beautiful homage to Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, a pioneer in the history of photography.” Vincent Canby, “ ‘Daguerreotypes’ Film on Paris,” New York Times September 11, 1976, 50. Siclier calls Varda’s images “animated portraits” or “portraits animés.” Jacques Siclier, Le Monde, March 2, 1977. Smith describes Varda’s shots of her neighbors standing still as “old-fashioned, motionless, posed photographs.” Alison Smith, Agnès Varda (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998) 79. 4. Special thanks go to the staff of the Département des Estampes et de la Photographie of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France for generous access to collections that supported my interpretations. 5. The petits métiers typologies are part of a much longer tradition, dating back to the Middle Ages. In the modern period, lithographic representations increased circulation of this imagery, with popular photographic representations proliferating from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. See, for example, Pierre Perret, Les petits-métiers d’Atget à Willy Ronis (Paris: Editions Hoëbeke, 2007); Musée Carnavalet, Atget, Géniaux, Vert: Petits métiers et types parisiens vers 1900 (Paris: Musées de la ville de Paris, 1984); Tony Duvert, Les petits-métiers—Paris 1900, 800 cartes postales, Hommage à Albert Monier (Paris: Mairies Annexes des XVe et XVIIe arrondissements, 1982); Tony Duvert, Les petits-métiers (Editions Fata Morgana, 1978); Jacques Castelnau, Les petits métiers de Paris (Paris: Editions Astéria, 1952); Victor Fournel, Les

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rues du vieux Paris: Galerie populaire et pittoresque (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1881); and Victor Fournel, Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris (Paris: Adolphe Delahays, 1858). 6. This chapter focuses on excavating Varda’s specific references to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographic typologies, in particular the petits métiers, or minor trades. Typologies constitute a much broader visual tradition that has been re-examined in the work of contemporary artists such as Gillian Wearing, Nikki S. Lee, and Fiona Tan, among many others, and in contemporary scholarship, ranging for example from Allan Sekula’s landmark essay “The Body and the Archive,” in The Contest of Meaning, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), to Karen Beckman and Jean Ma, eds., Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), to Lisa Saltzman, Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 7. The Situationist International, a group of writers, artists, and intellectuals, was active from 1957 to 1972. The Situationists included Guy Debord, Michèle Bernstein, and Raoul Vaneigem, among others, who associated with Lefebvre for a time, before his rupture with the group. The Situationists’ concepts of cultural and urban intervention, as well as Lefebvre’s analysis of daily life and city space, have been widely influential both in this period and beyond. See, for example, Kristin Ross, “Critique ou mythologie? Lefebvre, Barthes et la vie quotidienne,” in Une autre histoire des ‘Trente Glorieuses,’ ed. Céline Pessis, Sezin Topçu, and Christophe Bonneuil (Paris: La Découverte, 2013); Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995); Rebecca J. DeRoo, The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art: The Politics of Artistic Display in France after 1968 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014 [orig. 2006]); Tom McDonough, ed., The Situationists and the City (London: Verso, 2009); Kristin Ross, “French Quotidian,” in The Art of the Everyday: The Quotidian in French Postwar Culture, ed. Lynn Gumpert (New York: NYU Press, 1997) 19–30; Alice Kaplan and Kristin Ross, “Introduction,” Yale French Studies 73 (1987) 1–4; Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998); and Andy Merrifield, Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City (London: Routledge, 2002). For recent applications of Lefebvre’s and the Situationists’ writings, see, for example, David Harvey, Rebel Cities (New York: Verso, 2012), and Michiel Dehaene and Lieven DeCauter, eds., Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society (London: Routledge, 2008). While recent work has investigated how Jean-Luc Godard was influenced by the Situationist International, particularly in his film 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know about Her) (1967), Varda’s engagement with ideas advanced by Lefebvre and the Situationist International has been largely unexplored. The Situationists, however, remained highly critical of Godard’s

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work. Consult, for example, the audio commentary for Jean-Luc Godard, 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (New York: Criterion 2009 [orig. 1967]). 8. See Henri Lefebvre, Le droit à la ville (Paris: Anthropos, 1968); Henri Lefebvre, La vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne (Paris: Gallimard, 1968); Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003 [orig. 1970]); and Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). 9. For example, Kristin Ross explains that from 1954 to 1974, the number of workers living in Paris declined by 44%, as they were dispersed to the outlying suburbs, while the number of affluent residents increased by 51%. The government simultaneously developed high-speed rail lines to and from the suburbs, enabling a smooth, efficient flow of the work force to and from the city. See Kristin Ross, 1995, 151–152; and Kristin Ross, “Paris Assassinated?,” in The End(s) of the Museum (Barcelona: Fundacio Antoni Tapies, 1996) 135–150. See also Rosemary Wakeman, Practicing Utopia: An Intellectual History of the New Town Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Kenny Cupers, The Social Project: Housing Postwar France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); and Céline Pessis, Sezin Topçu, and Christophe Bonneuil, eds., Une autre histoire des ‘Trente Glorieuses’ (Paris: La Découverte, 2013). 10. Haussmann’s renovations and reconstructions have been widely documented. See, for example, David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2006). 11. Translated in Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994 [orig. 1974]) 38. 12. Lefebvre explains: “It is essential to describe at length . . . armies of workers with or without white collars, people from the provinces, the colonized and semi-colonized of all sorts, all who endure a well-organized daily life . . . [the] misery of the inhabitant . . . in the moldering centers of old cities and in the proliferations lost beyond them . . .”; translated in Henri Lefebvre, “The Right to the City,” in The Blackwell City Reader, ed. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (Malden: Blackwell, 2002 [orig. 1968]) 374. See Henri Lefebvre, La vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne (Paris: Gallimard, 1968). 13. For discussion of Varda’s references to the minor trades in La Pointe Courte, see chapter 2. 14. On physiognomic practices in Europe, see, for example, Sharrona Pearl, About Faces (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010); Melissa Percival and Graeme Tytler, eds., Physiognomy in Profile (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005); and Lucy Hartley, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 15. Guillaume Le Gall, Atget: Life in Paris, trans. Brian Holmes (Paris: Harzan, 1998).

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16. Molly Nesbit describes the ways in which the petits métiers were regularly being forced out of the space of the street in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. See Molly Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). On Atget’s work more broadly, see, for example, Jean-Claude Lemagny, Atget the Pioneer (Munich: Prestel, 2000); David Harris, Eugène Atget: Unknown Paris (New York: The New Press, 1999); John Szarkowski, The Work of Atget, vol. 4: Modern Times (New York: MOMA, 1985); Maria Morris Hambourg, The Work of Atget, vol. 2: The Art of Old Paris (New York: MOMA, 1982); Jean Leroy, Atget: Magicien du vieux Paris en son époque (Paris: Pierre Jean Balbo, 1975); and documentation from the 2012 exhibition Eugène Atget, Paris, at the Musée Carnavalet. 17. Here, Varda’s frontal composition evokes August Sander’s typologies. See the multivolume re-edition of his series, August Sander, People of the 20th Century (New York: Abrams, 2002). Walter Benjamin asserted that both Atget’s and Sander’s typologies provide a critical social portrait of their era. By referencing these sources, Varda asks us to see Daguerreotypes as part of this artistic tradition. See Benjamin’s “Short History of Photography” (1931), reprinted in Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1997). 18. For a discussion of her photographic training and early photographic work, see Bernard Bastide, “Agnès Varda photographe ou l’apprentissage du regard,” Etudes cinématographiques 179–186 (1991) 4–12. 19. On cinéma vérité and its legacy, see, for example, Ivone Margulies, “Chronicle of a Summer (1960) as Autocritique (1959): A Transition in the French Left,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 21.3 (2004) 173–85; Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Jack C. Ellis and Betsy A. McLane, A New History of Documentary Film (London: Continuum, 2005); Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2000); Michael Chanan, The Politics of Documentary (London: British Film Institute, 2007); Patricia Aufderheide, Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Alan Rosenthal and John Corner, New Challenges for Documentary (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010 [orig. 2001]); and Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov, eds., Collecting Visible Evidence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Beattie invokes Eric Barnouw’s often-cited distinction between cinéma vérité as it developed in France and direct cinema in the United States: “The direct cinema artist aspired to invisibility; the . . . cinéma vérité artist was often an avowed participant. The direct cinema artist played the role of the involved bystander; the cinéma vérité artist espoused that of provocateur. Direct cinema found its truth in events available to the camera. Cinéma vérité was committed to a paradox: that artificial circumstances could bring hidden

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truth to the surface.” Yet Beattie complicates this distinction: “cinéma vérité was provocational and observational; direct cinéma was observational and interventionist.” Keith Beattie, Documentary Screens, Non-Fiction Film and Television (New York: Palgrave, 2004) 83–84. Cinéma vérité is a translation of “kino pravda,” a term promoted most famously by the Soviet documentary filmmaker Dziga Vertov in his early newsreels, which sought to reveal the importance and vitality of the communist worker—an example that informed Jean-Luc Godard’s and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s creation of the collective “Dziga Vertov Group” in 1968. 20. See Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); DeRoo, 2006; Daniel Sherman, ed., The Long 1968 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 21. “Pompidou Scorns Paris as Museum,” New York Times, November 5, 1972. 22. Ibid. 23. For more recent assessments of Pompidou’s influence on urban planning, see Virginie Lefebvre, Paris-Ville Moderne: Maine-Montparnasse et La Défense, 1950–75 (Paris: Norma, 2003); and Mathieu Flonneau and Pascal Geneste, eds., Le grand dessein parisien de Georges Pompidou (Paris: Archives Nationales, 2010). 24. “US Builder Spurs Plans for Big Paris Complex,” New York Times, October 23, 1966. 25. For recent work on this phenomenon, see Marilena Kourniati, “Policies and Colonialism: Nanterre’s Three Generations of Grands Ensembles,” in European Architectural History Network, ed. Hilde Heynen and Janina Gosseye (Brussels: 2012) 562–568. For an overview of international urban planning and popular resistance in this period, see Christopher Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). On earlier artistic engagements with the process of decolonization in France, see Hannah Feldman, From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945–1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 26. Jean de Baroncelli, “Daguerréotypes,” Cahiers du cinéma (1975). 27. Louis Chevalier, The Assassination of Paris, trans. David P. Jordan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994 [orig. 1977]) xiii. 28. Ibid., x–xi. 29. Pompidou was famous for “adapting Paris to the automobile,” with newly constructed autoroutes and shopping centers affecting the pedestrian traffic and commerce on streets such as the rue Daguerre. Varda conveys these larger urban and economic transformations through these more subtle changes in work and everyday life on her street. 30. In fact, the term odalisque in French can connote both a chamber maid and a harem concubine; Varda’s shot evokes both meanings.

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31. Bénézet interprets this portrayal of women’s work as demonstrating “that women play a critical role in the local economy and in society overall.” Delphine Bénézet, The Cinema of Agnès Varda (London: Wallflower, 2014) 25. 32. In Varda’s unpublished notes, written while making the film, she reveals her frustrations with the film’s subjects. She describes them as an unengaged, “neutral mass,” though recognizing that they defer to the client, who is “king.” In Varda’s final film, her tone is more tempered. Archival documents courtesy of Ciné-Tamaris, Paris. 33. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994 [orig. 1967]). 34. Henri Lefebvre, La vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne (Paris: Gallimard, 1968). See also Michèle C. Cone, “ ‘Metro, Boulot, Dodo’: The Art of the Everyday in France, 1958–1972,” in The Art of the Everyday: The Quotidian in French Postwar Culture, ed. Lynn Gumpert (New York: NYU Press, 1997). 35. Whereas Lefebvre saw dreams and pleasure as potentially utopian sources of resistance, Varda represents the ambivalence and complexity of her subjects. 36. Sarah Cooper notes the cinematic reference to Méliès within her larger discussion, “Film Portraits: From Jane B. to Agnès V.” See Sarah Cooper, Self less Cinema? Ethics and French Documentary (London: Legenda, 2006) 77–79. 37. This evokes Varda’s cinematic dialogue with Jean-Luc Godard, who uses various techniques to reference technical staff and co-workers in his films from this period. See, for example, Hunter Vaughan, Where Film Meets Philosophy: Godard, Resnais, and Experiments in Cinematic Thinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 38. Petho compares Varda’s reflection with Velázquez’s self-reference in Las Meninas. See Agnes Petho, “Intermediality and Metalepsis in the ‘Cinécriture’ of Agnès Varda,” Acta Univ. Sapientale, Film and Media Studies 3 (2010) 69–94. Given the film’s title, however, I will later argue that Varda’s reflection evokes the mirror-like surface of the daguerreotype. 39. In the scenes of the magic show, we see that workers, who are ostensibly immobilized by the magician’s hypnotic trances, cannot suppress a laugh or smile. By including these moments, Varda signals to the viewer that the workers are playing along with the act, while also recognizing its awkwardness. Similarly, Daguerreotypes includes shots when workers enter a neighbor’s store and look at the camera or nervously twitch. We are continually reminded of the camera’s presence and the ways in which it changes subjects’ behavior, an important facet of cinéma vérité practice. 40. On the specific properties of the daguerreotype, see, for example, Dominique Font-Réaulx, The Daguerreotype (Paris: Musée d’Orsay, 2008); Todd Gustavson, Camera: A History of Photography from Daguerreotype to Digital (New

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York: Sterling, 2009); and Melissa Banta, A Curious and Ingenious Art (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000). 41. Here I draw on Sarah Cooper’s assertion that Varda’s documentary practice evokes the reciprocal construction of identity between filmmaker and subject. While her analyses focus on Jane B. par Agnès V., Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse, and Les Plages d’Agnès, I believe the concept can be expanded to examine Varda’s relationship to her subjects in Daguerreotypes. See Cooper, 2006; and Sarah Cooper, “Looking Back, Looking Onwards: Selflessness, Ethics, and French Documentary,” Studies in French Cinema 10.1 (2010) 57–68. Varda’s subjective approach in her more recent non-fiction films, such as The Gleaners and I, has been productively read within the tradition of the essay film. Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) 69–75. Here, in Daguerreotypes, I seek to uncover the specific documentary media and traditions with and against which Varda works. 42. The no entry sign references Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), which critiques Pompidou’s renovation of Paris. Godard depicts the destruction of neighborhoods, construction of highways, and hostility to pedestrians. Varda references this film, evoking this urban history and locating her film within a tradition of critical cinematic commentary.

6. melancholy and merchandise: documenting and displaying widowhood in l’ île et elle 1. This exhibition in part stems from her filmic work of the last three decades exploring themes of documentary and her relationship with her late husband, Jacques Demy. Varda completed filming Jacquot de Nantes, a film about Demy’s childhood, just before he died in 1990. Since then, she has made Les demoiselles ont eu 25 ans (1992), and L’Univers de Jacques Demy (1993), about Demy’s life and work. She revisits and reworks her films about Demy in her exhibition L’île et elle and in her 2008 film Les Plages d’Agnès, discussed in this chapter and the following. 2. Although continuing Varda’s longstanding practice in documentary film, the exhibition also represents an important shift in her work that began in the twenty-first century, as it incorporates film into multimedia installation art. Specifically, the exhibition is a temporary, site-specific work that surrounds a spectator and engages the architecture and layout of the exhibition space to shape the viewer’s experience. I refer to Varda’s work as both an exhibition and an art installation, as it was a solo exhibition occupying the entire museum as well as a work of installation art. L’île et elle was realized with Christophe Vallaux’s collaboration on the scénographie des espaces.

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3. For documentation of the exhibition, see Agnès Varda, L’île et elle: Regards sur l’exposition (Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2006). 4. Kelley Conway productively notes this difference in emotional atmosphere between the two levels of the exhibition. See Kelley Conway, “The New Wave in the Museum: Varda, Godard, and the Multi-Media Institution,” Contemporary French Civilization 32.2 (2008) 195–218. Isabelle McNeill describes how Varda’s moving images make the museum a site of dynamic, emotional encounter; see Isabelle McNeill, “Agnès Varda’s Moving Museums,” in Anamnesia, ed. Peter Collier, Anna Magdalena Elsner, and Olga Smith (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009) 283– 294; and Isabelle McNeill, Memory and the Moving Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). 5. For a compelling reading of Varda’s decision to represent herself among her filmed subjects, see Jenny Chamarette, Phenomenology and the Future of Film (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012) 110. Dominique Blüher views The Widows of Noirmoutier as representing Varda’s openness to the world, rather than focusing on her personal story. Dominique Blüher, “La miroitière: à propos de quelques films et installations d’Agnès Varda,” in Agnès Varda: Le cinéma et audelà, ed. Antony Fiant, Roxane Hamery, and Eric Thouvenel (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009) 178. 6. Romney, however, also describes the exhibition as “affecting, and accessible.” Jonathan Romney, “Agnès Varda: L’île et elle,” Modern Painters (September 2006) 108. 7. Shirley Jordan writes: “Snagged . . . in a temporal loop between stasis and movement, The Widows of Noirmoutier provides no . . . leaving behind [of Varda’s grief], but a powerful persistence of the vulnerable self.” She sees L’île et elle as drawing audiences into Varda’s ongoing mourning. She asserts that the “reiterative and cyclical nature of this spatialized palimpsestic autobiography . . . is also an exercise in memory,” 582–583. See Shirley Jordan, “Spatial and Emotional Limits in Installation Art: Agnès Varda’s L’île et elle,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 13.5 (2009) 581–588. 8. Jordan powerfully describes the raw character of Varda’s autobiographical expression: she is “exposed (she elects to be filmed by another in a most intimate act of mourning).” Jordan, 2009, 585–586. 9. Conway writes: “elle demeure silencieuse avec une expression d’immense tristesse que j’ai intimement partagée et que les paroles, de fait, ne pouvaient exprimer.” Kelley Conway sees Varda’s monitor in The Widows of Noirmoutier as her most autobiographical gesture in the exhibition. Kelley Conway, “L’île et elle: lieu, temps, écran, récit,” in Agnès Varda: Le cinéma et au-delà, ed. Antony Fiant, Roxane Hamery, and Eric Thouvenel (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009) 217. Delphine Bénézet describes: “In this video, Varda makes no compromise and exposes herself as she is filmed weeping and isolated.” Delphine Bénézet, The Cinema of Agnès Varda (London: Wallflower, 2014) 34.

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10. The work can also be productively considered in relation to the larger artistic practice of institutional critique, which proliferated in the 1960s and remains vibrant today, as it draws critical attention to the question of art’s relationships to its institutions and audiences. Like other artists engaging in institutional critique, Varda bases her work in a specific exhibition site, and self-consciously mixes display practices to make audiences critically aware of them, underscoring how they inform how we look and socialize in exhibition spaces and are connected to broader issues of social, political, and economic power. See, for example, Blake Stimson and Alexander Alberro, eds., Institutional Critique (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011). 11. The Cartier Foundation, with its collection and commissioning of contemporary art, is a prominent example in France. Martine Robert explains that when the foundation began in the 1980s with a budget of 3 million euros, no other private enterprise had given so much support to contemporary art in France. Martine Robert, “L’art en prise avec l’entreprise,” L’Oeil 611 (2009) 28–33. In the 1990s, the Fondation Cartier “abandoned its original aims to act as an independent corporate foundation and [took] on a new mantle as the friend and benefactor of the world’s foremost modern art galleries.” Elspeth Moncrieff, “A Corporate Friend: Changing Direction at the Fondation Cartier,” Apollo (September 1992) 185. The foundation loans its collections to major public museums, demonstrating the Cartier’s increasing influence on public museums in France and abroad. (This is, of course, part of a larger international phenomenon and debate, with companies such as Prada sponsoring art and exerting influence at venues such as the Venice Biennale and Tate Britain.) In France, modern art museums have been generally organized differently than they are in the United States, where public museums receive a range of private and public support at both local and national levels. In Paris, art museums are typically part of the city or national network, which traditionally has been largely publicly funded and has a highly centralized bureaucracy. However, over the last several decades, public art museums and new tax incentives in France have sought to develop what are often termed “American” models of corporate sponsorship. The Fondation Cartier has been considered an “unparalleled” example of corporate sponsorship of contemporary art in France. (The recent opening of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris is part of this larger trend.) See Christine Coste, “Les Fondations à l’honneur en 2014,” L’Oeil 666 (2014) 20. While some praise the curatorial adventurousness and innovation of the Fondation Cartier, other critics believe that the foundation has been “better known for its gimmicks and parties” and that the exhibitions “lack the curatorial intensity of some public institutions.” See Moncrieff, 184–185; Jeff Rian, “Nomad Nights at the Cartier Foundation,” Flash Art International no. 188 (May–June 1996) 42; and Laurie Hurwitz, “French Twist,” Artnews 110.1 (2011) 44–45. 12. Moncrieff, 185.

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13. Elisabeth Lebovici relates the central projection to Catholic ceremonies, in which a table may represent the body of the deceased. Elisabeth Lebovici and Gérard Lefort, “Varda, glaneuse de veuves,” Libération February 7, 2005. 14. The English interview text here is based on the film subtitles, with minor differences in my translation. 15. Varda uses similar metaphors of growth in her Patatopia art installation and in The Gleaners and I, where rotting potatoes sprout new shoots, new life. 16. In “Mourning and Melancholia” (1915, published in 1917), Freud distinguished between two responses to death. Mourning is the healthy response—in which a person gradually recognizes loss in the world, severs attachment, and moves on. Melancholia, in contrast, is unhealthy grief, whereby the grieving individual refuses to let go. Freud speculated that this unhealthy response stemmed from unresolved disappointment in a relationship; thus, grieving subjects incorporated the relationship, what the relationship represented, or attributes of the other person into their own identities, as a way of trying to work through this unfulfillment. For Freud, this process is fraught and often creates a hostile internal dynamic, resulting in depression, low self esteem, or self-punishment. See Sigmund Freud, Freud: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1956–74) vol. 14. See also Tammy Clewell, “Mourning beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 52.1 (2004) 43–67. 17. Later, in “The Ego and the Id” (1923), Freud revised his conception of melancholia, accepting that it may be a necessary part of mourning. This idea has been interpreted and expanded by contemporary scholars, such as Judith Butler, who explains that melancholic incorporation “becomes a magical, a psychic, form of preserving the [loved] object.” Melancholic identification enables letting go of the person in the external world by providing “a way to preserve the object as part of the ego itself, and thus avert the loss as a complete loss.” See Freud, vol. 19; and Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997) 167. Varda evokes the dimension of fantasy in melancholia. Yet she portrays maintaining a relationship with a deceased spouse, or making the relationship part of the widow’s identity, as a touching, productive, painful, and emotionally complex process. In fact, the music Varda chose for the central projection—a violin score that begins with two counterpoint melodies that almost resolve into a raw, extended, single note—serves as an auditory metaphor for melancholia: the loss of presence in the world, psychological incorporation of the deceased other, continued pain involved in that process, and lack of resolution. On the musical counterpoint, see Céline Gailleurd, “Moi, si on m’ouvre, on trouvera des plages,” in Agnès Varda: Le cinéma et au-delà, ed. Antony Fiant, Roxane Hamery, and Eric Thouvenel (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009) 201.

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18. Both Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholy and the gendered ways in which they are perceived have been the subject of feminist scholarship of the last several decades, and Varda’s project can be seen as part of this feminist dialogue. Juliana Schiesari notes that Hamlet is the only named character in Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” essay; Hamlet’s melancholia enables him to function as a speaker of social truths, whereas women figure as nameless social types. She argues that for women, melancholia is seen as a stigmatized disease rather than an enabling ethos. Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992) 15–16. Julia Kristeva, for example, sees alternative possibilities within melancholia, as “loss, bereavement, and absence trigger the work of the imagination and nourish it permanently as much as they threaten it and spoil it.” Julia Kristeva, Black Sun, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). For a broader exploration of the ways in which recognition of melancholic loss can foster creativity in art historical practice, see Michael Ann Holly, The Melancholic Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 19. Whisper, the Waves, the Wind. Performance by Suzanne Lacy with Sharon Allen, 1984. Lacy designed the project to represent experiences of elderly women not commonly voiced and to challenge cultural stereotypes. In this work, more than one hundred elderly women dressed in white processed down to a beach in La Jolla, California, where they sat at tables and spoke about their experiences of aging. The audience watched from the rocks above and listened to a sound score, composed by Sharon Stone, which included excerpts from prior interviews with the women, many of whom described their community activism. The interviews conveyed how the women confronted challenges of aging with strength, wisdom, energy, and ambition. After one hour, audience members were invited to the beach to engage with the participants. The women then processed back up the stairs to the audience’s applause. Lacy explains that she designed the work as a celebration of women’s liveliness to counteract media images of elderly women as withered. The work evokes feminist consciousness raising—women’s strength through dialogue with other women and expanding public discourse. Stephanie Arnold, “Suzanne Lacy’s ‘Whisper, the Waves, the Wind’,” The Drama Review: TDR 29.1 (1985) 126–130; Jennifer Fisher, “Interperformance: The Live Tableaux of Suzanne Lacy, Janine Antoni, and Marina Abramovic,” Art Journal 56.4 (1997) 28–33; Moira Roth, “Suzanne Lacy: Social Reformer and Witch,” TDR 32.1 (1988) 42–60; and Suzanne Lacy, ed., Mapping The Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995). On representations of elderly women more broadly, see Marcia Tucker and Anne Ellegood, eds., The Time of Our Lives (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999). Initially, Varda’s evocation of Lacy’s work seems surprising, since the tone of Lacy’s project is triumphant, while Varda’s is somber. However, as Varda’s work progresses, one begins to notice many of the similarities. In Varda’s Widows of

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Noirmoutier, as in Lacy’s work, women arrive at a beach and gather around a table, momentarily creating community, then departing. Like Lacy, Varda includes interviews with the women that explore experiences of aging and grief not commonly part of public dialogue in order to challenge common stereotypes. In these ways, Varda references Lacy’s work and its feminist spirit, though in Varda’s work this message is less overt and takes time to discover. And of course, the mood of the two pieces is very different. In place of Lacy’s cheering audience, Varda portrays her subjects’—and her own—ongoing experience of grief and social misunderstanding and isolation. 20. Suzanne Lacy, Whisper, the Waves, the Wind: Celebrating Older Women, Documenting a Performance Work (Chicago: Terra Nova Films, 1985). 21. See Wilson’s moving analysis of Jacquot de Nantes, in Emma Wilson, Love, Mortality, and the Moving Image (London: Palgrave, 2012) 23–28. 22. Marcel Carné, Les Visiteurs du Soir (New York: Criterion Collection, 2012 [orig. 1942]). The film was produced by André Paulvé; Jacques Prévert and Pierre Laroche were the screenwriters. The film featured Arletty, Robert Blin, and Jules Berry, among others. The song lyrics were published separately as poetry in Prévert’s Paroles, in the section titled “Quicksand.” See Jacques Prévert, Paroles (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). My translation is offered here. 23. At one point the devil criticizes the couple for taking refuge in happy moments; he says that memories are lovely, but the past is gone forever. Yet the film suggests that he’s wrong. 24. Wilson suggests the figures are shaped like angels. See Wilson, 2012, 39. 25. Geneviève Sellier and Noël Burch argue that love and desire overcoming destiny or duty is a metaphor for France. See Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier, La drôle de guerre des sexes du cinéma français, 1930–56 (Paris: Nathan, 1996). For a discussion of Carné’s film in its historical context, see Gregory Sims, “Démons et merveilles: Fascist Aesthetics and the New School of French Cinema,” Australian Journal of French Studies (January–April 1999) 58–88. 26. Scholars have explored Varda’s complex depiction of Demy in Jacquot de Nantes, Les demoiselles ont eu 25 ans, and L’Univers de Jacques Demy. See for example, Adrian Danks, “Living Cinema: The ‘Demy Films’ of Agnès Varda,” Studies in Documentary Film 4.2 (2010) 162. Marie-Claire Barnet, writing on Varda’s portrayal of Demy in her subsequent Plages d’Agnès (2008), argues that: “Varda does not limit identities to (confusing) signs or symbols of sexuality, sexual orientation, or gender, preferring instead to hint at le non-dit, and all the complex issues of privacy while respecting Demy’s own silence, as explored explicitly in Les Plages d’Agnès.” Marie-Claire Barnet, “ ‘Elles-Ils Islands’: Cartography of Lives and Deaths by Agnès Varda,” L’Esprit Créateur 51.1 (2011) 108. For interpretations of representations of gender and sexuality within Demy’s films, see for instance, Darren Waldron, Jacques Demy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014); and Anne E. Duggan, Queer Enchantments: Gender, Sexuality, and Class in the

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Fairy-Tale Cinema of Jacques Demy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013). In this 2006 exhibition, Varda presents other subjects’ identities in ways that exceed convention. In The Portrait Cabana, photographs of women are exhibited on one wall, with men on the opposite wall. In between, Varda displays an image of a phallic lighthouse, and on the wall facing it, a video of a vulvic mussel washed by waves. Varda explained that she created the work to reflect on the “private, sexual lives” of the subjects. It also suggests a playful critique of gender and sexual binaries. Varda’s commentary courtesy of Ciné-Tamaris, Paris. Furthermore, Carné’s The Devil’s Envoys features gender and amorous confusion around the character of “Dominique” and her appearance in masculine and feminine disguises. Varda evokes complex notions of identity with these layered references. 27. Kelley Conway describes viewing Varda’s monitor: “she remains silent with an expression of immense sadness that I intimately shared, and that words could not express.” Conway, 2009, 217. Marie-Claire Barnet (2011) describes the “flow of emotions,” 105. 28. The interpretation offered here is the author’s own. The sculpture was installed using the ideal weight as a guide, though could be configured in different shapes and weights, remaining open to interpretation at different sites of exhibition. Whereas some venues chose to allow the work to reduce in size over the course of an exhibit, others replenished the candy regularly. 29. Nouvel himself explains the building concept as expanding the storefront display window (the large glass exterior wall). Jean-Yves Jouannais, a journalist at Art Press, evokes this aspect when asking the curator, Hervé Chandès: “Hasn’t the move to the heart of Paris and increased visibility accentuated the showcase aspect of the Fondation Cartier, in the negative and positive sense of the word? That, certainly, is what Nouvel’s architecture seems to be saying.” Chandès replied: “I like the showcase aspect. What matters is to take advantage of the situation you’re in.” Jean-Yves Jouannais, “The Fondation Cartier So Far: Interview with Hervé Chandès,” Art Press 225 (1997) 62–65. For a broader historical overview of the relationships between art and commercial exhibition practices, and the museum as a site of fashionable display, see Charlotte Klonk, Spaces of Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 30. Romney, 2006, 108. 31. Timothy Corrigan has analyzed Varda’s films, such as The Gleaners and I (2000), as part of the larger genre of the essay film. For example, essayists often portray change and questions, rather than certainty; present a personal perspective (rather than an “objective” view); and embrace the idea that in trying to depict facts, we fictionalize them. Here, I aim to excavate the specific ways in which Varda develops related concepts across a range of media in the threedimensional space of the exhibition. See Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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32. Hubert Arnault, “Entretien avec Agnès Varda,” Image et son, revue de cinéma 201 (1967) 40–48. 33. Similarly, in Varda’s monitor of The Widows of Noirmoutier, she shows a wave rolling ashore and then reverses it; she suggests that “the tide has gone out” and uses this visual device to evoke going back in time, as if it were a memory. 34. Roger Ebert, “Les Créatures,” November 14, 1969. Web. Accessed June 30, 2016. 35. On collaboration and consent between Varda and Demy, in films such as Jacquot de Nantes, see Wilson, 2012, 21–40, upon which I draw here.

7. varda now: autobiography, memory, and retrospective 1. Delorme, for example, describes the difficulty of avoiding nostalgia when watching the film. Stéphane Delorme, “Un vie bien remplie,” Cahiers du cinéma 640 (2009) 37. 2. Sophie Mayer explains: “The Beaches of Agnès is a retrospective film. . . . Varda turns the camera on her own career from . . . La Pointe Courte to her . . . exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. The result is a dazzling personal and social history, an intimate documentary.” Jonathan Romney describes how through her performance “Varda frames an undeniably heartfelt and emotionally direct film.” Domenach and Rouyer describe how the film spectator is emotionally overwhelmed (bouleversé) by the film. Sophie Mayer, “Portrait of the Artist,” Sight and Sound 19.10 (2009) 12. Jonathan Romney, “A Life Through a Lens,” Sight and Sound 19.10 (2009) 46–48. Elise Domenach and Philippe Rouyer, “Entretien avec Agnès Varda: Passer sous le Pont des Arts à la voile,” Positif 574 (2008) 17–21. See also Juliette Reitzer and Auréliano Tonet, “Agnès Varda: Sables Emouvants,” Trois Couleurs December-January (2008–2009) 26–27. 3. The film received numerous awards including “best documentary” from the Director’s Guild of America and the National Society of Film Critics. 4. Varda’s film can be viewed within the broader contemporary genre of the self-portrait essay film; she invokes different media to create fictional selves or reveal variations on a fragmentary self. Timothy Corrigan argues that today the film essay has become ubiquitous and the self-portrait essay is one prominent version. He sees the “essayistic subjectivity” as sharply differentiated from stable and coherent models of the self shaped by and sustained by traditional narrative and temporal structures. He views self-portrait essays as different from the construction of public history through the narrative agencies of renowned individuals. See Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) 80, 85, 87–88. On the proliferation of

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subjective, first-person documentary in recent decades, see also Alisa Lebow, ed., The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary (New York: Wallf lower, 2012), which includes Rascaroli’s chapter on the selfportrait film; Laura Rascaroli, The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (New York: Wallf lower Press, 2009); and Haden Guest, “Emotion Picture,” Film Comment July-August 2009, 48. 5. Dominique Blüher, among others, emphasizes the performative nature of Varda’s self-portrait. See Dominique Blüher, “Autobiography, (Re-)enactment and the Performative Self-Portrait in Varda’s Les Plages d’Agnès,” Studies in European Cinema 10.1 (2013) 59–69. 6. Wolmart, among others, compares Varda’s play with narrative conventions and subjective documentary style to that of her Left Bank colleagues Alain Resnais and Chris Marker. Gregory Wolmart, “Beaches of Agnès,” Film & History 44.1 (2014) 8–12; see also “Les Plages d’Agnès,” New York Times March 3, 2009. Web. Accessed January 10, 2010. Others link her approach to the history of cinéma vérité. See Franck Kausch, “Les Plages d’Agnès: La mer, éternellement recommencée,” Positif 574 (December 2008) 15–17. 7. The scholarship on self-fiction and autobiography in France is too vast to name here. Many reference Serge Doubrovsky’s seminal role in popularizing hybrid literary forms; Jordan focuses on feminine and feminist uses of self-fiction; Boyle sees Varda’s performance and process of creative expression as transformative of herself; and McGuire, for instance, explores the ways in which contemporary female filmmakers’ self-representations use false “making of” documentary components. See Shirley Jordan, “Autofiction in the Feminine,” French Studies 67.1 (January 2013) 76–84; and Claire Boyle, “Self-Fictions and Film: Varda’s Transformative Technology of the Self in Les Plages d’Agnès,” Revue Critique de Fixxion Française Contemporaine no. 12, 2012. Web. Accessed June 30, 2016. Shana McGuire, “Vers un ‘nouveau réalisme intérieur’: L’autoreprésentation féminine à l’écran,” Dalhousie French Studies 70 (Spring 2005) 71–79. 8. On themes of fragmentation in Varda’s film and art, see, for example, Mireille Brioude, “Varda et l’autoportrait fragmenté: Du film à l’exposition,” Image & Narrative 19 (2007). 9. For a beautiful discussion of how Varda’s cinematic self-portraits are constructed via dynamic encounters with others and resist notions of separate and stable selves, see Sarah Cooper, Selfless Cinema? Ethics and French Documentary (London: Legenda, 2006) and Sarah Cooper, “Looking Back, Looking Onwards: Self lessness, Ethics, and French Documentary,” Studies in French Cinema 10.1 (2010) 57–68. 10. “Frustrated desires are a common theme in René Magritte’s work. Here, a barrier of fabric prevents the intimate embrace between two lovers, transforming an act of passion into one of isolation and frustration. Some have interpreted this work as a depiction of the inability to fully unveil the true nature of even our

notes to pages 152–157

203

most intimate companions.” Museum of Modern Art, “The Lovers, René Magritte.” Web. Accessed June 30, 2016. See also Didier Ottinger, ed., Magritte: La Trahison des Images (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2016). 11. Briony Fer, “Surrealism, Myth, and Psychoanalysis,” in Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art between the Wars, ed. Briony Fer, David Batchelor, and Paul Wood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) 178. 12. “Agnès Varda vide son sac!” Agnès Varda interview with Julien Dokhan, Allociné, December 12, 2012. Web. Accessed June 30, 2016. 13. Cited in “Cannes 2015: La 4ème Palme d’Or d’Honneur de l’Histoire remise à une cinéaste,” L’actualité cinéma sur Canal+, May 11, 2015. Web. Accessed June 15, 2015. 14. For excerpts from her speech, see “Cannes 2015—L’émouvant discours d’Agnès Varda, Palme d’or d’honneur,” Télé 2 semaines, May 25, 2015. Web. Accessed June 30, 2015. 15. “Les hommes qui ont eu ce prix ont fait gagner des millions à l’industrie. Et moi alors je suis fière car il ne s’agit pas d’une question de mérite commercial.” Quoted in Laetitia Ratane, “Cannes 2015—Agnès Varda: ‘J’aurais préféré avoir plus d’argent pour financer mes films que de prix!’ ” Allociné, May 23, 2015. Web. Accessed June 15, 2015. Télé 2 semaines quotes Varda’s comments at the festival: “I am French, I am female, and my films have neither won [awards at Cannes] nor made [a lot of] money.” “Je suis française, je suis femme, et mes films n’ont ni gagné ni fait gagner de l’argent.”) “Cannes 2015—L’émouvant discours d’Agnès Varda, Palme d’or d’honneur,” Télé 2 semaines, May 25, 2015. Web. Accessed June 30, 2015. 16. Roslyn Sulcas, “Agnès Varda to Be Honored at Cannes” New York Times, May 11, 2015. Web. Accessed June 15, 2015. In her acceptance speech, Varda recalled her first trip to Cannes in 1955, riding a third-class train and carrying reels of La Pointe Courte and a mandat de 100 francs to rent a projection room to try to show the film to professionals. 17. Journalists and critics surrounding the event expanded the inquiry, noting, for example, that women are outnumbered by men 1:9 in the Directors Guild of America. See Emma Jones, “Women in the Spotlight at Cannes Film Festival,” BBC News, May 16, 2015. Web. Accessed June 15, 2015. For video of the dialogues, see “Cannes: Women in Motion Panel,” Hollywood Reporter, May 23, 2015. Web. Accessed June 15, 2015. 18. The Women in Motion dialogues are planned to continue over five years at the festival. 19. See Elsa Keslassy, “Cannes Film Fest, Kering Launch Women in Motion,” Variety, June 24, 2015. Web. Accessed June 30, 2015. 20. Ibid. 21. “Cannes: Jane Fonda, Megan Ellison among ‘Women in Motion’ Award Honorees,” Hollywood Reporter, May 13, 2015. Web. Accessed June 15, 2015.

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22. Elizabeth Kiefer, “Women Set to Take the Spotlight at this Year’s Cannes Film Festival,” Refinery 29 (April 15, 2015). Web. Accessed June 15, 2015. The festival also paid tribute to Rossellini’s mother, Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman, whose face appeared on the festival posters. Kiefer writes: “It’s been nearly three decades since the annual Cannes Film Festival opened with a movie directed by a woman—and despite the fact that women have come a long way both in front of and behind the camera since then, they’re still often left out of the spotlight. But, on the eve of the fest’s 68th anniversary, there’s change in the air: This year, Cannes is shining the light on women’s contributions to film—and paying more attention to the overall role of women in the industry. . . . But, despite the shift in focus, some things seem to never change—or at least change very slowly. The coveted Palme d’Or prize features only two female directors in the running, the same number as last year. Even while Cannes becomes more woman-inclusive, the fest is still a far cry from truly representing the work and achievements of women in film.” 23. Jones, 2015. 24. “Women in Motion Talk with Agnès Varda—Cannes Film Festival 2015,” Le Figaro TV, May 23, 2015. Web. Accessed June 15, 2015. Varda echoed this need for financial support for continuing her current cinematic projects in conversation with the author. Rebecca J. DeRoo, Interview with Agnès Varda, June 8, 2015. The Beaches of Agnès was produced by Ciné-Tamaris in co-production with Arte and distributed in France by Les Films du Losange. The film received modest subsidies from Canal+ and the Ile de France and Languedoc Roussillon regions, and was awarded an innovation grant from the Centre National du Cinéma. See the dossier de presse published by Ciné-Tamaris in 2008. This press packet emphasizes that the film was expensive for a European documentary, and archival documents indicate the budget was approximately 1.9 million euros. 25. See Henry Barnes, “Cannes Faces Backlash after Women Reportedly Barred from Film Screening for Not Wearing High Heels,” Guardian, May 19, 2015. Web. Accessed June 15, 2015. And “Cannes ‘Turned Away Amputee in Flat Shoes,’ ” BBC News, May 19, 2015. Web. Accessed June 15, 2015. 26. “Cannes Film Festival ‘Turns Away Women in Flat Shoes,’ ” BBC News, May 19, 2015. Web. Accessed June 15, 2015.

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Index

Films and book titles are followed by a gloss with the filmmaker’s or author’s name only. Works in other media are followed by a gloss indicating the artist’s name and the medium. A Bout de Souffle (Breathless) (Godard), 3–4, 150 Agel, Henri, 171n20 Agnès de-ci de-là Varda (Varda), 164n13 Agnès Varda in Californialand (Varda), 165n17 “Ahistory of French Cinema” (Hayward), 163n7, 184n21 Aimée, Anouk, 150 Akerman, Chantal, 166n21, 187n47 Algerian war, 162n6 Allen, Sharon, 129fig58, 198n18 Allen, Woody, 1, 156 Althusser, Louis, 187n47 Altman, Rick, 73–74, 184n18 The American Film Musical (Altman), 73–74, 184n18 “Amsterdam sur eau” (“Amsterdam on the Sea”), 75–76, 76fig24, 184–85n23 A nous la liberté (Clair), 185–86n36 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 25 Arletty (singer, actress), 199n22 art history, 7, 9–10, 164n13, 166n20 The Assassination of Paris (Chevalier), 96 Astruc, Alexandre, 24, 162n5, 171n18, 171n20, 172n30

Atget, Eugène, 89, 90fig28, 191n17 Audé, Françoise, 85, 183n16, 188n2 auteur filmmakers and filmmaking, 24, 166n18, 171n18 Aviv, Nurith, 103 L’Avventura (Antonioni), 25 Baecque, Antoine de, 162–63n6 Baldung Grien, Hans, 164–65n15 Barbaud, Pierre, 27, 41, 172–73n35 Bardot, Brigitte, 5, 62, 63fig21 Barnet, Marie-Claire, 165n16, 199–200nn26–27 Barnouw, Eric, 191–92n19 Baroncelli, Jean de, 24, 171n19 Barthes, Roland, 182n8 Bastide, Bernard, 164n13, 166n18, 170n14 Bazin, André: as Cahiers co-founder, 23; on neorealism, 21, 26, 168–69n1, 171n23; New Wave study by, 161–62n3; and La Pointe Courte, 23–26, 28, 32–33, 170n15, 170n17, 173n39; and Tallenay, 27; as Varda advocate, 21, 23–26, 170n15, 170n17

227

228

index

The Beaches of Agnès (Les Plages d’Agnès) (Varda): overview, 143–59; awards won by, 144, 201n3; critics’ responses to, 144, 201n1; Demy in, 135, 144, 146, 147fig64, 194n1; as documentary, 144–45, 194n41; Documenteur in, 146–47; as essay film, 201–2n4; financing of, 158, 204n24; and Magritte, 148, 149figs66–67, 150–51, 151– 52figs68–69; and Marker, 17–18, 150, 202n6; memory in, 143, 145–46, 148–50; multiple media represented in, 143, 146– 48; New Wave discussed in, 150–51; and Resnais, 202n6; as retrospective, 144–53, 201n2; as self-portrait, 16–17, 144–45, 158, 164n13, 201–2nn4–5, 201n2, 202n9; self-referentiality in, 16; speech in, 177n70; and surrealism, 148, 149figs66– 67, 151–52figs68–69; Varda as performer in, 145; visual fragmentation in, 143–46, 202n8; widowhood, 144 Beattie, Keith, 191–92n19 Beauregard, Georges de, 52, 150 Beauvoir, Simone de: feminist views of, 51, 57, 59; on gilded mediocrity, 64; housework critiqued by, 65–66; The Second Sex, 51, 57, 59, 62, 178n8; and L’une chante: Mon corps est à moi, 82; Varda’s departures from, 65–66; on women’s internalization of domesticity, 62 beaux-arts painting, 12 Beckman, Karen, 167n23 Bellour, Raymond, 166n20 Bénézet, Delphine: on corporeality in Varda’s work, 165n16; on phenomenology of Varda’s work, 165n16; on La Pointe Courte, 39, 173n37, 176n65; on Varda as auteure, 166n18; on The Widows of Noirmoutier, 195n9; on women’s work, 193n31 Benjamin, Walter, 191n17 Bergman, Ingrid, 204n22 Berlin Film Festival, 49 Bernstein, Michèle, 189–90n7 Berry, Jules, 199n22 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 1, 156 Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette) (De Sica), 25 Birkin, Jane, 2, 2fig1, 153, 159 Black Panthers (Varda), 164n15, 165n17 Blin, Robert, 199n22 Blüher, Dominique, 202n5 Bodard, Mag, 180n25 Bogart, Betsy Ann, 165n16 Le Bonheur (Happiness) (Varda): overview, 49–69; and antifeminism, 49, 53; awards

won by, 49; clichés in, 51, 67–68; color in, 49, 55, 179n15; critics’ responses to, 49, 51, 53, 67–68; domesticity in, 53–68, 54fig16, 56–58figs17–19, 61fig20, 79–81; domestic labor vs. paid labor in, 64–66; Emilie as a modern woman in, 62–63, 63fig21, 179n20; Emilie’s domesticity in, 60, 61fig20, 62, 65–66; and feminist debates, 15, 49; feminist strategies in, 52–53, 66–69; feminist texts as source for, 51–52, 62, 64–65; final scene of, 50fig14, 63–64; ironies in, 51, 67–69; jump cuts in, 59; opening credits of, 50fig13, 63–64; plot lines of, 49, 51; popular culture aesthetics in, 53, 55, 62, 63fig21; production of, 180n25; the serving hand ideal in, 53–64, 54fig16, 56–58figs17–19, 61fig20; Thérèse replaced by Emilie in, 49, 50fig14, 60, 62–63; Thérèse’s domesticity in, 59–66; Thérèse’s suicide in, 49; Thérèse’s vs. François’s work in, 64–65, 65fig22; Varda as scriptwriter of, 179n10; and Varda’s validation of housework, 65–66; women’s housework in, 51–52, 55–57, 59–60, 64–66, 65fig22; women’s magazine imagery in, 15, 51–52, 52fig15, 54–56, 56–58figs17–19, 62, 66–68 Bonnaire, Sandrine, 153 Bory, Jean-Louis, 55, 172–73n35 Boyer, Marie-France, 63fig21 Boyle, Claire, 202n7 Brady, Martin, 182n8 Breathless (A Bout de Souffle) (Godard), 3–4, 150 Brecht, Bertolt: audience interaction prompted by, 71, 79, 185n27, 185n34; awareness vs. empathy prompted by, 185n27; on Chaplin, 185–86n36; and Cléo, 180n2; and feminism, 15, 75–81; French cinema influenced by, 182nn8–9; Godard influenced by, 182n8; intertitles used by, 186n38; leftist politics of, 187n47; “The Modern Theater Is the Epic Theater,” 71, 75, 182n8; and La Pointe Courte, 32, 37, 174n49, 183n11; political relevance of, 182nn8–9; theatrical elements disrupting expectations in, 75, 82; and L’une chante, 71, 73, 75–83; Varda influenced by, 32, 172n30 Brialy, Jean-Claude, 168n30, 181n3 Bruno, Giuliana, 166n20 “The Bubble Woman” (La femme-bulle), 77–78, 78fig25

index Burch, Noël, 162n6, 199n22 Butler, Judith, 197n17 Cabane aux Portraits (Varda installation), 119–20, 200n26 Cahiers du cinéma (film journal and group): Bazin as co-founder, 23; on Brecht, 182n9; and cinephilia, 172n30; film promoted as an art form by, 4, 162n5; and Godard, 71, 163–64n12, 168n30; leftist politics of, 83, 187n47; and New Wave, 4, 163–64n12; and Truffaut, 163–64n12, 168n30; Varda’s association with, 5, 70, 163–64n12, 168n30, 181n3, 187n47; Young Turks of, 168n30, 181n3 caméra-stylo (camera pen), 24, 171n18, 171n20 Canby, Vincent, 188n3 Cannes Film Festival: Cléo’s objectification in, 5; as consecration, 155–59; gendered dynamics of, 4–6; gendered expectations of, 158; high heels scandal of, 158–59; La Pointe Courte screened concurrently with, 23; Varda honored at, 1–5, 155–59; Varda’s attire at, 159; Varda’s Palme d’honneur acceptance speech at, 5, 143– 44; and “Women in Motion” dialogues, 157–58, 203n18; women in the spotlight in, 1–2, 5–6, 53, 155–56, 159 Carné, Marcel, 132–33, 199–200n26, 199n22 Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art (Paris): as exhibition site, 15–16, 123, 135– 37, 196n11; L’île et elle in, 8, 115, 117, 153; Nouvel on, 200n29; photo of, 116fig48 Centre National de la Cinématographie, 23 Chabrol, Claude, 150–51, 152fig69, 168n30 Chamarette, Jenny, 165n16, 195n5 Chandès, Hervé, 200n29 Chaplin, Charlie, 79, 185–86n36 Chevalier, Louis, 95–96 cinéma de qualité (quality cinema), 4, 24, 66–67, 170n15 cinema nuovo (Brazil), 185n35 Cinémathèque Française (Paris), 18, 166n21, 168n31 cinéma vérité (international film movement), 93, 112, 191–92n19, 193n39, 202n6 cinephilia, 18, 172n28, 172n30 Ciné-Tamaris (Varda’s production company), 16, 82, 153, 155, 204n24 Clair, René, 185–86n36 Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7) (Varda): and the Algerian war, 162n6; in The Beaches,

229

150; Beauregard’s support for, 52, 150; Brecht motifs in, 180n2; as Cannes Classic, 2–3; and Cannes’ gender dynamics, 4–5; commercial success of, 2–3, 52; and feminism, 4–5, 52–53, 163n7; and Hans Baldung Grien, 164–65n15; improvisational style of, 52; intertitles in, 186n38; legacy of, 2; and New Wave, 4–5, 52; plot and style of, 4; poster, 150; success of, 2–3, 52; Varda’s career represented by, 2–3. See also Marchand, Corinne clichés, 51, 67–68, 76, 119–20, 183n14, 185n26 Cloquet, Ghislain, 162n6 CNC, 82, 170n14 Coen, Joel and Ethan, 156 consumerism. See L’île et elle Conway, Kelley: on cinephilia, 172n29; on neorealist elements in Varda’s work, 25; on La Pointe Courte, 174n49; on Varda’s literary influences, 172n30; on Varda’s production methods, 165n16; on Vilar, 32; on The Widows of Noirmoutier, 122, 195n4, 195n9, 200n27 Cooper, Sarah, 193n36, 194n41, 202n9 Corrigan, Timothy, 167n26, 200n31, 201–2n4 Les Créatures (Varda), 138–40, 168n31 cultural politics, 4–5, 7–9, 18, 162–63n6. See also political engagement Curot, Frank, 27, 33–34, 37, 172–73n35, 173n38 Daguerre, Louis, 85–86, 188n3 daguerreotypes, 106–15, 110–11figs43–44, 193n38 Daguerréotypes (Daguerreotypes) (Varda): and La Pointe Courte, 84; accordion instructors in, 85fig27, 96; and Atget, 88–89, 90fig28; audience involvement in, 109, 114, 194n41; awards won by, 188n1; bakers in, 84, 85fig27, 93, 96, 103, 105fig39, 109–10, 112fig45; butchers in, 84, 85fig27, 90–92, 92fig30, 95–97, 101–2figs36–37; and cinematic practice, 106–14; and cinéma vérité, 112; critics’ responses to, 84–85, 188nn2–3; daguerreotypes in, 106–14; documentary limits in, 89, 92–93, 99; dreams of shopkeepers in, 100–102; driving instructor in, 84, 85fig27, 96–97; drugstore owners in, 84, 85fig27, 95, 97–99, 99–100figs34–35, 107fig42; film reels in, 104fig38; French identity in, 85fig27, 95–96; gendered

230

index

Daguerréotypes (continued) divisions of labor in, 97; gendered dynamics in, 88; grocers in, 85fig27, 96–97, 98fig32; haircutters in, 84, 85fig27; and L’île et elle, 116, 122; knife sharpener in, 88–89, 90–91figs28-29; the magician in, 85fig27, 86, 89, 102–4, 105–6figs39–41, 193n39; modernization in, 15, 84, 86–89, 93–95, 94fig31, 109–11, 112fig45, 115; and the Montparnasse Tower, 94–96, 94fig31; opening credits of, 104fig38; and Pain, Peinture, et Accordéon, 109, 113figs46–47; and petits métiers photography, 88–92, 90–91figs28–29, 108; the plumber in, 85fig27; political engagement in, 15, 86, 95–96, 100–102, 111; posed shots in, 85fig27, 88–89, 90–92, 92fig30, 96–97, 98fig23; poster, 84–85, 85fig27; production crew members in, 103, 104fig38, 193n37; Rosalie Varda in, 100fig35, 103, 104fig38; self-referentiality in, 109, 193n38; self-reflexivity in, 93, 102–5, 109, 111–12; social content in, 88, 93, 96–97, 99, 102–3, 111–12, 114; sources for, 15, 86; tailors in, 84, 85fig27; typologies in, 86–93, 90fig28, 92fig30, 98figs32–33, 108, 112; and L’une chante, 84; unevenness of daily life in, 92–102; urban politics in, 86–88, 93–95; Varda in, 85fig27, 106, 109, 193n32; workers’ self-consciousness in, 193n39 Dalle Vacche, Angela, 166n20 Dancer in the Dark (von Trier), 183n15 Danks, Adrian, 199–200n26 Debord, Guy, 101, 189–90n7 Delluc, Louis, 49, 162n5 Delorme, Stéphane, 201n1 Les demoiselles ont eu 25 ans (Varda), 194n1 The Demolition of a Wall (Auguste and Louis Lumière), 139 “Demons and Wonders” (lyrics by Prévert), 130–32 Demy, Jacques: in The Beaches, 135, 144, 146– 48, 147fig64, 150–51, 152fig69, 194n1; Cinémathèque Française retrospective of, 168n31; in Les Créatures, 138; death of, 132, 135, 146–48, 199–200n26; and Les demoiselles ont eu 25 ans, 194n1; Hollywood musicals reworked by, 73; in L’île et elle, 15–16, 130–35, 132fig60, 140, 194n1, 199–200n26; and Jacquot de Nantes, 130–31, 194n1; and Left Bank, 181n3; Lola, 150; in Noirmoutier, 8, 115, 117–18;

Palme d’Or awarded to, 156; self-image of, 134–35; and Tout(e) Varda, 153; Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 156; and L’Univers de Jacques Demy, 194n1; Varda as influenced by, 81; Varda’s marriage to, 8, 66, 81, 115, 117–18, 133; Varda’s separation from, 133, 146–47; in Varda’s work, 16–17, 130–35, 132fig60, 140, 168n31, 194n1; in The Widows of Noirmoutier, 130–35, 132fig60, 140 Demy, Mathieu, 146–47, 148fig65 Deneuve, Catherine, 138–39, 153 Depardieu, Gérard, 153 Derrida, Jacques, 187n47 The Devil’s Envoys (Les Visiteurs du Soir) (Carné), 132–33, 199nn22–26 direct cinema, 191–92n19 Directors Guild of America, 203n17 documentary films: audience involvement in, 13–14, 48, 109, 114, 122, 137; and Cartier Foundation installation, 16, 116; and consumerism, 103, 116; and fiction films, 15, 27, 37–39, 139–140, 144, 168n28; limits of, 15, 89, 92–93, 99, 122, 145; in multimedia exhibitions, 14–16, 116; necessities of, 12, 15, 114; and neorealism, 21; and photography, 85–93, 99, 165n17; and selfreflexivity, 16; Varda’s rejection of conventions in, 7, 13–16, 30, 97, 99–100, 111, 122, 138, 150, 153; Varda’s subjective style of, 202n6. See also The Beaches of Agnès; cinéma vérité; Daguerréotypes; essay films; The Gleaners and I; L’île et elle; La Pointe Courte Documenteur (Varda), 146–47, 148fig65 “Domestic habits” (“Les moeurs domestiques”), 79–81, 80fig26, 186n39 Doniol-Valcroze, Jacques, 168n30, 170n12, 181n3 Dos Passos, John, 26 Doubrovsky, Serge, 202n7 Douchet, Jean, 24, 161n2, 177n73 Drouot, Claire and Claude, 52fig15 Dulac, Germaine, 162n5 Duras, Marguerite, 23, 177n73, 183n13, 187n47 DVD compilation of Varda’s work (2012), 7, 9, 16, 109, 112, 153–55, 154fig70, 164n14, 167n25 Dziga Vertov film collective, 182nn8–9, 187n47, 191–92n19 Eastwood, Clint, 1, 156 Ebert, Roger, 140, 188n2

index The Eclipse (Antonioni), 25 Ecole de Vaugirard, 164n13 Ecole du Louvre, 7, 164n13 “The Ego and the Id” (Freud), 197n17 Elle (magazine), 51, 55, 179n16, 180n29 Engels, Friedrich, 79–80 essay films, 13, 167n26, 194n41, 200n31, 201–2n4. See also documentary films Faulkner, William, 25–26, 172n30 The Feminine Mystique (Friedan), 51, 60, 65, 179n9 feminism: and Brecht, 15, 75–81; and Freudian scholarship, 198n18; and grief, 128; and “Mourning and Melancholia,” 128; Varda as feminist filmmaker, 1, 4–5, 7, 14–15, 48, 50, 144, 178n4, 180n1, 183n14, 186n41; and Varda’s feminist source material, 7, 51–52, 68, 186n41; in Whisper, the Waves, the Wind, 198–99n19; and widowhood, 118, 123–135. See also Beauvoir, Simone de; Le Bonheur; Friedan, Betty; Lacy, Suzanne; L’une chante; The Widows of Noirmoutier; women’s liberation movement “La femme-bulle” (“The Bubble Woman”), 77–78, 78fig25, 185n31 Une femme mariée (A Married Woman) (Godard), 67 Fer, Briony, 151 Firestone, Shulamith, 186n41 Flammer, Ami, 123, 125 Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy, 163n7, 165n16, 178n7, 180n2, 183n11, 183n14 Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. See Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art Foucault, Michel, 187n47 The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups) (Truffaut), 3–4, 177n72 Frémaux, Thierry, 156–57 Freud, Sigmund, 128, 197–98nn16–19 Friedan, Betty, 51, 60, 65–66, 179n9 Gainsbourg, Charlotte, 153 gendered dynamics: in The Beaches, 143, 151– 52; in Le Bonheur, 15, 53, 67–68; in the Cannes Film Festival, 4–6; and Cléo, 5–6; in Daguerréotypes, 88, 97; in The Devil’s Envoys, 199–200n26; in the family, 186n41; and Freud, 198–99n19; in Hollywood musicals, 74, 183n15; and Palme d’Honneur, 6; in popular culture, 53,

231

67–68; in The Portrait Cabana, 199– 200n26; women’s choices constrained by, 52–53; in women’s domestic labor, 79–80. See also feminism; New Wave movement gentrification, 15, 87, 95, 109–10. See also modernization George Eastman Museum, 165n17 Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse (Varda). See The Gleaners and I The Gleaners (Millet painting), 10fig3, 11–12 The Gleaners and I (Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse) (Varda): audience and filmmaker identities in, 194n41; contemporary gleaners in, 11fig4, 12–13; as essay film, 13, 167n26, 200n31; gleaner iconography in, 10fig3, 164–65n15; growth and transformation in, 197n15; and Millet, 10fig3, 11–12; political engagement in, 10–13; Varda in, 11–14, 167n25 Godard, Jean-Luc: and the Algerian war, 162n6; in The Beaches, 150–51, 152fig69; and Le Bonheur, 67; A Bout de Souffle (Breathless), 3–4, 150; Brecht’s influence on, 182n8; in Cahiers group, 163–64n12, 168n30, 721; 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know about Her), 189–190n7, 194n42; and the Dziga Vertov film collective, 182n8, 191–92n19; Une femme mariée (A Married Woman), 67; Hollywood musicals reworked by, 73; intertitles used by, 186n38; leftist politics of, 187n47; on modernization in Paris, 194n42; and Pompidou, 194n42; production crew in films of, 193n37; and Situationist International, 189–90n7; Tout va bien (All’s Well), 71, 82, 183n13; and Varda, 6, 17, 193n37; Vivre sa vie, 186n38; women’s magazine imagery in, 67–68 Gois Causeway (Le Passage du Gois) (Varda installation), 120–23, 120–21figs52–53, 137–38 Gonzalez-Torres, Felix, 135, 136fig62, 200n28 Greffier, Doudou, 184n22 grief. See L’île et elle; Whisper, the Waves, the Wind; The Widows of Noirmoutier Guillaume (cartoon cat), 18, 150 Happiness (Varda). See Le Bonheur Haussmann, Georges-Eugène (Baron), 87–89, 95, 190n10 Hayward, Susan: “Ahistory of French Cinema,” 163n7, 184n21; on color in Le Bonheur, 55; on New Wave politics, 162–

232

index

Hayward, Susan (continued) 63n6; New Wave study by, 161–62n3; on La Pointe Courte, 163n7; on social/political content in Varda’s lyrics, 74; on Varda’s feminism, 165n16, 184n21; on Varda’s New Wave position, 67 Hemingway, Ernest, 26 Hiroshima Mon Amour (Resnais), 177n73 Hollywood musicals: conventional love themes in, 74, 184n18; French directors’ reworkings of, 73; gender reinforcing social order in, 74; heterosexuality idealized in, 73–74; and L’une chante, 74, 77; Varda vs. conventions of, 73–75, 77, 83 Huillet, Danièle, 182n9, 187n47 I Do Not See the (Woman) Hidden in the Forest (Magritte painting), 152fig69 L’île et elle (The Island and She) (Varda installation): overview, 115–142; autobiographical gestures in 1–2, 122, 130–31, 140, 195– 96nn7–9; cabanas in, 118–20, 119fig51, 138–41, 139fig63, 199–200n26; Cabane aux Portraits in, 119–20; and the Cartier Foundation, 8, 15–16, 115–17, 122–23, 135–37, 141, 153, 196nn10–11; contrasting styles in, 118–19, 195n4; Les Créatures in, 140; critics’ responses to, 122, 195n6; and Daguerréotypes, 116, 122; Demy in, 130– 35, 132fig60, 140, 194n1, 199–200n26; and documentary films, 122, 137–42; Gois Causeway in, 120–23, 120–21figs52–53; and Gonzalez-Torres, 135, 136fig62; grief in, 116–18, 121–23, 121fig53, 125–35, 141– 42, 195–96nn7–9; growth and transformation in, 127–28, 127fig57, 197n15; Inès A. interviewed in, 125–27, 126fig56; melancholy and merchandise in, 134–37; memory in, 130, 138, 140, 201n33; music in, 123, 197n17; Noirmoutier setting of, 8, 115, 117–18, 122; photography in, 117–18, 117fig49, 119–20, 138, 140; Ping Pong, Tong, et Camping installation in, 119–20; salt installation in, 134, 134fig61; sea-salt stand in, 118, 118–19figs50–51, 135, 137; self-limitation in, 134; self-reflexivity in, 115, 122; as site-specific, 194n2, 196n10; souvenirs in, 119, 122, 134, 137, 141; tourists and tourism in, 118–19, 121–23, 128, 135–37, 141–42; viewers’ engagement with, 115–16, 133–35, 140–42, 194n2, 195n8; and Whisper, the Waves, the Wind,

128–29, 198–99n19. See also The Widows of Noirmoutier intermediality, 8–9, 166–67n22. See also multimedia installations The Island and She. See L’île et elle Jacquot de Nantes (Varda), 130–31, 132fig60, 194n1 Jane B. par Agnès V. (Jane B. by Agnès V.) (Varda), 164n15, 194n41 The Jazz Singer (Crosland), 183n15 Je ne vois pas la ( femme) cachée dans la forêt (Magritte painting), 151fig68 Jones, Emma, 157–58 Jordan, Shirley, 195–96nn7–8, 202n7 Jouannais, Jean-Yves, 200n29 Journey to Italy (Rossellini), 25, 173n39 jousting, 33, 36–39, 45, 47 Kering company, 157 Kiefer, Elizabeth, 204n22 Kline, T. Jefferson, 165n16 Lacy, Suzanne, 128–29, 129fig58, 198n18 Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) (De Sica), 25 Laroche, Pierre, 199n22 Laycock, Ross, 135 Lebovici, Elisabeth, 197n13 Lee, Nikki S., 189n6 Lefebvre, Henri, 87–88, 101–2, 112, 189–90n7, 190n12, 193n35 Left Bank, 6, 163–64n12, 181n3, 202n6 Legrand, Michel, 168n31 Lellis, George, 182nn8–9 Lenin, Vladimir, 82, 187n47 Lescure, Pierre, 156–57 literature, 26, 172n30. See also Brecht, Bertolt; Dos Passos, John; Faulkner, William; Hemingway, Ernest Lola (Demy), 150 Louis Delluc Prize (French Film award), 49 The Lovers (Magritte painting), 148, 149fig67 Loyer, Emmanuelle, 32 Lubtchansky, William, 103 Lumière, Auguste and Louis, 103, 139 Ma, Jean, 167n23 Ma Cabane de l’Echec (My Cabana of Failure) (Varda installation) 138–41, 139fig63 Ma Cabane du Cinéma (My House of Cinema) (Varda installation), 138–41, 139fig63

index Madonna del Parto (Piero della Francesca painting), 173n42 Magritte, René, 148, 149figs66–67, 150–51, 151–52figs68–69, 202–3n10 Malvern, Jack, 159 Mamou, Sabine, 146–47, 148fig65 Manceron, Claude, 188n2 Marchand, Corinne, 3fig2, 5, 150 Marie Claire (magazine), 51, 55 Marker, Chris: and Anne Sarraute, 23; and The Beaches, 17–18, 150, 202n6; and the Left Bank, 163–64n12, 181n3, 202n6; and La Pointe Courte, 23; Les Statues Meurent Aussi, 162n6; subjective documentary style of, 202n6; symposium on, 166n21 Marx, Karl, 82, 187n47 Mary, Philippe, 47 Masculine Singular: The French New Wave (Sellier), 5, 53, 67, 152, 179n2, 180n12, 181n4 Mayer, Sophie, 201n2 McDormand, Frances, 158 McGowan, Todd, 163n7 McGuire, Shana, 202n7 McMahon, Orlene Denise, 165n16 Méliès, Georges, 103, 193n36 Melville, Jean-Pierre, 172n30 Las Meninas (Velázquez painting), 193n38 Millet, Jean-François, 10fig3, 11–12 Millett, Kate, 186n41 minor trades. See petits métiers MLAC (Le Mouvement pour la liberté de l’avortement et de la contraception), 77 modernization: and automobile traffic, 96, 192n29; in Daguerréotypes, 15, 84, 86–89, 93–95, 94fig31, 109–11, 112fig45, 115; of labor, 96; in La Pointe Courte, 21, 84; social dispersion caused by, 87–89, 190n9, 191n16, 192n25 “The Modern Theater Is the Epic Theater” (Brecht), 71, 75, 182n8 Modern Times (Chaplin), 79 “Les moeurs domestiques” (“Domestic habits”), 79–81, 80fig26, 186n39 Monfort, Silvia: acting style of, 172–73n35; dialogue of, 45; and Piero’s Madonna del Parto, 30, 173n42, 175n58; in La Pointe Courte, 23, 31–32, 34fig7, 40–41; and Vilar, 31 Monod, Martine, 173n40, 175n61 Monroe, Marilyn, 62, 63fig21 Montparnasse Tower (Paris), 94–96, 94fig31 Morin, Edgar, 93

233

“Mourning and Melancholia” (Freud), 128, 197n16, 198n18 Mouvement de libération des femmes (French women’s liberation movement), 79 Le Mouvement pour la liberté de l’avortement et de la contraception (MLAC), 77 multimedia installations (by Varda): audience engagement with, 140–42; critics’ responses to, 7–8; exhibited internationally, 1; film incorporated into, 194n2; media included in, 8; multimedia investments predating, 8, 166n20; and other filmmakers’ installations, 166n21; Varda’s career interpreted through, 7. See also Gois Causeway; L’île et elle; Ma Cabane du Cinéma; Patatopia; Ping Pong, Tong et Camping; Portrait Cabana; The Widows of Noirmoutier Muriel (Resnais), 162n6 My Body Is Mine (L’une chante: Mon corps est à moi) (unpublished Varda film script), 82–83 My Cabana of Failure (Ma Cabane de l’Echec) (Varda installation), 138–39, 139fig63, 199–200n26 My House of Cinema (Ma Cabane du Cinéma) (Varda installation), 138–39, 139fig63 Napoleon III (emperor), 87 neorealism: Bazin on, 21, 26, 168–69n1, 171n23; characteristics of, 21, 171n23; in French film culture, 14–15; and New Wave (overview), 19–48; and petits métiers photography, 44; and La Pointe Courte, 14–15, 21, 24–30, 177n69; Varda questioning the conventions of, 22, 44, 47; waning in France, 21 Neroni, Hilary, 163n7 Nesbit, Molly, 191n16 Neupert, Richard John: on cinephilia, 172n30; New Wave study by, 161–62n3; on La Pointe Courte, 170n13, 171n18, 171n21; on Varda and the Cahiers group, 163–64n12, 181n3; on Varda and the Left Bank, 181n3; on Varda and photography, 170n13, 176n65 New Wave movement: and auteur filmmaking, 24; in The Beaches, 150–51; characteristics of, 4–6; and cinephilia, 18, 172n28; and Cléo, 4, 52; cultural politics of, 4–5; gendered dynamics in, 5–6, 53, 67, 150–52, 152fig69, 159, 163n8;

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New Wave movement (continued) Hayward on, 163–64n12; vs. the imposition of ideologies on film, 47; and the Left Bank, 6, 163–64n12, 181n3; and neorealism (overview), 19–48; La Pointe Courte as forerunner of, 4, 14–15, 20, 22–24, 47, 161n2, 171n18; and popular culture, 52–53, 66–67; short films in, 170n13; studies of, 161–62n3; subdivisions of, 163–64n12; time span of, 4; Varda as only female filmmaker in, 5, 70, 81, 150, 181n4; Varda as the mother of, 1, 3, 5–6, 70; Varda perceived at the margins of, 18, 67, 70, 150–53, 168n30; Varda’s continuing engagement with, 14, 52, 67, 72, 81; Varda’s diversity occluded by, 161n2; Varda vs. conventions of, 7. See also Astruc, Alexandre; Chabrol, Claude; Demy, Jacques; Doniol-Valcroze, Jacques; Godard, Jean-Luc; Melville, JeanPierre; Rivette, Jacques; Robbe-Grillet, Alain; Rohmer, Eric; Truffaut, François Night and Fog (Resnais), 162n6 Noiret, Philippe, 23, 31–32, 34fig7, 40, 45, 172–73n35 Noirmoutier (island). See Cabane aux Portraits; Demy, Jacques; L’île et elle; The Widows of Noirmoutier nonfiction films. See documentary films; essay films Nouvel, Jean, 116fig48, 136, 200n29 Oliveira, Manoel de, 156 One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (L’une chante, l’autre pas). See L’une chante Orpen, Valerie, 163n7, 179n11, 180n2 Oscar (Academy Award), 144 Pain, Peinture, et Accordéon (Varda), 109, 113figs46–47 Palme d’honneur (Cannes lifetime achievement award): paradoxes of, 6, 156; Varda as recipient of, 1, 2fig1, 155–58; and Varda’s acceptance speech, 5, 143–44, 156, 159; Varda’s resistance and endurance represented by, 5, 156 Palme d’Or (Cannes film award), 1, 156, 158, 204n22 Papineau, Joëlle, 78fig25, 80fig26, 184n22 Papineau, Micou, 78fig25, 184n22 Paroles (Prévert), 199n22 Le Passage du Gois (Gois Causeway) (Varda installation), 120–23, 120–21figs52–53, 137–38

Patatopia (Varda installation), 197n15 Paulvé, André, 199n22 People of the 20th Century (Sander photo series), 191n17 Petho, Agnes, 166–67n22, 166n20, 193n38 petits métiers (minor trades) photography, 43–45, 88, 176n65–67, 188–89nn5–6 Philippe, Pierre, 55, 68 photographic typologies. See Daguerréotypes; petits métiers photography; Sander, August; scènes et types photography photography: daguerreotypes and cinematic practice, 106, 108–9, 110–11figs43–44, 111; and documentary films, 85–93, 99, 140, 145–46, 165n17; petits métiers genre of, 43–45, 88, 176nn65–67, 188–89nn5–6; scènes et types genre of, 97, 98fig33; stereoscopic photography, 108; Varda’s training in, 7, 92, 163n7, 169n5, 170n13. See also Daguerréotypes; L’ île et elle; La Pointe Courte physiognomy, 44, 89, 190n14 Piccoli, Michel, 138–39, 153 Piero della Francesca: Madonna del Parto, 173n42, 175n57; and Monfort, 30; Portrait of Federico da Montefeltro and His Spouse Battista Sforza, 34–35, 35fig8; Portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino, 34–35, 35fig8 Ping Pong, Tong et Camping (Varda installation), 119–20 Les Plages d’Agnès. See The Beaches of Agnès La Pointe Courte (community): audience as outsiders in, 39–41; audience involvement in, 45–48; the couple as outsiders in, 37–38; environmental concerns in, 169n3; as La Pointe Courte locale, 21, 27–28, 38–48; in La Pointe Courte‘s opening credits, 39, 40fig9; residents as nonprofessional actors, 19, 22–23, 25, 27, 38–48; social content in, 169n3; and Varda’s youth, 22 La Pointe Courte (Varda): overview, 19–48; acting styles in, 32, 174n48; ambiguities in, 31, 174n44, 174n47; audience involvement in, 38–39, 44, 46–48; and Bazin, 23–26, 28, 32–33, 170n15, 170n17, 173n39; and Brecht, 37, 174n49, 183n11; character identity in, 31, 174n44, 174n48; character/villagers contrasts in, 38, 47, 175–76n62, 175n60; and commercial success, 170n17; compositions of shots in, 19, 20fig5, 21–22, 24, 26–28, 29fig6, 30,

index 33–34, 34fig7, 173n41; the couple as outsiders in, 37–38, 47; critics’ responses to, 19–27, 33–34, 45, 170n15, 171n20, 171n21, 173n40; and Daguerréotypes, 84; depth of field in, 28, 29fig6, 30, 46, 171n21; dialogue in, 25–27, 31–32, 38; distribution of, 23, 170n14; documentary elements in, 21, 25, 27, 171n24, 173n38; environmental content of, 169n3; as feature-length film, 170n13; as a fiction film, 21; influence of, 23, 170n15; influences on, 25–26, 172n30, 174n49; jump cuts in, 37; knowledge and understanding as themes in, 47–48; local airs in, 38–48; main characters’ conflicts in, 20fig5, 25, 31–34; main characters’ reconciliations in, 34fig7, 35–37, 175n61; music in, 33, 36, 41, 45–46, 46fig12, 48, 172–73n35; naturalistic elements in, 19, 34fig7, 44–45, 177n69; neorealist elements in, 14–15, 21, 24–30, 177n69; as New Wave forerunner, 4, 14–15, 20, 22–24, 47, 161n2, 171n18; non-professional actors in, 19, 22–23, 25, 27, 38–48, 40fig9, 172–73n35; opening credits of, 39–42, 40fig9; and photography, 15, 40, 42–44, 42–43figs10–11, 48, 176n65; plot lines of, 21, 26, 35–37, 176n64; political content in, 21–22, 37–38; premier of (Paris), 23; production of, 22–23, 45, 169n6, 169n8; and Renaissance painting, 15, 22, 30, 34–35, 35fig8, 173n42, 175n57, 175n58; Resnais as editor of, 177n73; screening of, concurrent with Cannes 1955, 23; self-reflexivity in, 48; social content in, 22, 169n3, 172–73n35; sound in, 32, 37, 39, 45, 174n52, 175–76n62; speech in, 44–45, 177n69, 177n70; stylistic contrasts in, 172–73n35, 174n49; stylized aesthetic of, 23–24, 26, 28, 31; Truffaut on, 170n15; Varda on, 22–23, 25, 45, 174nn47–48, 175–76n62; as Varda’s first film, 19; villagers’ roles in, 38–48; water jousting in, 33, 36–39, 45, 47, 175n59; ways of seeing, 25, 31–38 political engagement: in Daguerréotypes, 15, 86, 95–96, 100–102, 111; in The Devil’s Envoys, 133; in The Gleaners and I, 10–13; in La Pointe Courte, 21–22, 37–38; and Pompidou, 86; range of, in Varda’s work, 7–8; in L’une chante, 70–71, 73–74, 79, 81–83; in L’une chante: Mon corps est à moi, 82; in Varda’s work (general), 6–9, 14–17, 24, 143, 159, 164–65n15, 165n17; in

235

The Widows of Noirmoutier, 140–41. See also cultural politics; feminism; Left Bank; New Wave movement; Situationist International; social content Pompidou, Georges, 15, 86–88, 94–96, 112, 192n29, 194n42 popular culture: in Le Bonheur, 53, 55, 62, 63fig21, 66–68; and New Wave gender dynamics, 52–53, 66; New Wave presentations of, 66–67; subverted by Varda’s feminism, 184n21 The Portrait Cabana (Varda installation), 119–20, 199–200n26 Portrait of Federico da Montefeltro and His Spouse Battista Sforza (Piero della Francesca painting), 34–35, 35fig8, 175n57 Portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino (Piero della Francesca painting), 35fig8 Powrie, Phil, 166n18, 181n3 Prévert, Jacques, 130–32, 199n22 Prix du Cinéma d’Art et Essai (film award), 188n1 production companies. See Ciné-Tamaris Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows) (Truffaut), 3–4, 177n72 Rascaroli, Laura, 167n26, 201–2n4 Raynaud, Annette, 171n24 Reader, Keith, 166n18, 181n3 Rémouleur (Knife Sharpener) (Atget photograph), 90fig28 Renaissance painting. See Piero della Francesca; La Pointe Courte (Varda) Resnais, Alain: in The Beaches, 150–51, 152fig69; documentary style of, 202n6; Hiroshima Mon Amour, 177n73; and the Left Bank, 6, 163–64n12, 181n3, 202n6; Les Statues Meurent Aussi, 162n6; Muriel, 162n6; Night and Fog, 162n6; as La Pointe Courte editor, 23, 177n73; and Varda, 17 Revolution of 1848 (France), 12, 87 La Révolution Surréaliste (The Surrealist Revolution) (Surrealist journal), 151–52 Rivette, Jacques, 150–51, 152fig69 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 174n44 Robert, Martine, 196n11 Rohmer, Eric, 168n30, 181n3 Romney, Jonathan, 122, 195n6, 201n2 Ross, Kristin, 55, 162n6, 189n7, 190n9 Rossellini, Isabella, 157

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Rossellini, Roberto, 25, 28, 173n39, 204n22 Rouch, Jean, 93 Sadoul, Georges, 24, 161n2 Sander, August, 191n17 Sarraute, Anne and Nathalie, 23 scènes et types photography, 97, 98fig33 Schiesari, Juliana, 198n18 Schwartz, Vanessa, 5, 162n6 The Second Sex (Beauvoir), 51, 57, 59, 62, 178n8 Second World War: domestic life after, 53, 65–66; economic expansion after, 87; German occupation of France during, 133; housewives’ domesticity after, 15, 53; Italian neorealism flourishing after, 21, 168–69n1; melodramatic cinema during, 21; migration to cities after, 21; and petits métiers photography, 43 segregation, 15, 87–88 self-reflexivity (of Clair), 185–86n36 self-reflexivity (of Varda): in The Beaches, 16, 143; and cinéma vérité, 93; in Daguerréotypes, 93, 102–5, 109, 111–12; in The Gleaners and I, 12–13, 164–65n15; in L’île et elle, 15–16, 115, 122; in La Pointe Courte, 48 self-reflexivity (of Velázquez), 193n38 Sellier, Geneviève, 5, 53, 67, 152, 162n6, 181n4, 199n25 Serreau, Coline, 187n47 Siclier, Jacques, 173n40, 188n3 Silver Bear (Berlin Film Festival award), 49 Situationist International (radical political group), 87, 101, 112, 189–190n7 Smith, Alison, 25, 165n16, 171–72n27, 183n14 social content. See gendered dynamics; political engagement The Society of the Spectacle (Debord), 101 Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Statues Also Die) (Resnais and Marker), 162n6 Stein, Louis, 23 stéréo-daguerréo-typés, 106, 108 Stone, Sharon, 198–99n19 Straub, Jean-Marie, 182n9, 187n47 Stromboli (Rossellini), 25, 33 Studio Parnasse (Paris), 23, 170n14 Sullerot, Evelyne, 55 surrealists and surrealism, 148, 149figs66–67, 151–52, 151–52figs68–69 Tallenay, Jean-Louis, 27 Tan, Fiona, 189n6

La Terra Trema (Visconti), 27, 173n39 Théâtre National Populaire (TNP) (Paris), 22–23, 32, 164n13, 169n5, 170n17 Le torchon brûle (feminist periodical), 82 Tout(e) Varda (DVD box set), 143, 153–55, 154fig70 Tout va bien (All’s Well) (Godard), 71, 82, 183n13 Truffaut, François: in The Beaches, 150–51, 152fig69; in Cahiers group, 163–64n12, 168n30; on cinéma de qualité, 66–67; Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows), 3–4, 177n72; and Varda, 6; in Varda’s adapted Surrealist image, 152fig69 Two Years After (Varda), 167n25 typologies. See photographic typologies Ulysses (Varda), 164–65n15, 165n17 Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Demy), 156 Uncle Yanko (Varda), 164–65n15 L’une chante, l’autre pas (One Sings, The Other Doesn’t) (Varda): abortion rights in, 71, 75–78, 185n32; “Amsterdam sur eau” in, 75–76, 76fig24, 184–85n23; assembly line scenes in, 79, 185–86n36; audience involvement in, 77–79; Brecht’s techniques of disruption in, 71, 73, 75–83; clichés, 76; critics’ responses to, 71, 73, 83, 183n14, 187n48; and Daguerréotypes, 84; distribution of, 83; domesticity in, 79–81, 80fig26; as a female friendship film, 74, 184n19; feminist politics in (overview), 70–84; “La femme-bulle” in, 77, 78fig25; heterosexual idealization challenged in, 73–74; vs. Hollywood spectacle, 74; incongruity as strategy in, 71, 83; interpreted as conventional, 71; intertitle in, 79; melodramatic genres in, 71; MLAC in, 77; “Les moeurs domestiques” (“Domestic habits”) in, 79–81, 80fig26, 186n39; musical genres in, 71, 73–74; narrative in, 73; neglect of, 70; non-actors in, 78; Pomme as lead character in, 71, 72fig23; Pomme’s feminist activism in, 74; Pomme singing in, 75–81, 76fig24, 78fig25; poster, 72fig23; reproductive rights in, 77–78, 82–83; social/political content in, 73–79; Suzanne as lead character in, 71, 74; Suzanne’s trajectory in, 72fig23; theatrical elements’ disruption of expectations in, 75–77; Varda as director of, 81–83; Varda as lyricist of, 184n22; viewer’s self-questioning prompted in, 77–78, 185n35;

index women’s domestic work in, 79–81; and women’s liberation, 15, 71, 73, 79, 83, 183n16 L’une chante: Mon corps est à moi (My Body Is Mine) (unpublished Varda film script), 82–83 Ungar, Steven, 163n7 United Nations panel on gender equality, 157 L’Univers de Jacques Demy (Varda), 194n1 “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (Gonzalez-Torres installation), 135, 136fig62, 200n28 urban renewal. See modernization Vacche, Angela Dalle, 166n20 Vallaux, Christophe, 154, 194n2 Vaneigem, Raoul, 189–190n7 Varda, Agnès: and artistic sponsorship in France, 123, 196n11; author’s interactions with, 16–18; autobiographical work of, 7, 18, 143–59, 168n31, 195nn7–9; and cinematic dialogue with Godard, 67–68, 71, 73, 82, 193n37, 194n42; cinematic naiveté of, assumed, 17–18, 20, 26, 172n30; classifications and interpretations of, rejected by, 143, 153, 159; and commercial success, 2, 23, 52, 138, 156, 158, 170n17, 203n15; contradictions in the career of, 6–7, 18, 70, 81; conventional understandings of, 8; early career of, 22; evasiveness as critical strategy of, 17–18, 20, 68, 130, 140, 143– 44, 168n32; vs. film industry’s gendered dynamics, 5, 158–59; on financial support for films, 157–58, 204n24; on happiness, 69; legacy of, 16, 143–44, 148, 155–56, 159; misreadings of, as instructive, 8; MLAC and, 77; as performative artist, 145, 202n5, 202n7; reinterpreted (overview), 1–18; The Second Sex as influence on, 178n8; three lives of, 8; Varda now, 143–59; in the Women in Motion dialogues, 158. See also art history; Brecht, Bertolt; Cahiers du cinéma; Cannes Film Festival; Demy, Jacques; documentary films; feminism; L’île et elle; Left Bank; multimedia installations; neorealism; New Wave movement; photography; selfreflexivity; Théâtre National Populaire; Vilar, Jean; specific Varda films Varda, Rosalie, 99, 100fig35, 103, 147fig64 Varda/Cuba (Varda), 165n17 Varda par Agnès (Varda), 164–65n15 Variety (entertainment industry journal), 157

237

Velázquez, Diego, 193n38 Venus of Urbino (Titian painting), 164–65n15 Vertov, Dziga, 182nn8–9, 187n47, 191–92n19 Les Veuves de Noirmoutier. See L’île et elle; The Widows of Noirmoutier Vilar, Jean, 22, 31–32, 164n13, 169n5, 174n49, 182n8 Visconti, Luchino, 28, 173n39 Les Visiteurs du Soir (The Devil’s Envoys) (Carné), 132–33, 199nn22–26 Vivre sa vie (Godard), 186n38 Voyage to Italy (Rossellini), 28 water jousting, 33, 36–39, 45, 47 Wearing, Gillian, 189n6 Wertheimer, François, 80fig26, 184n22 Whisper, the Waves, the Wind (Lacy), 128–29, 129fig58, 198n18 widowhood. See Demy, Jacques; L’île et elle; The Widows of Noirmoutier The Widows of Noirmoutier (Les Veuves de Noirmoutier) (Varda installation): clichés in, 119–20; contradictory elements in, 141–42; critics’ responses to, 128; Demy in, 130–33, 140, 199–200n26; and documentary films, 122; feminism of, 118, 123– 139; grief in, 118, 121–23, 125–29, 141–42, 195–96nn7–9, 198–99n19; growth and transformation in, 127–28; as L’île et elle‘s central work, 118, 121–22; Inès A. interviewed in, 125–27, 126fig56; installation view, 124fig55; layout of, 123, 125, 197n13; memory in, 130, 138, 140, 201n33; music in, 123, 197n17; political motivations of, 140–41; scenario of, 123; self-limitation in, 141–42; viewers’ engagement with, 124fig55, 133–35, 140–42; viewers’ entry into, 118; and Whisper, the Waves, the Wind, 128–29, 198–99n19; widowhood of Varda in, 117fig49, 121, 124fig54, 130–34, 131–32figs59–60; widows’ adaptability in, 125, 127–28, 127fig57; and the widows aid association, 118–19figs50–51; widows of Noirmoutier in, 121–29, 124figs54–55 The Wild Palms (Faulkner novel), 25–26 Williams, James S., 187n47 Wilson, Emma, 162n6, 173n42, 184n17, 184n19, 199n21, 199n24 Wilson, Lambert, 2fig1 Wolmart, Gregory, 202n6 women: financial support for films by, 157– 58, 203n17, 204n24; Godard’s representations of, 183n13; labor of, paid and

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women (continued) unpaid, 19, 64–66, 79–81, 97; modern women in French culture, 62–63, 63fig21, 152, 179n20; New Wave objectification of, 5; as Palme d’Or recipients or nominees, 158, 204n22; and the serving hand ideal, 53–64, 69; in the spotlight (Cannes, 2015), 1, 5–6, 53, 155–56, 159, 204n22; stereotypes of, challenged, 129, 155, 199n19; underrepresentation of, in cinema, 1, 157–58; in Whisper, the Waves, the Wind, 128–29, 129fig58; year of (Cannes, 2015), 159. See also Le Bonheur; Daguer-

réotypes; L’île et elle; The Widows of Noirmoutier; L’une chante “Women in Motion” (Cannes festival dialogues), 157–58, 203n18 women’s household work. See Le Bonheur (Happiness); L’une chante women’s liberation movement, 15, 68, 71, 73, 79, 83, 183n16 women’s magazines. See Le Bonheur (Happiness) World War II. See Second World War Young Turks, 168n30, 181n3