Welcome to MAI 12: Reframing Varda

Dearest MAI Readers,

This is the third time this year that we have had the pleasure of offering you a brand-new set of feminist readings. Given the contents of our previous issues, which featured a range of novel and creatively diverse discourses and methods for researching and discussing visual culture, this collection may seem rather traditional in its focus. Some may even see it as an unexpected return to a more old-school style of academic analyses. In fact, this slight return represents a celebration of a multimedia female artist who was the exact opposite of ‘traditional’.

Agnès Varda, whom our feminist authors here ‘reframe’, gave the global cineaste community such a breadth of beautiful filmic, visual, and political commentary that we may never tire of discussing her. From her earliest directorial debut, La Pointe Courte (1955), through the unforgettable and always mesmerising nouvelle vague masterpiece Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962), to her final self-reflective film, Varda by Agnès (2019), she stood out as the caring, sensitive pioneer of both serious social commentary and cheeky, flippant remarks, which showed her distance to herself and the often-challenging surroundings of the patriarchally structured world of media.

However, Varda’s experiments with intellectual distance, although sometimes sarcastically humorous, were never demeaning. Each of her characters, lines of dialogue, photographs, film frames, or even edits vibrated with a profound sense of dignity she saw in each being. That’s why, we feel, she kept appealing to the aesthetic and social sensitivities of her worldwide audiences and creative peers.

Yes, Varda won acclaim and recognition from critics and festival juries such as only a few female artists during her lifetime could match, but that’s not why we love and appreciate her at MAI. This issue is neither about Agnès Varda, the trophy winner, nor Agnès Varda, the auteur.

Our specialist authors ‘reframe’ her here as a source of constant inspiration, the brave artist who pondered on the surrounding reality not just through stories but through what occupied her frames on the screen and in print. Like Varda’s projects, the contributors to this issue always put her image at the centre of their reflection. A single picture opens a debate on sometimes intangible feelings and thoughts that cannot be verbally captured.

And this is how this focus issue came into being. Rewatching Varda’s work with their colleagues and friends during the lockdown, our guest editors, Nicole Fayard and Erica Sheen, wanted to delve into recent posthumous responses to her films and photography. Later, having secured funding from the University of York, they organised a conference, ‘Reframing Varda’, in September 2022. What you are about to read is a set of fresh philosophical and feminist re-readings of Varda’s output all of which originated from that event.

We hope these articles will inspire you not only to watch Varda again—after all, we expect that most of our readers return to her now and again anyway—but to find some optimism, and a positive mindset to deal with the pain, grief and sadness that can often feel overwhelming in today’s war-riven world. We are deeply saddened by the news reports coming from Gaza, Ukraine, and many other places around the globe where innocent people, including children and women, are losing their lives on a daily basis, victims of patriarchal and political aggression.

Although we are aware that we cannot find an immediate remedy for war and conflict, we return to Agnes Varda’s output to offer a tiny drop of optimism, small consolation, or emotional reassurance. Knowing that we have no healing powers, rethinking her dedication to ethical feminist criticism, to love, care and the often-unnoticed complex beauty of life, we feel reinvigorated in our faith in humanity. Perhaps Varda’s attention to detail is the only way to continue the feminist project to support those in need without taking sides, judging, or falling into self-righteousness and lust for power.

We are particularly proud of the thought-provoking and learned articles in this dossier, all of which demonstrate that feminist criticism can be forwarded through delicate and subtle attention to small moments, objects, figures and millions of meaningful shapes and shades one can spot in Varda’s multimedia work. We offer them to you here in the hope that they speak to you, as they have us.

With feminist hope for a better future, and in solidarity with everyone subjected to political injustice,

Anna Misiak & Houman Sadri