RETHINKING FEMINIST CINEMA:

AGNS VARDA AND FILMMAKING IN THE FEMININE

by

Nam Lee

A Dissertation Presented to the

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

August 2008

Copyright 2008

Nam Lee

3325062
Copyright 2008 by
Lee, Nam
All rights reserved

2008

3325062

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DEDICATION

To My Parents and Kunsoo

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Nothing and nobody exists independently of others and this dissertation is no

exception. Many people have contributed to the writing of this dissertation and I would
like to express my sincere gratitude for their inspiration, support and encouragement.
My greatest debt is to my dissertation chair, Dana Polan. I thank him not only for
his sustained attention to my project, since its earliest conception to its completion, but
also for encouraging me to challenge myself and to go beyond my own expectations
through his enthusiasm for my project. An independent study with him on French New
Wave cinema and his single-theorist classes on Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin and
Antonio Gramsci were instrumental in developing my own theoretical framework to
approaching Agns Vardas work from a broad perspective. His scholarly passion and
committed mentoring embodied the kind of scholar and mentor I hope to become. I am
also grateful for the intellectual guidance and inspiration I received from my dissertation
committee members. Anne Friedberg led me to inquire into the issue of visuality in
transposing literary theory to film narratives. Peggy Kamuf willingly offered me an
independent study on French women writers and feminine writing, as well as her
expertise on Jacques Derrida and Hlne Cixous. She inspired and urged me to elaborate
on my very basic ideas on feminine writing and to pursue lines of thought beyond my
limit.

iv
My gratitude also goes to Marsha Kinder, who has been supportive of my project
throughout the dissertation process, offering me her insightful comments and
suggestions. I must also thank David E. James, who encouraged me to stay engaged
with East Asian cinema, and whose words of advice and support have been vital to my
growth as a scholar.
Special thanks must also be given to Agns Varda for making the films that
inspired me to write this dissertation. She gladly opened her personal archive when I
visited her Cin-Tamaris office in Paris in 2004, and mailed me her out-of-print book,
Varda par Agns, which turned out to be one of the most important source materials for
my dissertation. I hope to visit her again as I plan to further expand my research on her
work.
I would also like to thank my colleagues and friends. I especially thank Linda
Robinson for her time and energy in proof-reading the dissertation and offering valuable
suggestions. Her continued interest in my project helped me to refine my thoughts and
arguments. I thank the members of my dissertation group - Dong Hoon Kim, Jaime
Nasser and HyeRyoung Ok - for reading parts of my work and sharing common
anxieties and frustrations during the writing process. I thank Paul Reinsch, Dukyu Min
Kim, Sunyoon Lee and Sejung Kim for their friendship, encouragement and for many
hours of enjoyable conversations. I thank Jae-Cheol Lim, a long-time friend and a true
cinephile, who first introduced me to the films of Agns Varda.

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

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication

ii

Acknowledgments

iii

Abstract

vii

Introduction

Chapter I: Agns Varda in Context

1. Agns Varda and the French New Wave Cinema: The Only
Girl among the Boys
2. Feminist Reception of Vardas Films: From Reactionary to
a Feminist Auteur

15
15

Chapter II: Writing in Film: Agns Varda and Female Authorship

1. The Conceptualization of Writing in French Critical Theory
2. Agns Varda, Auteur Theory and Female Authorship

87
88
99

Chapter III: Theories of the Feminine, Feminism and Feminine Writing

1. French Feminism and Philosophy
2. Contested Notions of Feminist vs. Feminine in France and
the U.S.
3. Theories of Feminine Writing

132
134

Chapter IV: Visualizing Feminine Writing: Agns Vardas cincriture

1. Between the Real and the Imaginary: Narrative Subversion
and Female Subjectivity
2. Writing the Body: Inscription of the Feminine
3. Writing the Other: Vardas Cinema of Marginality

171

Conclusion

254

Filmography

262

Bibliography

265

52

146
156

173
204
231

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ABSTRACT
My dissertation examines the work of French director Agns Varda in the context
of French feminism and its theory/practice of feminine writing(criture fminine). By
demonstrating how Vardas notion of cincriture (cine-writing)her own term for her
filmmakingshares close similarities with feminine writing, I argue that Varda
uniquely practices feminine writing in film: a cinematic writing concerned with
exploring questions of feminine identity and creating an alternative film language that
challenges and disrupts the dominant mode of filmmaking.
Since a study of a film director inevitably raises the question of authorship in
film, I examine the development of auteur theory to question male-centered canonical
auteur studies of the past. I also interrogate traditional accounts of French New Wave
cinema and feminist film criticism to establish how Varda, previously marginalized, is
pivotal to both.
I then turn to feminine writing as proposed by French literary critic/writer
Hlne Cixous: an alternative textual, political, and ethical strategy to dismantle the
hierarchical binary oppositions of phallogocentrism that subordinate the feminine to
the masculine. Drawing upon the idea of the feminine and feminine writing as
proposed by Cixous and other French feminist critics such as Luce Irigaray and Julia
Kristeva, I analyze Vardas films in terms of the three major characteristics of feminine

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

1
INTRODUCTION

In her 1975 essay, Sorties, French feminist literary critic and writer Hlne
Cixous gives a list of hierarchical binary oppositions in which Western philosophy and
literary thoughts are caught up:

Activity/passivity
Sun/Moon
Culture/Nature
Day/Night
Father/Mother
Head/Heart
Intelligible/Palpable
Logos/Pathos.
Form, convex, step, advance, semen, progress.
Matter, concave, groundwhere steps are taken, holding-and dumping-ground.
Man___
Woman 1

Cixous argues that the structure of Western thought is based on this endless
series of binary oppositions in which the second term is considered inferior to the first
one; moreover, she argues that these hierarchical binaries ultimately come back to the
fundamental oppositions of man/woman. Therefore, phallogocentrism, a system based
on these binary oppositions, subordinates the feminine to the masculine order. Since

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

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these binaries operate through language, Cixous calls for a feminine writing (criture
fminine) to disrupt the masculine language of patriarchy.
A similar concept of binary oppositions is also found in the Asian philosophy
of yin-yang. Yin and yang represent all the opposite principles and qualities of every
phenomenon in the universe. Literally, yin means shady or cloudy, while yang means
sunny. Yin qualities are characterized as passive, negative, feminine, and dark, whereas
yang qualities are characterized as active, positive, masculine, and light. Yin is the earth,
yang heaven. Since the notions of yin-yang originated in sun-based daily life where
people work during the daylight and return home at dark, yang represents movement,
and yin represents rest. Yang is the sun, yin the moon; the list of binaries is endless.
However, there is a fundamental difference between the binaries of
phallogocentrism and those of yin-yang. There is no valuational hierarchy in any of these
yin-yang oppositions. Yin and yang are two complementary qualities, both of which are
required to form life or any natural phenomenon in the cosmos. One is not complete
without the other; one cannot exist without the other. The harmony of the two is the
ultimate goal. For example, in traditional Asian medicine, a balance between yin energy
and yang energy is crucial to maintaining good health. This notion of yin-yang is applied
universally, and it is foundational not only in classical thought but also in everyday
wisdom. People seek harmony of yin-yang in virtually everything from food to interior
decoration. Therefore, unity in duality lies at the base of yin-yang philosophy. In a

3
strict sense, the binaries in yin-yang philosophy are not oppositions but simply opposites
that complement each other.
However, this complementary relationship does not mean man (yang) and
woman (yin) have been considered absolute equals in Asia. Far from it. Even though the
principle of original yin-yang philosophy lies in an absolute equality between the two,
patriarchy and social, political, philosophical systems such as Confucianism have
distorted yin-yang philosophy in furtherance of male domination and have produced a
hierarchy between man and woman. Consequently, a sexist interpretation of yin-yang
was established and disseminated: yang, the heaven, symbolizes man while yin, the
earth, symbolizes woman; earth is beneath heaven, so woman should uphold man as
heaven. Thus, patriarchal thought has distorted the principal idea of yin-yang and
produced an inequality between man and woman.
As a Korean, I have known the yin-yang concept as a part of my everyday life
since childhood; all my life, I have heard people talking about the importance of yinyang harmony in life. When I was first exposed to the French feminist notion of the
feminine and of feminine writing as a means to dismantle patriarchal society, I saw
similarities between their ideas and original yin-yang philosophy: the recognition of
non-hierarchical differences. I was also struck by French feminists criticism of AngloAmerican feminism as forcing women to function like men through its preoccupation
with political, economic, and social equality within the present system. As one of few
women journalists in a male-dominated newspaper company, I often had to act (or

4
sometimes overact) mannish (or what is considered mannish) to avoid persistent
gender-bias.
However, I gradually begin to think this kind of overacting was not solely a
womans problem. Some of my male colleagues were also having difficulties adapting to
the survival of the fittest competitive environment of Korean journalism, an
environment in which you have to push aside others in order to win. These men had
certain feminine characteristics. According to yin-yang philosophy, the human body
contains yin energy and yang energy; in both bodily and psychological functioning, men
are predominantly yang but contain a yin aspect, and women are predominantly yin but
have a yang aspect. Consequently, if femininity and masculinity co-exist within everyone,
it must be the masculine system and culture that forces both men and women to
maximize masculinity and minimize femininity as much as possible to survive and
compete successfully. For me, femininity and feminine behavior signifies, above all, the
positive quality of an openness to differences and to the Other. Therefore, French
feminists notion of the feminine struck a chord in me.
The argument that the present system of patriarchy forces women to function
like men resonates with recent cultural phenomenon in which masculine women are
valorized whereas feminine men are often the subject of comedy in mainstream media.
Also, in cultural studies, girls who enjoy traditional masculine activities or sports,
such as boxing and pro-wrestling, are considered as making a positive transgression.
But I do not think I have come across any essay valorizing men who enjoy girlie or

5
womens pursuits, such as soap opera or melodrama, i.e. the weepies. This type of
transgression is not considered a worthy object for cultural studies. Here again, we see
too much emphasis on yang for both men and women, and again because yin is
considered worthless. Once again harmony is broken.
What I saw in French feminist thought, however, is a reinstatement of the
harmony between yin and yang. French feminists see a potentially liberating force in the
feminine, an open attitude towards the Other. And their argument that feminine writing
offers a strategy for dismantling masculine language also made sense to me because
language is so crucial to creating ideas and shaping cultures. As a film journalist/critic, it
was natural for me to think about the possibility of feminine writing in film. What
would feminine writing in film consist of? I began to ask this question to find ways to
promote the feminine attitude of embracing differences and otherness in filmmaking.
This is how I began my study of Agns Varda in the context of French feminism and its
notion of feminine writing. I was especially drawn to Cixous argument that even
though women are more likely to adopt a feminine attitude at present, femininity and
feminine writing is not confined to women and womens writing. Since the feminine
implies not a biological sex but an attitude, it offers the possibility of considering
feminist politics in a larger context than sexual politics.
In this so-called post-feminist era, feminism based on oppositions of sex is
considered out of fashion, particularly in the West where post-feminists believe that the
feminist goal of achieving political and economic equality with men has been achieved.

6
Poststructuralist criticism that dismantled the notion of fixed identity also contributed to
the decline of feminist questions such as what is woman? and what does it mean to
be a woman? However, in reality, patriarchal domination persists, and patterns of
white, male privilege can still be observed on a global level. In this respect, French
feminists idea of the feminineespecially as articulated by Julia Kristeva as
encompassing all marginalized groups suggests the possibility that feminism can
expand its scope to encompass and to align itself with other feminine groupsthat is,
all those groups who are marginalized by racism, neo-colonialism, and sexual
preference. Since masculinity is appropriately no longer a sex-specific term but is
viewed as an attitude one adopts, feminism is not about hating men but about hating
(over-exaggerated) masculinity both in men and women.
Along with the general decline of feminism, feminist film criticism in particular
also seems to have lost the political edge it had in the 1970s. I argue, however, that
expanding the notion of feminist cinema to include a new conception of feminine
cinema and filmmaking will help spark productive rethinking, redefining, and
broadening of the concept of feminist cinema. Studies of feminist cinema have largely
concentrated on the representation of women and on the workings of patriarchal
ideology in films by male directors. Thus, many anthologies of feminist film theory are
filled with essays on canonical films of male directors. Interest in womens filmmaking is
increasing; however, the decline of both feminism and feminist film theory has meant
that studies of womens filmmaking are still limited. Furthermore, increasing suspicion

7
of the notion of auteur has also contributed to a lack of studies on women directors.
However, if feminine writing is an important tool to disrupt masculine order and, as
French feminists have argued, if women are currently more likely to adopt a feminine
attitude than men, then studying womens filmmaking becomes an important task.
Women should be studied not only as consumers but also as producers of cinematic
discourses.
Agns Vardas films offer excellent examples of feminine writing in film. Not all
of her films are about women, but many of her films feature groups of people often
marginalized by the dominant system. Whether literally about women or not, Vardas
films share feminine qualities: an openness toward the Other; reflections on and a
questioning of social and cultural clichs; and formal experimentation. Throughout the
fifty-four years of her career as a filmmaker, Varda has shown a constant attention to
marginalized people considered the other by mainstream media. Her filming
techniques also incorporate different media into cinema to generate multiple meanings.
In particular, Vardas interest in exploring the possibilities of combining both
photography and cinematography has inspired her filmmaking throughout her career.
What she has written about photography and cinema is reminiscent of yin-yang
philosophy: These two captures of lifeone immobile and silent, the other moving and
talkingare not enemies but differences, even complementary. The photography is

8
stopped movement or immobilized interior movement. The cinema proposes a series of
successive photographs during the length of time which animates them.2
Varda manifests in her films an interest in various contradictions in life: between
personal life and collective life; between the real and the imaginary; between fiction and
documentary. She often talks about her dialectical approach to contradictions: This
dialectic, this ambiguity, this contradiction between the clichs of the interior life and the
images of the lived life, it is the subject of all my films.3 In fact, the resolution of these
contradictions constitutes the framework of her films. Many of her films juxtapose two
different worlds: for example, her first film La Pointe courte (1954) juxtaposes the
personal story of a Parisian couple and the collective story of fishermen; LOpra Mouffe
(1958) juxtaposes the documentary world of street people and the subjective fantasies of
a pregnant woman; and One Sings, the Other Doesnt (1977) is a story of a long friendship
between two women of very different character and life paths. Often, an individuals
inner world is juxtaposed with the outer world of reality.
When her films have female protagonists, such as Clo from 5 to 7 (1961), One
Sings, the Other Doesnt, Vagabond (1985), Jane B. par Agns V. (1987), and The Gleaners and

Ces deux saisies de la vie, lune immobile et muette, lautre mouvante et parlante, ne sont pas ennemies
mais diffrentes, complmentaires mme. La photographie, cest le mouvement arrt ou le mouvement
intrieur immobilis. Le cinma, lui, propose une srie de photographies successives dans une dure qui les
anime. Agns Varda, Varda par Agns, Paris: Cahiers du cinma, 1994, 130. All the translations from French
are my own, unless otherwise indicated.
2

cette dialectique, cette ambiguit, cette contradiction entre les clichs de la vie intrieure et les images de
la vie vcue, cest le sujet de tous mes films. Agns Varda, Un bonheur bien dfendu, Cinma 67, no. 97,
juin 1967, quoted from Franoise Aud, Cin-modles, cinma delles, Paris: LAge dHomme, 1981, 141.
3

9
I (2001), Varda raises issues relating to the female body. This practice is similar to
feminine writings proposal to write the body and to write the Other.
This dissertation, therefore, examines Agns Vardas work in the context of
French feminism and its theory/practice of feminine writing. Drawing upon Hlne
Cixouss idea of feminine writing as a political act that contains the potential to explode
the hierarchical binaries of patriarchal society, I explore the possibility of a feminine
filmmaking that opens up space for the feminine. In America, the word feminine
tends to carry negative connotations, but I regard the feminine not in biological terms
but as an ethical term: it is an open attitude that embraces the Other. I therefore define
feminine filmmaking as a filmmakers way of resisting the increasing masculinization
of everyday life and mainstream filmmaking, and I argue that Varda is an exemplar of
such filmmaking who has consistently challenged the masculine language of dominant
cinema. I also distinguish feminine filmmaking from feminist filmmaking in that the
former is less a cinema of womens issues than a cinema that challenges the various
hierarchical binaries of phallogocentrism both in its subject matter and its style.
My first chapter, Agns Varda in Context is divided into two sub-chapters.
The first one, Agns Varda and the French New Wave Cinema: The Only Girl among
the Boys, is an overview of historical accounts of the French New Wave Cinema. It
examines how Varda has been placed within the history of French cinema, especially in
relation to the French New Wave. Although Vardas first film, La Pointe courte, has been
heralded in some quarters as the first film of the French New Wave, she has been

10
marginalized in most accounts of this film movement. By examining the French New
Wave within a larger historical, political, social, and cultural context, I suggest the need
to redefine French New Wave cinema and to re-position Varda as the first filmmaker to
make a truly modernist film in France. The second sub-chapter of Chapter One,
Feminist Reception of Vardas Films: From Reactionary to Feminist Auteur, traces
the changes in feminist reception of Vardas films since the establishment of feminist
film theory in the 1970s to the present day. Varda is one of the rare women directors in
France who has openly claimed to be a feminist filmmaker. However, she has been
underappreciated not only in the accounts of French New Wave but also in feminist film
criticism. Claire Johnston even condemned Vardas work as being reactionary.4
Interestingly, since the mid-1990s, feminist critics attitude toward Vardas body of work
has become much more appreciative, and her 1961 film Clo from 5 to 7 has now acquired
iconic status as a representative feminist film. By tracing this change in reception, I argue
that the dismissal of Varda by early feminist film critics is partly due to their relative
neglect of the importance of textual politics and of the need for resistance to dominant
film language.
The second chapter, Writing in Film: Agns Varda and Female Authorship, is
also divided into two sub-chapters. The first one, The Conceptualization of Writing in

Claire Johnston, Womens Cinema as Counter-Cinema, Claire Johnston ed., Notes on Womens Cinema,
BFI pamphlet, 1973, 30.
4

11
French Critical Theory, examines the notion of writing (criture) as developed in
French critical theory, especially by Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, whose ideas
greatly influenced French feminist critics such as Hlne Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia
Kristeva in their notion of the feminine and of feminine writing. This sub-chapter
provides a theoretical ground on which to understand Vardas notion of cincriture, a
term she coined to describe her filmmaking practice, as a political act that challenges
dominant cinema on a textual level as well as on a discursive level. This sub-chapter also
examines the theory of writing in order to understand filmmaking as an act of writing.
The second sub-chapter, Agns Varda, Auteur Theory, and Female Authorship,
examines the development of auteur theory in film studies and the ongoing debates
surrounding its validity. A study of a film director inevitably raises a question of
authorship in film. By examining the issue of authorial death as discussed by such
theorists as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, I suggest that the
meaning of a text does not depend on authorial intention. The death of the Author
does not deny that there was an author who produced the text by his/her gesture;
instead it argues that once the text is written, the author has no control over the text.
Therefore, reading a text according to its authors intention is simply one of many ways
to read a given text. This sub-chapter also examines the issue of female authorship, since
studies of women filmmakers have been limited. The notion of auteur has been intensely
contested in film studies because filmmaking is a collaborative practice, making it
difficult to assign a single author to a given text. Nevertheless, the fact that Varda has

12
made films using an artisanal mode of production by which she has more or less full
control over her work means that she is appropriately deemed an auteur.
The third chapter, Theories of the Feminine, Feminism, and Feminine Writing,
examines French feminism within the context of contemporary French philosophy; the
notion of the feminine as developed by French feminist thinkers; the distinction between
the descriptors feminine and feminist in France and the U.S.; and lastly, French
feminists theory of feminine writing and its pertinence to understanding Vardas films.
The chapter is divided into three sub-chapters. The first one, French Feminism and
Philosophy, provides an overview of the history of post-68 French feminism and its
theory, particularly Jacques Derridas influence on French feminist ideas of the feminine
and feminine writing as a challenge to phallogocentrism. The second sub-chapter,
Contested Notions of Feminist vs. Feminine in France and the U.S., examines the
differences in the perception of the term feminine and feminist between France and
the U.S. While Anglo-American feminists perceive feminine as an anti-feminist term,
French feminists see in the feminine a potentially subversive force. By examining the
varied receptions of these terms, I reveal the different philosophical traditions that
influenced feminists to take different paths in each country. The third sub-chapter,
Theories of Feminine Writing, examines the strategies and characteristics of feminine
writing as proposed by Hlne Cixous and others; I then demonstrate briefly how
Vardas films constitute feminine writing in film.

13
The fourth and last chapter, Visualizing Feminine Writing: Agns Vardas
cincriture, offers textual analyses of those of Vardas films which I argue best exemplify
feminine writing. The chapter is divided into three sub-chapters, each devoted to one
aspect of feminine writing. The first one, Between the Real and the Imaginary:
Narrative Subversion and Female Subjectivity, looks at Vardas fiction films in which
she explores female subjectivity. This sub-chapter pays particular attention to the ways
in which Vardas film techniques disrupt the linearity and visual perspective of classical
Hollywood cinema. In this sub-chapter, I compare Vardas narrative strategies and
experiments with the conventions of mainstream cinema, i.e., masculine film language.
The second sub-chapter, Writing the Body: Inscription of the Feminine, examines six
of Vardas films which mostly clearly exemplify a feminine cincriture that inscribes the
female body in the text. Maternity has been a constant subject of interest in Vardas films,
and in such films as Jane B. par Agns V. and The Gleaners and I, Varda inserts herself into
the film text to both declare her authorial presence and raise the issue of the female body.
The third sub-chapter, Writing the Other: Vardas Cinema of Marginality, examines
Vardas films as embodying feminine writing by giving voice to the Other. Attention to
the marginalized has been a constant marker of Vardas oeuvre, and I argue that the
discourse of the Other emerges as one of Vardas central preoccupations. I also explore
Vardas own sense of marginality in relation to this preoccupation.
Throughout fifty-four years of filmmaking, Varda has made films with a
conscious emphasis on creating new cinematic language. Her notion of cincriture shares

14
close similarities with that of feminine writing. However, her films have not been
examined in the context of French feminism. By exploring the possibility of feminine
writing in film, I hope to contribute to the ongoing discussion on feminist film criticism
and to expand the notion of feminist cinema to embrace the feminine.
In summary, I argue that Agns Varda is an exemplary filmmaker who practices
feminine writing in film and that her films constitute active political writing: a cinematic
writing that is concerned, at the level of content, with questions of feminine identity and,
at the level of form, with redefining filmmaking from a feminine perspective by creating
a new kind of narrative and discursive practice.

15
CHAPTER I
AGNS VARDA IN CONTEXT

1. Agns Varda and the French New Wave Cinema: The Only Girl among the Boys

When Agns Varda began shooting her first film, La Pointe courte, in the early
summer of 1954, she was a twenty-six-year-old young woman with no background in
filmmaking. After studying art history at the cole du Louvre, Varda had studied
photography at the cole de Vaugirard. In 1949, at the age of twenty-one, she started her
career as a theater photographer for the famous stage actor Grard Philippe at the
Avignon Theater Festival, and from 1951 to 1961, she worked as the official
photographer at Jean Vilars Thtre National Populaire (TNP). It was during this time that
Varda shot La Pointe courte, which she also wrote. Not only did she have no training or
experience in filmmaking, she had not even seen many films in her life. Thus, she recalls
in her 1994 autobiographical book, Varda par Agns, that her film dbut was a mystery:

When I began my first film, I knew nothing about filmmakers or

films and had not even a vague idea of entering the world of
cinema. Therefore, [my becoming a filmmaker] is a mystery or
an incomprehensible combination of chance and embryonic
desire.5

Au commencement de mon premier film, il n'y avait presque rien, aucune ide sur les cinastes ou sur les
films et aucune aspiration, mme vague, entrer dans le monde du cinma. Mystre donc ou combinaison
incomprhensible de hasards et de dsirs larvaires. Agns Varda, Varda par Agns, Paris: Cahiers du cinma,
1994, 38.
5

16
It can be inferred from her book that the lack of words in photography is one of
the reasons she undertook filmmaking. She writes that [p]hotography seemed to me
too silent6 and that especially to capture the ebb and flow of feelings, the wounds of
the spirit, photography was not enough.7 At the time, she saw cinema as silent
images plus words spoken out loud.8
After filming La Pointe courte, Varda had no idea how to go about editing the film
and had to call on Alain Resnais to edit the film. Her first meeting with Resnais
provides an interesting anecdote about Vardas absolute lack of knowledge of the
filmmaking process. Resnais, who initially declined to work as the editor after reading
Vardas script because the concept of her project was too close to his own,9 agreed to
look at the rushes upon her insistence. Varda brought him ten hours of silent images
(because of a tight budget, she filmed silent and added dialogue during
postproduction), but Resnais found that she had not numbered any of her film footage.
After four hours of watching the rushes, Resnais told Varda he was unable to work on
the film because in order to edit a film, the film must be numbered, a number for each
6

La photographie me semblait par trop muette. Ibid.

Ibid., 39.

Sans doute ai-je pens (et ctait stupide, dis-je maintenant) quimages muettes plus mots dits voix haute,
ctait du cinma. Ibid.
8

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

17
foot.10 Resnais offered to lend her his equipment; she took it home and began writing
small numbers on the edges of the film to mark each shot and take. She worked on it all
day for ten days and called Resnais on the phone:

I have finished what you have told me to do.

You have numbered ten thousand meters in ten days! You are
crazy! OK. I will do the editing, but on some conditions. Salary
on cooperative basis is all right, but you have to pay for lunch
everyday. And I am going to stop working at 6 pm [everyday].11

After agreeing to edit the film, Resnais then worked on it for months. When he
discovered that Varda had shot the film in slow speed and without any alternative shots
or close-ups, Resnais decided to keep its slowness and its rigid, objective quality. When
he told her that her film reminded him of Luchino Viscontis La terra trema and
Michelangelo Antonios Il Grido, Varda had to ask him who Visconti and Antonioni
were.12 Varda mentions that she will never forget Resnais generosity in working for
months on the editing and in giving her the education she has remembered ever since.

10

pour monter un film il faut numroter la pellicule, un numro chaque pied. Ibid.

Jai fin ce que vous mavez dit de faire.

Vous avez numrot dix mille mtres en dix jours! Vous tes folle! Bon! Je vais venir faire votre montage,
mais en y mettant des conditions. Salaire en cooprative daccord, mais il faut me payer de quoi djeuner
tous les jours. Et aussi je marrte 18 heures. Ibid.
11

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

18
It was basically through Resnais that Varda began acquainting herself with the
world of cinema. It was Resnais who introduced Varda to the films of directors such as
Dreyer, Renoir, and Murnau and to the Cinmathque franaise in Paris, where she went
to see films and learned the names of great directors. It was also through Resnais,
during the editing of La Pointe courte, that Varda first met with the young critics of the
Cahiers du cinma, such as Jean-Luc Godard, Franois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Eric
Rohmer, who later became the representative filmmakers of the French New Wave.
Vardas account of her first encounter with these cinephiles conveys how different from
them she felt:

These famous Cahiers which I knew nothing about, I met some

of the members for the first time on a winter evening in 1954-55
because they had asked to see Resnais, who received them at his
place. It was during the editing period of La Pointe courte. Since I
did not know these young men, its solely from a vague
memory of their faces (better identified later) that I can say
Chabrol, Truffaut, Rohmer (who had another name), Brialy,
Doniol-Valcroze and Godard were present that evening. I did
not follow the conversation well. They cited thousands of films
and addressed all their comments to Resnais, talking so fast they
lost meI was there as an anomaly, feeling small, ignorant, and
the only girl among the Cahiers boys.13
Qui est Visconti?
Il y a chez Antonioni, dans Il grido, le mme got pour les murs.
Qui est Antonioni?) Ibid.
Ces fameux Cahiers, dont je ne savais rien, jen rencontrai pour la premire fois quelques membres un soir
de hiver 54-55, car ils avaient demand voir Resnais qui les reut chez lui. Ctait le temps du montage de
La Pointe courte. Comme je ne connaissais pas ces jeunes gens, cest seulement sur un vague souvenir de
leurs visages (mieux identifi plus tard) que je crois pouvoir dire que Chabrol, Truffaut, Rohmer (qui avait
un autre nom), Brialy, Doniol-Valcroze et Godard taient runis ce soir-l. Je suivais mal la conversation. Ils
citent mille films et proposaient je ne sais quoi Resnais, tous parlant vite Moi jtais l comme par
13

19
Ultimately, however, she developed a long relationship with Cahiers du cinma
members, especially with Godard, who starred with his then-wife Anna Karina in a
black-and-white film-within-a-film in Vardas 1961 film Clo from 5 to 7. In addition, she
also collaborated in the 1967 collective film, Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam), with
Godard, Resnais, Chris Marker, Claude Lelouch, William Klein, and Joris Ivens.
Similarly, Varda did not know anything about the business side of cinema
before she met Resnais, who surprised her by knowing the audience numbers for a
given film; he also explained to her that box office receipts can be checked daily or
weekly on a regular basis. Varda had believed that a film was like a painting, seen by
some people and circulating from gallery to gallery.14 Actually, Varda could not
release La Pointe courte on the commercial circuit because her mode of production and
filming did not correspond to the professional rules set up by the CNC (Centre Nationale
de la Cinmatographie) and because she did not obtain authorization from the CNC; in
fact she didnt know such an institution and its rules existed. Thus, her film was
considered an amateur film. Nevertheless, two years later, in January 1956, the film was
screened in a Studio Parnasse theater in Paris and won critical praise during its twoweek run.

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

un film tait comme une peinture, vu par quelque-uns et circulant de galerie en galerie. Ibid., 47.

20
Ironically, the fact that Varda was totally unaware of all the professional rules of
filmmaking and of film history allowed her to be completely free from conventional
film grammar and to follow her own ideas about the film she had in mind.15 La Pointe
courte was inspired not by any great film or filmmaker but by modernist literature:
William Faulkners 1939 novel Wild Palms. This was Vardas attempt to produce on film
what Faulkner did in literature: narrative innovations. Wild Palms alternates between
two completely different stories that never meet: one is a story of two men escaping
from a penitentiary during the Mississippi River floods of 1927, and the other is a love
story taking place in 1938. La Pointe courte is also composed of two separate stories that
run parallel to each other: a story of a couple on the verge of a breakup, and a story of
fishermen trying to organize a union. As Bruce F. Kawin points out, Wild Palms, which
was first translated into French in 1953 (a year before the shooting of La Pointe courte),
had a huge impact on leading French intellectuals at the time and greatly influenced
writers of the nouveau roman (new novel), such as Alain Robbe-Grillet.16

Varda recalls that at the age of twenty, she had seen only four or five films altogether including two films
she saw as a child. She says, If I had seen the films of masters, men or women, that I discovered later, I may
have been intimidated or even inhibited. (si javais vu alors ces films de matres, hommes ou femmes, que
jai dcouverts depuis, jaurais peut-tre t intimide. Ou mme inhibe.) Emile Breton, femmes dimages,
Paris: Messidor, 1984, 56.
15

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

21
Although French film historian Georges Sadoul praised La Pointe courte as
certainly the first film of the French nouvelle vague,17 Varda has been marginalized in
accounts of French New Wave cinema. In order to position Varda properly in the
history of French cinema of the 1950s and 60s, this chapter examines how the French
New Wave has been defined by various film scholars and historians, and how Varda
has been placed in relation to the movement.
The French New Wave cinema has traditionally been understood as
synonymous to the films made by the Young Turksa nickname for Cahiers du cinma
critics-turned-filmmakerswho first formulated new film theories in the decade after
the Liberation and then put them into practice in the late 1950s and early 1960s by
making films themselves. James Monacos 1977 book, The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard,
Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette, one of the early studies of the French New Wave cinema,
limited the term to the films by the five directors of the Cahiers du cinma group.
Monacos definition is the most extreme case; however, most French film history books,
even though they may include other directors and films, also privilege the Young Turks
who started as critics for Cahiers du cinma. In his two-volume history, French Cinema
Since 1946 (1966), Roy Armes considers the Cahiers du cinma directors as the only pure
members of the New Wave because they came from a background of film criticism. He

Georges Sadoul, Dictionary of Films, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972, 288. In his Dictionary of
Film Makers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), Sadoul writes of Varda, Independent and
original, she is one of the most important film makers of the nouvelle vague.(261)
17

22
distinguishes the Cahiers du cinma directors as men who see the world exclusively in
film terms, quoting Godards remark about his film Breathless: Our first films were
purely films of cinphiles.18
In Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction (1996), Guy Austin also
privileges the Young Turks when he christens the preview of Claude Chabrols first film,
Le Beau Serge, in 1958 as the beginning of the Nouvelle Vague. However, Austin also
views Vardas absence from historical accounts of the French Nouvelle Vague as a
major omission and identifies Roger Vadims 1956 film Et Dieu cra la femme (And God
Created Woman) as another precursor of the Nouvelle Vague:

La Nouvelle Vague is usually taken to encompass five principal

directors: Franois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol,
Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette, all of whom wrote for Cahiers
du cinma in the 1950s. However, this canonical list, and indeed
the dating of the movement as beginning in the 1958/9, should
be qualified. Agns Varda, a major omission from some
accounts of the movement, predated Chabrol, Truffaut, and
Godard by shooting her first feature, La Pointe courte, in 1954
In 1956 another important precursor of la nouvelle vague,
Roger Vadims Et Dieu cra la femme, proved a great commercial
success.19

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

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

23
Vardas exclusion from accounts of the New Wave occurs, I contend, for two
main reasons: first, because she was a woman and women filmmakers have always
remained on the margins of film history; and second, because she was not a cinephile
and did not belong to the Cahiers du cinma group long considered the core of French
New Wave. Indeed, the French film industry in 1950s France was very masculine. As
Carrie Tarr and Brigitte Rollet point out, There were no women among the 135
directors who made their first film in the period of 1956-1962, the time of the New Wave,
and the directors, producers and technicians (and to a certain extent stars) of French
cinema have been overwhelmingly male, as have its critics and historians.20 Varda was
the only woman to make a full-length feature film (Clo from 5 to 7, 1961) during this
period, but since it was not her first film and since the New Wave was in a way a cult
of first films, she was not generally included as one of the New Wave directors.
Varda also suffered from obscurity because she made only three documentary
shorts between La Pointe courte in 1954 and Clo from 5 to 7 in 1961: Saisons, chteau
(1957), LOpra-Mouffe (1958), and Du ct de la ct (1958). Moreover, except for LOpraMouffe, these shorts were publicity films commissioned by the Tourist Office. Like many
women filmmakers before her, Varda had difficulty securing funding for her films. It
was only when her husband and fellow filmmaker Jacques Demy introduced her to

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

24
Georges de Beauregard, a prominent New Wave producer who produced Demys film
Lola (1961), that she was finally able to make another feature film. In fact, she had
wanted to make a film titled La Mlangite in color and on location outside Paris;
however, Beauregard asked her to make a black-and-white film with a budget of thirtytwo millions francs.21 Hence, she made a black-and-white film about a singer who
wanders around the city of Paris. The fact that she was not able to make her second
feature film, Clo from 5 to 7, until 1961, seven years after La Pointe courte, contributed to
her relative obscurity in the French cinema scene, especially during the peak moments
of the French New Wave.
Even though La Pointe courte was made five years before the French New Wave
officially started, it shows many characteristics of French New Wave cinema. First, it
was a low-budget film made by a first-time filmmaker in her twenties; second, it was
totally outside the mainstream commercial film circuit; third, it was a feature film shot
on location with a documentary sensibility, featuring unknown actors; and finally and
most importantly, it was innovative in its film language and narrative structureit
aimed to create a new modern cinema.
To make the film, Varda set up a cooperative with young actors and technicians
to work without salary, who would be reimbursed when and if the film made profit.22

21

Agns Varda, op.cit., 48.

Eventually, it took Varda thirteen years to pay back all parts of the cooperative in 1967. La Pointe courte:
Agns Varda, une femme lavant-garde de la Nouvelle Garde, (La Pointe courte: Agns Varda, a woman at
22

25
She made the film with 6.5 million francs she inherited and borrowed from her parents
at a time when, according to the French film historian Ren Prdal, the average
production cost of a film was seventy million francs.23 Furthermore, like the New Wave
directors who made their dbut in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Varda did not go
through the long apprenticeship traditionally required to become a director in France at
the time. In the 1950s, the average age of a first-time director was forty-five.24
Also, as her coining of the term cincriture (cinematic writing) demonstrates,
Varda was very much influenced by the French cinemas tradition of low-budget auteur
films; in her films, she has consistently created a new cinematic language and alternative
forms of narrative organization. Furthermore, her analogy between filmmaking and
writing shares an affinity with the French New Wave and its notion of camra-stylo 25
(camera-pen).

the avant-garde of the New Garde), Kinescopie(s), http://interieurjour.free.fr/spip/article.php?id_article=177.

Ren Prdal, Sans toit ni loi dAgns Varda, (Vagabond by Agns Varda), Paris: Atlande, 2003, 29. The francs
here is old franc; the new franc was introduced in 1960, worth one hundred of the old francs.
23

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

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

26
Even so, for the most part, traditionally, Vardas only connection with the French
New Wave or recognition by the French New Wave was as its Grandmother, even
though she is only two years older than Jean-Luc Godard and is in fact eight years
younger than Eric Rohmer. Varda herself once mentioned that she was called the
ancestor of the New Wave when she was only thirty. She also described her
marginality in the French film scene on several occasions. When asked by the indie Wire
about the French New Wave, Varda responded:

I've been called the Grandmother of the New Wave, because

my first feature I made in '54, five years before the New Wave,
and I already had the freedom and the principles that they had.
I hadn't met with the Cahiers du Cinema. I never had any training.
I wasn't a cinebuff like they were. I wasn't a film critic. So, they
called me the Grandmother, because I started it, almost. There
was a critic who said I was the first "son de cloche d'un
immense carillon." It's a beautiful sentence. It's the first bell ring
of a massive peal of bells. The immense carillon is the fifty
films of the New Wave.26

This representation as Grandmother not only marginalizes her first film, La

Pointe courte, to the periphery of the New Wave movement, but it also underestimates
the importance of her film in the history of French cinema, especially the innovation in
its mode of production and film style. Indeed, the only time La Pointe courte was
discussed by Cahiers du cinma critics in the 1950s was during a roundtable discussion

Andrea Meyer, Celebrity, Filmmaker, Grandmother: Agns Varda

http://www.indiewire.com/people/int_Varda_Agnes_990419.html
26

27
on Alain Resnais film Hiroshima, mon amour in 1959. In the discussion entitled,
Hiroshima, notre amour (Hiroshima, our love), Jacque Rivette regards Varda as
merely a fragment of Alain Resnais since Resnais was the editor of La Pointe courte.
When Jean-Luc Godard brings up La Pointe courte as one film that must have given
Alain Resnais something to think about27 in terms of its modernist narrative technique,
Rivette argues, I dont think its being false to Agns Varda to say that by virtue of the
fact that Resnais edited La Pointe courte, his editing itself contained a reflection on what
Agns Varda had intended. To a certain degree Agnsvarda becomes a fragment of Alain
Resnais28 This dismissive mention of Varda and her film reflects a complete
disregard of the films importance as an early or even the first attempt to experiment
with modern narrative form in cinema.
When Varda is mentioned in the history of French cinema, she is often classified,
along with Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, with the so-called Left Bank (Rive
Gauche) filmmakers, who started making modernist films slightly before the Cahiers du
cinma group did. Unlike the Cahiers group, who were cinephiles, these filmmakers
were concerned with documentary and were influenced by the literary avant-garde
movement of the time: the nouveau roman. Their films were less commercial and more

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

28

Ibid., 66-67.

28
political than those of the Cahiers group. They are often considered as the precursors of
the French New Wave.
Varda received only minimal recognition from French New Wave filmmakers at
the time. Writing in 1956, French critic Andr Bazin deemed La Pointe courte to be a
miraculous film. . . . by its existence and by its style.29 As Bazin saw it, there were two
miracles: the first was that Varda did not search for a producer in a traditional way but
formed a cooperative with other young actors and technicians to make the film with
little money; the second miracle, which was made possible by the first miracle, was that
Varda had the total freedom of an auteur in shaping the films style. Bazin also notes
that La Pointe courte is unique in that it was made by a woman: First of all, [La Pointe
courte] is a film by a woman, which is practically the only one in cinema, even though
women novelists do exist.30 Also, with La Pointe courte and the three short films she
made in the late 1950s Saisons, chteau (1957), LOpra-Mouffe (1958), and Du ct de
la ct (1958)Varda was heralded by film critic and filmmaker Jean Douchet as the
first representative of a modern cinema.31 He writes in Arts, [Varda] is the true
forerunner and promoter of this revival.32

La Pointe courte est un film miraculeux. Par son existence et par son style. Andr Bazin, Agns Varda:
La Pointe courte: un film libre et pur, ( La Pointe courte: a free and pure film), Le Parisien libr, Janvier 7, 1956
quoted from Andr Bazin, Le Cinma Franais de la Libration la Nouvelle Vague, Paris: Cahiers du cinma,
1983, 194.
29

Dabord, cest un film de femme, je veux dire comme il existe des romans fminins, ce qui est quasiment
unique au cinma. Ibid., 195.
30

31

Michel Frodon, Lge moderne du cinma franais: de la Nouvelle Vague nos jours (The Modern Age of French

29
Even today, in most accounts, Varda is denied rightful place as the innovator
and the actual founder of the new film movement born in France in the 1950s. Vardas
La Pointe courte has not even been given proper credit for its place in modern cinema.
Instead, in most studies, Alain Resnais 1959 film Hiroshima, mon amour is credited as the
first modernist film. Georges Sadoul, who praised Vardas La Pointe courte as the first
Noulvelle Vague film, is one of the few critics to recognize that [La Pointe courtes]
interplay between conscience, emotions, and the real world make it a direct antecedent
of Hiroshima, mon amour.33
Admittedly, establishing Varda as founder of the French New Wave requires
some re-conceptualization of the French New Wave. If French New Wave cinema is
defined as cinema of cinephiles (made by cinephile directors and consumed by a
cinephile audience), then Varda is certainly not a New Wave filmmaker since she was
not a cinephile. However, recent scholarship is challenging the traditional definition
of the French New Wave. While taking different approaches, recent scholars are
unanimous in arguing that the French New Wave must be de-mystified, that it must be
expanded beyond the Young Turks, and that to be understood correctly, it must be
examined within a broader social, economic, and cultural context.
Cinema: from the New Wave to the present), Paris: Flammarion, 1995, 76.
32

Cest elle le vritable prcurseur et promoteur de ce renouveau, quoted from Michel Frodon, Ibid.

Quoted from Film Reference, Agns Varda,

http://www.filmreference.com/Directors-St-Ve/Varda-Agn-s.html
33

30
Although the French New Wave movement exerted a great influence on world
cinema (we saw multiple New Waves in the 1960s), there had been a paucity of booklength studies devoted to the movement until recent years. In addition to Monacos
book, one of the few early studies in English was The New Wave (1968) by Peter Graham,
a selection of writings by both supporters and opponents of the Nouvelle Vague films.
However, thanks to renewed interest in the French New Wave on the occasion of its
fortieth anniversary in 1998, several significant studies have appeared both in France
and the U.S. They include Michel Maries La Nouvelle Vague: Une cole artistique(1997,
translated into English as The French New Wave: An Artistic School in 2002); Jean
Douchets Nouvelle Vague (1998, translated into English as French New Wave in 1999);
Antoine de Baecques La Nouvelle Vague: portrait dune jeunesse (The Nouvelle Vague:
Portrait of a Youth, 1998) and La cinphilie (Cinephilia, 2003); Richard Neuperts A History
of the French New Wave Cinema (2002); Nouvelle vague, nouveaux rivages (New Wave, New
Shores, 2001) edited by Jean Clder and Gilles Moullic; Que Reste-t-il de la Nouvelle
Vague? (What Remains of the New Wave? 2003) edited by Aldo Tassone; Genevive
Selliers La Nouvelle Vague: Un cinma au masculin singulier (The New Wave: A Cinema in
the Masculine Singular, 2005); and Naomi Greenes The French New Wave: A New Look
(2007). Except for the books by Richard Neupert and Naomi Greene, all of these books
were originally published in France, and most of them are not yet translated into
English.

31
Each book focuses on a different aspect of the Nouvelle Vague: Douchets book
provides a useful political analysis; Maries book focuses on the movements economic
and technical contexts; de Baecques La Cinphilie recounts 1950s cultural history and
film criticism; Neuperts book also offers a solid cultural context of the New Wave; and
Nouvelle vague, nouveaux rivages focuses on the narrative techniques of various films.
Further, in discussing the French New Wave period in his 1995 book, Lge moderne du
cinma franais: de la Nouvelle Vague nos jours (The Modern Age of French Cinema: From the
New Wave to the Present), Jean-Michel Frodon looks at cinema as a site of conversion of
the ideas and philosophies of the time.
Naomi Greenes book defines New Wave cinema as part of a dramatic
generational shift that France underwent in the 1950s; she contends, as Armes did, that
the young directors and young audience of the cinematic Nouvelle Vague belonged to,
and embodied a generation that adored filmscinephilie.34 Genevive Sellier examines
the New Wave from a gender perspective. She asserts that all prior studies of the French
New Wave have been done from a masculinist male perspective, and she criticizes
French historiography on the New Wave cinema for its failure to consider women
filmmakers.
As Richard Neupert points out in his book, A History of the French New Wave
Cinema, opinions differ about how to define or periodize the New Wave. He himself
34

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

32
defines the New Wave as first and foremost a cultural phenomenon, resulting from
economic, political, aesthetic, and social trends that developed in the 1950s.35 He
summarizes the New Wave as a complex network of historical forces, including all
films made by young directors exploiting new modes of production as well as unusual
story and style options.36 He includes in this network all creative personnel directors,
producers, actors, and even the audience, whom he calls the nouvelle vague
spectator37 all of whom helped make the new films.
Neupert represents the view of most recent studies on French New Wave cinema
in two respects: first, he re-examines the New Wave within a larger historical context;
and second, he revises the original definition of the French New Wave cinema as a
movement initiated and carried on by a discrete number of directors, especially those of
the Cahiers du cinma. Neupert blames the 1962 special issue of Cahiers du cinma for the
unfortunate condensation and canonization of the New Wave into a list of directors.38
More than half of this special issue on the New Wave was devoted to interviews with
three directorsChabrol, Godard, and Truffautand the issue listed 162 New French

35

3.

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

36

Ibid., xviii.

37

Ibid., xxi.

38

Ibid., xviii.

33
Filmmakers; thus, this issue presents the New Wave as a collection of directors rather
than of films.
While recent studies each take slightly different approaches to the New Wave, a
common thread runs through them: an attempt to de-mystify the French New Wave
cinema and to place it within the larger context of the changes in postwar French society
that made the emergence of a new cinema possible or, in a certain sense, inevitable.
Compared to previous accounts, which consisted primarily of auteur-based thematic and
stylistic film analyses of certain core directors, these new studies adopt broader
perspectives. They no longer posit the New Wave as a group of young film geniuses
suddenly bursting onto the scene and revolutionizing filmmaking practices; rather, they
evaluate the movement as a phenomenon that was fundamentally a product of its time.
Film historians, especially Michel Marie and Richard Neupert, replace the various myths
surrounding the New Wave with a defined contextualization of its economic, social,
technical, and political conditions. The general consensus of these new studies is that it
is necessary to look at the new movement in cinema in a wider context and thus to
regard the New Wave filmmakers as just one partthough the most impressiveof this
larger movement in French society and culture. This new historiography involves,
therefore, de-mystifying the Cahiers du cinma group.
The Cahiers du cinma, long considered as the sole birthplace of the French New
Wave, published a special issue on the movement in 1998. Its title, La Nouvelle Vague: une
lgende en question (The New Wave: A Legend in Question) seems to carry a symbolic

34
meaning representative of the recent reassessment of the French New Wave in film
history. French film historians Antoine de Baecque and Charles Tesson state in their
editorial for the special issue, The New Wave was quickly caught up in its own
mythology of having made a desire for renewal equate with a certain style, form, themes,
methods and new faces;39 they contend that to fully understand the movement, scholars
must undo the myth(dfaire le mythe) and to withdraw its aura(retirer son aura).
In a roundtable discussion with Jean Douchet and Luc Moullet, Andr S. Labarthe
describes the first films by the Cahiers du cinma filmmakers, such as Rohmer, Rivette
and Godard, as films of amateurs. He explains that it was only later that these
filmmakers joined the professional cineastes such as Resnais, Franju, and Varda who did
not write for the Cahiers du cinma but practiced a nouveau cinema (new cinema) that
Cahiers du cinma defended.40 He includes Varda as one of the professional filmmakers
who showed the first cinematic signs of the French Nouvelle Vague. Labarthe also
states that [t]here is a danger in saying the Cahiers is the Nouvelle Vague because the
Cahiers was not responsible for the 170 directors who had just suddenly made their first
films.41 In the same discussion, Jean Douchet argues that the Cahiers du cinmas

La Nouvelle Vague a t vite rattrape par sa lgende, pour avoir fait coincider un dsir de renouveau
avec un style, une forme, des thmes, des manires et de nouveaux visages. Antoine de Baecque, Charles
Tesson, Editorial La Nouvelle Vague en question, Cahiers du cinma numro hors-srie, dcembre 1998, 5.
39

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

Le danger tait de dire <<les Cahiers cest la Nouvelle Vague>>Car les Cahiers navaient pas en charge
les cent soixante-dix ralisateurs qui venaient tout dun coup de faire leur premier film. Ibid., 16.
41

35
politique des auteurs (auteur policy) is in fact a politique des copains (policy of
buddies)42 developed by those Cahiers du cinma critics-turned-directors. They shared a
common taste for films and defended those filmmakers whom they considered their
buddies. They also helped each other by quoting each others films and by supporting
each others films and filmmaking. This strong bond among the Cahiers du cinma
filmmakers and their self-promotion has contributed to the previously accepted notion
of the New Wave as synonymous with the filmmakers of the Cahiers du cinma.
The editors of Que Reste-t-il de la Nouvelle Vague? asked thirty French filmmakers,
What remains of the French New Wave after forty-five years? Among these
filmmakers is Agns Varda. When asked to define Nouvelle Vague, she responds, In a
word? Godard [the Nouvelle Vague] is not at all a school or a group like Dada ,
surrealists, fauvists or cubists. It is a cluster; and a true explosion which saw the birth of
thirty (or more) new cineastes in five years. This burst of an independent and creative
French cinema marked by the freedom of tone and low budget had a true impact on the
entire world. However, if you take a closer look, there were more differences and
divergences than common ideas among the cineastes of the Nouvelle Vague, except for,
perhaps, the group coming from the Cahiers du cinma.43 From the filmmakers answers

42

Ibid., 15.

En un mot? GodardCe ntait pas du tout une cole ou un groupe comme Dada ou les surrealists ou les
fauves ou les cubists. Cest un agglomerate. Et une vraie explosion qui a vu la naissance de trente (ou plus)
nouveaux cinastes en cinq ans. Ce jaillissement dun cinma franais indpendant et cratif, marqu par la
43

36
to a set of questions, the books editors conclude that [t]he Young Turks of the Cahiers
were truly exaggerated.44 Another conclusion derived from these interviews is that the
Nouvelle Vague was a technical revolution and [revolution] in terms of production, but
not an aesthetic revolution,45 and that the only authentic aesthetic revolutions in
cinema occurred in the French cinema of the 1930s and in Italian neo-realism. Georges
Franju, one of the Nouvelle Vague period filmmakers, even denounces the Nouvelle
Vague as a joke:

The Nouvelle Vague was not even a group, it was a false

grouping, with false friendship: they took advantage of a trend.
[] They made us believe it was about an aesthetic movement
but it was a totally different thing. What did they invent?
Nothing. They created a myth about the Nouvelle Vague, but in
my opinion, it was only a joke. It was the triumph of
amateurism; it brought about new customs, but not a new
cinema.46

libert de ton et par de petits budgets a eu un vrai retentissement dans le monde entier. Mais si vous y
regardez de prs, il y avait plus de diffrences et de divergences entre les cinastes de la Nouvelle Vague
que dides communes, sauf peut-tre le groupe issu des Cahiers du cinma. Aldo Tassone, Que Reste-t-il de
la Nouvelle Vague? Paris: Stock, 2003, 335-336.
44

les jeunes Turcs des Cahiers ont vraiment exagr. Ibid., 12.

la Nouvelle Vague a t une revolution technique et dans la production, mais pas une rvolution
<<esthtique>> Ibid.
45

la Nouvelle Vague ce ntait mme pas un groupe, ctait un faux regroupement, avec de fausses amitis,
ils profitaient du courant. [] Ils nous ont fait croire quil sagissait dun courant esthtique, mais ctait tout
autre chose. Quont-ils invent? Rien. On a fait un mythe de la Nouvelle Vague, mais selon moi elle na t
quune blague. a t le triomphe de lamateurisme; cela a amen des moeurs nouvelles, mais pas un
nouveau cinma. Ibid., 21.
46

37
The book also questions the common assumption that modern cinema begins
with the New Wave, perceiving the influence of Robert Bresson on modern cinema as
more important than that of the New Wave and highlighting the innovations of Alain
Resnais, who made films before the Cahiers du cinma group did so. Ultimately, the
books editors conclude that the French New Wave was only one branch of a tree that
ended up hiding the forest. They define the French New Wave as a mark of a
generational change in cinema and as a revolution both technical and of production,47
but argue that the aesthetic revolution was realized by Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais
and Chris Marker. It should be noted here that Agns Varda is the only one of the LeftBank group who is not mentioned as aesthetically innovative, which suggests that
Vardas contribution to the new cinema is still eclipsed, even in recent studies.
Among various approaches to the French New Wave cinema, I agree with that
of Jean-Michel Frodon, who distinguishes between the French New Wave cinema (la
Nouvelle Vague) and New Cinema (le Nouveau Cinma). (From now on I will use the
French terms Nouvelle Vague and Nouveau Cinema to distinguish the two more
clearly). I support this position because unlike young filmmakers who emerged, en
masse, in the late 1950s as part of the Nouvelle Vague, Varda does not belong to the

47

une rvolution technique et de la production. Ibid., 20.

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

49

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

50

Ibid., 11.

39
Chabrol, Franois Truffaut, Jacques Rozier, and Jacques Demy.51 First generation
filmmakers/critics were born between 1918 and 1925, and the second generation
filmmakers were born between 1928 and 1932. Douchet does expand the scope of the
Nouvelle Vague beyond the Cahiers du cinma group to include pre-Cahiers du cinma
critics and the Left Bank group; however, he does not recognize Varda as belonging to
the Nouvelle Vague generation. Varda, born in 1928, seems to straddle the two groups
because according to her birth year, she should belong to the second generation, but her
dbut as a filmmaker and affinities with the Left Bank group align her with the first
generation.
In addition to the different opinions about whom to include in the Nouvelle
Vague, its exact periodwhen it started and when it declinedis also still being
debated. Scholars disagree as to whether the year of the first Nouvelle Vague film is
1958 or 1959. Some historians, especially those who consider Nouvelle Vague cinema to
be synonymous with the filmmakers of the Cahiers du cinma group, argue for 1958, the
year Claude Chabrols first feature film, Le Beau Serge, was previewed; others argue for
1959, the year when Resnais Hiroshima, mon amour and Truffauts 400 Blows were
introduced at the Cannes Film Festival. This latter view stems from the characterization
of the Nouvelle Vague as being the invention of a new, modern cinema, since Le Beau

51

Ibid.

40
Serge is more or less conventional in its narrative structure. As for the end of the
Nouvelle Vague, most critics agree that it had declined by the early 1960s.
Despite these different opinions, historians agree that the major characteristic of
the Nouvelle Vague period is the explosion of first films by young directors. However, if
we define the Nouvelle Vague as the birth of modern cinema as well as the explosion
of first-time filmmakers, the year 1959 is more appropriate as the starting year for
Nouvelle Vague. Jean-Michel Frodon asserts 1959 as the beginning of the Nouvelle
Vague, and Michel Marie also defines it as a coherent movement which existed for a
limited period of time [1959-1962].52 Genevive Sellier, too, states that the 1959 Cannes
Film Festival where Hiroshima, mon amour and 400 Blows were presented marks the
official birth of the Nouvelle Vague.53 However, in her book French National Cinema
(1993), Susan Hayward extends the Nouvelle Vague period further. She divides the
Nouvelle Vague period into two stages: the first period from 1958 to 1962, marked by an
explosion of young filmmakers, and the second period from 1966 to 1968, when
filmmakers turned toward political filmmaking in the lead-up to the events of May 1968.
Richard Neupert argues that the Nouvelle Vague lasted from 1958 to 1964.
Scholars also differ on how to position the Left Bank filmmakers in relation to the
Nouvelle Vague. Whereas Frodon distinguishes between Nouvelle Vague and the Left

52

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

53

Genevive Sellier, La Nouvelle Vague: Un cinma au masculin singulier, Paris: CNRS ditions, 2005, 2.

41
Bank groups Nouveau Cinema, Naomi Greene groups the Left Bank filmmakers as
the first generation of the New Wave,54 and thus includes them as a part of the
Nouvelle Vague. She describes their filmmaking as challenging the conventions of
documentary and lists three traits the Left Bank group shares that distinguish them
sharply from the Cahiers group: first, intense historical awareness coming from their
direct experience of the war and its aftermath; second, deep political consciousness as
left-wing artists; third, their immersion in other arts of painting, theater, and particularly
literature, as all three of them had distinct affinities with the novelists of nouveau roman.55
Greene argues, however, that despite these differences in terms of politics and
sensibilities, the two groups shared a fundamental trait: an idea of cinema as an
intensely personal calling. In her estimation, this common pursuit unifies them within
the Nouvelle Vague. Michael Witt and Michael Temple further expand the scope of the
Nouvelle Vague by adding yet a third group: Jacques Demy, Louis Malle, Jean-Daniel
Pollet and Jacques Rozier, who shared some of the aspirations of the New Wave.56
Frodon recognizes that the expression Nouvelle Vague has been used
inaccurately since the term had been used for two years already by 1959, what he

54

Naomi Greene, op.cit., 41.

55

Ibid., 43-45.

56

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

42
considers the birth year of Nouvelle Vague.57 He acknowledges, though, that 1959 is
certainly a year that exploded with new directions, especially with the Cannes Film
Festival where Resnais Hiroshima, mon amour, Truffauts 400 Blows, and Marcel Camus
Orfeu Negro each represented a different current in French cinema. However, Frodon
still reserves the term Nouvelle Vague for the Cahiers group, which was the most
coherent expression of the epoch. To refer collectively to different groups who were part
of this new filmmaking, he employs instead the term modern cinema. To Frodon,
modern cinema represents a revolution in the practice of filmmaking. According to him,
the Nouveau Cinema group is less structured than the Nouvelle Vague group, and he
regards the Cahiers group as the hard core of the Nouvelle Vague. He defines the
Nouvelle Vague films as those made by a small group of people (Truffaut, Godard,
Rohmer, Rivette, Chabrol) who know each other and think highly of each other, who
were formed under the spiritual direction of Bazin.58
The Nouvelle Vague appeared contemporaneously with great intellectual
advances and with the whole modern art movement; Frodon appropriately points out
that it was not only the small group from the Cahiers who were the protagonists of the

The term Nouvelle Vague was first used in LExpress magazine in 1957. Journalist Franoise Giroud
coined the term in her article entitled, Report on Todays Youth to describe the emerging fresh and lively
youth culture in 1950s France.
57

Les films de la Nouvelle Vague au sens strict sont le fait dun petit groupe de gens (Truffaut, Godard,
Rohmer, Rivette, Chabrol) qui se connaissent et sestiment, qui ont t forms sous la conduite spirituelle
dAndr Bazin. Jean-Michel Frodon, op.cit., 24.
58

43
new, modern French cinema. He asserts that the Left Bank filmmakers were
ideological artists very much explicitly engaged in political reflections on society.59 It
is interesting to note that Frodon singles out Resnais as the most remarkable filmmaker
of the year 1959:

to the eyes of all the defenders of

including those of the Cahiers, it is not
mon amour which appeared at the
important film of the year 1959, and
signal of the invention of another
cinema.60

the renewal movement,

400 Blows but Hiroshima,
moment as the most
as the most convincing
criture (writing) of

Frodon points out the exaggerated importance that has been placed on the
Nouvelle Vague group as the inventor of modern cinema. As Frodon suggests, the
notion of modern and modernity became the crucial criteria for the Nouvelle
Vague filmmakers and critics to distinguish themselves from previous filmmaking in
France. Frodon further sees a difference between the Nouvelle Vague and Nouveau
Cinema in terms of their self-promotion. Referring to the filmmakers of the Nouveau
Cinema, he writes: they do not form a public group comparable to that of the Young

.des artists <<idologiques>>, beaucoup plus explicitement engags dans une rflexion politique sur la
socit. Ibid., 28.
59

Aux yeux de tous les dfenseurs du movement de renouveau, y compris parmi les gens des Cahiers, ce
nest dailleurs pas Les Quatre Cents Coups mais Hiroshima qui apparat sur le moment comme le film le plus
important de lanne 1959, et le signal le plus convaincant de linvention dune autre <<criture>> de
cinma. Ibid., 27.
60

44
Turks. They did not share their taste for the media fuss61 Susan Hayward also points
out that the producer hype and the commercial greed on the part of producers
contributed to making the Nouvelle Vague seem bigger and more important than it
was.62 Furthermore, she uses the term entre-hommes (between men) to describe the
fraternity of male directors who typically quoted from and referred to the films of other
members of their group.
In fact, the Nouvelle Vague was a new wave in film criticism long before it
became a new wave in filmmaking. Its core members were all film critics of Cahiers du
cinma before they became film directors. Antoine de Baecques book, La cinphilie, is an
excellent account of the development of French cinephilia and film criticism in the 1940s
and 50s before the advent of the Nouvelle Vague. De Baecque defines the history of
cinephilia as the cultural history of cinema and considers cinephilia as a manner of
viewing the films, talking about them, then diffusing this discourse.63 In short,
cinephilia is about learning to view films.64 And it is this cinephilia that distinguishes the
Nouvelle Vague from the Nouveau Cinema.

ne forment pas un groupe public comparable celui des jeunes Turcs, dont ils ne partagent pas le got
pour le tapage mdiatique Ibid., 27-28.
61

62

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

La cinphilie, considr comme une manire de voir les films, den parler, puis de diffuser ce
discourse Antoine de Baecque, La cinphilie : Invention dun regard, histoire dune culture 1945-1968.(The
Cinephilia : Invention of a look, history of a culture 1945-1968) Paris: fayard, 2003, 11.
63

Numerous cine-clubs and especially Henri Langloiss Cinmathque franaise played an important role by
offering numerous screenings to the cinephiles. Through these screenings, the cinephiles rediscovered silent
64

45
According to de Baecque, the significance of the French cinephile culture lies in
the fact that it gave birth to modern film criticism. It also affirmed the important role
cinema played in French cultural history because serious discourses and critical reviews
of cinema, especially the auteurism of the Cahiers du cinma critics, helped to elevate
cinema to the status of art. French cinephilia is also unique in that its criticism actually
invented a new cinema. De Baecques account of French cinephile culture also shows
that the 1950s French film scene was very male-dominated and that it would not be an
exaggeration to describe it as a boys club. Not only the filmmakers, but also the
audience was primarily malemany of them adolescents and young menand film
viewing served as an education in feelings (ducation sentimentale) for them:

For a cinephile, . . . female characters appear as objects of desire:

he can collect them, exchange them, dream about them, love
them. They are fetish elements of a cult of cinema in the
paroxysm of his desire.65

De Baecque states his view that many young men entered into cinephilia through
love and desire for the women seen on screen; the cinema brought them womens bodies,

cinema and this in turn made them become more conscious of the film language and formal aspects of miseen-scne. For detailed account of Langlois efforts, see Glen Myrent and Georiges P. Langlois, Lisa Nesselson
trans., Henri Langlois: First Citizen of Cinema, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995.
Pour un cinphile, toutes ces apparitions fminines sapparentent des objets de dsir: il peut les
collectionner, les changer, les rver, les aimer. Elles sont les lments ftiches dun culte du cinma au
paroxysme de son dsir. Amour des femmes, amour du cinma: Lrotomanie cinphile, maladie infantile
des salles obscures (1944-1963) (Love of women, love of cinema: the Cinephile Erotomania, infantile disease
of the dark rooms), Antoine de Baecque, op.cit., 268.
65

46
their movements, their gestures, their emotions, and their beauty, as well as their
monstrousness. In short, the cinema educated young cinephiles about women. It was
during the peak years of this cinephilia that both the Nouvelle Vague and Nouveau
Cinema filmmakers began to practice filmmaking; unsurprisingly, women filmmakers
were denied any significant place within this film culture.
Among recent new studies, Selliers La Nouvelle Vague: Un cinma au masculin
singulier (The New Wave: A Cinema in the Masculine Singular), stands out because it is the
only book-length study of the French Nouvelle Vague cinema that is centrally
concerned with the issue of gender; indeed, the French Nouvelle Vague cinema
movement had never been studied or assessed from a gender/feminist perspective
before this book. Sellier explores what she describes as this blind point of the French
historiography on the Nouvelle Vague,66the absence of a gender dimensionand
criticizes most previous studies of the French Nouvelle Vague cinema for identifying
with the masculine point of view of the young filmmakers and with their vision of
women and the relationships of sex, without ever questioning the absence of women
filmmakers in this generation.67 She explains that the mythic dimension of the aesthetic
revolution has eclipsed all other dimensions, and although recent studies show an

66

ce point aveugle de lhistoriographie franaise sur la Nouvelle Vague, Genevive Sellier, op.cit., 6.

au point de vue masculin des jeunes cinastes et leur vision des femmes et des rapports de sexe, sans
jamais sinterroger sur labsence de femmes cinastes dans cette gnration Ibid.
67

47
increasing interest in the socio-cultural context of the Nouvelle Vague, they still do not
include the issue of gender in their analysis.
Selliers book is significant in two aspects: first, it attempts to re-write the history
of the French Nouvelle Vague from a gender perspective, and second, it includes the
Left-Bank group in the Nouvelle Vague, reassessing this cinema style as synonymous
with modernity in the aesthetic sense. In addition, Sellier highlights the fact that
Hiroshima, mon amour by Resnais, Clo from 5 to 7 by Varda, and Thrse Desqueyroux by
Georges Franjuall films directed by a Left Bank filmmakerare the only films of the
1960s generation which construct female characters as an example of consciousness, as
subject, and not as object of the story.68 Sellier also argues that the Left Bank filmmakers
were more inclined to defend a modern form of art for art than the Cahiers group,
and to share the idea that stylistic research can be articulated with a progressive
political engagement.69
From a feminist perspective, Varda has often been compared with Marguerite
Duras as an avant-garde filmmaker. Guy Austin identifies the two as the principal
auteurs in French film since the 1960s whose idiosyncratic styles epitomize avant-garde

Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), Clo de 5 7 (1962) et Thrse Desqueyroux (1962) sont sans doute les seuls
films de cette gnration (deux de ces films sont crits ou raliss par une femme) qui construisent le
personnage fminin comme instance de conscience, sujet, et non pas comme objet du rcit. Ibid., 133.
68

les cinastes dits <<de la rive gauche>>. plus enclin dfendre une forme moderne de <<lart pour
lart>>. partagent lide que les recherches stylistiques peuvent sarticuler avec un engagement politique
progressiste Ibid., 183.
69

48
auteur cinema.70 This shows that in France, women filmmakers are regarded within the
auteur tradition of French cinema. Duras and Varda both spoke of their work in literary
terms; Duras described each of her films as un livre sur de la pellicule (a book recorded
on film), and Varda described her filmmaking as cincriture (cinematic writing).71 Their
thoughts on cinema show that French women filmmakers worked inside the intellectual
scene of their time and tended to explore the deep structure of film language rather than
deal with immediate womens issues.
Unlike Varda, Duras did not direct a film during the Nouvelle Vague period,
although she wrote the script of Resnaiss Hiroshima, mon amour in 1959. Unlike Varda,
who started filmmaking at the age of twenty-six without having any prior experience,
Duras was already an established writer when Resnais asked her to write a script for
him. Her first directing experience, however, did not come until 1966, when she codirected La Musica with Paul Seban; she did not direct a film on her own until 1969,
when she directed Dtruire, dit-elle (Destroy, she said), which was based on her own novel.
Renate Gnther positions her as closer to the Nouveau Cinema than the Nouvelle Vague
because her background was literary and her films were more politically committed
than those of the Nouvelle Vague.72

70

Guy Austin, op.cit., 81.

71

Ibid., 81-86.

72

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

49
Estimating Vardas proper place in relation to the French New Wave cinema is a
tricky task because, as I have elaborated, even almost five decades since its
inauguration, the question of what really constitutes the French Nouvelle Vague
cinema and its major traits is still being debated among film historians and critics.
However, as Naomi Greene points out, critics generally agree that Vardaperhaps
because of her outsider status as a womanhas not really been given adequate credit
for her pioneering work.73
Varda has usually been slotted in with the Left Bank Group,74 along with Alain
Resnais and Chris Marker, in the accounts of 1950s and 60s French cinema. However, as
previously noted, scholars also disagree about how to place this Left Bank filmmakers in
relation to the Nouvelle Vague. Sandy Flitterman-Lewis asserts that by expanding the
definition of the Nouvelle Vague beyond the filmmakers of Cahiers du cinma to include

73

Naomi Greene, op.cit., 110.

The Left Bank Group is not a movement but a loose group of independent filmmakers of the same
generation who shared similar tendencies. They were older than the filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague
Group, and their direct experiences of World War II are reflected in their politically and socially conscious
films. They were more radical in their political stance and often mentioned the Algerian war in their work.
They were also more influenced by literary avant-garde movement of the time than by cinema and therefore
were much more committed to experimenting with language and narrative. Resnais collaborated with
Marguerite Duras as well as Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Duras herself became an influential avant-garde
filmmaker in the 60s.
Varda certainly shares these characteristics of the Left Bank Group, constantly making documentary films and
continually posing the question of cinematic language in her work. Her concept of cincriture can be understood in
reference to the avant-garde literature. The French Algerian war is often referred to in her films as in Clo from 5 to 7,
where Clo meets a soldier on his short vacation from the Algerian war. She collaborated with Resnais, Marker and
Godard on the protest documentary film Loin du Vietnam (1967), but the political aspect of her work is best
understood as the politics of sexual difference and representation that calls for a different cinematic language for
women.
74

50
those filmmakers who maintained a continual preoccupation with the language of film,
forms of narrative organization, and strategies of cinematic discourse, Resnais, Varda
and Marker should be included.75 Jill Forbes, on the other hand, characterizes Varda as a
post-nouvelle vague director although she excludes from this category major
filmmakers such as Resnais, Chabrol, Bresson, Rivette and Rohmer. The reason for the
exclusion is that although they continued to make films in the 1970s, their innovative
influence was over. In contrast, Forbes classifies Varda as one of the filmmakers
whose career had begun in the 1950s or 1960s for whom the 1970s represented a new
departure and who thus produced a body of work of new significance in the post-1968
period.76 She names Varda as one of cinemas most influential filmmakers, along with
Truffaut and Godard, who in the 70s began to work for television. Richard Neupert
argues that the young Agns Varda, along with Jean-Pierre Melville and Alexandre
Astruc, produced low-budget films which contained valuable narrative lessons that
anticipated and influenced the Nouvelle Vague.
Recent revisionist studies on the historiography of the Nouvelle Vague certainly
place more weight on Agns Varda compared to previous accounts; however, her
contribution to the making of a new cinema in the 1950s, in particular through her first
film, La Pointe courte, is still underrated. She therefore remains one of the least studied
Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently-Feminism and the French Cinema, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1996, 250.
75

76

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

51
filmmakers in French film history. Vardas place within the history of French cinema of
the 1950s and 60s deserves much more attention, if for no other reason than the
potential to enhance our understanding of the Nouvelle Vague.
It is evident from recent research on the Nouvelle Vague that this cinematic
revolution should not be wholly attributed to the small group of critics-turneddirectors of the Cahiers du cinma. Rather, it was a part of larger historical, political,
economic, social and cultural changes that were taking place in postwar France. Also,
the invention of modern or modernist cinema in France did not begin with the Nouvelle
Vague, despite previous perceptions. It started with Agns Vardas La Pointe courte in
1954. Therefore, I question the equation of New Wave =Cahiers du cinma= modern
cinema and argue that Varda is the true initiator of the modern era in French cinema.
Following Frodons definition, I distinguish Nouvelle Vague cinema from the
Nouveau Cinema. The main difference between the two is that the former is closely
related to the vogue for cinephilia, whereas the latter was more influenced by
modernist literature and tried to find the ways to translate it onto film. Therefore,
arguably we could say that New Wave films are closer to cinematic modernism,
meaning that they use the film medium more self-consciously and display greater selfreflexivity than those of the Nouveau Cinema.
Therefore, if we redefine the Nouvelle Vague as an invention of a new
modern cinemaNouveau Cinemaand a new cinematic writing, then Varda
certainly deserves an important place as pioneer and legitimate member. However, I

52
prefer to distinguish between the Nouvelle Vague and the Nouveau Cinema because I
would emphasize that the Nouvelle Vague, which began in the year 1959 when
Truffauts 400 Blows and Alain Resnais Hiroshima, mon amour were screened at the
Cannes Film Festival, is a product of the postwar French cinephile culture. The Left Bank
filmmakersVarda, Resnais and Chris Markerwere making modernist films before
1959, but they did not belong to the cinephile generation. Also, the Nouvelle Vague
erupted during the short period of 1959-1962 when more than 160 young filmmakers
made their first films, resulting in the Nouvelle Vague becoming the cult of first films.
In this regard, Varda deserves her proper title as the pioneer of the Nouveau Cinema
which in turn influenced the emergence of a new cinema by young filmmakers.

2. Feminist Reception of Vardas Films: From Reactionary to a Feminist Auteur

Some radical feminists hated my work, some feminists

loved itI was like a ping-pong ball. But in terms of
real life, simple things, and not theoreticalbecause I
never was, never read anything about feministsall
these people knew about Babel and Engels, which I
came to know very late. But I was naturally involved in
fighting whatever was prejudicial to women. So we
started in FranceIm speaking about 48, 49, 50
going with other groups to the government, making
petitions. I was there, helping women with that, and
trusting women and working with them, giving them
confidence and pushing them to become technicians
way ahead of others. 77
--Agns Varda

77

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

53
In 2007, two books on womens films came out whose front covers, coincidentally,
consist of exactly the same still from Agns Vardas 1961 film Clo from 5 to 7 (French
title, Clo de 5 7). One is Valerie Orpens Clo de 5 7, the first book-length study in
English entirely devoted to a single film by Varda. The other is Geetha Ramathans
Feminist Auteurs: Reading Womens Films, which analyzes, from a feminist perspective, a
set of diverse films by women directors. The image used is a close-up of Clo, the
protagonist of the film, trying on a hat and looking at herself in the mirror in a moment
of narcissism. It is in fact a mirrored image of Clo, who in the course of the film
transforms herself from a woman-being-looked-at to a woman-with-an-active-look; in
other words, from an object of a look to a subject looking.
Whereas it is clearly logical for the first book to choose Clos image for its cover
since the film is the books only subject, the choice seems rather odd for the second book
because it never mentions Clo from 5 to 7. Of course, Ramathan discusses Varda as one
of her feminist auteurs, but the Varda film she analyzes is not Clo from 5 to 7 but
Vagabond (French title, Sans toit ni loi, 1985). Why did the publisher decide to use a still
from Clo from 5 to 7 and not from Vagabond, and for that matter, why not any still from
the twenty-two films actually discussed in the book? It is possible to guess a few
answers to the question: first, Clo from 5 to 7 is Vardas best known film; second, Clo
from 5 to 7 is not only representative of Varda but of feminist cinema; and third, Clo is
more pleasurable to look at than Mona, the protagonist of Vagabond (Clo is a beautiful

54
singer whereas Mona defies feminine beauty by being filthy) so that this still makes the
book more eye-catching than it would be with a shot from Vagabond on the cover.
Whatever the reason, it seems plausible to argue that in todays feminist film
studies, Vardas Clo from 5 to 7 has acquired an iconic status. This raises the question,
however, of why now, more than forty-five years after the film was made? The same
question can also be asked about Varda, the filmmaker herself, who has been making
films for more than half a century. Since her first film, La Pointe courte (1954), Varda has
made more than forty films, including shorts and documentaries, and at the age of
eighty, she is still committed to active filmmaking.78 However, as Jill Forbes asserted in
1987, Varda is literally invisible, either because her movies do not find a distributor
or more subtly, through a damaging critical silence.79 Susan Hayward also wrote in
1990 that Varda has been little heralded by feminist critics, least of all by those in the
United States and the United Kingdom.80

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

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

Susan Hayward, Beyond the gaze and into femme-filmcriture: Agns Vardas Sans toit ni loi (1985),
French Film: Texts and Contexts, eds. Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau, London and New York:
Routledge, 1990, 285.
80

55
As I have elaborated in the previous section, Varda has not been given the
appropriate credit she deserves as the inventor of a new cinema or modern
cinema in France. At the same time, Varda has been underappreciated in feminist film
criticism as well. Varda is one of the rare women filmmakers in France who has openly
claimed to be a feminist filmmaker and who made an explicitly feminist film, One Sings,
the Other Doesnt (French title, Lune chante, lautre pas, 1977) during the height of 1970s
French womens liberation movement. Nevertheless, her films have not been well
received by feminist critics; she was even attacked as reactionary by Claire Johnston,
one of the most prominent feminist film critics of the 70s. Interestingly though, since the
mid-1990s, feminist critics attitude towards Vardas body of work has become more
appreciative, and her films, most notably Clo from 5 to 7 and her feature documentary
The Gleaners and I (French title, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, 2000), have in recent years
joined the list of the films most studied by feminist critics. This belated recognition of
Varda as a feminist auteur opens an area in which historical changes in feminist film
criticism and feminist filmmaking can be explored.
This section of the chapter traces the changes in feminist reception of Vardas
films since the emergence of feminist film theory in the 70s to the present day. It will
examine the feminist criticism of Varda in France, the United States and United
Kingdom, paying particular attention to the similarities and differences between French
and Anglo-American feminist film criticism. In fact, French feminist film criticism was
short-lived, lasting only from the mid-1970s to early 80s, during which time several

56
books and journal issues on feminist cinema were published: La Revue du cinmas issue
on Les Femmes et le Cinema (Women and Cinema, April 1974), CinmActions Le cinma au
fminisme (Feminist Cinema, Autumn 1979), Franoise Auds Cin-modles cinma delles
(Cinema Models Womens Cinema, 1981), and Emile Bretons Femmes dimages (Women of
Images, 1984). It is interesting to note that studies on Vardas films in France these days
do not emphasize gender issues; she is discussed as a cinaste (filmmaker) rather than a
feminist filmmaker.
The rise and decline of feminist film criticism in France directly reflects the
success of a strong feminist movement which followed the events of May 1968 and
subsequently declined in the early 80s.81 October 1973 saw the creation of Musidora
(LAssociation Musidora), a feminist association whose goal was to promote the
production and distribution of films by women and to critique the roles and images of
women in cinema. In its manifesto, Musidora declared, We deem that womens cinema,
in fact, is in creation and in movement and that it does not have any lesson to learn from

It is beyond the scope of this dissertation to elaborate on the history of the womens movement in France.
However, it is worthwhile pointing out that the feminist movement in France was triggered by the events of
May 1968 which had an enormous social impact in France by replacing the old conservative order and moral
values with the leftist liberal political institutions and morality. Women who participated in this
revolutionary movement were dismayed to discover that their male colleagues ideals did not include equal
relationship between men and women. Realizing the need for their own movement, they created
Mouvement de libration des femmes (Womens Liberation Movement, MLF), a name given by analogy to
the Womens Liberation Movement in the U.S. The MLF actively and successfully pursued womens rights
in the 70s; however, since the late 70s, the differences within MLF intensified eventually causing the
movement to disintegrate. Additionally, the election of the socialist Franois Mitterrand as President in 1981,
and the passage of law against sexism in 1983 further weakened the feminist movement. For a detailed
account of the feminist movement in France, read Claire Duchen, Feminism in France: From May 68 to
Mitterrand, London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986.
81

57
current cinema, which expresses only one ideology, male sentiments and sensibilities.
Reference to the cinema of men deforms, mutilates and kills the creativity of women.82
Musidora organized a womens film festival in April 1974, and for the event, the film
journal La Revue du cinma: Image et son published a special issue dedicated to the subject
of Les femmes et le cinma (Women and Cinema). In this issue, Agns Varda contributed
an article on womens films at the Toronto Film Festival. In 1976, Musidora also edited
an anthology paroleselles tournent! (WordsWomen Shoot Movies!) in which women
filmmakers, critics, writers, and actresses talk about womens filmmaking. However,
Varda is not featured in this book.
Another film journal CinmAction also dedicated an issue to the subject of Le
Cinma au Fminisme (Feminist Cinema) in 1979 and discussed the works of several
women filmmakers, including Agns Vardas One Sings, the Other Doesnt. Fourteen
years later in 1993, CinmAction published an issue on feminist film criticism: 20 ans de
thories fministes sur le cinma (20 Years of Feminist Film Theories). Interestingly, this time
the issue consists mainly of French translations of essays in feminist film criticism
written by Anglo-American feminist critics such as Laura Mulvey, Claire Johnston, Mary
Ann Doane, Constance Penley, Annette Kuhn, bell hooks, Linda Williams, Anne

nous estimons en effet que le cinma des femmes est en cration et en mouvement et quil na pas de
leons prendre dans le cinma actuel, qui nexprime quune idologie, des sentiments, des sensibilits
mles. La rfrence au cinma des hommes dformes, mutile ou tue la crativit des femmes. Franoise
Aud, Cin-modles cinma delles: Situations de femmes dans le cinma franais 1956-1979, Paris: LAge dhomme,
1981, 95.
82

58
Friedberg, Ginette Vincendeau, Judith Mayne, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis and others. In
her editorial introduction, Monique Martineau states, Although France has largely
colonized diverse Anglo-Saxon countries with her theories of cinema (notably the
auteur policy and semiology), she has sent them nothing in the area of feminist film
criticism.83
It is evident from Martineaus comment that in France, feminist film theory and
criticism were not able to develop and flourish as they did in the U.K. and the U.S.
Brnice Reynaud and Ginette Vincendeau also point out that although French
theoristsLacan, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Althusser, Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva and
otherscontinue to inspire the development of Anglo-American feminist criticism,
France has remained in theoretical isolation when it comes to feminist film criticism.
Reynaud and Vincendeau find the reason for this absence in the intellectual disrepute
into which feminism in the 80s and 90s was cast.84 Indeed, unlike in the U.K. and the
U.S., womens studies are not considered a serious academic discipline in France. In
1982, Hlne Cixous criticized the 1980 suppression of the Womens Studies Program at

Alors que la France a largement <<colonis>> divers pays anglo-saxons avec ses thories sur le cinma
(politique des auteurs et smiology notamment), elle ne leur a rien envoy en matire de critique de cinma
fministe. Monique Martineau, Inconnu au bataillon! (Unknown to the battalion!), 20 ans de thories
fministes sur le cinma, CinmAction, no. 67, 2e trimestre 1993, 5.
83

84

Brnice Reynaud and Ginette Vincendeau, Contre-champs, Ibid., 9.

59
the University of Paris VIII by the minister of the universities, Mme. Saunier-Sit, and a
government attack on the Program later in the year.85
Feminisms falling into disrepute in the French intellectual scene must have
played a significant, if not decisive, role in the decline and failure of feminist film
criticism in the early 80s. It also influenced women filmmakers to eliminate gender or
feminist issues from their work. When I first met Varda in 2003 at the University of
Southern California where she received the first Eisenstein Award presented by the
School of Cinematic Arts, she questioned my approaching her films in the context of
French feminism. She seemed to disapprove of being labeled a feminist filmmaker,
emphasizing instead that she is a cineaste (filmmaker). Carrie Tarr and Brigitte Rollet
state that French women directors characteristically disclaim their gender as a
significant factor in their filmmaking[,] and their films lack a critical engagement with
feminism and feminist film theory because issues relating to gender inequalities and
sexual difference have been persistently obscured by discourses on Republican
universalism inherited from the French Revolution.86 This lack of engagement with
feminism is surprising because France has, arguably, the strongest presence of women
filmmakers in the world. According to Tarr and Rollet, during the 1990s, the total

Hlne Cixous, Comment on Womens Studies in France, Signs, Vol. 7, no. 3, Feminist Theory, Spring
1982, 721-722.
85

86

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

60
number of films made by women was 166, 13.7% of the nations total production.87 Tarr
and Rollet argue, in fact, that women directors have been successful integrating into the
French film industry because they have set aside the question of their gender.88
In contrast to France, where the womens movement and feminist studies
flourished for only a short time during the 1970s, feminist film theory has exerted a great
influence on film theory in the U.K. and the U.S. since the publication of Laura Mulveys
1975 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Although during the 1990s and
onwards, the emergence of so-called post-feminism has more or less had the effect of
making the term feminism seem outdated, feminist film criticism continues to play a
significant role in film studies, especially with the development of cultural studies. The
focus of feminist film studies has moved from analyzing the representation of women in
dominant cinema (mostly from a white, middle-class womens perspective) to
investigating issues of differences among women: race, class, and sexual preference. In
addition, cultural studies have given rise to reception studies that explore the role of
spectatorship in popular culture, and to visual culture studies that focuses on cultural
aspects of visual forms of media, communication and information.
Recent re-discovery of Vardas films by feminist critics, especially in the U.S.,
reflects this new trend in film/cultural studies. For example, Ruth Hottells 1999 essay,

87

Ibid., 3.

88

Ibid., 11.

61
Including Ourselves: The Role of Female Spectatorship in Agns Vardas Le Bonheur
and Lune chante, lautre pas, examines how Varda brings previously marginalized
female spectators into the interpretative, creative process,89 and Janice Moutons 2001
essay, From Feminine Masquerade to Flneuse: Agns Vardas Clo in the City, draws
upon Walter Benjamins notion of flnerie to trace Clos transformation as a female
flnerie in the city of Paris90. Undoubtedly, Benjamin is one of the crucial figures in the
development of American cultural studies. Jill Forbes posthumous essay, Gender and
Space in Clo de 5 7 (2002), reconsiders the canonical feminist reading of the film that
Clo is empowered as a subject; she argues that the film is as much about Paris as about
a woman and that Clo is mapped on to Paris as whore.91 Space and the city are also
important subjects in cultural and visual culture studies.
Feminist critics response to Vardas films has not always been favorable. In fact,
the recent surge of interest in Vardas films among feminist critics is a stark contrast to
the assessment she received in the 1970s, when feminist theory began to develop in the
English-speaking world.92 Claire Johnston, who in 1973 edited the pioneering anthology
in feminist film theory, Notes on Womens Cinema, attacked Varda as reactionary:

Ruth Hotell, Including Ourselves: the Role of Female Spectators in Agns Vardas Le Bonheur and Lune
chante, lautre pas, Cinema Journal, Vol. 38, no. 2, Winter 1999, 52-71.
89

Janice Mouton, From Feminine Masquerade to Flneuse: Agns Vardas Clo in the City, Cinema Journal,
Vol. 40, no. 2, Winter 2001, 3-16.
90

91

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

92

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

62

The films of Agns Varda are a particularly good example of an

oeuvre which celebrates bourgeois myths of women, and with it
the apparent innocence of the sign. Le Bonheur in particular,
almost invites a Barthesian analysis! Vardas portrayal of female
fantasy constitutes one of the nearest approximations to the
facile day-dreams perpetuated by advertising that probably
exist in cinema. Her films appear totally innocent to the
workings of myth; .Vardas concern for nature is a direct
expression of this retreat from history: history is transmuted
into nature, involving the elimination of all questions, because
all appear natural. There is no doubt that Vardas work is
reactionary: in her rejection of culture and her placement of
woman outside history her films mark a retrograde step in
womens cinema.93

By the time Johnston wrote this essay, Varda had five feature-lengths films in her
oeuvre: La Pointe courte (1954), Clo from 5 to 7 (1962), Le Bonheur (1965), Les Cratures
(1966), and Lions Love (1969). Johnstons primary target was Le Bonheur; however, Clo
from 5 to 7 was also subjected to harsh criticism at the time. Naome Gilburt, whose essay,
To be Our Own Muse: The Dialectics of a Culture Heroine, is included in Notes on
Womens Cinema, categorizes Clo from 5 to 7 as one of those films in which the female

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

63
image was characteristically oppressed and the roles were stereotypes.94 Her analysis of
Clo from 5 to 7 offers a very different reading from contemporary critics, who see Clos
empowerment in the film:

In Clo from 5 to 7, Agns Varda projects the other side of the

same negative female myth and reality. Clo, a wealthy and
successful Parisian singer, actress and sex idol, experiences
feelings of existential worthlessness behind her beauty, artifice,
and histrionics. Clos form of oppression . . . is equally as
corrosive and undermining to self-esteem . . . Clo is the image
men have of her[T]he film suggests there is nothing to love for.95

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

Naome Gilburt, To be Our Muse: the Dialectics of a Culture Heroine, Claire Johnston ed., Ibid., 6.
Among the films Gilburt criticized together with Clo from 5 to 7 include Barbara Lodens Wanda (1970), Lina
Wertmullers The Lizards (1963), and Ida Lupinos The Bigamist (1953).
94

95

Ibid., 6-7.

64
and European art cinema that reproduce and perpetuate the myths of women and
stereotyping of women. Johnston calls for a new type of film that makes a strategic use
of the forms of Hollywood commercial cinema: entertainment cinema informed by
political ideas. Her notion of counter-cinema is achieved by womens films made
within the system which interrogate and demystify the workings of sexist ideology.
In this respect, it was Nelly Kaplan, another French woman director who made
her feature dbut in 1970 with La fiance du pirate (English title, A Very Curious Girl), who
suggested a model for the counter-cinema. Johnston argues that Kaplan poses woman as
subject while leading the audience into self-awareness with the surrealist impulse in her
films. Johnston also praised Kaplan for embracing narrative conventions and
iconography derived from Hollywood and using the entertainment fiction film to
draw on the collective fantasies of women.96 Also, [Kaplan] understands the dangers of
myth invading a sign in the art film, and deliberately makes use of Hollywood
iconography to counteract it.97 Similarly, Johnston perceives Dorothy Arzners Dance,
Girl, Dance (1940) and Ida Lupinos Not Wanted (1949) as films that show the possibilities
of subverting the workings of myth in the Hollywood system. Since Johnstons emphasis
is on the strategic use of the Hollywood entertainment form for feminist ends, she puts
more weight on womens films made within the Hollywood system. She argues that

96

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

97

Claire Johnston, Womens Cinema as Counter-cinema, Ibid., 25.

65
European art film is more open to the invasion of myth [of women] than Hollywood
cinema and takes as examples the works of Leni Riefenstahl, Nina Companeeze, Nadine
Trintignant, and Varda.
In France, although Clo from 5 to 7 received critical acclaimit was presented at
the 1962 Cannes Film Festival in competition for the Golden Palm Award and won the
Best Film award from the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics in 1963it was not in fact
acclaimed by women critics at the time of its release. For example, Franoise Giroud, a
journalist of LExpress who first used the term New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) to describe
the newly emerging French youth culture in 1957, wrote, She is beautiful? Rather
sleepy in her head, not awakened to the world, object Certainly the WOMAN. For
others, nothing and especially not one to make noises.98
Vardas next feature film, Le Bonheur (Happiness), which Johnston harshly
criticized as a retrograde step in womens cinema,99 in fact, provoked much debate
among critics and the public alike at the time of its release in France. For her third
feature film and the first film shot in color, Varda chose a male as the central character.
Franois is a young, handsome, and happily married carpenter living an idyllic life in a
tiny suburb near Paris with his wife Thrse and two children, a girl and a boy. The film

elle est belle? Plutt ensommeille dans sa tte, non veille au monde, objet. . . Pour certains, LA femme.
Pour l'autre, rien et surtout que a ne fasse pas de bruit. Franoise Giroud, Clo de cinq sept, LExpress,
1962, quoted from Franoise Aud, Cin-modles cinma delles, op.cit., 140.
98

99

Claire Johnston, Womens Cinema as Counter-Cinema, op.cit., 30.

66
begins with this ideal family of four having a picnic on a Sunday afternoon: the very
picture of happiness. The film depicts Franoiss anxiety-free, stress-free and conflictfree everyday life. Then, while on a business trip, he meets milie, a pretty blonde post
office clerk, and falls in love with her. They begin an affair, and Franois feels that his
happiness has doubled now that he loves both his wife and his mistress. While on
another family picnic, Thrse asks him why he looks happier than usual. He tells her
about his affair with milie but explains that it does not affect his love for Thrse.
Thrse hesitates only briefly before telling Franois that she can accept the situation as
long as he is happy. However, when Franois falls asleep after love-making, Thrse
wanders into the woods and is drowned, it being unclear whether by suicide or by
accident. The film ends with the same image of the happy family picnic with which the
film began, except that milie has taken Thrses place as the wife.
It is understandable why the film provoked heated debate. The story is told from
Franoiss point of view, and the film does not condemn his infidelity. Georges Sadoul,
who wrote a review of the film in Les Lettres franaises, quotes a woman spectator who
wrote, It is scandalous. It is this rotten man who should have drowned, not his wife!100
Sadoul predicts that the entire audience will be shocked by the story and that the shock
will come from the idea that Franois has the right to regain happiness with the other
woman. He points to the fact that none of the three characters (Franois and the two
100

Georges Sadoul, Un rgne heureux, Les Lettres franaises, Mars 10, 1965.

67
women) feels shame and writes, The real scandal of the film is that a wound does not
imply the end of happiness and that Varda does not consider happiness as a good thing,
as a prize granted to highly deserving people.101 The ironic title, Le Bonheur (Happiness),
also became an object of debate. How could a story that contains such a shocking death
of the wife be called Happiness? At the time of its release, critics and journalists reported
on the heated reaction of the audience and interviewed Varda to ask what she meant by
happiness.
From a feminist standpoint, is the film downright reactionary as Claire
Johnston declared, or is it merely depicting a cruel truth about the status of women in
relation to men? The juxtaposition of picnic scenesone at the beginning with Thrse
as the wife and the other at the end with milie as the wifeconveys visually that
women are replaceable. It does so in a very detached and objective way. It does not take
sides. According to Johnston, however, [t]he idea of non-intervention is pure
mystification102 because cinema involves the production of signs:

The sign is always a product. What the camera in fact grasps is

the natural world of dominant ideology. Womens cinema
cannot afford such idealism; the truth of our oppression
cannot be captured on celluloid with the innocence of the
camera: it has to be constructed/manufactured. New meanings
Le vrai scandal du film est quune blessure nimplique pas la cessation du bonheur et que le bonheur ne soit
pas considr par Agns Varda comme un bon point, comme une prime accorde aux personnes
hautement mritantes. Georges Sadoul, Ibid. (Italics in original)
101

102

Claire Johnston, Womens Cinema as Counter-Cinema, op.cit., 28.

68
have to be created by disrupting the fabric of the male bourgeois
cinema within the text of the film.103

Therefore, for Johnston, Le Bonheur is nave about the workings of the myth of
women and perpetuates dominant ideology. Johnston objected to realism in womens
cinema, arguing that The law of verisimilitude (that which determines the impression
of realism) in the cinema is precisely responsible for the repression of the image of
woman as woman and the celebration of her non-existence.104 In this regard, Clo from 5
to 7 falls into the same category as Le Bonheur.
However, Johnstons criticism of Vardas films is based on a misunderstanding of
their inner workings. Although the films depict a very submissive wife and a selfish
husband (Le Bonheur) and a beautiful, sumptuous woman (Clo from 5 to 7), they
generate within their text an internal criticism of clichs of women. As I mentioned
previously, Le Bonheur reveals the replaceability of women, and Clo actually breaks the
clich to recover her own subjectivity.
In her interview with Jacqueline Levitin in 1974, Varda expresses dissatisfaction
with the reaction she received from critics and audiences. According to Varda, women
came to her and said, Le Bonheur is shit, its not a film for women made by a woman.

103

Ibid.

104

Ibid., 26.

69
Society got you and you betrayed us, etc.105 Varda explains that her intention in making
Le Bonheur was to show the clichs of society; those clichs, in fact, are what the film is
about. She adds that she wanted to make a beautiful, entertaining film which would
make people think about what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman,
what cruelty it involves if you want to be happy, how someone must pay for you. . . 106
Varda wanted to raise questions about the function of woman and her ready
replaceability, but at the same time she wanted to make the film beautiful so that people
did not have to think about these issues if they did not want to. Indeed, the
cinematography of Le Bonheur was inspired by Impressionist paintings which, in Vardas
words, emanate. . . melancholy though they depict scenes of everyday happiness.107
Thus, one of the films goals was to recreate the look and feeling of Impressionist
paintings on screen, a goal Varda achieves successfully with experiments with colors,
composition, and Mozarts music.
In fact, much of the criticism against Le Bonheur involved the issue of
aestheticism. Many of Vardas films display beautiful and stunning cinematography,
which testifies to her penchant for painting. In the case of Le Bonheur, this

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

106

Ibid., 65.

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

70
cinematography triggered more criticism than in any of her other films because its
striking chromatic beauty belied the cruel content of the film. Varda herself writes,
Everywhere, people accuse me of aestheticism. They say, its too pretty, it is composed,
it is planned, . . . They also say it is too intelligent, it is planned, it is dishonest.. . . They
again say This man loves two women at the same time: it is not possible.108
Despite womens complaints about the film, Le Bonheurs photographic
proficiencies were commended by critics, and the film won the Louis-Delluc award in
1965. Most contemporary reviews of the film are about either the scandalous debate or
the films aesthetic quality, since in 1965, feminist film theory had not yet emerged. Le
Monde reports that in the vote for the award, Le Bonheur won eight votes against JeanLuc Godards The Married Woman, which received five votes.109 Le Monde says of the film,
Its colors and composition recall the canvases of Sisely, Monet, Berthe Morisot by the
simplicity of its story (a boy finds the happiness in loving his wife and his mistress with
an equal heart) and by its gentle populism.110 Max Kozloff, critic for Film Quarterly, calls
Le Bonheur a pastoral, imbued with a simple gravity, nymph and shepherd. . . and
praises the color lyricism of the film.111

108

Agns Varda, Un bonheur bien dfendu, Cinma 65, no. 97, 1965, 14.

109

Le Bonheur, dAgns Varda obtient le prix Louis-Delluc 1965, Le Monde, January 10, 1965.

les coloris et la composition rappellent les toiles de Sisley, de Monet, de Berthe Moroisot, par la simplict,
de son intrigue (un garon trouve le bonheur en aimant dun coeur gal sa femme et sa matresse), par son
gentil populisme. Le Monde, Ibid.
110

111

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

71
After Le Bonheur, Varda made another feature film, Les Cratures (1966), with the
major stars Catherine Deneuve and Michel Piccoli. The film is about a science fiction
writer (Michel Piccoli) and his mute wife (Catherine Deneuve), who find themselves
living between fantasy and reality. Unlike Le Bonheur, which attracted both critics and
audiences to become a box office success, Les Cratures was a flop at the box office
despite the star actors, and it was not well received by critics. However, unusual for
Vardas films, Les Cratures had a fight scene, and according to Varda, having made the
fight scene helped her get over an inferiority complex that a woman couldnt make a
fight scene:

I was impressed because I thought it was always said that a

woman couldnt make a fight scene, or war films, or things like
that. And I never wanted to make war films or fight films So I
had a slight inferiority complex that I had a limit. And after not
only did I get over this complex but I realized that this complex
was silly because the role of a woman is not to prove that she
can do all that a man can do or knows how to do. On the
contrary, the role of a woman is to do what she feels she should
do as a woman. 112

After Les Cratures, Varda left for the U.S. in 1967 with her husband Jacques
Demy and stayed in California until 1969. Her stay in California prevented her from
participating in the events of May 1968 in France, but it gave her an opportunity to

112

Jacqueline Levitin, op.cit., 66.

72
observe the American womens movement. During her stay, she read books by such
feminists as Kate Millet, Germaine Greer, and Shulamith Firestone, and she reports that
I learnt a lot about myself and about feminism thanks to the women in the movement,
the American radicals, or theorists, then the French women after May 68.113 Varda was
also able to witness other civil rights movements including the Black Power movement,
and she made a documentary Black Panthers about the Free Huey rally held on February
17, 1968, at Oakland Auditorium in Alameda, California. Huey Newton was a young
college student who founded the Black Panther Party and was jailed for allegedly killing
a police officer, although his arrest was widely believed to be a setup. Vardas
documentary chronicles a rally held on his behalf. Varda also witnessed the hippie
period in the U.S. and produced a short documentary, Oncle Yanco (Uncle Yanco), and a
feature film, Lions Love. Her interest in the feminist movement, however, did not
materialize in any feminist filmmaking at this time.
Nonetheless, upon her return to France, Varda took an active part in the French
womens movement: the MLF (Mouvement de libration des femmes). Varda was one of the
343 women, many of whom were famous artists and writers, who signed the MLF
manifesto in 1971, calling for abortion rights. They also affirmed having had abortions.
She participated in street demonstrations, including the struggle over the famous

Jai beaucoup appris sur moi-mme et sur le fminisme grce aux femmes du mouvement, les
amricainnes radicales, ou thoriciennes, puis les franaises daprs mai 68. Agns Varda, Autour et
alentour de Daguerrotypes, Cinma 75, no. 204, Dcembre 1975, 46. English translation quoted from Alison
Smith, Agns Varda, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998, 103.
113

73
Bobigny trial that occurred in 1972. The trial involved a minor, a rape victim, who
obtained an abortion with the help of her mother. The mother and daughter were
prosecuted under a 1920 law which made abortion a criminal act. Women gathered
together to fight for abortion rights, and the trial resulted in acquittal. Vardas 1977
feature film, One Sings, the Other Doesnt (French title LUne chante, lautre pas), a story of
a long friendship between two women, is set during the period of womens movement.
Varda included diverse sequences that evoke the history of abortion in France. For
example, one of the protagonists, Suzanne, goes to Switzerland for an abortion but
comes back sterile. In addition, she re-created in the film womens street demonstrations
over the Bobigny trial.
Thus, it was during this period that Varda made two explicitly feminist films: a
documentary short, Rponse de femmes: Notre corps, notre sexe (Women Reply: Our Body,
Our Sex, 1975) and the feature film, One Sings, the Other Doesnt (1977). Both films deal
with maternity and the question of whether to have children. Rponse de femmes is an
eight-minute documentary Varda made when the magazine F. comme Femmes (W as in
Women) asked a number of women filmmakers to each make a film answering the
question, What does it mean to be a woman? (Quest-ce qutre femme?). Varda
chose Our Body, Our Sex as her theme. She asks a group of diverse women questions
such as What does it mean to be a woman? Do all women want to become
mothers? and What is a real woman? Starting with a shot of a naked baby girl, the
film shows nude young women, a nude pregnant woman and nude mothers. Young

74
girls to women of old age talk about social preconceptions about women and the
taboos inflicted upon them. They question and contest social norms, and state,
Women must be reinvented. In her book, Varda par Agns, Varda recalls that when
the film was aired on Antenne 2, letters of complaint were received from viewers who
thought showing naked women on TV at the dinner hour was inappropriate for
children.114
One Sings, the Other Doesnt was made for commercial release. In fact, after the
commercial failure of Les Cratures, Varda had difficulty in securing funding for her
films. The difficulty continued after she returned from the U.S.; would-be producers did
not like the script for One Sings, the Other Doesnt because men had minor roles and
musical interludes were included. Finally, however, in 1976 the CNC (Centre Nationale de
la Cinmatographie) accepted the scenario of One Sings, the Other Doesnt for its Avance sur
recettes (advance on future revenues) funding. One Sings, the Other Doesnt is an
exceptional film in Vardas oeuvre in two respects: first, it was an overtly feminist film
supporting the womens movement and its demand for abortion rights, and second, its
narrative structure and style were conventional compared to other Varda films. Varda
herself labeled the film a feminist musical115 because one of the protagonists sings
several songs in the film.

114

Agns Varda, Varda par Agns, op.cit., 113.

115

Propos sur le cinma par Agns Varda, ed. Mireille Amiel, Cinma 75, no. 204, Dcembre 1975, 50.

75
Although it was a feminist film expressing Vardas stance on womens rights
over their bodies, One Sings, the Other Doesnt received mixed reviews from feminist
critics. According to Monique Martineau, the film was strongly criticized in several
aspects: some thought the storyline was too melodramatic, and others disapproved
Vardas choice of the two protagonists, Pomme and Suzanne, who are both attractive
and become successful in somewhat stereotypical ways.116 When the film was aired on
TV in 1979, Hlne Hazra, the critic of Libration, wrote, What is fascinating in this film
is the ease with which Varda collects banality and even creates it anew. . . 117 and
criticized some scenes for being too melodramatic and tear-jerking. Martineau is also
critical of Vardas choice of heroines, Pomme and Suzanne. She points out, first of all,
that they both have a pleasant appearance and become more attractive at the end of the
film. She also writes that the social trajectory of both Pomme and Suzanne is
stereotypical:

As for their social evolution, one can read it as an ascension in

accordance with two codes of equally recognized values:
Suzanne, daughter of a peasant, becomes a doctor. Pomme, born
into a petit-bourgeois family, will live in an environment of
artists and the marginalized. One represents the classical
journey of social promotion procured through a good marriage,
Monique Martineau, Un coup de tendresse pour les femmes: Lune chante, lautre pas, dAgns Varda,
(Tenderness for women: One Sings, the Other Doesnt by Agns Varda), Le Cinma au Fminisme, ed. Monique
Martineau, CinmAction no. 9, Automne 1979, 53-58.
116

Ce qui est fascinant dans ce film, cest laisance avec laquelle Varda accumule les poncifs et cre mme
de nouveaux Ibid., 54.
117

76
and the other represents that of a certain intelligentsia. In both
cases, the farming countryside is shown as a passage place that
one leaves as quickly as possible, and rejects.118

One Sings, the Other Doesnt also received tepid reactions from feminist critics in
the U.S. at the time of its release. Carrie Rickey criticized the film for lack of character
development and political scope. She argues that Vardas images are of a sunny,
carefully composed and deep space, but the people in them are paper dolls flattened
against the screen, adding that even though Varda reduces the male characters roles in
order to maximize the womens roles, this choice fails as a strategy because of its
smugness.119 Pauline Kael, an established film critic in the U.S., also sums up the film as
straightforward and all up-front, shallow with no depth. She concludes, Its a cheery,
education feminism-can-be-fun movie, and further criticizes Varda for being a lively,
sophisticated film technician who thinks that this ode to superficiality is poetic truth.
Kael characterizes the scenes in which Pomme sings songs that celebrate the satisfactions
of pregnancy as a new form of asexual lyricism and a Disney touch to womens

Quant leur volution sociale, on peut la lire comme une ascension conforme deux codes de valeurs
galement reconnus: Suzanne, fille de paysans, va devenir femme de mdicin. Pomme, ne dans une famille
de petits-bourgeois lhorizon born, va vivre au milieu dartistes et de marginaux. Lune reprsente la
parcours classique de la promotion sociale que procure un beau marriage, et lautre celui que prne une
certaine intelligentsia. Dans les deux cas, le monde paysan est montr comme un lieu de passage, que lon
quitte au plus vite, et un repoussoir. Ibid.
118

Carrie Rickey, Tepid Yesterdays: Some Make Movies, Others Dont, Artforum 16, December 1977, 53,
quoted from Louise Heck-Rabi, Women Filmmakers: A Critical Reception, Metuchen & London: The Scarecrow
Press, Inc., 1984, 348.
119

77
liberation.120 Sandy Flitterman-Lewis also pointed out the limitations of One Sings, the
Other Doesnt in 1996: although Vardas more avowedly feminist films, such as LUne
chante, lautre pas, are quite explicit in their concern with womens issues, they fail to
offer a serious challenge to dominant structures of representation, a challenge which
forms the core of any alternative cinema.121
It is ironic that the only film Varda openly claimed to be feminist should receive
such harsh criticism from women critics. However, One Sings, the Other Doesnt was not
without positive aspects. Although she agrees that this film is overly simple, Judith
Thurman sees strength in Vardas open-endedness.122 Martineau also praises the fact that
the film does not end on the images of women among themselves, but on the idyllic
vision of a mixed community, which regroups the two friends, their children and almost
all those who are dear to them. Further, she recognizes that the story of the long
friendship between Pomme and Suzanne permitted Varda to put on screen a grand
diversity of situations the women were subjected to and under which they made their
choices in their relationships with children, men, and with themselves.123 According to

Pauline Kael, Scrambled Eggs, New Yorker 53, November 14, 1977, 75-78, quoted from Louise Heck-Rabi,
Ibid., 349-350.
120

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

122

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

le film ne clt pas sur des images de femmes entre elles, mais sur la vision idyllique dune communaut
mixte, qui regroupe les deux amies, leurs enfants et presque tous ceux qui leur sont chers..de mettre en
scne une grande diversit de situations subies ou choisies par les femmes dans leur rapports aux enfants,
123

78
Martineau, it was a film which showed the freedom of choice women now have, not
only about having children but also about what they want to do with their lives.
After One Sings, the Other Doesnt, it took Varda seven years to make another
feature film. Vagabond (French title Sans toit ni loi), made in 1985, won three major prizes,
including the Golden Lion Award and International Critics Award at the Venice Film
Festival. It brought Varda worldwide attention and her greatest critical acclaim. It is a
story about a young woman drifter, Mona, who was found frozen to death in a ditch.
The film begins with the discovery of her corpse, stained in purple, and the rest of the
film unfolds entirely in flashback to uncover how she died. The film traces the last three
weeks of Monas life by interviewing the people she met while on the road. Thus,
Monas last weeks are reconstructed through the subjective testimonies of a series of
individuals, each of whom had his or her different perception of her. Ren Prdal, who
wrote a book on Vagabond, praised it as [Vardas] central work, at once the synthesis of
the preceding films and the antecedent for the following ones.124 Indeed, Vagabond is
considered by many critics to be the best of Vardas work, and rightly so. It won critical
acclaim from both feminist and non-feminist film critics alike for its challenge to the
narrative conventions of dominant cinema and for its concern with the issue of womens
identity.
aux hommes et elles-mmes. Monique Martineau, op.cit., 56.
Sans toit ni loi est une oeuvre centrale, la fois synthse des films prcdents de la cineaste et
programmatique des suivants. Ren Prdal, Sans Toit ni Loi dAgns Varda, Paris: Atlande, 2003, 10.
124

79
In her essay, Beyond the Gaze and into Femme-Filmcriture: Agns Vardas Sans
toit no loi (1985), Susan Hayward asserts, Sans toit ni loi is as much political as it is
and because it isfeminist in its conception and message.125 Hayward analyses the film
in detail to show how the film goes counter to dominant filmmaking. According to
Hayward, Vagabond takes the genre of the road movie and deconstructs it in several
ways: first, Mona, the protagonist, moves backward, from right to the left; second, the
narrative is not linearit starts with the ending, an unhappy one at that; three, the film
presents everyones point of view except Monas; four, the traveler is not a man but a
woman on her own; and five, the road-movie does not lead to the protagonists selfdiscovery or self-knowledge but to her death. Stating that the film shows that Monas
identity cannot be produced by male discourse and therefore Mona remains a puzzle,
Hayward concludes, We cannot fix the film any more than we can fix Mona, and it is in
this de-fetishization of the text as well as the body-female that Varda asserts her own
brand of feminist film-making practices.126
Unlike Clo from 5 to 7 and One Sings, the Other Doesnt, which received mixed
reviews from feminist critics, Vagabond earned undisputed status as a feminist film, both
in its content and its form. We could argue that it is Vagabond which played a crucial role

Susan Hayward, Beyond the Gaze and into Femme-Filmcriture: Agns Vardas Sans toit ni loi (1985),
French Film: Texts and Contexts, eds. Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau, London and New York:
Routledge, 1990, 269. (Italics in original)
125

126

Ibid., 278.

80
in the re-evaluation of Varda as a feminist auteur. As I mentioned previously, feminist
critics attitude towards Varda became more appreciative during the 1990s, and this is
linked to the wide range of critical acclaim Vagabond received. Sandy Flitterman-Lewiss
1996 book, To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema, offers what is now
considered a canonical reading of Vardas Clo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond. FlittermanLewis includes Varda as one of the three major women filmmakers (Germaine Dulac
and Marie Epstein being the other two) in France who have challenged male-dominated
filmmaking.
Emphasizing the importance of textual politics in conceiving resistance to
dominant cinema, Flitterman-Lewis engages in detailed textual analyses of the two films.
According to her, Clo has made the journey from object to subject of vision, and the
textual process of the film traces Clos development in terms of movement from
narcissistic containment to a burgeoning awareness of and empathy for others,127 a
reading that is widely accepted by feminist critics today. In Vagabond, which traces
Monas progress from a triumphant wanderer with leather jacket and pack to a frozen,
crying vagrant in tattered boots and wine-soaked blanket,128 Varda redefines cinematic

127

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

128

Ibid., 288.

81
55%pleasure just as certainly as she interrogates femininity and its cultural
representations.129
Varda achieved more international acclaim fifteen years later in 2000 with her
feature documentary, The Gleaners and I (French title, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse). Between
Vagabond and The Gleaners and I, she made Kung-Fu Master (1987), Jane B. par Agns V.
(1988), Jacquot (French title, Jacquot de Nantes, 1991), A Hundred and One Nights (French
title, Les Cent et une nuits de Simon Cinema, 1995), The Universe of Jacques Demy (French
title, LUnivers de Jacques Demy, 1995) and some short films, but none of these films
received as much attention as Vagabond. In case of Kung-Fu Master and Jane B. par Agns
V., both of which have a lot to offer feminist film criticism, the lack of attention was due
to lack of accessibility. For the other films, this lack of attention stems from their subject
matter -- Jacques Demy, Vardas husband ( Jacquot and The Universe of Jacques Demy) and
cinema on its centennial anniversary (A Hundred and One Nights) which had nothing to
do with womens issues per se.
As previously noted, feminist film criticism virtually disappeared in France after
the 1980s; therefore, from that point forward in French criticism, Varda was discussed
not as a feminist filmmaker but as one of the great cineastes in France who continues to
push the limit of her cincriture. However, in the U.S. and the U.K., feminist interest in
Vardas films surged with the international success of The Gleaners and I. In fact, the
129

Ibid., 286.

82
most popular films among feminist critics in the U.S. are Clo from 5 to 7 and The Gleaners
and I. In contrast, in France, Vagabond is still Vardas most studied film among film critics.
Whereas Clo from 5 to 7 is the first and only film of Vardas to have a book-length study
published in the U.S., Vagabond is the only film to be the subject of a book published in
France. As I briefly mentioned previously, the difference seems to lie in the fact that Clo
from 5 to 7 is a more accessible film than Vagabond, not as complex in its narrative
structure, and that Clo from 5 to 7 invites a more cultural studies approach than
Vagabond, which is more cinematically challenging.
Gleaners and I became the third film by Varda to win major film awards after Clo
from 5 to 7 and Vagabond. It received numerous documentary awards, both in Europe
and the U.S., including the Best Documentary Award in 2000 European Film Awards,
the Gold Hugo Award for Best Documentary in the Chicago International Film Festival,
and the Best Film award from the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics. Varda herself
once expressed her surprise at the enthusiastic reception of her film, which in fact
became the most widely distributed and appreciated of her films. Varda was even able
to make a sequel, The Gleaners and I Two Years Later (French title, Les Glaneurs et la
glaneuse deux ans aprs) in 2002, inspired by audiences avid responses to the first film.
The Gleaners and I is a documentary about modern-day gleaners in rural and
urban France that explores how the notion of gleaning has changed over time. Varda
begins with a shot of Jean-Franois Millets famous nineteenth-century painting of The
Gleaners and the dictionary definition of gleaning: To glean is to gather after the

83
harvest. A gleaner is one who gleans. She then explores the current state of gleaning
or scavenging by meeting and interviewing different people who are forced to or who
choose to live on the waste that an over-consuming society dumps in enormous
quantities everyday.
However, it was Vardas insertion of herself into the film that attracted attention
from feminist critics. This was the first film Varda shot with a DV camera. With the
small camera held in one hand, Varda films her own aging body; she gleans images of
her own hand, with its brown spots and wrinkled skin, and of the grey roots of her dyed
hair. While filming she says, Im getting old, the end is near, and Im something of a
leftover myself, comparing herself to decaying vegetables. By filming her own body,
Varda breaks the traditional image of women on screen: she presents an old female body,
which is taboo in dominant cinema. In her essay, Agns Vardas Les Glaneurs et la
glaneuse: Portrait of the Artist as an Old Lady, Mireille Rosello writes, [Varda]
questions both the cultural definition of female beauty and the cultural imperative that
makes beauty mandatory in our representational universe130 by systematically avoiding
two prevalent stereotypical conventions: first, the taboo on an old female body; and
second, the convention that when it does appear on screen, old age should be presented
as beautiful. Martine Beugnet also asserts that Vardas filming of her own body

Mireille Rosello, Agns Vardas Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse: Portrait of the Artist as an Old Lady, Studies
in French Cinema, Vol. 1, no. 1, 2001, 34.
130

84
articulates the crucial connection between femininity, aging, and otherness in positive
terms, and that the film offers a space where femininity as old-age may gain access to
presence and representation as a subjective discursive voice and analytical vision.131
As I have elaborated in this chapter, feminist critics reception of Vardas films
underwent a significant change during the 1990s. In the 1970s, she was either absent or
condemned. This absence or dismissal is first of all due to the fact that the early feminist
criticism concentrated on revealing the workings of the male gaze and sexist ideology
in dominant Hollywood cinema; therefore it was mostly canonical films by male
directors that were the object of feminist analysis. Most of the anthologies of feminist
film theory published at this time contain more analyses of films by male directors than
those by women directors.
It should be noted that from her first film, La Pointe courte, Varda has been given
critical attention in France, not necessarily as a feminist filmmaker, but as an individual
auteur who pioneered the Nouvelle Vague cinema and who consistently challenges the
limits of cinematic expression. Her films are discussed as individual works with distinct
cinematic style. It is valid to say that early feminist film critics dismissal of Varda is due
partly to their misunderstanding of her films and partly to these critics relative neglect
of the importance of textual politics and cinematic resistance to dominant film
language. The early criticism about Clo being the embodiment of frivolous femininity
Martine Beugnet, Screening the old: Femininity as old age in Contemporary French Cinema, Studies in
the Literary Imagination, Vol. 39, no. 2, Fall 2006, 12.
131

85
missed Vardas textual process in which Clo transforms herself and gains subjectivity.
However, during the 1990s, as the importance of resisting dominant cinema in textual
terms began to take hold, Vardas films and her cinematic strategies began to be reassessed from a feminist perspective. Now Varda is appreciated both as a feminist
filmmaker who is concerned with womens identity and image construction and as an
individual auteur who has developed her own idiosyncratic cincriture. Vardas
cinematic writing is now appreciated by feminist critics as presenting the possibility of a
feminist alternative cinema. However, to define Vardas filmmaking as strictly feminist
is rather limiting since not all of her films are about women. Rather, I focus particularly
on the issue of marginality that runs through all of her films and define her filmmaking
as feminine rather than feminist.
Varda herself once remarked on the difference between European and American
approaches to filmmaking. In her interview with Barbara Quart, Varda commented, I
have not seen a woman director in American that I could speak to as I can speak to
European women directorsto von Trotta, to Chantal Akerman. They do what they can
but I never spoke with an American woman director who had thought about what is the
cinematic writing, and where are the goals of what I call in French cincriture, which
means cinematic writing. Specifically that. Not illustrating a screenplay, not adopting a
novel, not getting the gags of a good play, not any of this. I started, since La Pointe
courte, for something that comes from emotion, from visual emotion, sound emotion,
feeling, and finding a shape for that, and a shape which has to do with cinema and

86
nothing else. That conversation I almost never had here. Either the talk goes to subject,
like the woman subject; or screenplay, the story.132
Varda has been making films for over fifty years, and as Barbara Quart has
appropriately pointed out, her longevity as a serious filmmaker, her capacity for
survival, is in itself moving.133 However, although feminist critics interest in Vardas
films is surging, it is still limited to very few of the more than forty films in her oeuvre.
The fact that Vardas films received mixed reviews among feminist critics provides an
interesting starting point to delve into questions of feminist or feminine alternative
cinema. The change in the reception of her films reflects a change of paradigm in
feminist film criticism. The study of Vardas films might suggest a new way to
approach womens filmmaking -- feminist or feminine filmmaking -- that I will discuss
in detail in Chapter III.

132

Barbara Quart, op.cit., 3.

133

Ibid.

87
CHAPTER II
WRITING IN FILM: AGNS VARDA AND FEMALE AUTHORSHIP

Agns Varda explains her filmmaking as cincriture, a cinematic writing, which

displays her concern for cinematic textuality. Her definition of filmmaking as an act of
writing places her within the French New Wave tradition, with its preoccupation with
inventing a new film language and making low-budget auteur films. However, what
distinguishes her cincriture from other concepts of filmic writing, such as the French
New Waves notion of camra-stylo (camera-pen), is that her concept draws our attention
to the issue of female authorship and to the possibilities of feminine writing (criture
fminine) in film. As a woman director working in the world of cinema dominated by
men, Varda can be compared to women writers such as Marguerite Duras, Nathalie
Sarraute, Colette, and Virginia Woolf, who tried to break or subvert the confines of the
masculine language system to write novels which explored the issues of feminine
identity. Varda has consistently made films with a conscious emphasis on creating an
alternative film language that challenges the masculine language of both Hollywood
dominant cinema and French New Wave films, and a concern for female subjectivity
and agency has been prominent throughout her career.
To provide a theoretical context for understanding Vardas cincriture as a
feminine writing, this chapter will examine the notion of writing (criture) in French
critical theory, especially the theory of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, whose ideas

88
greatly influenced the development of the concept of feminine writing by French
feminist literary critics and writers such as Hlne Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia
Kristeva. Since a study of a film director inevitably raises a question of authorship in
film, this chapter will also examine the development of auteur theory in film studies and
ongoing debates surrounding its validity. Despite the fact that the auteur approach to
film studies has been much contested in audience-oriented cultural studies, director
studies seem to linger on and even show signs of resurgence. In fact, authorship offers a
valid critical starting point in evaluating Varda because she has consistently made films
outside the commercial film industry, creating an alternative cinema over which she has
had more or less full control. Also, the fact that she has been marginalized in accounts of
French New Wave cinema, as I established in Chapter I, allows us to question the malecentered canonical auteur studies of the past. Furthermore, Vardas own definition of
filmmaking as writing shows she is very much self-conscious about being the author of
her films.

1. The Conceptualization of Writing in French Critical Theory

The term writing (lcriture) became an important critical term among French
intellectuals in the 1960s when structuralism came to prominence. Influenced by
Ferdinand de Saussures linguistic theory, structuralism rejected the notion of human
freedom and choice promoted in the aftermath of World War II by Jean-Paul Sartre and
existentialism. Instead, structuralism focused on various structures imposed on human

89
behavior and studied the resulting underlying structures inherent in cultural texts.
Structuralism sought to identify the structures of language, psyche and society that
operate unconsciously. It led to the founding of semiology in the 1960s and to the
subsequent poststructuralist idea of deconstruction of the phallogocentric language
system. Within this philosophical tradition, French feminists have advocated for
feminine writing as an alternative to the masculine language of patriarchy.
A new concept of writing was first proposed by Roland Barthes in his 1948 essay,
Writing Degree Zero (Le Degr Zro de Lcriture), in which he critiqued the ideal of
committed literature Jean-Paul Sartre had put forth in What is Literature?, a series of
essays written in 1947. A supporter of non-authoritarian socialism, Sartre called for
writers social engagement in postwar France. He asked a series of questions to expound
on his notion of committed literature (littrature engage): What is it to write? Why
write? For whom does one write? He locates the difference between literature and
other arts, such as music and painting, in its use of language, with which everybody is
familiar. According to Sartre, the role of the writer is both to disclose the world and to
offer it as a task to the generosity of the reader,1 and the writers main function is
communication. Language is an instrument of action, and writing is a praxis: an action
to change the society. Therefore, Sartre prioritized journalistic prose writing as the best
form of writing to disclose the world and in turn, change it. For him, Poets are men
1

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

90
who refuse to utilize language,2 whereas the prose-writer is a man who has a certain
method of secondary action which we may call action by disclosure.3 Poets are caught
up in language itself; in contrast, the prose-writer is the committed writer who reveals
the world with an intention to change it.
In Writing Degree Zero, Barthes shifts Sartres question of What is
Literature? (Quest-ce que la littrature) to What is Writing? (Quest-ce que lcriture?)
and introduces writing as the third analytical category that is absent from Sartres
analyses. Whereas Sartre initiates an inquiry into the nature or essence of literature by
examining the nature of language and style, Barthes shifts the focus to the function of
writing (criture). According to Barthes, the two existing categorieslanguage and
styleimpose fixed frames on the writer, while writing is the space in which the writer
enjoys freedom. That is, Barthes argues that language is a corpus of prescriptions and
habits common to all the writers of a period,4 a resistant medium in which no writer
can act freely. Similarly, style is imagery, delivery, vocabulary [that] spring from the
body and the past of the writer.5 Therefore, language and style are givens (language
by History, style by personal biography) that limit the writers form of expression. In

Ibid., 29. (Italics in original)

Ibid., 37.

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

Ibid., 10.

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contrast, writing is the space where the writer can make intentional decisions and
choices:

there is a room, between a language and a style, for another

formal reality: writing. Within any literary form, there is a
general choice of tone, of ethos, if you like, and this is precisely
where the writer shows himself clearly as an individual because
this is where he commits himself.6

Thus, Barthes opens up new possibilities for the writer by arguing that a
meaningful gesture of the writer7 can transcend the limits of language and style, and
invent new modes of writing. Barthes claims that to dismantle the dominant mode of
writing which reflects bourgeois ideology, we should adopt a colorless writing, what he
calls writing degree zero -- that is, a writing free of all the restrictions imposed by
dominant language and style. Writing degree zero is a writing that is not bound by force
and that refuses to serve dominant ideology. For Barthes, modernist literature is a form
of writing degree zero, and this is where he differs sharply from Sartre.
While Sartre, who believes that writers should adopt forms of mass
communication, does not consider modernist texts committed, Barthes argues that
modernist texts are a committed writing at another level. For him, writing is not a mere
6

Ibid., 13.

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

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means of communication but a way for the writer to show his ideological attitude to the
world, and for Barthes, form takes on responsibility as important as that of content. He
celebrates the writers self-consciousness of the medium and, consequently, modernist
literature that breaks existing codes of writing. In other words, Sartre and Barthes both
call for committed literature and the responsibility of the writer but differ in their
opinion about formal aspects. For Barthes, writing is an issue of ethics in which form
represents a key choice:

A language and style are blind forces; a mode of writing [criture

is here translated as mode of writing] is an act of historical
solidarity. A language and a style are objects; a mode of writing
is a function: it is the relationship between creation and society,
the literary language transformed by its social finality, form
considered as a human intention and thus linked to the great
crises of History. 8
These [historical] modes of writing, though different, are
comparable, because they owe their existence to one identical
process, namely the writers consideration of the social use
which he has chosen for his form, and his commitment to this
choice. Placed at the centre of the problematics of literature,
writing is thus the morality of form . . . . His choice is a matter of
conscience, not of efficacy. 9

Since the act of criture implies an ethical choice on the part of the writer, it
becomes his/her political act upon a given reality. This idea can also be applied to

Ibid., 14.

Ibid., 15. (Italics added)

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filmmaking: a filmic criture, the choice of form, is also a moral issue and a political act,
just as Jean-Luc Godard has famously declared that tracking shots are a question of
morality.
The notion of writing as an act is further developed by Jacques Derrida, who
examined the transformative potential of literary and other texts and shifted the central
question in literary theory from What is literature? to What does, and can, literature
do? Derrida emphasized the primacy of writing over speech to counter the history of
phallogocentrism10 that privileges speech over written texts. Derrida talks about the
audacity of writing that disturbs the order of the logic of phallogocentrism or touches
on limits where things are reversed.11 He considers literature as something that has to
invent something new.
Derridas notion of writing as a performative act is useful in thinking about
filmmaking in general, and Vardas notion of cincriture in particular, since films are
visual texts that not only represent reality but also have the potential to change it. In
their book, Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, Andrew Bennett and Nicholas
Royle challenge traditional ways of thinking about literature by examining twenty-eight

Phallogocentrism or phallocentrism is a term coined by Derrida to refer to the privileging of the masculine
(phallus) in the construction of meaning. In logocentrism, speech is prioritized over writing because it is
considered as a direct, transparent representation. According to Derrida, this hierarchy is based upon a
metaphysics of presence: whereas speech is made in the presence of both speaker and the listener, writing is
done in the absence of both the writer and the reader.
10

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

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important issues in literary theory and, in the process, revealing the transformative
power literary texts possess. In particular, they explore the idea that literary texts are
acts that destabilize the very notion of the world and disturb all assumptions about a
separation between world and the text.12 They argue that texts may be considered as
performative speech-acts,13 acts of language which themselves do things, as well as just
talk about things.14
Edward Said also argues against the text/world dichotomy in his criticism of
American literary theory of the 1980s era of conservative Reaganism:
As it is practiced in the American academy today, literary
theory has for the most part isolated textuality from the
circumstances, the events, the physical senses that made it
possible and render it intelligible as the result of human work.15

He affirms the connection between texts and the realities that produced the texts,
and asserts that texts are worldly, to some degree they are events, and even, when they
Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, Introduction to Literature, Criticism, and Theory, Second Edition, New
York: Prentice Hall, 29.
12

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

14

Ibid.

15

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

95
appear to deny it, they are nevertheless a part of the social world, human life and of
course the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted.16 Bennett and
Royle further affirm the transformational value of the literary:

To talk about texts as representing reality simply overlooks

ways in which texts are already part of that reality, and ways in
which literary texts produce our reality, make our worlds.17

How does a literary text produce our world? This question inevitably leads us
to the mediating function of the language, since every human activity, including
literature, is mediated by language. As evident in Derridas famous statement, Il ny a
pas de hors-texte (There is no outside-text18), there is no way to perceive the world
without the mediation of language. Literary texts are always constructed by and within
a context. However, since contexts are historical and changeable, it is important to
understand how language shapes our thoughts and to think about how language could
possibly subvert the binary oppositions on which traditional thought is based. Hence,
Derridas emphasis on the act of writing, which derives from a meaningful gesture of
the writer.19

16

Ibid.

17

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

18

Translation by Bennett and Royle. Ibid, 31.

19

Roland Barthes, op.cit., 17.

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

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

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These discussions about language, text, and writing are also pertinent to studies
of film and filmmaker because films are also texts that represent and produce our reality.
Not only literary texts but any cultural products capable of symbolic interpretation and
reinterpretation can be considered texts. Indeed, many literary concepts were
transported to film studies through the semiotic revolution into film theory during the
1970s. Since the events of May 1968, which brought a vast change in French culture,
semiology was applied to the criticism of the avant-garde, including cinema and other
non-linguistic texts such as painting and music. Christian Metz was the leading film
theorist in France who attempted to establish a semiotics of film language in his books
Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (Essais sur la signification au cinma, 1971) and
Language and Cinema (Langage et cinma, 1971), in which he applies structural linguistics
to the language of film. He states that both film and natural language have syntagmatic
natures; however, whereas language selects and combines phonemes and morphemes to
form sentences, film selects and combines images and sounds.21 Metz sees film as a
textual system and analyses how signifiers are organized within a film.
Even before semiotics in film was established, the film critic Andr Bazin wrote a
famous essay, The Evolution of the Language of Cinema, in which he traces the
history of film aesthetics from the silent era to the 1950s and argues that deep focus and

For a comprehensive understanding of the concept of film semiotics and the key aspects of contemporary
semiotic and cultural debate, see Robert Stams book, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism,
Poststructuralism and Beyond, New York: Routledge, 1992.
21

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the long take constitute the tools of realist film language.22 Therefore, the idea of film as
language has a long history, and since Barthes, the term criture took on far more
extensive meaning than the English translation, writing would indicate.23 It is not
unusual for French filmmakers and critics to use the term to indicate filmmaking
practice; for example, the expression criture filmique (filmic writing) is commonly used.
The concern for the forms and structures of the medium is also reflected in the
cinema of the French Nouvelle Vague and Nouveau Cinema. Film historian James
Monaco asserts that Barthess theory of literature is similar to the New Wave vision of
film. He argues that two ideas of vital importance to Bazin, the film critic considered the
Father of the French New Wave, and to the Cahiers du cinma critics are also present in
Barthess Writing Degree Zero: first, the dialectical relationship between the history of the
art and the artists personal action (for Barthes language and style, for Bazin genre and
the auteur theory), and second, the result from the interaction of these two forces of a
third thing: criture. Thus, Monaco describes the cinema of the New Wave as a
cinematic criture that combines language and style and is written with a Camra-

Andr Bazin, The Evolution of the Language of Cinema, What is Cinema? Vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, 23-40.
22

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

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Stylo.24 Vardas own term cincriture reflects this concern for textuality in French critical
theory. Furthermore, this concept of cinema as writing naturally led to the concern for
the writer of the film: the auteur.

2. Agns Varda, Auteur Theory and Female Authorship

As noted in the previous chapter, women filmmakers in France tend to disown

gender or feminism in relation to their work. Rather, they embrace a sense of diversity
and individualism born not of feminism but of the auteur tradition in French cinema.25
Novelist, critic and filmmaker Alexandre Astruc introduced the idea of camra-stylo in
his 1948 landmark essay, The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camra-stylo. This
concept provided the basis of the politique des auteurs (author policy) developed by the
Cahiers du cinma in the 1950s and of auteurist critics subsequent French New Wave
filmmaking. By equating filmmaker with serious writer, Astruc defined film as personal
expression and called for a cinema where the film-maker/author writes with his camera
as a writer writes with his pen.26 He envisioned that the cinema could become a means
of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language27:

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

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

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

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To come to the point: the cinema is quite simply becoming a
means of expression, just as all the other arts have been before it,
and in particular painting and the novel. After having been
successively a fairground attraction, an amusement analogous
to boulevard theatre, or a means of preserving the images of an
era, it is gradually becoming a language. By language, I mean a
form in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts,
however abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions
exactly as he does in the contemporary essay or novel. That is
why I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of
camra-stylo (camera-pen).28

Equating a filmmakers work with that of a writer is not unique or new. In the
silent era, D.W. Griffith compared his narrative techniques, such as parallel editing and
the close-up, to those of Charles Dickens, and Dziga Vertov declared himself a film
writer.29 Bazin also asserted that [t]he film-maker is no longer simply the competitor of
the painter or the playwright; he is at last the equal of the novelist.30 What

27

Ibid., 18.

28

Ibid.

In his 1949 essay, Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today, Russian filmmaker and theorist Sergei
Eisenstein points out that Griffith borrowed various narrative techniques such as parallel editing and closeup from Dickens novels. When the Biograph studio people were skeptical about his idea of using close-up
and of cutting from one scene to another without finishing either, Griffith asked, Doesnt Dickens write
that way? and explained that filmmaking and writing is not much different: These stories are in pictures,
thats all. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. Jay Leyda, New York: A Harvest Book,
1977, 195-256.
Dziga Vertov wrote in his September 6, 1936 diary: Im a film writer. A film poet. I write not on paper
but on film. Like any writer, I must have a creative stockpile. Recorded observations. Rough drafts. But not
on paper; on film.I can write only as they [events] happen. Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: the Writings of Dziga
Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin OBrien, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, 199.
29

30

Andr Bazin, op.cit., 40.

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distinguishes Astrucs concept of the camra-stylo from these earlier ideas is his call for a
new film language and a different and individual kind of film-making in which the
individual director expresses his or her philosophical thoughts rather than simply
illustrating or presenting scenes. Astruc anticipates that the scriptwriter will direct his or
her own scripts, eliminating the distinction between writer and director and thus
making the writer/director the auteur. Astruc saw this new kind of cinema in Jean
Renoirs Rules of the Game, Orson Welless films, and Robert Bressons The Ladies of the
Bois de Boulogne.
Vardas own notion of cincriture also shares this self-consciousness of the
filmmaker herself as the author/writer of film. The use of the literary term criture
(writing) in her coining of the term cincriture emphasizes personal creation.
1950s classical auteurism was built on two premises: that a film has an author
and that the author is the director. Franois Truffauts 1954 article, A Certain Tendency
of the French Cinema, had a great influence on French film criticism during the 1950s
and 60s. In the article, Truffaut claimed that auteurs are those filmmakers who express
in their films not only their personality but also a certain world view. While Truffaut
celebrated the artistically compelling and highly individualistic cinma dauteurs (cinema
of auteurs)the films of Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau etc.he harshly
attacked the French tradition of quality, exemplified in the films of Claude AutantLara, Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, which consisted of adaptations of well-known
literary works. In subsequent film criticism, not only European art film directors but also

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American directors who worked within the Hollywood system, such as Alfred
Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, were studied as auteurs because auteurist critics were
fascinated with instances of an individual voice emerging out of the system. Hence the
auteur theory had a romantic streak because Hollywood auteurs were seen as heroic
individuals. In France, the politique des auteurs paid particular attention to mise-en-scne,
but the Cahiers du cinma critics distinguished an auteur from a mere metteur-en-scne
who did not write his own script but simply filmed a literary work or a scenario written
by a scriptwriter. Ideally, the auteur should write his own script, and auteur studies
involved both thematic interpretation and stylistic analysis. In France, autuerism
stimulated the New Wave directors new kind of filmmaking.
The French notion of cinma dauteurs was misappropriated in the U.S. by the film
critic Andrew Sarris, who created a pantheon of great directors in the history of
American cinema in his 1968 book, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 19291968. Prior to the publication of this book, Sarris had defined the three premises of the
auteur theory:

the first premise of the auteur theory is the technical

competence of a director as a criterion of value. . . The second
premise of the auteur theory is the distinguishable personality of
the director as a criterion of value The third and ultimate
premise of the auteur theory is concerned with interior meaning,
the ultimate glory of the cinema as an art. Interior meaning is

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extrapolated from the tension between a directors personality
and his material.31

According to these criteria, Sarris ranked American directors into categories such
as Pantheon Directors, The Far Side of Paradise, and Less than Meets the Eye.
Sarris was severely attacked by American film critic Pauline Kael in her 1963 article,
Circles and Squares. Kael argued that the directors signature has nothing to do with
the artistic value of the film. In particular, she criticized the auteur critics in England and
the U.S. for their emphasis on virility:

The auteur critics are so enthralled with their narcissitic male

fantasies that they seem unable to relinquish their schoolboy
notions of human experience. (If there are any female
practitioners of auteur criticism, I have not yet discovered
them.) Can we conclude that in England and the United States,
the auteur theory is an attempt by adult males to justify staying
inside the small range of experience of their boyhood and
adolescencethat period when masculinity looked so great and
important but art was something talked about by poseurs and
phonies and sensitive-feminine types? And is it perhaps also
their way of making a comment on our civilization by the
suggestion that trash is the true film art? 32

The advent of structuralism in the 60s also undercut the notion of the auteur as
the originator of meaning. Now auteurs were thought of as only a part of language
system. Auteur-structuralism put the directors name in quotation marks to emphasize a
31

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

32

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

104
view of the author as a critical construct rather than an originary person. Peter Wollen
argued that, the structure is associated with a single director, an individual, not
because he has played the role of artist, expressing himself or his vision in the film, but
[because] it is through the force of his preoccupations that an unconscious, unintended
meaning can be decoded in the film, usually to the surprise of the individual
concerned.33 Therefore, for Wollen, auteur analysis is not about re-tracing a film to its
origins, to its creative force, but about tracing a structure within the work.
Despite the continuing debate on its validity, auteur studies lingers on but in
modified forms: director studies moved away from canonical Hollywood auteurs and
focused on marginalized directors, such as avant-garde filmmakers, women filmmakers,
and Third World filmmakers; also the scope of the film auteur broadened to include
producers, screenwriters, stars, and even the Hollywood production system itself.
Roland Barthess 1968 essay, The Death of the Author and Michel Foucaults
1969 essay, What is an Author? were instrumental in the decline of auteurism in film
studies. Classical auteurism of the 1950s and 60s that called for personal films and
traced a thematic and/or stylistic consistency over all of a directors films gave way to
textual analysis less concerned with the personality of the director. Film theorists often
quote Barthes and Foucault to talk of the death of the author, author function, and

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

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film as a discursive practice. The effect Barthess essay had on film studies is twofold:
on one hand, it brought about the decline of classical auteurism, and on the other hand,
it gave rise to an increasing interest in audience research and reception studies since
Barthes concludes his essay by saying, the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the
death of the Author.34 Both structuralism and poststructuralism relativized the notion
of the author as the sole originator of meaning of the text, and Barthess provocative title,
The Death of the Author, was taken rather literally, shifting critics attention from
auteurs to spectators. Subsequently, as film studies evolved more and more into cultural
studies, reception studies took precedence over studies of film and/or cultural
production.
It is ironic, in fact, that auteurism proliferated in film criticism when in literature,
the status of the author was pronounced dead. The essays by Barthes and Foucault
profoundly changed the critical approaches to film authorship in the 1970s. In The
Death of the Author, Barthes argued, We now know that a text is not a line of words
releasing a single theological meaning (the message of an Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and
clash.35 He pushed aside the figure of author from the center of literary studies and
argued that we should study not authors but texts. Subsequently, literary discourse and
Roalnd Barthes, The Death of the Author, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath, New York: Hill and
Wang, 1977, 148.
34

35

Ibid., 146.

106
filmic discourse gravitated towards notions of writing and textuality. In S/Z, Barthes
again valorizes avant-garde, modernist writing as the writerly text as opposed to the
readerly text. The readerly text is writing that follows classic conventions and
therefore meets the readers expectation, whereas the writerly text challenges readers
into thinking by breaking conventions and defying the predictability of the classic
narrative. However, it is important to note that Barthes does not totally eliminate the
figure of author. As Kaja Silverman appropriately points out, The authors body
remains as the support for and agency of criture.36
As Bennett and Royle aptly indicate, Barthes is in fact talking about not the
author but the Author.37 What Barthes put to death is the Author-God. He
distinguishes author, the person, and the Author, the origin of meaning, to emphasize
the specific meaning he attributes to the Author. He was against the notion that the
meaning of a text comes from its author because it is the language which speaks, not
the author.38 In fact, what Barthes was criticizing in his article are literary critics, and
what he was rejecting is God:

To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to

furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a
Kaja Silverman, The Female Authorial Voice, Film and Authorship, ed Virginia Wright Wexman, New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003, 51.
36

37

Benett and Royle, op.cit., 23.

38

Barthes, op.cit., 143.

107
conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting
itself the important task of discovering the Author beneath the
work: when the Author has been found, the text is explained
victory to the critic . . . literature, by refusing to assign a secret;
an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text),
liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, and
activity that is truly revolutionary. . . 39

The author, the person, does exist but [l]inguistically, the author is never more
than the instance of writing,40 and in fact, the author dies as writing begins. That is,
writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.41 This is very similar
to Derridas notion of writing; he also argues that the authorial death occurs in the act of
writing since texts escape writers control after they are written because of the nature of
language and writing.
Foucaults essay, What is an Author?, written a year after Barthess essay, also
affirms the disappearance of the author from modern literature and further interrogates
the relationship between the text and the author. Whereas Barthes replaced the figure of
Author with that of criture, Foucault proposed to examine the author as a function of
discourse. He developed a new concept, the author function, that explains the
discursive role played by the author. Implicitly referring to Barthes notion of writing,
Foucault argued that this concept runs the risk of maintaining the authors privileges
39

Ibid., 147.

40

Ibid., 145.

41

Ibid., 142.

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under the protection of the a priori.42 Instead, Foucault problematizes the figure of the
author and the privileged position that is given to that figure. He argues that the author
is in fact an interpretative construct associated with canonical works and that the figure
of the author plays a discursive role in a given society:

The authors name manifests the appearance of a certain

discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a
society and a culture. It has no legal status, nor is it located in
the fiction of the work; rather it is located in the break that
founds a certain discursive construct and its very particular
mode of being. As a result, we could say that in a civilization
like our own there are a certain number of discourses endowed
with the author function while others are deprived of it. The
author function is therefore characteristic of the mode of
existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses
within a society.43

Although Foucault mainly discusses literary works, he does not limit the author
function to literature, arguing that the concept of the author function applies in painting,
music, and other arts as well. He also identifies certain authors as founders of
discursivity. These are not just the authors of their own works but those who have
produced the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts;44 Marx and
Freud are two such founders of discursivity. The texts of these figures apparently
Michel Foucault, What Is an Author, Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D.
Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and al., New York: The New Press, 1998, 208.
42

43

Ibid., 211.

44

Ibid., 218.

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point to an authorial figure; however, Foucault argues that the author is not an
indefinite source of the meaning of the text. The significance of Foucaults essay is that
the author is considered as an ideological figure and that he is decentered from the text:
he only possesses the subject position. The author is not the origin of the meaning of the
text but a product or function of the writing and of the text.
In his work in the philosophy of language and writing, Jacques Derrida also talks
of authorial death:

For a writing to be a writing it must continue to act and to be

readable even when what is called the author of the writing no
longer answers for what he has written, for what he seems to
have signed, be it because of a temporary absence, because he is
dead or, more generally, because he has not employed his
absolutely actual and present intention or attention, the
plenitude of his desire to say what he means, in order to sustain
what seems to be written in his name.45

Derridas conception of authorial death has been much less influential than
Barthes in the discussion of film authorship. First, Derrida himself rarely wrote about
film,46 and second, because Derridas theories are about challenging and deconstructing

Jacques Derrida, Signature Event Context, Limited Inc, ed, Gerald Graff, trans.Jeffrey Mehlman and
Samuel Weber, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988, 8.
45

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

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

47

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

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opposite: Gerstner and his co-editor Janet Staiger declare in the introduction of the book,
We dont think the author is dead.48
Peter Brunette and David Williss book, Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory
(1989) is the only book in English which deals exclusively with Derrida and film.
Brunette and Willis examine Derridas notion of writing, textuality, and deconstruction
in relation to film theory and criticism. They assert that film is to be considered as a type
of writing because cinema, like all other forms of writing, leaves something behind,
something involving material effects that cannot be hidden if the operation is to
continue to function, like printed letters and words or reels of celluloid.49 And to the
extent that film is a language, an institution and convention according to Derrida, the
strategies of deconstruction effective in subverting that institution offer a new
perspective to film criticism. Brunette and Willis argue that applying Derridas concept
of writing to film is strategically important on two counts:

[F]irst, it inscribes film (or cinema) within the domain of the

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

Ibid., xi.

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

50

Ibid., 62. (Italics in original)

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In the same vein, Robert Smith raises the issue of authorship in film in terms of
Derridas notion of signature and countersignature:

[Derrida] raises a question about the applicability of his

comments to film. He says that [f]or Van Gogh we can say that
he was an individual with his brush, but in the case of film,
what is the equivalent, where is the body in that case? There is
no single creator, no single body that creates a film, for all the
talk in film studies about the auteur. Highly polymorphous
and fragmentary, the creative body in film fails to stabilize our
experience of it.
Nevertheless the origin of a film will be marked in a certain way
that Derrida chooses to discuss in terms of the signature. This
does not refer to a signature conventionally understood, but
rather to the conditions of an artworks thereness again, the
possibility of its being there and being recognized and
received.51

Smith concludes that although Derridas notion of signature in the above quote
refers to painting, it applies to film as well because the film exists as an event. The fact
of its therenessit is thereconstitutes a kind of signature. Derrida acknowledges the
fact that film is necessarily a collaborative work; however, he does not completely do
away with the notion of authorship in film. Film is also a form of writing which involves
the body and the signature of the creator. Derrida explains his terms signature and
countersignature:

Robert Smith, Deconstruction and Film, in Deconstructions: A Users Guide, ed. Nicholas Royle, New
York: Palgrave, 2000, 129.
51

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

Derrida, in fact, specifically identified film as a writing, an event. In Derrida,

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

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

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There is an essential link between the deconstructive type of
writing in which I am interested and the cinema. It is the
exploitation in the writing . . . of all the possibilities of
montage . . . of playing on the rhythms, of quotations, of inserts,
of changes of tones, of changes of languages, of crossroads
between the disciplines and the rules of the art, of arts. But
the writing is aspired as much inspired by this idea of
montage. Moreover, the writing, or lets say the discursivity,
and the cinema are pulled along in the same technical, therefore
aesthetic evolution, that of the more and more refined, rapid,
accelerated possibilities offered by technological renovations
(computers, internet, synthetic images). The cut-and-paste,
the recomposition of texts, the insertion of citations, all that the
computer permits, come closer and closer to the writing of
cinematographic montage. . . Deconstruction or not, a writer
has always been an editor. Today, he is so even more.53

Derridas comment on the techniques of editing is useful in discussing

filmmaking as an act of writing and the filmmaker as a writer. His description of editing
techniques corresponds to Vardas own idea of cincriture by which she compares

Il y a entre lcriture de type dconstructif qui mintresse et le cinma un lien essential. Cest
lexploitation dans lcriture, que ce soit celle de Platon, Dante ou Blanchot, de toutes les possibilits de
montage, cest--dire de jeux sur le rythmes, de greffes de citations, dinsertions, de changements de tons, de
changements de langues, de croisements entre les disciplines et les rgles de lart, des arts.. Mais
lcriture est comme inspire et aspire par cette ide du montage. De plus, lcriture, ou disons la
discursivit, et le cinma sont entrans dans la mme evolution technique, donc esthtique, celle des
possibilits de plus en plus fines, rapides, acclres, offertes par le renouvellement technologique
(ordinateurs, Internet, images de synthse). Le couper-coller, la recomposition des texts, linsertions
toujours plus rapide de citations, tout ce que lordinateurs permet, rapproche de plus en plus lcriture du
montage cinmatographique, et inversement. Si bien que le cinma est en train de devenir,
paradoxalement une discipline plus littraire, et inversement: il est evident que lcriture, depuis
quelque temps, participe un peu de quelque vision cinmatographique du monde. Dconstruction ou pas,
un crivain a toujours t un monteur. Aujourdhui, il lest encore davantage. Jacques Derrida: Le cinma
et ses fantmes, interview by Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse, Cahiers du cinma, Avril 2001, 81-82.
53

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editing techniques to the writing techniques of choosing the type of words, numbers of
adverbs, chapters and so on.54
Although Barthess essay exerted a great influence on the development of
poststructuralist theories, its argument that the birth of the reader must be at the cost of
the death of the Author55 is perceived by other poststructuralist literary theorists as a
sort of an embarrassment, since it simply switches the authorial figure from the author
to the reader. Moreover, the essays slogan-like title opens itself up to the risk of
misappropriation. Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle assert that Barthess claim is
manifestly problematic because rather than solving the problem of interpretive
authority, The Death of the Author in certain respects simply transfers it.56 Peggy
Kamuf wonders, How did this essay end up saying almost precisely what it does not
want to say, having perhaps done nothing else than exchange the tyranny of the idea of
the Author for that of the reader?57
Indeed, it is legitimate to say that Barthess essay has been misappropriated and
overly simplified in both film studies and cultural studies, especially in reception studies
that valorize fandom and the individuals taste. These studies argue that it is in the

54

Agns Varda, Varda par Agns, op.cit., 14.

55

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

56

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

57

Peggy Kamuf, op.cit., 10.

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

What goes for literary production also goes for the reading
of literature. The performativity we have been talking about
calls for the same responsibility on the part of the readers. A
reader is not a consumer, a spectator, a visitor, not even a
receiver.58
58

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

117
Thus Derridas notion of the reader/reading is similar to that of Barthes, who also
sees reading as the true place of writing.59
Derrida also influenced the development of the idea of feminine writing with his
new concept of phallogocentrism. Derrida argues that the symbolic order of patriarchal
society depends on the logo of phallogocentrism to perpetuate binary oppositions
and hierarchies such as man/woman, good/evil, light/dark, truth/error, soul/body,
life/death, presence/absence and speech/writing, where the first term of the two is
prioritized over the second one. According to Derrida, this concept of hierarchical binary
oppositions forms the fundamental basis of Western thought: logocentrism. In terms of
language, because speech is associated with presence (a speaker and listener(s) present
in the same space at the same time) and writing with absence (the writer writes in
absence of readers and readers read in the absence of the writer), speech is privileged
over writing. Derrida, however, argues for the deconstruction of the traditional priority
given to speech over writing. Through his emphasis on writing, Derrida counters the
history of logocentrism and aims to dismantle the binary oppositions by arguing that
writing and texts are performative.
One of the binary oppositions that create hierarchy in our world is that of man
versus woman. Arguably, it is the most profound and persistent of all oppositions, for it

Literature ed. Derek Attridge, New York: Routledge, 1992, 51.

59

Roland Barthes, op.cit., 147.

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perpetuates the dominance of man and the subordination of woman. Bennett and Royle
problematize the conventional presuppositions about the difference between men and
women and point out that [a]ll literary texts can be thought about in terms of how they
represent gender difference and how far they may be said to reinforce or question
gender-role stereotypes.60 Here they adopt Derrdas notion of phallogocentrism that
depends on masculine language and writing. Therefore, it becomes imperative for
feminists to recognize this working of the masculine language and to find a way to
deconstruct it. Creating a feminine language opens a possibility of breaking with the
masculine. Thus, the act of writing in feminine language, as promoted by French
feminists such as Hlne Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, is bound up with a
strategy of deconstruction:

Deconstruction could be defined as a strategy of disruption and

transformation with regard to every and any kind of
essentialism. Deconstruction, however, entails not only the
reversal or overturning of hierarchies but also the
transformation of the basis on which they have operated.61

Then what is feminine writing as proposed by feminist writers? In fact, it was

Derrida who insisted on the femininity of writing, writing that would include the
repressed: the feminine. He urges writers to keep the opportunities for meaning open

60

Bennett and Royle, op.cit., 142.

61

Ibid., 146.

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and plural. He also emphasized that what defines feminine writing is not the gender of
the writer, but the gender of the writing:

what is called feminist literature or criticism, we risk

finding the same paradoxes: sometimes the texts which are most
phallocentric or phallogocentric in their themes (in a certain
way no text completely escapes this rubric) can also be, in some
cases, the most deconstructive. And their authors can be, in
statutory terms, men or women.62
Some texts signed by women can be thematically antiphallogocentric and powerfully logocentric. .without a
demanding reading of what articulated logocentrism and
phallogocentrism, in other words without a consequential
deconstruction, feminist discourse risks reproducing very
crudely the very thing which it purports to be criticizing.63

Thus, influenced by Derrida, the post-1968 feministsCixous, Kristeva, and

Irigaraydeveloped the notion of and practiced a feminine writing that seeks to
deconstruct and subvert the masculine language system by establishing a feminine
mode of writing. That is, feminism in its deconstructive mode undermines essentialist
ideas and calls for a disruption or subversion of identity at the level of language itself.
Writing in the feminine is about opening a site of questioning and subverting
phallogocentrism. Cixous argues:

62

Jacques Derrida, op.cit., 58.

63

Ibid., 60.

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writing has been run by a libidinal and culturalhence
political, typically masculineeconomy; that this is a locus
where the repression of women has been perpetuated, over and
over, more or less consciously that this locus has grossly
exaggerated all the signs of sexual opposition (and not sexual
difference), where woman has never her turn to speakthis
being all the more serious and unpardonable in that writing is
precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as
a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement
of a transformation of social and cultural structures. 64

Therefore, feminine writing is about the transformative potential of the literary

the performative and the invention of the new. Specifically, Cixous declared woman
must challenge phallogocentric authority through an exploration of the continent of
female pleasure, and through writing, she should construct an erotic aesthetics rooted in
her difference: that is, she must write the body and write the Other.
Then, how can we think of Vardas cincriture as feminine writing? In her
autobiographical book, Varda par Agns (1994), Varda defines cincriture as follows:

I invented the word and now I use it to mean the filmmakers

work. It puts the work of the scriptwriter who writes but does
not film, and of the director who does the mise-en-scne, back in
their respective boxes. The two may be the same person, but
theres often lasting confusion. I am so fed up with hearing: Its
a well-written film, when I know that the compliment is meant
for the scenario and the dialogue.

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

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A well-written film is also well filmed, the actors are well
chosen, so are the locations. The cutting, the movement, the
points-of-view, the rhythm of filming and editing have been felt
and considered in the way a writer chooses the depth of
meaning of sentences, the type of words, number of adverbs,
paragraphs, asides, chapters which advance the story or break
its flow, etc.
In writing, it is called style. In cinema, style is cincriture.65

In her description of the filming of The Gleaners and I (2000), Varda further
elaborates the relationship between her cincriture and documentary filmmaking in
particular:

The definition I gave to film-writing (cincriture) applies more

specifically to documentary films. The encounters I make and
the shots I take, alone or together with a team, the editing style,
with echoing or counterpointing moments, the wording of the
voiceover commentary, the choice of music, all this isn't simply
writing a script, or directing a film or wording a commentary,
all this is chance working with me, all this is the film writing
that I often talk about.66

Jai lanc ce mot et maintenant je men sers pour indiquer le travail dun cinaste. Il renvoie leur cases
le travail du scnariste qui crit sans tourner et celui du ralisateur qui fait sa mise en scne. Cela peut tre la
mme personne mais la confusion persiste souvent. Jen ai tellement assez dentendre: Cest un film bien
crit, sachant que le compliment est pour le scenario et pour les dialogues.
Un film bien crit est galement bien tourn, les acteurs sont bien choisis, les lieux aussi. Le dcoupage,
les mouvements, les points du vue, le rythme du tournage et du montage ont t sentis et penss comme les
choix dun crivain, phrases denses ou pas, type de mots, frquence des adverbs, alinas, parenthses,
chapitres continuant les sens du rcit ou le contrariant, etc.
En criture cest le style. Au cinma, le style cest le cincriture. Agns Varda, Varda par Agns, op.cit., 14.
(The translation is from the book Agns Varda by Alison Smith, 14.)
65

Agns Varda, Filming the Gleaners, interview,

http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/current/gleaners/gleaners.filming.html
66

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It is evident that her notion of cincriture has an affinity with Astrucs idea of
camra-stylo and with the French New Wave definition of auteur: directors should write
their own scripts (or produce film without written script by recording events directly on
camera) and should be in control of every aspect of filmmaking. Film is not about story
or dialogue, it is about mise-en-scne.
Vardas definition does not explicitly show that she is using the word criture in
the same sense as Barthes or Derrida. However, Vardas cincriture does open up a
possibility of feminine writing in film, a filmcriture (filmic writing) that has the potential
to dismantle the existing language and style of dominant cinema. What does it mean to
write film as a woman in the world dominated by men, and how does Vardas
cincriture realize feminine writing as proposed by Cixous and other theorists of
feminine writing? And why does her writing matter?
Both Barthess and Derridas notion of writing is relevant to the analyses of
Vardas films because Varda is a filmmaker who sees filmmaking as an act of writing: as
cincriture. Their notion of authorial death also offers a useful theoretical framework to
distinguish the act of writing from the text. It also helps to think about how I should
negotiate between her intentions in making the films and my own readings of her films.
Since reading of texts varies according to context, the intention of the filmmaker is one of
multiple ways his or her films can be read. The filmmakers intention is no longer the
true meaning of the film but a means with which he or she related to her own social
and historical situations at the time of its production. W.K. Wimsatt and M.C. Beardsley

123
identified the tendency to define meaning in terms of authorial intention as intentional
fallacy.67
Barthes distinction between an act of writing and the text is particularly
pertinent to my study because Varda is a filmmaker who can be thought of as an
intertextual site:

Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our

subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost,
starting with the very identity of the body writing. 68
Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of
multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into
mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation69

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

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

68

Ibid., 142.

69

Ibid., 148.

70

Ren Prdal. Sans Toit ni Loi dAgns Varda, Paris: Atlande, 2003, 23.

124
Baldung Griens painting, Death and the Maiden. In Vagabond, when the living Mona is
being introduced for the first time, coming out of the sea after bathing, Varda herself
narrates, it seems to me she came from the sea, an obvious reference to Sandro
Botticellis famous quattrocento painting Birth of Venus. Gleaners and I starts with JeanFranois Millets 1857 painting The Gleaners. The film, like many of her other films, is
also a self-reflexive one where Varda often comments directly on the art of filmmaking.
For example, she introduces on screen the new digital camera which she is using for the
first time and whose small size makes filming close-ups of flowers easy. She sets up her
project as filming my one hand with the other hand, something impossible with a
traditional camera. And while telling the audience her story of discovering many of
Rembrandts self-portraits in Japan, she claims [Art/filmmaking] is always selfportrait.
Varda is also influenced by literature, especially the nouveau roman and other
modernist literature. The dual narrative structure of her first film, La Pointe courte, was
influenced by William Faulkners novel Wild Palms, and she dedicates her film Vagabond
to the French writer Nathalie Sarraute, who has been a pervasive influence throughout
her work. Many of her films, both fiction and documentary, use interviews, and she is
also keen on commenting on social issues directly and indirectly in her films. Besides
overtly political films, such as Salute, les Cubains and Loin du Vietnam, she explains that
Clo from 5 to 7 reflects the collective fear cancer was creating among the French in the
early 1960s. Social and political issues such as the Algerian war are mentioned through

125
the radio or the character of Antoine in the film. In the taxi scene, the driver turns on the
radio, and the newscaster reports on various international and national events, from
American shampoo to the Algerian war. This long sequence apparently has nothing to
do with the progression of the story, but Varda uses it to make political or social
comments. This is because at the time, dealing with Algerian war in film was taboo. In
sum, her films are rich in intertextual reference.
Vardas idea of cincriture and her attention to the formal aspects of filmmaking
can also be linked to Barthess notion of writing as the morality of form, since her call
for the realization of film as an open textual process that allows for random encounters
and chances opens up a space for the Other. It also, in Derridas sense, disturbs the order
of phallogocentrism. Varda has never indicated that her notion of cincriture has
anything to do with gender or the feminine; nonetheless, her practice of cinematic
writing shares many similarities with that of feminine writing. Her films are
consistently concerned with the question of feminine identity and a desire to create an
alternative film language that challenges established conventions.
I will discuss feminine writing in more detail in Chapter III below, and I will
fully examine Vardas films as feminine writing in Chapter IV below. For the moment,
I will sketch out the similarities between Vardas cincriture and feminine writing with
the example of her feature film Clo from 5 to 7 (1961). If Vardas cincriture is a feminine
writing in film, and if Clo from 5 to 7 is a realization of her cincriture, how does it
embody the characteristics of feminine writing? We can view and analyze the film in

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terms of feminine writing precisely because it is a film that challenges the established
narrative conventions of dominant cinema for the purpose of exploring issues of female
identity and agency.
Traditionally, the subject of classical narrative is male, and only the male hero is
capable of progressing and changing. Thus, a womans becoming a subject capable of
defining her own desires and pleasures involves a narrative transgression or revolution.
Clo from 5 to 7 is about Clos transformation from a woman-being-looked-at to a
woman-with-a-look. As the only New Wave film made by a woman, it also challenges
the French New Wave films made by male directors which, although they also defy the
conventional film language, nonetheless cannot escape the criticism of misogyny in their
representation of women.
Varda often incorporates documentary techniques in her fiction films as well,
blurring the boundaries of reality and fiction. This blurring of the dichotomy of
inside/outside is consistent with Derridas notion of writing and with feminine writing.
In Clo from 5 to 7, whose narrative is carefully constructed by Varda, the protagonist
Clo goes walking in Paris and encounters people on the streets. The film makes the
audience wonder whether these encounters with people on the streets were carefully
planned by Varda or whether they were the result of pure chance. It is on these streets,
by encountering others, that Clo begins to change. Thus, this film embodies the two
major traits of feminine writing as proposed by Cixous: that of writing the body and
writing the Other. The film challenges the conventional notion of femininity and the

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patriarchal ideology of dominant cinema. Like other Vardas films, Clo from 5 to 7 calls
our attention to its visual forms as well as their discursive function.
In discussing Vardas films, one cannot escape the question of authorship,
especially because one of the distinct features of her films is her authorial presence. She
inscribes herself in most of her films, both fiction and documentary, either through
voice-over narration or her actual presence within the film. The feature documentary The
Gleaners and I is a cinematic essay about modern-day gleaning in France in which Varda
herself speaks directly to the audience and guides the audience through urban and rural
areas and into thinking about the excess of waste in contemporary society. At the same
time, she contemplates her own death by presenting to the audience her own aging body.
In Jane B. par Agns V., a documentary about the actress Jane Birkin, Varda foregrounds
her status as the author by the very title of the film: Jane B. by Agns V. In the film, Varda
is a camera-painter who tries to draw a portrait of Jane Birkin, and during the course
of the film, raises questions of representation and of female authorship.
Vardas use of her own voice-over narrations in such films as Vagabond, One Sings,
the Other Doesnt, The Gleaners and I and Jane B. par Agns V. also serves as a mark of
female authorship that has been excluded in traditional narrative filmmaking. In her
essay, Disembodying the Female Voice, Kaja Silverman emphasizes the absence of a
female voice-over in classical cinema. And this absence marks the exclusion of female
subjects from the position of discursive authority:

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the male subject is granted access to what Foucault calls
discursive fellowships, is permitted to participate in the
unfolding of discourse. In other words, he is allowed to occupy
the position of the speaking subjectin fiction, and even to
some degree in fact. Within dominant narrative cinema the male
subject enjoys not only specular but linguistic authority. 71

Therefore, Vardas constant use of her own voice-over in her films is another way
of resisting classical cinemas conventional narrative construction. Furthermore, Vardas
statement that I always get involved very precisely in my films, not by narcissism, but
by honesty in my approach,72 shows her belief in the cinema of auteur and in her
responsibility as a filmmaker. Varda always insists on having full control over her work.
She had a chance to make a Hollywood movie, but she refused because she did not want
to compromise her way of filmmaking. In the late 1980s, she was approached by an
American producer who wanted to do a remake of Clo from 5 to 7 with Madonna as
Clo. However, according to Vardas memoir, [Madonna] believed that we should
make a very American film. She was afraid of my directorial freedom.73 Varda liked the
idea of Madonna as the protagonist; however, their approaches to filmmaking were too
different for them to come to an agreement. Madonna also recalled in a 1993 interview
Kaja Silverman, Dis-Embodying the Female Voice, Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990, 309.
71

Je mimplique toujours trs prcisement dans mes films, non par narcissisme, mais par honntet dans
ma dmarche. Agns Varda and Mireille Amiel, Propos sur le cinma par Agns Varda, Cinma 75, no.
204, Dcembre 1975, 46.
72

Elle croyait devoir faire un film trs amricain. Elle avait peur de ma libert de cinaste. Agns Varda,
Varda par Agns, op.cit., 60.
73

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with a French TV, What happened was [Varda] wanted to make the film one way.
Improvisational. Very different from the American way of filming. To get financing
from studios, you need a script. You do it their way or no money. Agns didnt want to
make it their way.74 So the remake was never realized.
In fact, since her 1977 film One Sings, the Other Doesnt, all of Vardas films have
been made by her own production company, Cin-Tamaris. And her films bear her
authorial mark in the credit title, which always states, Un film crit and realis par Agns
Varda (a film written and directed by Agns Varda), emphasizing both writing and
directing. Varda is one of those filmmakers, self-conscious of their status as the author of
their films, who resist conventional modes of filmmaking so as to invent something new.
That is why there is a particular rationale for considering authorship as the starting
point in studying Vardas films.
Furthermore, the existence of women directors and their films has been neglected
by traditional auteurism and even in feminist film theory, which in fact was more
concerned with the films by canonical male directors and their negative representations
of women. Therefore, affirming the presence of women directors as auteurs is in itself a
challenge to the established canons of cinema. It is hard to deny that women experience
different sets of social relations and discourses within a given society. As a result,
women auteurs should be studied, not as the origin or agent of meaning but as a subject
The quote is from the 1993 French TV special Madonna, cest Madonna in which Varda and Madonna
discuss Clo from 5 to 7. Clip included in DVD set 4 by Agns Varda, Criterion, 2008.
74

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in the Foucauldian sense of an effect of discursive practice: in other words, as subjects
of discursive function.
Unlike literature, cinema is inherently a collaborative, commercial and highly
technologically mediated art form, making it difficult to attribute the role of author to
one person. Hence, the notion of auteur is increasingly contested in film studies. One
modification of auteurism comes from the theory of intertextualitythe idea that the
seemingly personal work of the author is in fact a series of quotations from previous
cultural voices and influences that work through him or her. Therefore, auteurs should
not be studied as the sole originators of meaning in their films but as historical beings
who mediate a reality by means of their act of filmic criture. Also, although the auteur
no longer occupies the central position in analyses of the meaning of a film, director
studies are still meaningful because directors are in the position of a decision maker in
filmic criture. Once the film is made, the auteur has no control over how his/her film is
received or interpreted by spectators or critics; however, it is his/her meaningful gesture
that transcended the limits of the existing system and created something new. Moreover,
Alison Smith claims, It is . . . hard to deny to Vardas work that rather over-used title of
cinma dauteur75 because Varda remains firmly in control of every aspect of her
cincriture even if she does not herself hold the camera.

75

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

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

76

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

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CHAPTER III
THEORIES OF THE FEMININE, FEMINISM AND FEMININE WRITING

A feminine text cannot fail to be more than subversive. It is

volcanic; as it is written it brings about an upheaval of the
old property crust, carrier of masculine investments;
theres no other way. Theres no room for her if shes not a
he. If shes her-she, its in order to smash everything, to
shatter the framework of institutions, to blow up the law,
to break up the truth with laughter. 1
Hlne Cixous

To argue that Agns Vardas filmmaking constitutes feminine writing in film, it

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

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

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1. French Feminism and Philosophy

The history of the French womens movement dates back to the French
Revolution, when a Womens Petition was presented to the National Assembly in
November 1789 after the Womens March on Versailles in October. The Petition
proposed that the National Assembly issue a decree giving women equality. However, it
was not until 1944 that women acquired the right to vote in France. In 1949, Simone de
Beauvoir published The Second Sex in which she argued that womens oppression
originates in mens social construction of Woman as the Other.
It was only after the events of May 1968, however, that feminism in France took a
new turn when women realized that they needed their own movement separate from
mainstream left politics. As Margaret Atack points out in her book, May 68 in French
Fiction & Film, the public face of May [1968 was] overwhelmingly male.2 Not only
were the student and union leaders all male, but womens issues were missing from the
leftist agenda. In view of this marginalization of women, de Beauvoir, a symbolic figure
in the womens movement, discarded her original belief that a socialist revolution would
liberate women, recognizing instead that women would have to engage in a separate
struggle with the mainstream political force. This realization led the May 68 generation
of women to initiate what would become the New French Feminism. The significant

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

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difference between the old and the new feminism lies in the fact that the new feminism
developed in close relation to changes in the French intellectual scene, which at the time
was fascinated with structuralism, semiotics and psychoanalysis. As Laura Mulvey
noted in 1978, Both film theory and feminism, united by a common interest in the
politics of images and problems of aesthetic language, have been influenced by recent
intellectual debates around the split nature of the sign (semiotics) and the eruption of
the unconscious in representation (psychoanalysis). There has also been a definite
influence from Louis Althussers Marxist philosophy, especially his essay Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses.3
Althussers reinterpretation of Marxism provided a theoretical framework for
critiquing the function and the structure of bourgeois ideology; post-Freudian
psychoanalysis revealed how gendered subjectivity is constructed through language;
and semiotics analyzed how meanings are created in language. The new French
feminists such as Hlne Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray adopted the theories
of Lvi- Strauss and Jacques Lacan, who reinterpreted Saussure and Freud, respectively.
In particular, Lacans theory of the Symbolic Order and language had a pervasive
influence on French feminist thinking about sexual difference and the notion of
feminine writing. Lacans post-Freudian psychoanalysis emphasized the role of

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

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language in constructing the social subject and revealed how sexual difference produces
gendered subjectivity. Lacan argued that women do not have subjectivity in the
Symbolic Order, i.e. the Law of the Father 4; rather, woman is represented as a lack (of
penis) and a negativity. This relationship between the Law and language prompted
French feminists to develop strategies to attack and dismantle the language of the
Symbolic Order: that is, they sought to achieve a feminine writing which would
radically change the relationship of the female subject to language.
Outside of psychoanalysis and semiotics, three additional contemporary thinkers
influenced French feminist thinking: Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques
Derrida, all of whom argued that there is no such thing as a fixed meaning. Barthes
revealed the workings of bourgeois ideology behind everyday cultural phenomena in
Mythologies and other works; Foucault studied how the relationship between power and
knowledge worked on language and discourse, and how differences have been
repressed and excluded as the other; and Jacques Derrida developed the concept of
diffrance, a constant deferral of meanings. All three of these thinkers influenced French
feminists concern with sexual difference and otherness, although Derridas influence
was the greatest. As Elizabeth Grosz points out, Jacques Derrida was one of the very
few philosophers for whom feminism made a difference and who, in turn, made a
The Law of the Father is Lacans formulation for language as the medium for the formation of subjectivity,
a medium represented by the figure of the father in the family. It is also a willingness of the subject to accept
and follow patriarchal authority or law. Freuds term, the Oedipus Complex can also be referred to as the
Law of the Father.
4

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difference to feminism.5 Grosz identifies Derridas gift to feminism as his concept of
difference, a notion central to understanding the relation of the two sexes neither as a
relation of sameness, equivalence, or identity, nor as a relation of opposition or
dichotomy. Thus, she notes that Derridas work on difference has engendered a new
kind of feminism, a feminism beyond the egalitarianism of [John Stuart] Mill, a feminism
beyond the discourses of human rights, a feminism not simply interested in equal
treatment in civil and legal institutions . . . but above all a feminism committed to the
full elaboration of difference and its uncontrollable and uncontainable movements of
differentiation or becoming.6
When asked in 1982 about sexual difference, femininity and feminism, Derrida
claimed that the destruction of phallogocentrism will require two phases. The first phase
is the reversal of the hierarchical opposition of man and woman, in which woman
would become the dominant and positive pole of the binary. Derrida argues, however,
that this phase retains the traditional hierarchical binary structure and thus fails to
radically transform it. That is, reversing the hierarchical opposition only affirms
phallogocentrism, and therefore feminism that strives to efface sexual difference runs
the risk of maintaining what it hopes to deconstruct:

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

Ibid., 91-92.

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When sexual difference is determined by opposition in the
dialectical sense, one appears to set off the war between sexes
but one precipitates the end with victory going to the masculine
sex. The determination of sexual difference in opposition is
destined, designed, in truth, for truth; it is so in order to erase
sexual difference. The dialectical opposition neutralizes or
supersedes the difference. One insures phallocentric mastery
under the cover of neutralization every time. And such
phallocentrism adorns itself now and then, here and there, with
an appendix: a certain kind of feminism.7

Therefore, it is not asexuality that renders the relationship to the Other nondiscriminating in terms of sexual difference but a multiplicity of sexually marked
voices. With this multiplicity, no monological or monosexual discourseno single
voicecould dominate. The new non-discriminating relationship to the Other would be
sexual beyond the binary difference that governs the decorum of all codes, beyond the
opposition feminine-masculine, beyond bi-sexuality as well, beyond homosexuality and
heterosexuality, which come to the same thing.8 Consequently, it is not the reversal of
the traditional opposition but proliferation of differences that allows for a space where
sexual markers no longer function as a discriminating code. This, then, is Derridas
second, more radical phase of deconstruction, one which he argues must occur
simultaneously with the first so that a new concept of woman may emerge.

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

Ibid., 455.

139
Hlne Cixous further develops Derridas notion of sexual difference and
attempts to do away with the traditional opposition between masculine and feminine.
She argues that all human beings are inherently bisexual. In her conception, however,
the bisexuality capable of neutralizing sexual differences is not bisexuality as it is
traditionally understood but what she terms other bisexuality, defined as each ones
location in self of the presencevariously manifest and insistent according to each
person, male or femaleof both sexes, non-exclusion either of the difference or of one
sex, and, from this self-permission, multiplication of the effects of the inscription of
desire, over all parts of my body and the other body.9
Therefore, instead of concentrating on achieving equality within the present
system, French feminists sought fundamental changes in the hierarchical binary system
of thought and focused their attention on the possibility of deconstructing philosophical
and literary discourses based on male-centered phallogocentrism. Unlike American
feminists, who more or less argue that no difference exists between men and women,
French feminists took sexual difference, the feminine, and maternity as their central
precepts. They criticized Western thought for representing only one sexthe maleand
worked on developing theories that took into account the sexual difference of women.
They saw silence and absence as the major form of womens oppression and thus began

Hlne Cixous, Laugh of the Medusa, op.cit., 254.

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to criticize and reshape male language.10 By analyzing the power structure in language,
they tried to define and practice a feminine writing.
In her 1976 essay, Castration or Decapitation?, Cixous lays out her thinking of
sexual difference and criticizes phallogocentrism for marking woman as Other and as
the inferior in hierarchical binaries:

This opposition to woman cuts endlessly across all oppositions

that order culture. Its the classic opposition, dualist and
hierarchical. Man/Woman automatically means great/small,
superior/inferiormeans high or low, means Nature/History,
means transformation/inertia. In fact, every theory of culture,
every theory of society, the whole conglomeration of symbolic
systemseverything, that is, thats spoken, everything thats
organized as discourse, art, religion, the family, language is
all ordered around hierarchical oppositions that come back to
the man/woman opposition, an opposition that can only be
sustained by means of a difference posed by cultural discourse
as natural. 11

To disrupt this phallogocentric economy, Cixous argues that women should put
aside all negativeness and bring out a positiveness which might be called the living
Other, the rescued Other, the Other unthreatened by destruction. Women have in them
to affirm the difference, their difference, such that nothing can destroy that
Their writings and other French feminist thinking were first introduced in English in New French
Feminisms-An Anthology, edited by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, The University of
Massachusetts Press, 1980 and then in French Feminist Thought-A Reader, edited by Toril Moi, Blackwell, 1987.
French feminist theories were not introduced to American feminist critics, who were still unfamiliar with
psychoanalysis, until the 1980s.
10

11

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

141
difference12 She calls for a feminine textual body, which she defines as a female
libidinal economy, a regime, energies, a system of spending not necessarily carved out by
culture. A feminine textual body is recognized by the fact that it is always endless,
without ending: there is no closure.13 Thus she contends it is womans writing that has
the potential to bring about a shift in hierarchical binaries and to de-phallocentralize
the body, relieve man of his phallus, return him to an erogenous field and a libido that
isnt stupidly organized round the monument, but appears shifting, diffused, taking on
all the others of oneself.14 Ultimately then, for Cixous, female sexual pleasure
(jouissance) constitutes a force that has the potential to disturb the phallogocentric order.
Thus, as Elaine Marker and Isabelle de Courtivron point out, [t]he greatest
discrepancy between French and American feminisms is in the realm of psychoanalytic
and linguistic theory.15 Until the mid-1970s, when Pam Cook, Claire Johnston, and
Laura Mulvey began to develop a theoretical framework for feminist film criticism,
Anglo-American feminists were unfamiliar with continental philosophy and
psychoanalysis. Unlike Anglo-American feminists who considered Freud their enemy,
French advocates of feminine writing adopted psychoanalysis, especially the post-

12

Ibid., 50. (Italics in original)

13

Ibid., 53. (Italics in original)

14

Ibid., 51.

15

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

142
Freudian theories of Lacan, as their theoretical tool to explore the womans unconscious
and womans libido that had been repressed under patriarchy. This is evident in the fact
that one of the earliest feminist groups formed in France was Psyche et Po (short for
Psychanalyse et Politique), which sought to overthrow patriarchal culture by
developing specifically feminine discourse. Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva all passed
through this group, and Psych et Po became a significant site of intellectual debate in
the mid-1970s.16
This group rejected the label of feminism and considered de Beauvoirs feminism
to be phallogocentric17 or male-identified because of de Beauvoirs attitude toward
psychoanalysis and her perception of womans independence. Specifically, in The Second
Sex, Beauvoir writes, Psychonalaysis fails to explain why woman is the Other We
therefore decline to accept the method of psychoanalysis, without rejecting en bloc the
contributions of the science or denying the fertility of some of its insights. She also
writes, The modern woman accepts masculine values: she prides herself on thinking,
taking action, working, creating, on the same terms as men; instead of seeking to
disparage them, she declares herself their equal.18 In response, Psyche et Po defined

16

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

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

18

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

143
feminism negatively as a reformist movement of women wanting power within the
patriarchal system, and its members even carried placards in the streets that read,
Down with feminism! on International Womens Day.19 Psyche et Po viewed
women who called themselves feminists as imitators of male models. Thus, it is
understandable that Anglo-American feminists embraced de Beauvoirs The Second Sex
more enthusiastically than their French counterparts.
Here, we can see noticeable differences within modern French feminism between
the old feminism represented by de Beauvoir and the new feminism represented by
Psyche et Po, from which the notion of feminine writing evolved. These differences
came about because the new feminism developed in close relation with changes in the
French intellectual scene after May 1968 and specifically, the intellectual turn to
structuralism and semiotics as part of a larger effort to analyze and demystify hidden
power structures, including language. The resulting emphasis on feminine language and
writing is what sets the new French feminism apart from both the old French and
American feminisms that concentrated on civil rights and equality, and on womens
issues such as abortion and contraception.
Concern with the relationship between language and politics remains the major
characteristic of French feminism. In contrast, most American feminists took a
website Simone de Beauvoir Archive:
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/2ndsex.htm.
19

Toril Moi, op.cit., 3.

144
sociological approach in their political action for equality and had backgrounds in the
civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam war activism. Compared to their French
counterparts, American feminists tended to distrust theory because they thought it was
too abstract and hyper-intellectual. Instead of pondering philosophical questions such as
the notion of the feminine, they were concerned with historyin which women had
been invisibleand thus concentrated on re-discovering womens history (herstory).
Their goals were improving womens social, economic, and political situation. In short,
their approach was more empirical than theoretical.
On the other hand, the new French feminism was developed by women with
theoretical backgrounds, such as literary critics and writers, philosophy professors, and
psychoanalysts. They shared a radical anti-bourgeois thinking and considered writing
and reading to be subversive political means to overthrow the present system. One of
the reasons that French feminists were more philosophical than their American
counterparts can be located in the different role philosophy plays in the French
education system from its role in American and British education. As Claire Duchen
points out, The French school student has a compulsory class in philosophy and can be
examined in philosophy when she leaves school. The French lyce pupil therefore has a
familiarity with certain philosophical ideas and thinkers that the British or American
child lacks . . . and the institutionalizing of philosophy affects the degree of importance
allocated to abstract inquiry, and the relative importance of intellectual life in France

145
compared to British anti-intellectualism.20 Elaine Showalter summarizes the difference
between French, British and American feminism as English feminist criticism,
essentially Marxist, stresses oppression; French feminist criticism, essentially
psychoanalytic, stresses repression; American feminist criticism, essentially textual,
stresses expression.21
It should be emphasized that French feminists notions of the feminine and of
femininity are not confined to women as a biological sex but include various others
who have been excluded and repressed in bourgeois (capitalist) and patriarchal society.
Still, their very use of the term feminine created much confusion among AngloAmerican feminists and led to their attack on French feminism for being essentialist.
Now, let us look at how the term feminine and feminist are perceived differently by
the French and American feminists.

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

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

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2. Contested Notions of Feminist vs. Feminine in France and the U.S.

Woman (truth) will not be pinned down. In truth woman,

truth will not be pinned down. That which will not be
pinned down by truth is, in truthfeminine. This should not,
however, be hastily mistaken for a womans femininity, for
female sexuality, or for any other of those essentializing
fetishes which might still tantalize the dogmatic philosopher,
the impotent artist or the inexperienced seducer who has not
yet escaped his foolish hopes of capture.22
Jacques Derrida

Defining what is feminine and what is feminist is a challenging task, and perhaps
it will continue to engender endless debates not only among feminist but also among
theorists concerned with the larger issue of identity. Before navigating through the
confusing and conflicting ideas surrounding these terms in France and the U.S., I would
like to start by articulating how I myself perceive the distinction between the two. My
definition is partly indebted to the French notion of feminine writing and partly to my
experience, although limited, of recent American popular culture, especially the
remarkable increase in the popularity of films, TV shows, and video games that feature
tough warrior women as their protagonists. In my opinion, films like Lara Croft: Tomb
Raider (2001) might be feminist films but not feminine films. They are feminist because
they break the traditional idea of passive woman and create an alternative image of
strong female characters on screen. However, they are not feminine precisely because
Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsches Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow, Chicago and London: The University of
Chicago Press, 1979, 55. (Italics in original)
22

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

148
It is evident from the example of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider that what we think is
feminist can inadvertently serve to maintain patriarchal ideology. We could say that
the term feminist has to do with images and representations of women and with
eliminating the differences between man and woman, whereas the term feminine can
be viewed as a potentially subversive force that threatens the patriarchal system. The
feminist is more about the content on the surface level, while the feminine is more
about formal transformations. However, my use of these words already brings out the
different meanings of the word feminine in the different cultural contexts of French
feminism and Anglo-American feminism.
The confusion comes partly from the use of the word feminine, which was
already tainted with negativity in both France and in the U.S., although to different
degrees. In her interview with Verena Andermatt Conley in 1984, Hlne Cixous claims
that feminists use of the word feminine is one of the curses of our time because
words like masculine and feminine which circulate everywhere and which are
completely distorted by everyday usage [and] refer to a classical vision of sexual
opposition between men and women are our burden.23 Here, she is referring to the
common misunderstanding of the term criture fminine as specifically womans
writing. Instead of defining the feminine or femininity as characteristics belonging
exclusively to women, however, Cixous declares the existence of a libidinal femininity
23

Hlne Cixous and Verena Andermatt Conley, Voice I, boundary 2, Vol. 12, no. 2, Winter 1984, 50.

149
which is distinct from traditional, phallocentric representations of femininity and which
can be located in a writing produced by either a male or female. For Cixous, feminine
writing is not defined by the sex of the writer but by the sex of the writing itself: it is a
writing whose qualities of language disrupt the symbolic order of patriarchy by
inscribing femininity. Cixous singles out Jean Genet as one of the rare men whose
writing, as a man, does not repress his femininity:

Which works, then, might be called feminine? Ill just point out
some examples: one would have to give them full readings to
bring out what is pervasively feminine in their significance
which I shall do elsewhere. In France (have you noted our
infinite poverty in this field?the Anglo-Saxon countries have
shown resources of distinctly greater consequence), leafing
through whats come out of the twentieth centuryand its not
muchthe only inscriptions of femininity that I have seen were
Colette, Marguerite Duras,and Jean Genet.24

In Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, Cixous writes of Genet: Genet constantly
puts a process of reversal into effect. He is absolutely clear on this subject. He exalts
what is abased by society, what is considered inferior. Dregs are what he most esteems,
what he likes most. His process is one of provocative contrast This process of reverse
relief is, as he always insists, at once moving, magnificent, and magnifying. At the same
time it is disquieting, since it undoes, undermines, and saps a social hierarchy25

24

Hlne Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa, op.cit., 248n.

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

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Similarly, Varda argues that the filmmakers gender is irrelevant to whether he
or she speaks in a female or feminine voice:

Woman can be as wrong as men about women and some men

can be better. I believe that [Ingmar] Bergman, for example,
knows more about women than a lot of women I dont think
we should put so much importance on the sex of the filmmaker,
but on what he is saying about women and how.26

For Cixous, feminine libidinal economy is based on free spending and giving,
and femininity is the ability to give without reserve. In Sorties she writes, The more
you have, the more you give, the more you are, the more you give, the more you have.
Life opens up and stretches to infinity.27 She uses the terms masculine and feminine to
distinguish different modes of behavior towards difference and otherness: whereas
masculine conduct eradicates differences with binaries, feminine conduct preserves and
celebrates differences. Also, for Cixous, although these terms run the risk of being
misunderstood, they are still useful because women are more likely than men to
open up to differences and the Other.
Whereas Anglo-American feminists viewed the term feminine as being antifeminist, seeing it as a patriarchal construction that functioned to confine women to a

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

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

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domestic or private sphere, [w]omen concerned with the woman question in France
use the words feminism and feminist less often than did their counterparts in the
United States.28 In fact, the title French New Feminism is a label given to the French
theories of the feminine by Anglo-American feminists.29 On the other hand, French
feminists view Anglo-American feminists pursuit of equality as perpetuating the status
quo of womens subordination. As Susan Sellers points out, Both Hlne Cixous and
Luce Irigaray, for instance, believe that the Anglo-American feminist preoccupation with
equality forces women to function like men.30
For French feminists, American feminism that was concerned with advancing the
position of women through the achievement of political, legal, economic rights equal to
those granted men perpetuated the standard of male adulthood as the norm. As a result,
they believed American feminists were pursuing only surface-level changes and were
driving women to become like men to survive in male-dominated society, without
achieving any fundamental change to society itself. Therefore, they sought other goals
besides access to male privilege and power; instead, they focused on sexual difference

28

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

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

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

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and argued that womens difference, repressed by patriarchal culture, is the source of
womens potential liberation.
To understand these different perspectives between American feminism and
French feminism, it is necessary to locate the origins and growth of these different ideas
within their specific social, cultural, political context. However, because AngloAmerican feminists began to actively adopt French theories in the mid-1970s and
reevaluated femininity and difference as positive notions that were to womens credit,
the comparison between two feminisms here mainly focus on the period of early and
mid-1970s.
In her Introduction to the book, French Feminist Thought, Toril Moi summarizes
the differences between French feminism and Anglo-American feminism of the 1970s:

Where we [Anglo-American feminists] were empirical, they

[French feminists] were theoretical; where we believed in the
authority of experiences, they questioned not only the category
of experience, but even that of the experiencerthe female
subject herself. If we were looking for a homogeneous female
tradition in art or history, they insisted that female writing
could only ever be visible in the gaps, contradictions or margins
of patriarchal discourse. And when we were looking for women
writers, they sought feminine writing.31

Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, who find the distinct characteristic of
French feminism in the combination of language and politics, state, Women concerned
31

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

153
with the woman question in France use the words feminism and feminist less often
than do their counterparts in the United States because the ridicule to which
feminists were subjected has always been more aggressive in France and also because
of the desire to break with a bourgeois past and its fixed categories of humanistic
thought, including feminism.32
Despite the fact that feminine writing is about challenging the various binaries
that stem from the male/female dichotomy, American feminists such as Ann Rosalind
Jones criticize French feminist writers for envisioning a separate language for women,
metaphorically based on womens physical experience of sexuality.33 However, Cixous
herself renounces the idea of sexual essentialism:

There is destiny no more than there is nature or essence

as such. Rather, there are living structures that are caught and
sometimes rigidly set within historicocultural limits so mixed
up with the scene of History that for a long time it has been
impossible (and it is still very difficult) to think or even imagine
an elsewhere. We are presently living in a transitional
periodone in which it seems possible that the classic structure
might be splitAnd let us imagine a real liberation of sexuality,
that is to say, a transformation of each ones relationship to his
or her body (and to the other body), an approximation to the
vast, material, organic, sensuous universe that we are. This
cannot be accomplished, of course, without political
transformations that are equally radical. Then femininity and
masculinity would inscribe quite differently their effects of
32

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

Ann Rosalind Jones, Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of Lcriture fminine, Feminist Studies,
Vol. 7, no. 2, Summer 1981, 247-63.
33

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difference, their economy, their relationship to expenditure, to
lack, to the gift. What today appears to be feminine or
masculine would no longer amount to the same thing.34

It is important to note at this point that there is a growing concern within

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

34

Hlene Cixous, Sorties, Ibid., 83.

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

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that women are not really different from men or to promote differences rather than
commonalities among women is to ignore thousands of years of patriarchal history and
its socialization processes. Furthermore, as Silvia Bovenschen argues, the motto
Women are not really different from men comes as a strategy to undermine
womens efforts to discover their own capabilities and needs, to reappropriate their
uniqueness.36 I agree with Bovenschens argument that art should be feminised, and
womens participation would do it a lot of good,37 and I would re-interpret the
expression feminized or feminine not in terms of sexed identity of woman but as an
attitude towards the Other.
In Extreme Fidelity, Cixous explains that her use of the terms masculine and
feminine is to distinguish between two different modes of behavior toward the law:

What I call feminine and masculine is the relationship to

pleasure, the relationship to spending, since we are born into
language, and I cannot do otherwise than to find myself before
words: we cannot get rid of them, they are there. We could
change them, we could put signs in their place, but they would
become just as closed, just as immobile and petrifying as the
words masculine and feminine and would lay down the
law to us. So there is nothing to be done, except shake them like
apple trees, all the time.38
Silvia Bovenschen, Is there a Feminine Aesthetic? in Feminist Aesthetics ed. Gisela Ecker, Boston: Beacon
Press, 1985, 29.
36

37

Ibid., 50.

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

156
Cixous compares the story of Perceval, who accepts the Law without any
questioning, with the story of Eve, who was willing to transgress the prohibition laid out
by the incomprehensible law of God. According to Cixous, although women are, at
present, more likely to adopt an open, questioning feminine attitude than men, it is
not anatomical difference between men and women that determines which attitude one
adopts. Therefore, as previously noted, feminine writing is open to male writers. Then,
what are the strategies of feminine writing? Cixous argues that they are to write the
body and to write the Other.

3. Theories of Feminine Writing

As noted previously, language was at the center of intellectual debates in

twentieth-century France. Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lvi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan,
Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida all explored the ways in which
meaning operates in language and how ideologies are encoded in language through the
processes of distinction and exclusion. French feminists response to this tradition of
thought is the concept of feminine writing (criture fminine), which makes space for the
feminine in language and writing. Hlne Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva are
the major proponents of feminine writing, although they differ from each other in
locating the feminine. They argue that we can transform the current order of
patriarchal relations only by inscribing femininity in writing. They specifically call for
feminine language that is different from the masculine language of phallogocentrism

157
because if women are liberated through mens language, nothing would be
accomplished except simply reversing the hierarchical opposition of man/woman
without fundamental transformation of the binary system. The goal of feminine writing
is to dismantle the hierarchical binaries and to do away with linear masculine logic that
excludes the Other. The acceptance of the Other will create a new order to replace
patriarchal and capitalist hegemony. Thus, feminine writing will transform the
structures of language and culture, and hence of our social and political system.
Julia Kristeva claimed in 1977 that there had been no female writing up to that
point:
If we confine ourselves to the radical nature of what is today
called writing, that is, if we submit meaning and the speaking
subject in language to a radical examination and then
reconstitute them in a more polyvalent than fragile manner,
there is nothing in either past or recent publications by women
that permits us to claim that a specifically female writing
exists.39

Moreover, in The Laugh of the Medusa, her 1976 manifesto on feminine writing,
Hlne Cixous also declared that there has not yet been any writing that inscribes
femininity and criticized women writers who wrote in male language, the immense
majority of whose workmanship is in no way different from male writing, and which
either obscures women or reproduces the classic representation of women (as
Julia Kristeva, A partir de Polylogue, interview with Franoise van Rossum-Guyon, Revue des sciences
humaines, vol. XLIV, no. 168, trans. Sen Hand, Oct/Dec 1977, 495f, quoted from Kelly Ives, Cixous, Irigaray,
Kristeva: The Jouissance of French Feminism, second edition, Kent: Crescent Moon Publishing, 2007, 31.
39

158
sensitiveintuitivedreamy, etc.)40 In Castration or Decapitation?, Cixous
emphasizes again the danger of women writers writing in the masculine and points out
the possibility of mans writing in the feminine:

Most women are like this: they do someone elsesmans

writing, and in their innocence sustain it and give it voice, and
end up producing writing thats in effect masculine. To be
signed with a womans name doesnt necessarily make a piece
of writing feminine and conversely, the fact that a piece of
writing is signed with a mans name does not in itself exclude
femininity. Its rare, but you can sometimes find femininity in
writings signed by men: it does happen. 41

Although she reserves the possibility of feminine writing by men, Cixous mainly
discusses womens writing in The Laugh of the Medusa:

Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring
women to writing, from which they have been driven away
violently as from their bodies for the same reasons, by the
same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself
into the textas into the world and into historyby her own
movement.42

Cixouss idea of feminine writing stems from womens long-standing oppression

by the Law of the Father. Women are marginalized in the signifying process and have

40

Hlne Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa, Ibid., 248.

41

Hlne Cixous, Castration or Decapitation? op.cit., 52.

42

Hlne Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa, op.cit., 245.

159
been denied a voice. Thus, she argues that to resist this repression and marginalization,
women must start representing themselves by writing. Further, for Cixous, feminine
writing starts with the body:

Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the
immense resources of the unconscious spring forth. Our
naphtha will spread, throughout the world, without dollars
black or goldnonassessed values that will change the rules of
the old game.43

Feminine writing is subversive because writing is precisely the very possibility of

change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought.44 Women
should write to challenge and transform male writing that has been run by a libidinal
and culturalhence political, typically masculineeconomy; . . . a locus where the
repression of women has been perpetuated.45 By writing, women begin to challenge
male language and representations, and feminine writing is revolutionary in that it
opens a new world in which women are no longer governed by male rules. In Newly
Born Woman, Cixous views womens inscription of their sexuality and history as
containing the potential to explode masculine thinking and initiate changes in our social

43

Ibid., 250.

44

Ibid., 249. (Italics in original)

45

Ibid.

160
and political system. Specifically, in her view, feminine writing is about inventing a new
woman:

Everyone knows that a place exists which is not economically or

politically indebted to all the vileness and compromise. That is
not obliged to reproduce the system. That is writing. If there is a
somewhere else that can escape the infernal repetition, it lies in
that direction, where it writes itself, where it dreams, where it
invents new worlds.46

Then, who is this feminine writer who can challenge the very foundation of the
patriarchal system? In Coming to Writing, Cixous suggest that the feminine writer is:

[s]he who looks with the look that recognizes, that studies,
respects, doesnt take, doesnt claw, but attentively, with gentle
relentlessness, contemplates and reads, caresses, bathes, makes
the other gleam. Brings back to light the life thats been buried,
fugitive, made too prudent. Illuminates it and sings it its name.47

Thus, whereas masculine law and masculine writing are based on the destruction
or exclusion of the Other, feminine writing is about embracing and writing the Other.
Therefore, feminine writing becomes an act of writing the Other, bringing into being a
new type of exchange in which one would keep the other alive and different.48 For

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

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

48

Ibid., 79. (Italics in original)

161
Cixous, feminine writing requires openness and entails the quest for the Other; it is
about love and nourishment. Thus, feminine writing is to write with milk and to open
a space for the Other. It is an act of love that liberates. Above all, in order to open up new
possibilities of becoming the Other, it has to challenge and transform masculine structure.
Further, feminine writing is a fluid one that cannot be defined and that takes place at the
margin:

It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this

is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never
be theorized, enclosed, codedwhich does not mean that it
doesnt exist. But it will always surpass the discourse that
regulates the phallocentric system; it does and will take place in
areas other than those subordinated to philosophico-theoretical
domination. It will be conceived of only by subjects who are
breakers of automatisms, by peripheral figures that no authority
can ever subjugate.49

Cixous herself is also a prolific writer in the feminine. She writes not only
criticism but also essays and fiction. In fact, she produces writings that collapse all
generic distinctions; her analytical writings blur the boundaries between theoretical
writings and poetry. She is a writer of feminine writing that does away with established
genre conventions and invents a new mode of writing that cannot be categorized. Like
other French theorists such as Barthes and Derrida, Cixous criticizes the literary illusion
of realism and celebrates modernist and experimental writing. She is against

49

Hlne Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa,op.cit., 253. (Italics in original)

162
representation associated with linearity and conservatism. She dreams of a nonoppressive and non-sexist utopia achieved through feminine writing.
Unlike Cixous who does not preclude men from the possibility of producing
feminine writing, Luce Irigaray identifies feminine language specifically with the female
body and female libido. In This Sex Which Is Not One, written in 1977, Irigaray argues
that the difference between the eroticisms of man and woman is manifest in the
difference of language:

[W]omans autoeroticism is very different from mans. In order

to touch himself, man needs an instrument: his hand, a
womans body, language And this self-caressing requires at
least a minimum of activity. As for woman, she touches herself
in and of herself without any need for mediation, and before
there is any way to distinguish activity from passivity. Woman
touches herself all the time, and moreover no one can forbid
her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in
continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two
but not divisible into one(s)that caress each other50
Her sexuality, always at least double, goes even further: it is
plural.But woman has sex organs more or less everywhere.
She finds pleasure almost anywhere the geography of her
pleasure is far more diversified, more multiple in its differences,
more complex, more subtle, than is commonly imaginedin an
imaginary rather too narrowly focused on sameness.51

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

51

Ibid., 28. (Italics in original)

163
For Irigaray, feminine language is linked specifically to womans sexuality. She
argues that since the time of the Greeks, woman has been the object of mans sexual
imaginary (governed by the erection, which is foreign to the feminine) and thus has been
kept in a perpetual state of dependency upon man. Irigaray characterizes the world of
mans imaginary as the predominance of the visual, and of the discrimination and
individualization of form and argues that this imaginary is very foreign to female
eroticism because [w]oman takes pleasure from touching rather than from looking, and
her entry into a dominant scopic economy signifies, again, her consignment to passivity:
she is to be the beautiful object of contemplation.52 Therefore, the womans sexual
organ lacks its own form of representation.
Since womans sexuality is plural and since she always touches the Other in
herself, she cannot be understood by male language, which is linear and is based on the
exclusion of the Other. In contrast, womans language is plural, whimsical, capricious,
and cyclical:
She is indefinitely other in herself. This is doubtless why she
is said to be whimsical, incomprehensible, agitated, capricious
not to mention her language in which she sets off in all
directions leaving him unable to discern the coherence of any
meaning. Hers are contradictory words, somewhat mad from
the standpoint of reason, inaudible for whoever listens to them
with ready-made grids. One would have to listen with
another ear, as if hearing an other meaning always in the process

52

Ibid., 26-27.

164
of weaving itself, of embracing itself with words, but also getting rid of
words in order not to become fixed, congealed in them. 53

Since there is no room for womens language in phallogocentrism, women must

undertake tactical strikes, [and] keep themselves apart from men long enough to learn
to defend their desire, especially through speech54 Irigaray differs from Cixous in that
she argues womens speech is possible only when men are not present and therefore,
men should be excluded from efforts to establish feminine language. However, Irigaray
also cautions against the simple reversal of masculine and feminine that simply
maintains the phallocentric system of binary oppositions. For Irigaray, establishing
womans language is central to the creation of a feminine aesthetics. Finally, she argues
that womans language is different from mans in that it is used to forge relationships
between genders and not for self-projection.
Julia Kristevas discussion of femininity differs sharply from that of Cixous and
Irigaray. Whereas Cixous and Irigaray link the notion of feminine writing and
womans language to the female body, Kristeva refuses to define femininity in
terms of biological woman. She states in an interview conducted in 1974 that [t]o
believe that one is a woman is almost [as] absurd and obscurantist as to believe that

53

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

54

Ibid., 33.

165
one is a man.55 Femininity, for Kristeva, has nothing to do with womens sexuality or
libido; it is a form of language that is open to both man and woman. Woman is that
which cannot be represented, that which is not spoken, that which remains outside
naming and ideologies.56 As Toril Moi states, Kristeva does not have a theory of
femininity and even less femaleness. What she does have is a theory of marginality,
subversion and dissidence.57
Kristevas main concern lies in the relationship between language and the
subjects development within the Symbolic order. She argues that if a child can choose
between the father or the mother as the object of identification when it enters the
Symbolic order, then boys can identify with the mother, and girls with the father.
Therefore, men can write in the feminine form and women in masculine form. She
argues that to distinguish language according to biological sex runs the risk of confining
men and women within the limits of patriarchy.
In her book, Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva talks about chora, a modality
of significance in which the linguistic sign is not yet articulated as the absence of an
object and as the distinction between real and symbolic.58 It is a pre-Oedipal stage when

Julia Kristeva, La femme, ce nest jamais a, Tel Quel, 59 Automne, 20, quoted from Toril Moi,
Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, London and New York: Routledge, 1985, 163.
55

56

Ibid.

57

Toril Moi, op.cit., 164.

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

166
the child is dominated by a chaotic mix of perceptions and feelings, and in this prelinguistic stage, the child does not distinguish itself from the mother. Therefore, the
mothers body mediates the symbolic law and becomes the ordering principle of the
semiotic chora. 59 The subject is dominated by drives, the most instinctual drive being
the death drive. Kristeva argues that to disrupt adult language, we should return to the
pre-linguistic energy of chora.
More particularly, Kristeva articulates her notion of the semiotic and the
symbolic, the two elements of signifying process: the semiotic is the pre-Oedipal bodily
drive associated with the maternal body, while the symbolic element is associated with
the Law of the Fathergrammar and structure. The two elements are constantly
engaged in a dialectical process to produce meaning. Kristeva emphasizes the semiotic,
the maternal function, in the development of subjectivity because it has been neglected
in male discourse. She argues that since masculine discourse has reduced the maternal
to nature (reproduction), a counter-action is necessary to develop a new discourse of the
maternal function that plays an important role in culture. In her view, the maternal is a
function of love and desire, and it is associated with gesture, rhythm and tones. For
Kristeva, the semiotic arises from the pre-Oedipal, maternal phase where there is no
gender distinction. Kristeva sees a subversive energy in the pre-Oedipal or pre-mirror
stage that can be used to counter masculine language.

59

Ibid., 27.

167
Although Kristeva does not define the semiotic as belonging exclusively to
women, it is closely connected to women. Kristeva sees subversive potential in the
marginal positions in which women are placed in masculine culture. Women speak and
write as outsiders to male-dominated discourse, and therefore their semiotic style is
likely to be different from mens, which is structured and which produces the fixed
subject.
Kristeva often links social revolution with poetic revolution and argues, [t]he
text is a practice that could be compared to political revolution: the one brings about in
the subject what the other introduces into society. The history and political experience of
the twentieth century have demonstrated that one cannot be transformed without the
other.60 The revolutionary subject, according to Kristeva, is a subject who is able to let
jouissance disrupt the Symbolic order, and that subject can be either masculine or
feminine. Kristeva locates this revolutionary activity in avant-garde poets such as
Lautramont and Mallarm or in modernist writers like James Joyceall male poets and
writers.
In an interview conducted in 1974, Kristeva characterizes male avant-garde
literature as feminine writing:

For at least a century, the literary avant-garde (from Mallarm

and Lautramont to Joyce and Artaud) has been introducing
60

Ibid., 17.

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ruptures, blank spaces, and holes into language All of these
modifications in the linguistic fabric are the sign of force that
has not been grasped by the linguistic or ideological system.
This signification renewed, infinitized by the rhythm in a text,
this precisely is (sexual) pleasure (la jouissance).61

She adds, In Western societies, (sexual) pleasure (the advent of non-sense which
multiples sense) is granted to women provided it isnt discussed. In the same way,
writer and literature in general are considered feminine.62 And she describes the role
women should play in the writing process as a negative function:

If women have a role to play in this on-going process, it is only

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

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

62

Ibid., 165-166.

63

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

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

Ibid., 167.

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

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CHAPTER IV
VISUALIZING FEMININE WRITING: AGNS VARDAS CINCRITURE

In an interview with Jean Michaud and Raymond Bellour in 1961, Agns Varda
affirmed, A womans vocabulary exists, linked to the feminine universe. I feel this
occasionally in that I am inspired by a certain number of attractions, subjects which
always draw me rather more than they would if I were a man I dont want to make
feminist cinema either, to tell womens stories about women.1 This was the year she
filmed Clo from 5 to 7; three years earlier, she had made a documentary, LOpra Mouffe,
about the people and the marketplace of rue Mouffetard in Paris. Although one is a
fiction film and the other a documentary, Varda described both films as subjective
documentaries. Clo from 5 to 7 contains images and scenes seen through the eyes of
Clo, a woman facing her fear of death; LOpra Mouffe was filmed when Varda was
pregnant with her first child, Rosalie, and was subtitled, Diary of a pregnant woman.
Both films exemplify womans vocabulary in that they convey the sensations,
emotions, and visions of a woman.
Since directing her first film, La Pointe courte, in 1954, Varda has made ten fiction
films and more than thirty documentary films, including ten feature documentaries. For

Il existe un vocabulaire de femme li luniverse fminine. Je sens cela par moments dans la mesure o je
suis aiguille par un certain nombre dattirances, de sujets qui mattirent toujours un peu plus que si jtais
un hommeJe ne veux pas non plus faire un cinma fministe, raconter des histoires de femmes concernant
les femmes. Agns Varda, interview with Jean Michaud and Raymond Bellour, Cinma 61, no. 60,
Octobre 1961, 7. (Translation is from Alison Smith, Agns Varda, op.cit., 92.)
1

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

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these questions. To do so, I have chosen films that I have determined best exemplify the
three major characteristics of feminine writing: first, narrative subversion and female
subjectivity; second, writing the body; and lastly, writing the Other.

1. Between the Real and the Imaginary: Narrative Subversion and Female Subjectivity

From her very first film, La Pointe courte (1954), Agns Varda experimented with
narrative structure and film language in ways that are radically different from dominant
cinema. Whereas the stories of classical films unfold in a linear narrative with invisible
editing that does not interrupt spectators absorption into the fictional world on screen,
Vardas films adopt various narrative and editing techniques that break down temporal
and spatial continuity and reveal the films own constructedness. As I have argued in
Chapter I, La Pointe courte claims its rightful place as the first modern or modernist film
in France before the advent of the French Nouvelle Vague. By breaking the illusion of
reality on screen, Vardas narrative experiments challenge the conventions and
ideologies of classical Hollywood cinema. This is one of the aspects that identify Vardas
cincriture with feminine writing: deconstruction of the classical film language of
Hollywoodits linearity, continuity and patriarchal ideologythrough non-linear,
disruptive, fragmentary, and experimental narrative and style.
As mentioned previously, Vardas notion of cincriture applies most
appropriately to documentary films that allow for random encounters and chances.
Varda is a filmmaker very much invested in making documentary films (more than half

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of her filmography is documentary, although the documentaries are rarely shown); even
her fiction films interweave real events, people and places with fictional characters and
plots. It is her tendency to inflect narrative with documentary reality that allows for the
play of random chances and encounters within her films, a combination that is one of
the prominent characteristics of her narrative construction. This strategy of interweaving
documentary and fiction is an embodiment of her concept of cincriture, which calls for
the realization of film as an open textual process, and this openness in turn is an
embodiment of feminine writing that blurs boundaries, limits and the distinction
between the real and the imaginary.
In this section of the chapter, I will look at Vardas fiction films, especially La
Pointe courte, Clo from 5 to 7 (1961) and Vagabond (1985), to explore her narrative
strategies of mixing documentary and fiction, and her techniques of breaking temporal
and spatial perspectives. What is unique about Vardas narrative experiments is that she
employs these strategies to explore issues of female identity. A concern for female
subjectivity and agency has been prominent throughout her fifty-four-year career. Clo
from 5 to 7 and Vagabond in particular address the issues of gaze, femininity, and
cinematic conventions to answer such questions as What does it mean to be a woman?
and How do we represent female agency in film? The two films share several common
elements that are significant in terms of narrative organization: first, they both feature a
female protagonist who pursues her own agency as she journeys through space; second,
they both present an alternative and subversive way of deconstructing normative

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conventions of traditional film narrative; and third, the narrative desire of both films
centers around death.
In exploring Vardas narrative strategies, it is crucial to define what narrative is
and to identify the primary function it performs. Marsha Kinder argues that narrative
should be seen broadly as a discursive mode of patterning and interpreting the
meanings of perception, an operation crucial to culture.2 Making narrative is, as film
theorist Edward Branigan argues, a strategy for making our world of experiences and
desires intelligible. It is a fundamental way of organizing data.3 Feminist film theorist
Teresa de Lauretis also posits that the aim of narrative theory is not to establish a
grammar of narrative but to understand the nature of the structuring and destructuring,
even destructive, processes at work in textual and semiotic production.4 Therefore, as
Kinder explains, the primary function of narratives can be contextualized in three ways:
aesthetically, ideologically and cognitively:

Aesthetically, the function of narrative is to arouse emotion or

give pleasure; to create a simulacrum of the world or preserve
ones experience in the face of death Ideologically, the
function of narrative is to transmit or challenge the dominant
values of culture, as in myths, religion and history

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

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

Teresa de Lauretis, Desire in Narrative, Alice Doesnt: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984, 105.
4

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Cognitively, the function of narrative is to contextualise the
meanings of perceptions, a process involving montage and
other modes of selection and combination, as well as the
hermeneutic pleasures of problem-solving.5

With these three primary functions of narrative in mind, I will now examine how
Varda successfully achieves these functions in her films. Although aesthetic and
hermeueutic pleasures are both effectively mobilized in her films, my main emphasis
will be on the ideological function of narrative since her films are consistent in their
challenge to the dominant master narrative of patriarchal society.
As previously noted, Varda was inspired by modernist writers such as William
Faulkner and Nathalie Sarraute. The narrative structure of La Pointe courte was inspired
by William Faulkners novel The Wild Palms, and she dedicated Vagabond to the French
woman writer of nouveau roman, Nathalie Sarraute,6 who has been pervasive influence
throughout Vardas work. In her autobiographical book, Varda par Agns (1994), she
explains why she dedicated the film to Sarraute:

For more than ninety years now, she is always sharp, intelligent,
and funny. To spend a moment with her would galvanize me, but

Marsha Kinder, op.ct., 121.

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

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

Varda has also stated that she dedicated [Vagabond] to Nathalie Sarraute
because, to me, she is an absolute rebel. Her comments on Sarrautes work evoke traits
of feminine writing: [Sarrautes] work is trying to capture the elusive, the space
between things, delving into feelings before they are put into words and actions. Varda
reveals that in Vagabond, she was trying to do in film what Sarraute does in novels:
Portraying each character in various ways, constantly reassessing opinions, everyone
being contradictory, nothing certain.8 Although Sarraute herself rejected the notion of
feminine writing, Leah D. Hewitt sees Sarrautes writing as fitting the theories of
feminine writing since her writing manifests a return to a repressed feminine.9 Sarraute
is also considered the precursor of the nouveau roman in that she called for a renewal of
novels form and sought to express multiple psychological points of view in her work.
In La Pointe courte, Varda adopts the dual structure of Faulkners Wild Palms. The
film tells two different stories taking place in La Pointe courte, a fishing village near

A plus de quatre-vingt-dix ans maintenant, elle est toujours aussi vive, aussi intelligente et drle. Passer
un moment avec elle me galvanise mais si je limagine, cause de ses livres, je la vois en solitaire qui marche
dans la campagne en hiver. Agns Varda, Varda par Agns, op.cit., 172. Nathalie Sarraute was born in 1900
and died in 1999. She was ninety-four years old when Varda wrote this book. Varda also writes that she
borrowed details from Sarrautes novel Planetarium for Vagabond.
7

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

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

178
Ste: one is a story of a couple in a relationship crisis after four years of marriage, and
the other is a story of the local fishermens struggle to organize a union. The two stories
are told in parallel without any connection between them, just as Wild Palms alternates
between a story of a couple and a story of prisoners trying to escape during a
Mississippi flood. Vardas film consists of seven sequences that alternate between the
couple and the villagers of La Pointe courte. All the sequences except the last one are
approximately ten minutes long; in the last, which is twenty minutes long, the couple
and villagers intersect without really connecting.
La Pointe courte set a tone for Vardas films to come in several aspects: first, the
meshing of documentary with fictional narrative; second, Vardas interest in
contradictions and oppositions (La Pointe courte explores the opposition between
individual life and the collective); third, depiction of contemporary socio-political issues
within the narrative (La Pointe courte depicts the conflict between the fishermen and the
Board of Health); fourth, insertion of images of landscape, objects, pictorial references
and animals (especially cats in La Pointe courte) as metaphors and as a means of breaking
narrative linearity; fifth, simple narrative but complex and carefully constructed miseen-scne that breaks visual perspective; sixth, attention to the marginal; and lastly,
Vardas interest in female subjectivity (In La Pointe courte, it is the wife who is
transformed during the couples brief stay in La Pointe courte.)
In the film, the stories of the couple and of the village residents are visually
contrasted because each is created with a different style of filming and editing. The story

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

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

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

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and her concept of love is transformed through her interaction with the otherness of La
Pointe courte where things are calm and slow. She tells her husband, Weve lost the
youth of our love, the emotion, discovery, desire, the passion. And I cant get over it. But
adult love based on knowledge is a passion, less external, not so fragile, rather like
maternal love that nothing can truly hurt. At the end, it is she who decides their fate.
However, the couple still does not relate with the villagers; even though they all appear
together in the last sequence, the film ends with the couple leaving the village.
La Pointe courte also manifests feminine values in its mode of production. As
noted in Chapter I, Varda made the film completely outside the French commercial
circuit and in collaboration with young actors and technicians in the form of a
cooperative. The very words by which Varda herself describes the films production
demonstrates a feminine attitude: I didnt bother with laws or unions, or get official
authorization. It was a way of eliminating the taboo of Cinema, of the closed world of
cinema and its hierarchies. Thats how it became a real film.12 She did not have any
commercial profit in mind when she made this film, and she has taken an artisanal
approach to filmmaking all through her career. The French word jouissance, which
means sexual pleasure and which French feminist writers call for in feminine writing,
is also interpreted by feminist literary critics as a pleasure different from the masculine

12

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

182
pleasure associated with the desire for capitalist profit and appropriation. Elaine Marks
and Isabelle de Courtivron explain:
This pleasure [jouissance], when attributed to a woman, is
considered to be of a different order from the pleasure that is
represented within the male libidinal economy often described
in terms of the capitalist gain and profit motive. Womens
jouissance carries with it the notion of fluidity, diffusion,
duration. It is a kind of potlatch in the world of orgasms, a
giving, expending, dispensing of pleasure without concern
about ends or closure. 13

The basic thematic and aesthetic elements of La Pointe courte can also be found in
Clo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond. Both of these latter films mix documentary elements with
fictional narrative; both take note of the contemporary socio-political issuesClo from 5
to 7 deals with the collective fear of cancer in the 1960s France, and Vagabond was
inspired by the emergence of le nouveau pauvre (the new poor) of the 1980s; both employ
filming and editing techniques that break linearity and visual perspective; both tell a
simple story by means of complex narrative devices; and both demonstrate Vardas
interest in the issue of female subjectivity.
Clo from 5 to 7 is the story of a beautiful singer anxiously awaiting the results of
a medical exam. She fears that the diagnosis might be cancer, and so she is a woman
forced to face her fear of death. This was one of the films produced in the highly

13

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

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politicized context of Paris in the 1960s and 1970s, the historical period when the shift to
post-structuralism took place,14 and under the surface of a seemingly conventional
melodrama, Varda has carefully constructed a political film that de-naturalizes the
conventional notion of femininity. The film covers Clos life for two hours in real time
and is carefully organized in chapters that indicate whom the scene is about and
emphasize the progression of time. By progressing in real-time, the film deliberately
imposes on itself a linear narrative. However, this linearity is not designed to lay out the
chronology of a narratives beginning, middle, and end in a conventional way but to
create a documentary sense of reality. While following Clo during these two hours,
Varda inserts digressions that pull us away from the films fictional structure into
moments of documentary. Wandering through the streets of Paris, Clo encounters
people in their everyday activities and, as Janice Mouton and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis
have argued in their respective writings, transforms herself from a feminine
masquerade into a flaneuse, a knowing subject15; from a woman being-looked-at to a
woman with her own active look.16

14

Marsha Kinder, op.cit., 120.

Janice Mouton, From Feminine Masquerade to Flaneuse: Agns Vardas Clo in the City, Cinema Journal,
Winter 2001, 3-16.
15

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

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

17

Marsha Kinder, op.cit., 128.

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

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time the girl escapes the truck and the lovers are reunited. This comic moment can be
seen as Vardas comment on perception and interpretationhow our understanding of
the world is colored by artificial constructions and how we can throw away that
artificeand also as a tribute to silent comedy, an intertextuality which was one of the
characteristics of New Wave films.
Clo from 5 to 7 certainly raises the issue of death as narrative desire, but what is
more significant is the way Varda expresses female subjectivity and agency in her
narrative. According to Teresa de Lauretis, the subject of classical narrative is masculine.
Only the male hero is capable of progressing and changing. For a womans desire to be
fulfilled, she must first become an object. Thus, a womans becoming a subject capable of
defining her own desires requires a narrative transgression or a revolution. In Clo from 5
to 7, the female protagonist transforms herself from an object of desire to a woman of
active looking by interacting with social reality. The film unfolds a linear narrative but
still subverts the notion of woman in patriarchal society, and Vardas cincriture
effectively deconstructs the symbolic order inscribed in the traditional male-centered
film narrative.
While death is used as a metaphor for self-discovery and transformation in Clo
from 5 to 7, it acts as a hermeneutic code18 in Vagabond. While Clo ultimately overcomes
her fear of death, Vagabond starts with the death of its female protagonist, Mona. In
In his book, S/Z, Roland Barthes lists the five major codes under which all the textual signifiers can be
grouped. The hermaneutic code is the driving question of a narrative that arouses the readers curiosity.
18

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

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

19

Susan Hayward, Beyond the gaze and into femme-filmcriture: Agns Vardas Sans toit ni loi (1985),op.cit., 270.

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ended up dead in a ditch, but we never learn who she really is or why she was drifting
alone in the first place. We dont learn about her; instead we learn about the multiplicity
of cultural and subjective attitudes that shape perception.
In terms of narrative subversion, the film effectively deconstructs the genre of the
road movie. Traditionally, it is a male who is on the move in a road movie, and his
movements are often towards self-discovery. However, in Vagabond it is a young woman
who is moving towards her death. Varda also deliberately subverts the use of the
tracking shot, an icon of the road movie. Varda herself explained in her DVD
commentary of the film that the tracking shots move from right to left instead of left to
right because Mona is moving towards her death. Since we write from left to right,
tracking from right to left defies social conventions. Mona herself defies all the social
conventions attributed to a decent young woman: she is filthy and selfish, and thus she
repels. Because she is completely outside convention, she is unlikable, and this in turn
reveals the predominant social view of a drifter.
In sum, both Clo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond have complicated narrative structures
that fragment the linear causality of classical Hollywood narrative. Also, on the
discursive level, the two films challenge the conventional notion of femininity and the
patriarchal ideology of dominant cinema. Furthermore, both films could be examined in
terms of what Teresa de Lauretis has called narrative with a vengeance.20 Clo from 5 to 7

20

In her book, Alice Doesnt: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984),

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provides the visual pleasure of a beautiful woman, but the beautiful woman refuses to
remain as a woman-being-looked-at and transforms herself into a subject of active
looking; in Vagabond, Varda has consciously inverted Citizen Kane, the canonical art film
Since feminine writing is about deconstructing dominant language, I now turn to
the question of how Vardas films violate or subvert classical narratives spatial
construction visually; that is, how the spatial construction of Clo from 5 to 7 and
Vagabond disrupt the classical narrative model of linear perspective. This examination
brings into play the relation between narrative and space as discussed by Stephen
Heath and others. In Clo from 5 to 7, the protagonist walks through the streets of Paris
and transforms herself from the clich woman to a woman with an active look, and in
Vagabond, the protagonist journeys through rural France towards her death. One is about
a woman in the city, and the other is about a woman traveling the bleak landscape of the
countryside. Lets see how spaces are represented in each film and how the filmic space
in each film helps to create a specifically feminine filmwriting that subverts the
masculine language of classical narrative.
As I mentioned, the stories of two films are very simple: Clo from 5 to 7 is about a
beautiful singer overcoming her fear of death, and Vagabond is a story of a young female
wanderer who has been found frozen to death in a ditch. In each film, however, Varda
Teresa de Lauretis argues that she sees it (=feminist cinema) possible without the stoic, brutal prescription
of self-discipline, the destruction of visual pleasure (156) and that the most exciting work in cinema and in
feminism today is not anti-narrative or anti-Oedipal. She calls for narrative and Oedipal with a
vengeance which seeks to stress the duplicity of that scenario and the specific contradiction of the female
subject in it. (157)

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

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companion that she sees cancer and that Clo is doomed. With this powerful beginning
prefiguring Clos fate, the film sparks viewers curiosity as to whether the fortune
tellers prediction will come true. At the same time, however, the film distances viewers
from being sutured into the fictional narrative by juxtaposing color with black and white.
The tarot card scenes are the only color scenes in the whole film; Varda explains this
choice:

From the first images of Clo from 5 to 7, the card readers

colored deck tells Clos future virtually, as a lie or a
premonition.
Like a short prologue inserted in a story, this beginning of Clo
from 5 to 7 is in color. Or rather that tablecloth and the cards are.
The credits appear over them. The film is announced in color,
what the card reader sees is a fiction, then we see Clos terrified
face in black-and-white, like the rest of the film.22

Varda imagined the color of fear as white because she had read somewhere that
in Asia the color of mourning is white.23 So she utilized white as a sensation. Her use
of black and white as reality and color as fantasy also goes against a common use of
color in film: black and white for the past, color for the present. However, according to
Edward Buscombe, when color was first used in cinema, it tended to connote fantasy
Ds les premires images de Clo de 5 7, les tarots colors de la cartonmancienne racontent lavenir de
Clo en virtuel, en mensonge ou en premonitionComme un court prologue insr dans le rcit, ce dbut de
Clo de 5 7 est en couleurs. Ou plus prcisement le tapis de table et les tarots. Le gnrique sy inscrit. On
annonce en couleurs le film, ce que voit la cartomancienne est une fiction, puis on voit le visage affol de
Clo, en noir et blanc comme la suite du film. Agns Varda, Ibid., 62. (Translation is from Agns Varda by
Alison Smith, op.cit., 23.)
22

23

Ibid.

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and not reality: [When] it first became technically feasible, color, it seems, did not
connote reality but the opposite[In] the first few years after the introduction of threecomponent of Technicolor (originally used in the Disney cartoon Flowers and Trees in
1932) the great majority of films employing the process were produced within genres
not notably realistic in the sense of their being accurate representations of what life is
like.24 Varda shot most of Clo from 5 to 7 in black and white because of the limited
budget she was working with (like most New Wave filmmakers of the 1960s);
nevertheless, she used color to go against the current of her time, when black and white
was often used to connote the past, to revert to the original use of color in cinema.
Varda uses art work and photograph-like shots frequently in the film to break
the continuous movement of time and also of the characters. These inserts are often
subjective shots of what Clo sees or imagines. In fact, Vardas inspiration for the film
was a series of sixteenth-century paintings entitled Death and the Maiden by German
painter Hans Baldung Grien (1484-1545):

I imagined a character walking in the city. I thought of the

master of Jacques the Fatalist. He became a female singer,
wandering in Paris, panic-stricken by the fear of cancer, often
accompanied by her fatalist governess. The fear of being
fatally ill. Beauty therefore does not protect her, neither the
mirrors nor the gazes of the others? The paintings of Baldung
Grien, beautiful and frightening, very quickly became the sense
of the film and its spirit: beauty and death. One sees women,
beautiful in their blonde flesh, embraced by a skeleton who
24

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

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gives them a rough time or frightens them. In one of the
paintings, the skeleton pulls the woman by the hair. It is the fear,
the great fear, that of death, because cancer threatens. Clo waits
the result of a medical analysis. The fear awakes her.
Everybody wants me, nobody loves me, she says
Everything I feel about the interior tension of this sweet woman
during the ninety minutes (from 5:00 pm to 6:30 pm),
everything was inspired by these women and these skeletons of
Baldung Grien. A small reproduction of one of his paintings
was often hung on the wall of the place where we filmed. It is
the force of painting to propose works that can become
inspiration and continuous dream.25

Thus, it was a set of still images that generated a narrative for Varda. In many of
Vardas films, art images are inserted or referred to. In Vagabond, when the living Mona
is being introduced for the first time, coming out of the sea after bathing, Varda herself
narrates, it seems to me she came from the sea, an obvious reference to Botticellis
famous quattrocento painting Birth of Venus. Both Death and the Maiden and Birth of Venus
portray a beautiful woman, an image that is linked to the issues of feminine
representation and identity in art. It is interesting to note that it was these immobile,

Jai imagin un personage marchant dans la ville. Jai pens au matre de Jacques le Fataliste. Il est devenu
une chanteuse, dambulant dans Paris, affole par le peur du cancer, souvent accompagne par sa
gouvernante fataliste. La peur dtre mortellement malade. La beaut ne protge-t-elle donc pas, ni les
miroirs ni les regards des autres? Les peintures de Baldung Grien, belles et effrayantes, sont trs vite
devenues le sens du film et son ressort: la beaut et la mort. On y voit des femmes, belles dans leur chair
blonde, enlaces par un squelette qui les malmne ou les effraie. Dans une des toiles, le squelette tire la
femme par les cheveux. Cest la peur, la vraie grande peur, celle de mourir parce que le cancer menace. Clo
attend le rsultat dune analyse mdicale. La peur la rveille. Tout le monde me veut, personne ne maime, ditelleTout ce que je sentais de la tension intrieure de cette femme douce pendant les quatre-vingt-dix
minutes du film (de 5 heures 6 heures 30), tout cela est inspir par ces femmes et ces squelettes de Baldung
Grien. Une petite reproduction dun de ses tableaux tait souvent punaise au mur, l o nous tournions.
Cest la force de la peinture de proposer des oeuvres qui peuvent devenir inspiration et rverie continue.
Agns Varda, Varda par Agns, op.cit., 48.
25

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fixed images of women that inspired Varda to create visual narratives of women in
movement. Clo walks through the streets of Paris, and Mona of Vagabond wanders
through the rural landscape.
Although both films center on a female protagonist on the move, the direction of
their movement is opposite: Clo moves towards self-realization and transformation,
while Mona moves towards death. It will be an interesting task to compare and contrast
how Varda translates this different tone and atmosphere in visual terms. For example,
Clo mostly moves from left to right across the frame, whereas Monas movement is
mostly from right to left, as explained earlier.
Time also plays a crucial role in Clo from 5 to 7, as is evident from the films title
that indicates a specific time duration. However, despite the films title, the films actual
running time is ninety minutes: the film actually covers 5:00 to 6:30 p.m., leaving it to
the audience to fill in the gap of the last thirty minutes of diegetic time. As Sandy
Flitterman-Lewis has analyzed in great detail in her book, To Desire Differently: Feminism
and the French Cinema, Clo from 5 to 7 is divided into thirteen chapters which are
presented in chronological order, and in the process of this temporal progression, Clo
transforms herself from a woman-being-looked-at to a woman with her own look. The
pivotal moment of her transformation occurs in the middle chapter: chapter 7. That is, at
exactly forty-five minutes into the film, Clo throws away her wig and goes out into the
street alone, and thus opens herself to the world. If she has been a woman representative

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of conventional femininity in the first half of the film, she becomes a transgressive
woman with her own active look and subjectivity in the latter half of the film.
However, it is not only Clo who changes in the latter half of the film. The style of
the film, the visual language of the film, also changes. The film visually depicts Clos
two passages through Paris differently. In the first half of the film, Clo is depicted as
the clich woman, oblivious to her surroundings and absorbed only in her beauty. To
visualize her narcissistic self-absorption, the camera follows her and keeps her strictly in
the center of the frame. According to David Bordwell, in classical filmmaking, the
human body is made the center of the narrative and graphic interest,26 and centered
composition is a way to shape the story action for the spectator. Thus, conventional
perspectival space is constructed to convey visually Clos conventional femininity.
Moreover, in many places she visits or passes on the way from the fortune teller back to
her apartmente.g., the hat shop, caf, the streetsshe is surrounded by mirrors. In this
half of the film, the mirrored images of her beautiful face give her self-assurance against
her fear of cancer.

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

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

Ibid., 50.

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in the mirrors is centered and unified, but in the few mirror scenes in the latter half of
the film, her image is fragmented and broken. In this way, Varda has rendered the
transformation of subjectivity in purely visual terms.
The representation of a woman character in the urban space of Paris is also
important in Clo from 5 to 7 because Clo breaks away from the women characters in
Paris featured in other New Wave films, all made by male directors. According to Susan
Hayward, the woman in Paris of French cinema (the younger woman) has for the most
part fallen into one of two categories:

She finds herself as the deviant (temptress, whore, fallen

woman, liar, cheat, murderer), even in comedies (neglectful
mother, for example)or she is represented as in distress
(suicidalpossibly madso still deviant really), or confused
either by being in the city or in mortal danger. Rarely is she
represented as heroic. Rarely does she express her own
subjectivity Rarely, does the woman occupy a voiced position,
does she become in a sense a truly female modernist flneur with
power to walk through the city on her own terms (much as the
male flneur did before her.) Only two films of woman as female
modernist flneur spring immediately to mind: Clo walking
through Paris as she faces death in Agns Vardas Clo de 5 7
(1961), and Florence roving the streets of Paris at night
searching for her lover in Louis Malles Ascensceur pour
lchafaud (1957). In both instances it is their subjectivities and
subjective experience of the city that we are privy to.28

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

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

200
from American shampoo to the Algerian war. This long sequence appears to have
nothing to do with the progression of the story. However, the Algerian war news has
two functions: first, it is a political comment by Varda as a French filmmaker during the
time of Algerian war, and second, it sets up Clos transformation. Clo is not at all
interested in this news coverage, but later on in the film, she becomes aware of the
Algerian war through her meeting with Antoine. The visual rendering of this taxi
sequence is striking. For the whole duration of this long sequence, the camera is fixed on
the radio at the center of the frame in what Bordwell calls sonic perspective. Since
Clo and Angle are sitting on either side of the backseat, this shot is not a point of view
shot from either of them. The film seems to offer a sonic or verbal spectacle instead of
the visual spectacle of classical cinema, and in the process, Varda makes her political
statement about the Algerian war. During the eight-year war with Algeria (1954-62) not
a single film on the Algerian question was granted a visaIn the 1960s, films which
tried to address this conflict, or the role of the army in any context, were effectively
blocked [by censorship].29 Here, Varda has cleverly succeeded in incorporating both
issuesthe Algerian war and the armyinto the film via the seemingly objective and
distanced vehicle of a radio news broadcast.
Vardas authorial stance is more evident in Vagabond, for which she provided the
voiceover narration from an omniscient point of view. The film starts with the death of a
29

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

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young vagabond woman who has left no trace as to her identity. The police conclude
she died of natural causes: she froze to death. After the police have wrapped her body in
a plastic body bag, the camera switches to a shot of a beach, and Vardas narration
begins:

No one claimed the body, so it went from a ditch to potters

field. She had died a natural death without leaving a trace. I
wonder if those who knew her as a child still think about her.
But people she had met recently remembered her. Those
witnesses helped me tell of the last weeks of her last winter. She
left a mark on them. They spoke of her, not knowing she had
died. I didnt tell them. Nor that her name was Mona Bergeron.
I know little about her myself, but it seems to me she came from
the sea.30

This is the only narration used in the entire film. The film does not tell the
audience it is Vardas voice, but as we can figure out from the narration, it is definitely
the voice of the filmmaker. The narrator I is the one who met with those who
witnessed Monas last days and is the only one who knows Monas last name. It is the
voice of the author who tries to put together the pieces of the puzzle that is Mona. And
the narration also tells the audience how Monas identity is going to be reconstituted
through the memories of the people she met during the last few weeks of her life.
Before the narration, the narrative unfolds in chronological order, although there
are inserts of puzzling shots that disrupt the films linear perspective. However, as the

30

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

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

31

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

203
However, the tracking shots in Vagabond often foreground and emphasize space and
place rather than the character of Mona. Tracking shots begin without her; she comes in
and then disappears from the frame; each shot begins and ends on some wayside object,
giving the audience a space for meditation. Also, Mona is not always kept at the center
of the moving frame. Thus, Varda does not use the tracking shot to reframe her character
in a perspectival composition. The tracking shot either overtakes Mona or is overtaken
by her, and sometimes, the tracking shot continues even after Mona has left the frame.
As she did in Clo from 5 to 7, Varda also violates many rules of classical cinema, such as
the 180 degree rule, the axis match, and movement match, in Vagabond.
As I have examined in the case of La Pointe courte, Clo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond,
Varda as a filmmaker does not set out to make classical narratives that are, according to
Teresa de Lauretis, patriarchal. Also as a female author, Varda distinguishes herself by
challenging and subverting both the narrative content and the visual style of classical
cinema. Her films are good examples of how the notion of writing can be adapted and
translated into the visual medium of film. Also, her integration of documentary material
into fictional structures in both Clo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond suggests the new uses for
improvisation that Varda has emphasized in her concept of cincriture. She calls Clo from
5 to 7 a subjective documentary that reconciles two aspects of reality that interest me:

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

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the very premeditated and reconstituted aspect and the documentary style, real life,
things caught in the moment. By following Clo into the streets, the film captures
certain aspects of Paris, its streets and its people, but it does so through the completely
subjective view of a young lady who feels sick.32 For Varda, even documentaries are
never objective because they are the result of the filmmakers selection during the
editing process. This play with the mixing of documentary and fiction is a constant mark
of Vardas feminine cincriture.

2 Writing the Body: Inscription of the Feminine

For me, being a woman is above all having a body of

a woman. A body that is not cut into more or less
exciting pieces, a body that is not limited to the socalled erogenous zones (and classified by men), a body
with refined zones33
--Agns Varda

In espousing her idea of feminine writing, Hlne Cixous asserts, Woman must
put herself into the textas into the world and into historyby her own movement,34

32

The quotations of Vardas words are from the DVD 4 by Agns Varda, Criterion Collection, 2008.

Pour moi, tre une femme, c'est d'abord avoir un corps de femme. Un corps qui ne soit pas dcoup en
morceaux plus ou moins excitants, un corps qui ne soit pas limit aux zones dites rognes (et classifies par
les hommes), un corps zones raffines . . . Agns Varda, Propos sure le cinma par Agns Varda, ed.
Mireille Amiel, Cinma 75, no. 204, Dcembre 1975, 48.
33

34

Hlne Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa,op.cit., 245.

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and she asks women to write your self. Your body must be heard. 35 Womens feelings
and experiences are emphasized, and the female body is the medium through which a
new mode of writing will emerge and displace masculine language. Specifically, she
associates the repressed female body with womens history:

[W]oman is body more than man is. Because he is invited to

social success, to sublimation. More body hence more writing.
For a long time, still, bodily, within the body she has answered
the harassment, the familial conjugal venture of domestication,
the repeated attempts to castrate her Now, I-woman am going
to blow up the Law: a possible and inescapable explosion from
now on; let it happen, right now, in language.36

Thus, Cixous places particular importance on the body, the very site of
repression and oppression by patriarchy. She argues that because the female body and
sexuality have been denied in silence and negation, opening up the body will be the
creative source of feminine writing. This is what she defines as the jouissance that
unleashes the unconscious and the feminine imaginary. Feminine jouissance drives the
woman to reaffirm her body, which has always been censored, and to rebuild her
identity as an independent entity. Hence, feminine writing is about writing the body.
In this section of the chapter, I will examine six of Vardas films which, I argue,
most clearly exemplify feminine cincriture that inscribes the female body in the text:

35

Ibid., 250.

36

Hlne Cixous, Sorties, op.cit., 95.

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

37

Agns Varda, Propos sure le cinma par Agns Varda, op.cit., 40.

38

Agns Varda, Varda par Agns, op.cit., 250.

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

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

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

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the one-eyed people and the tramps, all had been babies, the newborns often loved and
who were kissed on the stomach and had their backsides powdered 39
The film conveys a strong feeling of a pregnant woman who is filming the poor
people on the streets; it is filled with tenderness. In fact, Varda, who subtitled the film,
Diary of a pregnant woman, calls it a subjective documentary: a documentary about
la Mouffe and its people from a pregnant womans perspective.40 She wanted to film
something personal when she observed that pregnancy brought about a change in her
outlook and sensibility. She also describes it as her Threepenny Opera; hence the title,
LOpra Mouffe.
The film also reminds one of such silent documentaries as Jean Vigos propos de
Nice (1930) which documents the people and their daily routines in the city, a carnival,
and social inequalities. Also the two films are similar in that both blend documentary
realism and surrealism. Images of a dove trying to move out of a glass bowl, broken
light bulbs, a hatching egg inside that broken light bulb, a hatched chick in a glass are all
subjective shots of the pregnant woman. There is a dream-like sequence in which a
young woman runs in a gothic setting. There is an interesting juxtaposition in the

tous ceux-l, les vieux, les borgnes et les clochardes, tous avaient t des bbs, des nouveaux-ns
souvent aims qui on avait embrass le ventre et talqu le derrire Ibid., 115. This change in the outlook
and sensibility resonates with my own experience of pregnancy during which I began to see more babies
and children on the streets (which I hadnt noticed before) and I began to think of people as somebodys son
or daughter that brought tender, if not sentimental, feelings.
39

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

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

41

Ibid.

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We are not going to refuse ourselves the delights of a pregnancy,
which, moreover, is always dramatized or evaded or cursed in
classical texts. For if there is a specific thing repressed, that is
where it is found: the taboo of the pregnant woman (which says
a lot about the power that seems invested in her) . . . here are a
thousand ways of living a pregnancy, of having or not having a
relationship of another intensity with this still invisible other a
relationship of another intensityBring the other to life.
Women know how to live detachment; giving birth is neither
losing nor increasing. Its adding to life an other. 42

Writing in 1975, Cixous warns against a certain feminist tendency to negate

pregnancy:

The relation borne to the child must also be rethought. One trend
of current feminist thoughts tends to denounce a trap in
maternity that would consist of making the mother-woman an
agent who is more or less the accomplice of reproduction:
capitalist, familialist, phallocentrist reproduction. An accusation
and a caution that should not be turned into prohibition, into a
new form of repression. 43

Vardas instinctual filmmaking also evokes Kristevas notion of jouissance,

the pre-Symbolic delights and pleasure associated with the maternal body, i.e. the
semiotic body:

Language as symbolic function constitutes itself at the cost of

repressing instinctual drive and continuous relation to the
mother. On the contrary, the unsettled and questionable subject
42

Hlne Cixous, Sorties, op.cit., 90.

43

Ibid., 89. (Italics in original)

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

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

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

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

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

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before the camera, half of her body covered with chador-like veil and cloth and the other
half naked, the hand of her bare arm holding a red telephone. The naked half represents
the exploitation of womens body for commercial products and prostitution, and the
covered half represents the manner in which the female body is veiled and hidden
according to the cultural codes. It is a striking image that also reflects Vardas artistic
background in art history and photography.
The film goes on to show pornographic photos of women and magazine
commercials that exploit womens body to sell products; during these shots, we hear
women saying in unison: Each time I see a poster like this I think its absurd to
constantly see naked women. It feels like Im on the poster. The women continue to
shout, Each time a woman is undressed to sell a product, its me they undress, its me
they display, its me they criticize, its me they buy, its me they order by phone, its me
they pay for by check or cash, its me they offer as fodder for mens desire, expressing
the perception created by these images that men consider all women the same. The film
ends with a dialogue between the voice of a man (representing society) and the women
in the studio. The man threatens not to desire women anymore unless they stop
complaining, and the women demand that men change if they still need women and
love. The film concludes with the womens chorus: I am a woman. Women must be
reinvented.
Rponse de femme reflects and responds to feminist discourses in 1970s France. In
1970, feminists viewed motherhood as the major cause of womens oppression in

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capitalist society and argued that women must reject pregnancy and motherhood.
Moreover, as Claire Duchen points out, [f]rom 1970 to 1975, the analysis of motherhood
was almost exclusively tied to the campaign for free, legal abortion on demand, and the
diffusion of information about, and free availability to all women of contraception. 45
Thus, the the right to control our own bodies became a central issue for feminist
activists.
However, in the latter half of the 70s, attempts were made to find new ways to
accept motherhood without its being either destiny or slavery, the two extreme analyses
of motherhood in France. The scene in Vardas film in which two women show
opposing views of motherhood reflects this ongoing discussion among women: should
motherhood be prized as an experience specific to women or should it be condemned
for being part of their ideological oppression?
Rponse de femmes does not raise the issue of abortion, but a year later in 1976,
Varda made a fiction film in which the struggle for abortion rights is the central theme:
One Sings, the Other Doesnt. Whereas Varda calls LOpra Mouffe a subjective
documentary, she describes One Sings, the Other Doesnt as a documented fiction on the
struggle of women between 1969 and 1976.46 It is a fiction film; however, the events and
problems the two women protagonists experience draw a realistic picture of this period
45

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

une fiction documente sur la lutte des femmes entre 1969 et 1976. Agns Varda, Varda par Agns, op.cit.,
110.
46

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of the womens liberation movement in France. In particular, as I have elaborated in
Chapter I, the two protagonists participate in the 1970s struggle for abortion rights
triggered by the Bobigny trial. The struggle is reconstructed in the film with both
protagonists actively involved, one as a singer who sings militant feminist songs such as
My body belongs to me (Mon corps est moi), the other as a staff member of a family
planning center. Varda emphasizes the importance of the Bobigny struggle in her
interview with Cahiers du cinma in 1977: If there is a struggle told in this film, it is the
struggle for contraception, for the sexual or corporal freedom of women. In the history
of this struggle, Bobigny is more important than 68.47
As the film begins, Varda herself introduces the film in a voice-over narration,
stating that the film is about women, men, love, music, marriage or not, children or not
and friendship; it is about life, and then adding, It could also be subtitled, Women are
made, not born as our great Simone says, Simone de Beauvoir. During the credit
sequence in the beginning of the film, a series of black-and-white photos of women are
shown on screen to accentuate the films theme of women and the female body. Then the
film begins in 1962 in Paris when Pomme, a seventeen-year-old student, visits Jermes
photography shop and finds that her ex-neighbor, Suzanne, is living with Jerme. She
finds out because Jerme is a photographer who takes portrait photos of neighborhood

Sil y a une lutte raconte dans ce film cest celle pour la contraception, pour la libert sexuelle ou
corporelle des femmes. Dans lhistoire de cette lutte, Bobigny est plus important que 68. Propos recueillis
par Jean Narboni, Serge Toubianan et Dominique Villain, Cahiers du cinma, no. 276, mai 1977, quoted from
Ibid., 255.
47

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women, including his lover Suzanne. Pomme spots photos of Suzanne on the wall of
Jermes photoshop and comments that all the women in his photos look sad. In fact, it
turns out that twenty-two-year-old Suzanne has two children and is struggling with
economic difficulty. She is pregnant with a third child and is considering abortion.
Pomme lies to her parents to get money for the abortion, and Suzanne has the abortion
in Switzerland, but she comes back sterilized. Jerme kills himself, and Pomme leaves
her home and her abusive father to become a singer. The two girls are separated, but
they write each other postcards detailing their lives and emotions. Pomme falls in love
with an Iranian man and goes to live in Iran. She becomes pregnant but comes back to
Paris ten years later. She and Suzanne meet again, and together they are engaged in the
womans struggle of the mid-1970s. One Sings, the Other Doesnt is one of Vardas more
conventional narrative films; however, it provides a vivid portrait of women in the 1970s
who stood up to claim their right to control their own bodies.
Daguerrotypes is an eighty-minute color documentary Varda made in 1974 about
the street on which she had lived since 1951. Specifically, the film documents the little
shops and shopkeepers on rue Daguerre in Paris. The idea of this documentary was in
part prompted by the fact that she wanted to stay within a certain distance of her second
child, Mathieu. Varda shot Daguerrotypes a year after Mathieus birth, and her concerns
as a mother led her to invent a new and original way of filming. As previously noted,
Varda came up with the initial concept of the film from the idea that women are

220
attached to the house.48 Because she had one-year old Mathieu at home, Varda did not
want to go far from home to shoot. Consequently, she thought of a new umbilical cord
that would keep her and Mathieu close to each other. The new umbilical cord is the
electrical line she pulled from the meter of her house. She connected the electrical line to
her lighting equipment and stayed within its length of eighty meters. Thus, although
this documentary is not about maternity or pregnancy, the ideas of filming within the
range of a new umbilical cord and of women being attached to the house reflect
Vardas concern for womens conditions, limits and possibilities. As for its actual
content, the documentary pays attention to merchants of small establishments who are
marginal in the capitalist system. In this respect, the film fits more into the notion of
writing the Other, another important or more important element of feminine writing.
Therefore, I will discuss the film more in detail in the next section.
As previously mentioned in Chapter II, Varda often uses her own voice-over
narration to assert her authorial presence. However, in Jane B. par Agns V. and The
Gleaners and I, she goes one step further by appearing on screen and writing her own
body. Both films take the form of a cinematic essay in which the filmmaker herself is
present and active. Jane B. par Agns V. is a documentary about actress/singer Jane Birkin,
and The Gleaners and I is a film in which Varda meets and interviews modern-day
scavengers. While these films are about other people, they gradually turn into self48

Ibid., 40.

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

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

223
not yet written. In fact, like most of Vardas films, the film was made without a prewritten script.
At the same time, Varda herself and the camera, which is her brush, often appear
onscreen, reminding the audience of her presence. Vardas self-consciousness as a cinepainter is most evident in a scene in which the camera and the director are reflected in a
round mirror. As Alison Smith points out, the round mirror in the scene reminds us of
the Jan van Eyck painting Arnolfini Portrait (1434) and Diego Velazquezs Las Meninas
(1656), both of which have a mirror at the back reflecting the figure of the painter or the
model.49
The idea of self-portrait is even more prominent in The Gleaners and I. This is a
self-reflexive film in which Varda often comments directly on the art of filmmaking. She
comments as well on the relationship between art and self-portraiture: while her voiceover narration describes how she discovered many of Rembrandts self-portraits during
a visit to Japan, she claims that art is always self-portrait.
In this instance, Varda not only inserts herself into the film but also films her
body. A long segment of the documentary focuses on Varda herself, especially on her
aging body. She comments in her narration that she is now old and that death is around
the corner. With her small digital camera in one hand, Varda films the other hand. Thus,
she shoots close-ups of her old, wrinkled hand while holding the small digital video
49

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

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

Mireille Rosello, Agns Vardas Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse: Portrait of the Artist as an Old Lady, Studies
in French Cinema, vol. 1, no. 1, 2001.
50

51

Ibid., 34.

52

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

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

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

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the toilet and vomited. The content of her story is in strong contrast to the calm and
beautiful setting of the tableau vivant, implying that such classical portraits might not
reflect the true inner feelings of the persons portrayed. The film ends with the same
tableau vivant, but there, Birkin is celebrating her fortieth birthday.
Later we see the whole picture in tableau vivant. Even here, however, it is not a
faithful reproduction of the painting but actually a combination of three different
paintings: Titians Venus of Urbino and Francis Goyas 1800 sister paintings of The
Clothed Maja (La Maja vestida) and The Nude Maja (La Maja desnuda.). Birkin re-enacts
Venus and Maja, respectively. The intimate tracking shot caresses Janes nude body,
rendering it abstract, like a sublime landscape. Here, the womans body is not placed
within a landscape but becomes the landscape itself. Vardas portraiture is here intimate
but not sexual, as is the depiction in the original paintings by male painters. Instead,
here we have a womans portrait by a woman, as is indicated by the films title, Jane B.
par Agns V.
At the end of the film, there is a second reconstitution of the same paintings.
However, this time, Birkin comes back as the maid, and Venus is portrayed by another
actress who looks more like the Venus in the original painting. Birkin expresses her
resentment towards the class differences between her mistress (the noble Venus) and
herself by cursing her mistress with the wish that she die and rot. Birkin releases a
swarm of flies that attack the tableau vivant and mar the whole painting. With this
striking image of plague, the classical ideal of feminine beauty is attacked and denied.

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

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as a sexual invitation, caused it to be labeled pornographic.53 Finally, Goyas The
Nude Maja is said to be the first totally profane life-size female nude in Western art
with its depiction of female pubic hair. And because of this perceived profanity, the
identity of the model is still debated, as is the identity of Titians model for Venus of
Urbino. (Later, Manet reworked Titians Venus into his painting Olympia, using a
prostitute as his model, thus once again causing a big scandal.)
These paintings caused scandals and dispute over their models identities
because of the depicted womens active and powerful looking, which was traditionally
denied to ancient goddesses and noble women. Therefore, by bringing these paintings
alive through the figure of Jane Birkin, by rolling these three women from different
times and places into one, Varda raises the ongoing question of feminine identity, the
mysteries of identity, which is the same issue she explored in her fiction film Vagabond in
1981. In her narration for Jane B. par Agns V., Varda says, beauty is scandal, thus
emphasizing the particular and limiting relationship between beauty, power, and
feminine identity that patriarchy has constructed.
Moreover, as a modern-day Venus and Maja, Jane actively expresses her desires
about how she wants to be represented in Vardas portrait of her. As previously noted,
the film alternates between documentary segments chronicling Birkins real life and
fictional episodes that, while prompted or inspired by her stories and desires, are

53

Roan Goffen, Titians Women, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1997.

230
created by Varda. In these fictional sketches, Jane takes different roles as an actress, and
her public image as a star is contrasted with the real Birkin, again troubling and
exploring the meaning of feminine identity.
Thus, both Jane B. par Agns V. and The Gleaners and I are examples of the
cinematic visualization of feminine writing. In Jane B. par Agns V., Varda creates a
cinematic portrait that reworks the traditional portraits of patriarchal society by
breaking their clichs of feminine beauty. In The Gleaners and I, she sheds new light on
the old practice of gleaning, which traditionally was carried out solely by women but is
now no longer gender-specific. Varda writes or cine-writes the body in both films
with her filming of Janes body and her own, and she writes or cine-writes the Other
with her attention to the maid in Jane B. par Agns V. and to the leftovers and outsiders of
contemporary society in The Gleaners and I. Furthermore, her frequent use of still images
of painting and photography fragments and disrupts classical cinemas narrative model
of temporal and spatial linearity, thus opening up the possibility of an alternative film
language.
As an end note to this section of the chapter, I briefly call attention to another
aspect of Vardas filmmaking that embodies the characteristics of feminine writing: her
films not only write the body but also write sensations belonging specifically to women.
As elaborated earlier, the subjective documentary LOpra Mouffe expresses a pregnant
womans contradictory feelings of hope and anxiety. In addition, Vardas fiction film
Clo from 5 to 7 conveys Clos particularly female reaction to the fear of death. In the

231
first half of the film she equates her beauty to her life, using the mantra that as long as
Im beautiful, Im alive to fruitlessly try to shake off her fear and anxiety.
Further, Vardas 1987 fiction film, Kung-Fu Master, vividly depicts a forty-yearold womans boredom and emptiness, followed by her excitement over new feelings of
love and passion when she falls in love with a fourteen-year-old boy. In this film, Jane
Birkin plays Mary-Jane, who hopelessly falls for Julien, her daughters classmate; his
boyishness is represented by his penchant for the video game, Kung-Fu Master. This
brief love story between a middle-aged woman and an adolescent inverts the MayDecember relation usually depicted on screen between older men and young women or

the Lolita complex, a sexual attraction to younger girls by adult males.

3. Writing the Other: Vardas Cinema of Marginality

In Coming to Writing, Hlne Cixous states that writing is a gesture of

love,54 and that love signifies an open attitude toward the Other. What is the Other?
she asks in The Newly Born Woman. If it is truly the other, there is nothing to say; it
cannot be theorized. The other escapes me. It is elsewhere, outside: absolutely
other.But in History, of course, what is called the other is an alterity that does settle
down, that falls into the dialectical circle. It is the Other in a hierarchically organized

Hlne Cixous, Coming to Writing, Coming to Writing and Other Essays, trans. Deborah Jenson et al.,
Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1992, 42.
54

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relationship in which the same is what rules, names, defines, and assigns its other.55
While in the masculine schema of recognition, there is no place for the other, for an
equal other, for a whole and living woman, 56 feminine writing seeks the possibility of
extending into the other, of being in such a relation with the other that I move into the
other without destroying the other and looks for the other where s/he is without
trying to bring everything back to myself.57 This embracing of the Other celebrates
differences, multiplicity, and heterogeneity.
For Julia Kristeva, feminine equals marginal. Therefore, her notion of the
feminine extends beyond women to include all other groups marginalized by the
dominant, as they all face the same struggle:

As long as it has not analysed their relation to the instances of

power, and has not given up the belief in its own identity, any
libertarian movement (including feminism) can be recuperated
by that power and by a spirituality that may be laicized or
openly religious. The solution?. . . Who knows? It will in any
case pass through that which is repressed in discourse and in
the relations of production. Call it woman or oppressed
classes of society, it is the same struggle, and never the one
without the other.58

55

Hlne Cixous, Sorties, op.cit., 71.

56

Ibid., 79.

57

Hlne Cixous, Castration or Decapitation?op.cit., 55, 5n.

Julia Kristeva, La femme, ce nest jamais a, Tel Quel, 59, Automne 1974, 24, quoted from Toril Moi,
Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, op.cit., 164.
58

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

59

Toril Moi, Ibid., 166.

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

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

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

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Varda has argued that we should be open to differences:

I often hear this: people who grumble when one says there are
differences in cultures and that there are fundamental
differences to know. Should we abolish them? I believe that
people are limited. I am open to lots of things: I was in Cuba, I
made a film on Cuba, I tried to understand the Afro-Cuban
music; I was in Los Angeles, I tried to understand these
Mexican-Americans people call Chicanos and their mentality; I
was in China in 1957 when it was not in fashion, 62

Her openness to the Other is not limited to the subjects she chooses for her films.
It is also manifested in her documentary approach to all of her filmmaking. As
previously noted, Varda takes a documentary approach to her fiction films, which
allows for improvisations and the unexpectedthe Otherto enter the narrative; it is an
open-textual process. Also, the rich intertextuality in Vardas films corresponds to the
notion of feminine writing in that it is concerned with the openness of texts and
multiplicity of meanings. In particular, photography and painting play a crucial role in
her filmmaking, and this intertextual practice celebrates multiple voices. In short, it is an
embrace of the Other on a formal level. For Kristeva, intertextuality is not merely a
study of sources but the transposition of one (or several) sign system[s] into another;
Jentends beaucoup cela: des gens qui rousptent quand on dit quil y a des diffrences dans les cultures,
il y a des diffrences fondamentales savoir. Est-ce quil faut les abolir? Je crois que les gens sont limits. Je
me suis ouverte des tas de choses: jai t Cuba, jai fait un film sur Cuba, jai essay de comprendre la
musique afrocubaine; jai t Los Angeles, jai essay comprendre des Mexicains amricains que lon
appelle les Chicanos et leur mentalit; jai t en Chine en 57 alors que ce ntait pas la mode Agns
Varda, Le Film a venir les detours de linspiration, Agns Varda, Revue Belge du cinma, no. 20, t indien
1987, 6.
62

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

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

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

In terms of cultural references and heritage, she describes herself as a mlange

because she was born in 1928 in Belgium, the daughter of a Greek father and a French
mother. She spent her early childhood in Belgium and then lived in Ste (the town
where she filmed La Pointe courte) before moving to Paris. Thus, she reports that her
cultural references are not French but eclectic: while she reads mostly French literature,
she is influenced by Flemish, Italian, Egyptian and Greek painting and the art of the Far
East.65 As a filmmaker, she prefers to film real people: Nothing excites me more than to
find in real life the models and the characters to film or not.66 Indeed, most of her
fiction films such as La Pointe courte, Clo from 5 to 7, Le Bonheur, Lions Love, Vagabond,
and Kung-Fu Master, feature real people in their real situations. The use of fishermen and
their families in La Pointe courte gives the film a documentary feel that is reminiscent of
Italian Neorealism even though Varda was not aware of Neorealism at the time; in Le

A priori, je suis une marginal-ne. Quand jai tourn La Pointe courte en 1954, je ntais ni dans le cinma
officiel ni dans le cinma officieux.Dans le sujet, son traitement, la forme de production, jtais
marginalema carrire entire, je peux la considrer comme marginale. Agns Varda: A priori, je suis
une marginale-ne, interview with Franoise Puaux, La marginalit lcran, CinmAction, no.91, 2e
trimestre 1999, 101.
64

65

Agns Varda, Le film venir des dtours de linspiration, Ibid.

..mais rien ne mexcite autant que de trouver dans la vie relle des modles et des personnages pour les
filmerou pas. Agns Varda, Varda par Agns, op.cit., 142.
66

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

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

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possessions of the privileged class, and created moving portraits of the marginalized
people of the present.
Contemporary reviews of Daguerrotypes particularly note Vardas tenderness
towards the shopkeepers. In Tlrama, Claude Manceron sees the films as offering, An
hour of life. The suspended respiration. The irresistible tenderness towards all these
people that we did not know an hour earlier.67 Jacques Siclier, in Le Monde, describes
the film as, A spectacle of the reality where the merchants and the strollers of the corner
became characters for Varda, under the curious and warm look that she has for her
creatures. No populist picturesque: but a sort of social fantastic born from the
repetition of daily gestures, from an immobility of the habits and manners of being.68
Varda herself described Daguerrotypes as portraying the mysteries of everyday
exchange (Les mystres de lchange quotidien). At its conclusion, Varda asks about the
film she has just made: Does it all form a reportage? An homage? An essay? A regret, a
reproach, an approach? Anyway, its a film I sign as the neighbor.
Salut les Cubains is also an experiment with photographs: specifically,
experimentation with animating still photographs. In 1962, three years after the Cuban

Une heure de vie. La repiration suspendue. La tendresse irrsistible envers tous ces gens que nous ne
connaissions pas une heure plus tt. Claude Manceron, Tlrama, no. 1404, 8 dcembre 1976, quoted from
Agns Varda, Ibid., 251.
67

un spectacle de la ralit o les commerants et les promeneurs du coin sont devenus des personnages de
Varda, sous le regard curieux et chaleureux qu'elle a pour ses "cratures." Pas de pittoresque "populiste:
mais une sorte de fantastique social qui nat de la rptition des gestes quotidiens, d'un immobilisme des
habitudes et des faons d'tre. . . , Jacques Siclier, Le Monde, 2 mars 1979, quoted from Varda par Agns, Ibid.
68

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Revolution, Varda was invited to Cuba by the Cuban Institute of Cinema. Varda found
Cubans and their music fascinating, and their form of socialism surprising and joyous.
She took 4,000 photos of Cubans dancing, singing, working in sugarcane plants and so
on, and then spent six months editing them together into a documentary film. The
documentary is composed of 1,500 still photographs re-filmed and animated. The photos
are linked by Vardas narration, commentary by French actor Michel Piccoli, and above
all Cuban music. This animated photo album is educational in that it tells the history
of the Cubans struggle against the dictator Batista. It successfully conveys the peoples
excitement immediately after the Revolution. The photos still imagespreserved
moments of the pastare revived in the present by cinematography for present-day
audiences. Thus, Varda uses cinematography both to give a new life to photography and
to manipulate time.
Ulysse (1982) is a fascinating twenty-two-minute reflection on cinema,
photography, time and memory. It is a first-person documentary in which Varda
appears in person and looks back at a time past. One day in 1982 Varda was struck by a
photograph she took in 1954 and decided to make a film about it. This black-and-white
photo consists of a little naked boy sitting on a pebble beach, positioned in the middle of
the photo, with a man, also naked, standing to his left, looking towards the sea with his
back to the camera. In the foreground at the right corner lies a dead goat. The boy,
named Ulysse, was a neighbor boy and Vardas favorite model at the time. The man was
an Egyptian named Fouli Elia, whom Varda hadnt seen since taking the photograph.

242
She decides to trace him and finds out that he is now the art director of the magazine
Elle.
The film begins with a shot of the photo and Vardas voiceover narration,
explaining when and how she took the photo and who the models were. It was on
Sunday, May 9, 1954, and the man and the child had never met before that day. Then the
film switches to color, and there stands Fouli Elia naked behind his desk in his office,
books on the desk covering his genitals (one of Vardas humorous jokes!) Varda gives
him the photo and asks if he remembers it. He doesnt especially remember the photo,
but he remembers certain things: that he never saw the boy walking because he had to
be carried; that Varda often took pictures of dead things and not beautiful landscapes;
that she had made him and the boy pose without clothes. Varda shows him other
pictures of him; however, he doesnt remember them at all, even though he has a
memory of some of the clothing and shoes he wears in them. He even says he doesnt
remember his former self in the photo: I dont want to remember, he says, his
expression a blank.
Vardas meeting with the boy, Ulysse Llorca, now a thirty-six-year-old bookshop
owner, married with two daughters, is more shocking. He does not remember anything
about the photo. The film shows the photos Varda had taken of his family during the
time in the 1950s when they were neighbors on rue Daguerre. Ulysses family was a
Spanish family in political exile; the film shows family portraits and other photos of
Ulysse and his mother Bienvenida which take the audience back to the past in black and

243
white. However, when Varda hands him the photo taken on the beach, he responds that
he does not have any memory of it at all, even though he had drawn a picture of that
very photo. Varda shows him the picture he drew, but it sparks no memory. Ulysse has
to imagine his childhood through the photo. Consequently, Varda concludes that the
photo is a fictitious image for Ulysse, while for Varda herself, it is fact.
Varda turns to Bienvenida, the mother, who has more vivid and painful
memories of the photo. She doesnt quite like the photo, not because of its image but
because of the memories associated with it. Ulysse was at the beach because he was
suffering from coxa plana, a hip-bone condition that might paralyze his leg, and needed
to stay a season by the sea. His condition was the reason he had to be carried from place
to place, as Fouli Elia remembered. In contrast to her sons blank face in reaction to the
photo, Bienvenida bursts into tears while remembering the time pictured. Ulysse says he
doesnt remember the photo but remembers well his body in pain at the time and his
having to be stretched out for therapy at home for nine months. Thus, Varda
demonstrates that the photos image brings out different emotions and memories from
each person.
Towards the end of the film, there is a sequence in which a group of children talk
about the photo and Ulysses drawing. Varda has given them the photo and the drawing
to elicit their immediate reactions. The sequence is amusing, and at the same time it
offers a significant reflection on the issue of truth and representation. The childrens
observations and interpretations of the photo and the drawing are innocent yet sharp. A

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

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the upright father (the future) and the image of the mother, prone and big-bellied
[goat]. Ulysses future lies in the identification with the father and the abandonment of
the mother. Ultimately, then, in Ulysse Varda has used an image of a photograph to spin
out a philosophical cinematic essay which explores the boundaries between the real and
the imaginary and between photography and film, and which contemplates truth, time,
and memory.
In 2004, Varda re-released Salut les Cubains and Ulysse as two of a triptych of
short films entitled Cinvardaphoto. The third film in the triptych is a new documentary
Ydessa, les ours et etc..(Ydessa, the bears and etc..) As the title impliescinema-Vardaphotographythe three films were directly inspired by photography. They are all essay
films in which Varda herself narrates her own experience: of Cuba (Salut les Cubains); of
her investigation of a photo taken twenty-eight years earlier (Ulysse); and of the strong
emotion she felt at a photo exhibition (Ydessa, the bears and etc.). Within the triptych, the
films are presented in chronological order: first Salut les Cubains (1962), then Ulysse
(1982), and finally Ydessa, les ours et etc (2004). Therefore the triptych is also a look back
at Vardas own trajectory as a filmmaker who has never abandoned photography for
cinema and who relentlessly tried to find ways to combine the two visual media in her
work. These films demonstrate how, throughout her career, she has utilized in her
filmmaking photographic images that touch and move her; the films demonstrate as
well instances where her filmmaking is about the emotion and sensation that

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

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

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bombs, and Otto is left in the ruins. A black American G.I. finds Otto. The G.I. is shot,
but the teddy bear prevents his wound from being fatal. The G.I. takes Otto to America.
One day, Oscar now an old mandiscovers Otto in an antique shop, buys it and tells
his story to a newspaper. David reads the story, and the two friends are reunited. The
story of Otto resonates with the historical meaning the teddy bear acquired in Vardas
film. Further, the film deconstructs the fictional world the photographs had createda
world where everyone looked happy and secure, where a teddy bear was a simple toy
and reveals the historical trauma behind the love for teddy bears.
As previously noted, Varda uses not only photography in her films but also
paintings to trigger interesting narratives that link the past and the present. The Gleaners
and I is one such film. Inspired by Millets painting, The Gleaners, Varda explores the
meaning of modern-day gleaning in this film. The Gleaners and I can be viewed and
analyzed in terms of feminine writing precisely because it is a film about challenging
masculine language in film and because it embodies the notion of writing the body
and writing the Other. Vardas insertion of herself in the narrative and filming of her
body have been discussed in the previous section; therefore, here I will concentrate on
the writing of the Other and the intertextuality to be found in The Gleaners and I.
In The Gleaners and I, Varda herself travels through rural and urban France to
observe modern-day gleaning. She begins her film by introducing Millets famous
painting, The Gleaners, while reading the dictionary definition of gleaning in voiceover.
She then explores modern-day gleaning or scavenging by actively meeting and

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

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potatoes, Varda finds heart-shaped potatoes which she takes home and turns into works
of art, watching them decay and filming their metamorphosis. She does not consume
these heart-shaped potatoes but gives them a new function, a new identity; thus, her act
of cincriture is also about embracing the Other (the thrown away) and about
transformation. The heart-shaped potatoes also seem to symbolize the love Cixous
emphasizes in her description of feminine writing. When Varda sees heart-shaped
potatoes among the tons of newly harvested potatoes discarded as garbage, she contacts
the French charity restaurants known as restaus du coeur and informs them of the
existence and the location of the potatoes, and thus shares in the pleasure of feeding the
needy. The charity members come with a truck to glean large numbers of potatoes,
and Varda invites us to experience the pleasure of sharing this altruism.
As Vardas film reveals, the meaning of gleaning has changed from generous
giving and sharing on the part of the giver (the owner of the field) to scavenging waste
others have thrown away. Varda herself revives and then transforms the woman
gleanershe becomes la glaneuse of the titleinto a filmmaker who gleans images to
create a film, a work of art. As la glaneuse, Varda invites the audience to share the
pleasure of gleaning images and visions to create something different: a delightful film
she describes as a wandering-road-documentary70 in which her humor and
playfulness, together with the unexpected surprises she encounters on the way, convey

70

Agns Varda, Filming the Gleaners, www.zeitgeistfilms.com

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to the audience a sense of freedom and jouissance. One sequence that is one of the most
delightful surprises in the film is the discovery of a painting that contained both the
humble stooping of Millets The Gleaners and the proud posture of Bretons Gleaner.
After discovering the painting purely by chance in a finds shop, Varda assures the
audience that, Honest, this is no movie trick, we really did find these Gleaners [the
painting] purely by chance; this very line suggests our mutual recognition that movies
are constructed.
Another scene that demonstrates both Vardas playfulness and her comment on
cinema is one in which she plays at capturing huge trucks in her hands while riding
along on a highway. Her hand seems like a metaphor for camera, which can capture
larger-than-life objects and stories with a small lens. While watching a young man
transform yogurt containers into flowers and plastic bottles into mobiles, she even asks
herself, Where does play end and art start? thus raising an important issue in a playful
manner.
The Gleaners and I displays a rich intertextuality, another characteristic of Vardas
cincriture. As was mentioned earlier, the films starts with Millets painting in which
figures are frozen while stooping, a posture that plays a crucial role in Vardas
exploration of modern-day gleaning and scavenging. A dictionary provides the
definition of gleaning, and Varda also asks a lawyer to read Frances historical penal
code so as to explain what was allowed and what was not allowed in the original
practice of gleaning. She even uses rap songs as the soundtrack for the scene in which

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she shows heaps of garbage and scavengers who stoop to pick up food, as if to suggest
that the act of scavenging could be an act of resisting the dominant system. Indeed, one
young man stubbornly sticks to his way of lifeliving on wastebecause he thinks it is
unethical to give in to a system that propagates excessive waste.
Above all, Vardas cincriture can be thought of as an embodiment of feminine
writing in film because it is about transformation. The Gleaners and I is a film about
transforming our perception of the Other, about transforming waste into a necessity of
life and means of sharing, about transforming junk into beautiful works of art, and
about transforming random images and encounters into a film. It is a film that celebrates
openness, embracing the Other, and the transgression of conventions that opens up new
possibilities of inventing something new.
Vardas own account of the filming of The Gleaners and I most clearly displays the
similarities between her cincriture and Cixouss feminine writing:

I wanted to glean images as one jots down travel notes, and feel
free to show a funny dog I met on the way (why is it wearing a
red boxing glove around its neck?). Or the Dard overflowing:
Free to linger over a painting by Van der Weyden. To observe
couples. But always coming back to the gleaners, trying to win
their confidence, listen to them, converse with them rather than
interview them, and film them.
My intention became clearer to myself throughout the shooting
and editing stages. Little by little, I found the right balance
between self-referential moments (the gleaner who films one of
her hands with the other) and moments focused on those whose
reality and behavior I found so striking. I managed to approach
them, to bring them out of their anonymity. I discovered their

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

71

Ibid.

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CONCLUSION

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

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sits on a pink chair with her back towards the sea, looking at the camera. Next to her is
an empty blue chair. This image became the poster for Lle et Elle.1
This image of a woman alone is, in fact, one of the recurrent themes in Vardas
films. Many of her films feature a woman rebellious and in solitude. Clo (Corinne
Marchand) in Clo from 5 to 7 faces the fear of death alone. She has no one to share her
anxiety with, not even her rich lover. She is able to reach real mutual understanding
with Antoine, the soldier, but he has to leave for Algerian war. Mona (Sandrine
Bonnaire) in Vagabond wanders around the countryside in solitude. She refuses to talk,
and as Varda explains, Mona is an embodiment of the word No: The first day a baby
signals no, it begins to create its personality. Then the child says no, he affirms itAll my
work on Mona, in Vagabond, is focused around her stubbornness in saying no, including
to those who want to help her.2 The film is dedicated to Nathalie Sarraute, whom Varda
herself imagined as a woman walking alone in a winter countryside3 and described as
an absolute rebel. Mary-Jane (Jane Birkin) in Kung-Fu Master is a forty-year-old
divorced mother of two daughters. She is not in distress but feels lonely and isolated.
Perhaps from the regret that she does not have a son, Mary-Jane falls in love with

Agns Varda, Lle et elle, Paris: Fondation Cartier pour lart contemporain, 2006.

Le premier jour o un bb fait signe que non, il commence crer sa personnalit. Puis lenfant dit non, il
saffirmeTout mon travail autour de Mona s'articulait autour de son obstination dire non, y compris
ceux qui voulainet l'aider. Agns Varda, Varda par Agns, op.cit., 26.
2

Ibid., 172.

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

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its story and style; however, it is mainly a story of a family of eight the parents and six
children living in a mansion with seven bedrooms. In one scene, the family is having
dinner. When one of the boys stands up from the table and begins to play ball, the father
slaps him on the face and orders him to sit down. At that moment, Louise, the eighteenyear-old daughter, stands up, defiantly saying, Im not hungry. When her father tells
her to sit down, she retorts, Im an adult now. I wont obey you like a soldier.
Furthermore, she looks at her older brothers and says, You boys can do as Dad says if
you want to. But Im leaving home. I want to be free. The oldest brother responds,
Any call to freedom is somehow a challenge to us. But the study of civilizations, and
our future in society as outlined by our father, force me to ignore my sister. Her cry is a
vain protuberance, a false note, the cackling of hens. Louise looks at him with a
scornful smile. Throughout the film, Louise dreams of leaving home and being free.
As the only woman filmmaker in the French New Wave movement, Varda
herself identifies with other only woman among men. She writes in her book, Varda
par Agns, I know well another impression, that of being alone among men.4 She
identifies with Nathalie Sarraute, who was the only woman in the nouveau roman group
and who wrote Portrait of an Unknwon Man in 1948 well before the nouveau roman literary
movement began in the 1950s. Varda notes that she is touched by a photograph of a
group of surrealist artists in which Gisle Prassinos, the only woman, is surrounded by
4

Jai bien connu une autre impression, celle dtre seule parmi des hommes. Ibid., 30.

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men. Varda also mentions a photo collage by Belgian surrealist artist Ren Magritte as
an image that particularly fascinates her and which resonates with her life. In the image,
a painting of a nude woman who is surrounded by the lines je ne vois pas [la femme]
cache dans la fort (I dont see the woman hidden in the forest). This image is framed
by photographs of male surrealist artists with their eyes closed. This collage was
published in the journal La Rvolution Surraliste (Surrealist Revolution) in 1929. As Dawn
Ades points out, the woman is presented as the guide to the unconscious, the
incarnation of the marvelous, symbol of the psychic life.5 It is an image of woman as the
symbol of the unconscious place in which the revolutionary potential to explode the
repressive reality lies.
Indeed, Vardas work shows the influence of surrealism. As early as in 1957,
Saisons, Chateaux (O Seasons, O chateaus), a twenty-two-minute tourist documentary
commissioned by the Tourist Bureau, includes quasi-surrealist fantasy sequences; the
1958 documentary LOpra Mouffe includes surrealist shots which convey the inner
psychology of a pregnant woman; and the fiction short 7P., cuis., s. de b evokes
surrealist inspirations. In 1965, she was invited by surrealist poet and novelist Louis
Aragon and his wife Elsa Triolet to make a short documentary about Elsas childhood; in
this film, a narrator recites Aragons poems. In Jane B. par Agns V., there is an interesting

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

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

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

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

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FILMOGRAPHY

*All films written and directed by Agns Varda

La Pointe courte, 1954, 89 min., b/w 35mm, fiction film.

Saisons, Chateaux, 1957, 22 min., color, 35mm, short documentary.
LOpra Mouffe, 1958, 17 min., b/w, 16mm, short documentary.
Du Ct de la Ct, 1958, 24 min., color, 35mm, short documentary.
Clo de 5 7 (Clo from 5 to 7), 1961, 90 min., b/w, 35mm, fiction film.
Salut les Cubains, 1963, 30 min., b/w, filmed photographs in 35mm, short documentary.
Le Bonheur, 1964, 82 min.. color, 35mm, fiction film.
Les Enfants du Muse, 1964, 7 min., b/w, TV, short documentary.
Elsa la Rose, 1965, 20 min., b/w, 16mm, short documentary.
Les Cratures, 1965, 105 min., b/w and color, 35mm, fiction film.
Loin du Vietnam, 1967, 120 min., b/w and color, collective documentary.
Oncle Yanco, 1967, 22 min., color, 35mm, short documentary.
Black Panthers, 1968, 28 min., b/w, 16mm, short documentary.
Lions Love, 1969, 110 min., color, 35mm, fiction film.
Nausicaa, 1970, 90 min. (never shown), color, 35mm, fiction film.
Daguerrotypes, 1974-1975, 80 min., color, 16mm, feature documentary.
Rponse de Femmes, 1975, 8 min., color, 16mm, short documentary.
Plaisir dAmour en Iran, 1976, 6 min., 35mm, short fiction film.

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LUne chante, lautre pas (One Sings, the Other Doesnt), 1977, 120 min., color, 35mm, fiction
film.
Quelques Femmes Bulles, 1977, 58 min., color, video, fiction film.
Mur Murs, 1980, 81 min., color, 16mm, feature documentary.
Documenteur, 1980-1981, 63 min., color, 16mm, fiction film.
Ulysse, 1982, 22 min., color, 35mm, short documentary.
Une Minute pour Une Image, 1982, TV series of 170 2-minute spots.
Les Dites Cariatides, 1984, 13 min., color, 16mm, short documentary.
7 P., cuis., s. de b(A Saisir), 1984, 27 min., color, 35mm, short fiction film.
Sans Toit ni Loi (Vagabond), 1985, 105 min., color, 35mm, fiction film.
Tas de Beaux EscaliersTu sais, 1986, 3 min., color, 35mm, short documentary.
Jane B. par Agns V., 1987, 97 min., color, 35mm, feature documentary.
Kung-Fu Master, 1987, 78 min., color, 35mm, fiction film.
Jacquot de Nantes, 1990, 118 min., b/w and color, 35mm, fiction film.
Les Demoiselles ont eu 25 ans, 1992, 63 min., color, 16mm, feature documentary.
LUnivers de Jacques Demy, 1993, 90 min., color, 35mm, feature documentary.
Les 100 et 1 Nuits, 1994, 100 min., color, 35mm, fiction film.
Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I), 2000, 82 min., color, digicam, feature
documentary.
Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse deux ans aprs, 2002, 63 min., color, digicam, feature
documentary.
Le Lion Volatil, 2003, 12 min., color, 35mm, short fiction film.

264
Ydessa, les ours et etc., 2004, 44 min., color, 35mm, feature documentary.
Quleques veuves de Noirmoutier, 2006, color, 35mm, feature documentary.
Les Plages dAgns, 2008. (in post-production)

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