Reframing Varda: Introduction

by: Erica Sheen & Nicole Fayard , November 7, 2023

This focus issue brings together a collection of essays presented at the Reframing Varda conference. Organised by the Universities of York and Leicester and held at the Humanities Research Centre, University of York, the event took place on 8-9 September 2022. [1]

Prior to her death in March 2019, Agnès Varda was recognised as one of the most important filmmakers of the twentieth and early-twenty first centuries. In a career lasting six decades, she received multiple awards, including the Palme d’or at Cannes, the French Légion d’honneur and an Academy Honorary Award—the first female director to do so. Her name was associated with documentary realism, self-portraiture, aesthetic experimentation and—above all—feminism. Sandy Flitterman-Lewis’ ground-breaking study, To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema (1996), established Varda’s work at the heart of feminist film scholarship, and was followed by a steady output of influential monographs and edited volumes, ranging from introductory accounts examining the personal, political, social and cultural contexts within which Varda honed her process (Smith 1998, Conway 2015, Kline 2015), her influence on contemporary filmmaking (Barnet 2016, Chakali 2020, Kennedy-Karpat & Çiçekoğlu 2022), and the themes and trends emerging from her work (Bénézet 2014, DeRoo 2018, Wilson  2019). These studies emphasised Varda’s work as both a female and a feminist director, with a specific focus on the dynamics of feminine embodiment central to her concept of cinécriture (Bénézet 2014) and her engagement with the representation of women in the film industry (Kline 2015, Barnet 2016, DeRoo 2018, Kennedy-Karpat & Çiçekoğlu 2022). Varda scholarship has examined her blurring of the boundaries between documentary and fiction, explored the incursion of her work into painting, photography, and installation (Barnet 2016, DeRoo 2018, Bluher 2022), and considered her ability to open up spaces of memory and autobiography at the intersection of all these media (Barnet 2016, Chakali 2020, DeRoo 2018).

The particular space of memory and autobiography that saw the decision to hold this conference was a chilly meeting in the grounds of Chatsworth House in the UK in December 2020. Lockdown restrictions were still in place, so lunch was a picnic on a cold garden bench. Officially, the meeting was professional—at a time when social meetings were only just starting to be possible again—but it carried, and reflected on, the weight of the personal and physical isolation we had all experienced for nearly two years. As colleagues who had worked on collaborative projects for several years, we shared a sense of how difficult it had become to generate the energies that drive the institutional activities of teaching and research. One thing we agreed: Agnès Varda’s vision of feminist community and her commitment to a creative practice that might achieve and sustain it had been key to our intellectual survival.

In ‘normal’ circumstances, Varda’s death in March 2019 would have been followed by meetings, workshops, seminars, all of the more or less conventional occasions academics create to celebrate their intellectual enthusiasms. Was it time to try to create such an occasion, to make contact with others who similarly wanted to explore what could now be defined as an oeuvre? The Call for Papers that followed invited proposals that challenged conventional approaches to themes, genres, and media, approaches that ossified the astonishingly rich range of her work into limiting binaries: photography/cinema; film/installation; documentary/fiction; autobiography/engagement with ‘the other.’ We were especially interested in evaluations of the cultural and theoretical influences that underpinned her work, from its earliest to latest years. The idea of ‘re-framing’ in our title was to be understood both theoretically and literally: we asked contributors to take their point of departure from an image or still taken from any area of Varda’s work and present an analysis guided by textual close reading.

Would we get enough people to make the meeting worthwhile? We imagined a handful, perhaps a day’s worth of discussion. But as responses came in, we realised we had something special: proposals from distinguished members of the list with which this introduction began; young academics and film professionals in the early stages of their careers; graduate and postgraduate researchers; undergraduate students. And one very exciting response asked, ‘Have you found a journal for a special issue? If not, we’d be delighted to publish it at MAI.’

Our conference in September 2022, and this focus issue, thus began to take shape simultaneously. The fact that the destination for our work beyond the conference was a journal dedicated to the conjunction of feminism and visual culture provided an ideal framework for critical responses to the creative scope of Varda’s work brought to the conference by our participants. As Colleen Kennedy-Karpat put it,

Our time at Reframing Varda was all about giving this groundbreaking artist and her work the full spectrum of our individual and collective attention. As more and more people seemed to grasp in the last years of Varda’s life, and certainly since her death in 2019, audiences and scholars have barely begun to explore what her work can offer us. [2]

This focus issue reflects the intersection of personal, social, and professional contexts that come together in this celebration of Varda’s work. Bringing the concepts of authorship, reception, memory, intertextuality, and intermediality into dialogue with the posthumous configuration of her work as a critical and aesthetic legacy, these essays reveal the extent to which, at every stage of her career, Varda articulated a vision of the contemporary in its transformative relationship to past and future, and in doing so refigured the formal, social, and philosophical history of cinema. Jennifer Stob  and Melissa Oliver-Powell present powerful examinations of practices of care and caring; Tim Palmer, Natasha Farrell, and Sam Kaufman explore the innovative intermedialities that structured interrelations of form and medium. Stob and Karpat-Kennedy show how attention to Varda’s early or neglected films highlights the expression of her pioneering feminism in ground-breaking explorations of style and technique.

In her revisiting of the famously misunderstood dramatic fiction Le bonheur (Happiness, 1965) and exploration of the Shack of Happiness (2018)—an installation of celluloid greenhouses filled with artificial sunflowers—Sandy Flitterman-Lewis examines Varda’s strategies of self-representation and the personal voice ever-present in her work. Interviewed by Nicole Fayard in this issue, Flitterman-Lewis’ presence at this conference represented the strength of a tradition of feminist research that has burgeoned since personal contact between Varda and Flitterman-Lewis began in 1977. As Flitterman-Lewis puts it in her essay here, the ‘invented forms’ through which Varda expressed her personal voice ‘renovated cinematic language … redefined the nature of cinematic documentary … and expanded the notion of visual art in her later work.’ Farrell’s analysis of dissonance in music and sound in Le bonheur and Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cléo from 5 to 7, 1962) complements Flitterman-Lewis’ argument that sunflowers in Le bonheur act as ironic counterpoints to the film’s deceptive bucolic undertones. Farrell demonstrates that Varda’s subversive use of music is a feminist technique that reveals the paradoxes at work within the heteronormative tropes of Hollywood cinema.

Stob’s essay makes a profoundly timely contribution to Varda scholarship by reframing existing discussions of gendered domestic work, autobiography, and memory through contemporary approaches to care and vulnerability. Her attention to what she described as a ‘gem of an experimental short film,’ 7 P., Cuis. S. de b… (à saisir) (3 Bedrooms, Two Baths: Don’t Miss Out!, 1985), is particularly relevant in the context of contemporary anxieties around migration and displacement, as well as the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. Along with the photography of Melanie Bonajo and the artwork of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Varda’s film became what Stob described as

life-of-the-mind buoys for my struggle with the domestic absurdity of full-time, pregnant professoring, mothering, and partnering during lockdown. The Reframing Varda conference was, for me, a celebration of the pandemic’s slow conclusion.

For Oliver-Powell, the aesthetics and practices of care are evident in Varda’s collaborations with her daughter and street artist JR in her last films. Oliver-Powell’s analysis of Visages Villages (Faces, Places, 2017) is especially welcome in its re-assessment of Varda’s feminist gaze, inviting what is not shown or seen as well as what is seen. This strategy is especially important as it introduces a dialogue of care and mutual consent between Varda’s subjects and the viewer.

Varda’s later films are similarly the concern of Lydia Tuan’s essay. Tuan argues that by the 2000s Varda was using techniques more akin to the essay film than traditional documentary. Through detailed analyses of Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000) and Visages Villages, she suggests that Varda used essayistic modes of filmmaking as feminist self-portraiture, confronting the audience with her own on-screen presence both as a director and as an aging woman. These films establish a direct connection between biological and cinematic time.

Tracing the origins of some of these debates back to Varda’s early career, Tim Palmer examines how the trope of entropic creativity at work throughout her practice emerged in the post-war film culture that determined her multi-modal, experimental output. For Palmer, it is important to move beyond the familiar canon of Varda’s popular cinema and consider less well-known work, particularly the shorts and essay films from these early years. As he put it in our collaborative feedback, his presentation seeks to ‘reframe Varda’s post-war emergence … as part of a post-war cultural conversation that Varda engaged with her own 1950s media-making, including her book-writing and poetry.’

The concepts of intermediality and intertextuality are key to exploring Varda’s work as a process of constant revolution. She especially complicates the relationship between filmmaker and viewer by inviting conversations in which the first-person is actively engaged (Mathias Barkhausen, Farrell, Kaufman, Oliver-Powell, Tuan), redeploying the viewer’s own gaze, listening, and sense of touch within the film itself (Tuan, Farrell, Barkhausen, Stob). For Kierran Horner, this entanglement of self and other(s) disrupts the subsumption of spectatorship into narrative and transforms participation with, and within, the image for both filmmaker and spectator. In our collaborative feedback, Kaufman characterised this entanglement as a ‘spectrum of attentiveness’:

Varda has always shown a particular kind of respect towards the subjects of her films and photographs, whether they are human, goat, cat, or potato. I think this mostly has to do with truly giving these subjects her full attention, allowing them to guide the way she thinks through her work and not simply imposing her gaze or intellect upon them.

Barkhausen has coined an attractive phrase for this attentiveness, exploring the way it refuses stable distinctions between documentary and fiction: ‘the Varda vue.’ Contrasting Mur murs (1981) and Documenteur (1981), he argues that Varda’s cinema deploys the gaze as an instrument of empowerment. Horner’s essay suggests that this ‘vue’ explored the fragmentation and multiplicity that characterised the environment of theoretical feminism within which Varda’s filmmaking took shape across its seven decades, and to which it responded, challenging in particular the theoretical paradigms associated with the French ‘New Wave.’ Palmer similarly presents the extension of Varda’s creative context beyond what across the same period came to be known as ‘film studies’ in his account of post-war film culture as an ‘ecosystem’ which ‘generated … a lot more female-authored materials than film history typically reports.’

Kennedy-Karpat’s essay is in conversation with Palmer’s work, presenting an analysis of violence in the short film Du côté de la côte (Along the Coast, 1958) that builds on Palmer’s (2022) observations on the commonalities it shares with Jean Vigo’s À propos de Nice (1930). Kennedy-Karpat’s notion of a ‘politics of disregard’—a presentation of gendered violence by which Varda both draws her viewers’ attention to this violence while withholding formal signals that would clarify its meaning ‒seems certain to make its mark both on Varda studies and on feminist readings of the politique des auteurs, with its patriarchal ideology of authorship and control.

As Palmer asked in our feedback, ‘Is there a comparable filmmaker whose life’s work has had such an effect on people?’ We are particularly pleased that this Focus Issue goes into publication at a time when Varda is increasingly celebrated in public. In summer 2023, the photography festival Arles: Les Rencontres de la Photographie presented an exhibition, Agnès Varda: La Pointe Courte, From Photographs to Film (Arles 2023); in October 2023 the Cinémathèque française in Paris launched the Viva Varda! exhibition including a conference, film screenings, and a concert. The Cinémathèque website described Viva Varda! as an ‘homage’ to ‘one of the rare female filmmakers of her generation’, its aim being to show that ‘her polymorphous work, crisscrossed by the themes of feminism and marginality, is highly topical today’ (Cinémathèque 2023). Sandy Flitterman-Lewis drew attention in our collaborative feedback to the fact that Varda par Agnès (Varda by Agnès, 2019) opens with ‘three watchwords: Imagination, Creation, and Sharing.’ We were delighted that she found these values expressed in the Reframing Varda conference. Like these major exhibitions, this Focus Issue hopes to share Varda’s imagination and creativity with present and future generations of feminist scholarship and research.

Notes:

[1] The guest editors acknowledge the financial support of a University of York IDF award and grants from the Centre for Modern Studies and Department of English and Related Literature.

[2] Quotations from conference participants are taken from a post-conference collaborative feedback compiled in preparation for this collection of essays.