‘She Knew What She Wanted to Do, She Did It’: A Conversation

by: Nicole Fayard , November 7, 2023

Sandy Flitterman-Lewis is a distinguished scholar of feminist film. She is the author of the groundbreaking study To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema (1990, 1996) and numerous chapters and articles in journals and anthologies. She co-founded Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory with Janet Bergstrom, Elizabeth Lyon, and Constance Penley and the cultural studies journal Discourse: Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture. Notably, she co-edited New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-structuralism and Beyond (1992) with Robert Stam and Robert Burgoyne.

Flitterman-Lewis was the first film scholar to position Varda’s work firmly within the fields of feminism and feminist counter-cinema. To Desire Differently was recognised both as ‘an intellectual landmark’ and as ‘a model for studying feminist film expression’ (Hottell 1993). It won the Society for Cinema Studies Annual Award for outstanding dissertation in film, television, and media studies in 1984. Flitterman-Lewis argued that Varda’s innovative female and feminist cinematic authorship has produced a continual questioning of female identity and a challenge to the structures of spectatorship. Her scholarship continues to influence research on Varda worldwide, as illustrated in the essays in this special issue.

In the spirit of this focus issue on Reframing Varda, I spoke to Flitterman-Lewis about the ways in which friendship with the filmmaker framed her understanding of Varda’s work, especially in the early years of her career. We discussed Varda’s initial marginal status as female filmmaker, her collaborations, and the critical reception of her work.

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Nicole Fayard (NF): You had a long-standing friendship with Varda. What was the impact of this relationship on your work?

Sandy Flitterman-Lewis (SFL): My first meeting with her was a series of happy coincidences. I’ll start with the first anecdote, which is before I met her. Around Thanksgiving my sister and I were hitchhiking from Berkeley to Los Angeles, and this French painter named Jean Varda picked us up. Years later, I found out that one of the films that Varda used a lot to talk about her practice, was Oncle Yanco (Uncle Yanco) (1967), where she films her chance encounter with a relative who was a surrealist painter and who she thought was an uncle, although I believe they were cousins.

In the late sixties, early seventies, I was friends with Tom Luddy, who managed the Telegraph Repertory Cinema and started the Telluride Film Festivals at the time. Tom Luddy was friends with Agnès Varda, and he was the one who said to Varda that the Black Panthers were having their conference in California. [1] He suggested that she make a film of them. So, she told the Panthers that she was a French journalist, and they let her film them. You get the sense from the film that she was really celebrating the positive aspect of their militancy. It looked like a picnic, filled with joy and children, and an appreciation of the Panthers’ militancy as a progressive thing.

But it wasn’t until I was a graduate student that I really started in earnest looking at her work, and we became friends. I came back from France with a failed dissertation topic in 1977. I wanted to write the definitive critical analysis of Jean-Luc Godard’s Les carabiniers (The Carabineers), (1963) bringing in Brecht, but I was at the traditional impasse. My thesis advisor Bertrand Augst suggested a triad with Marie Epstein whom I had interviewed in 1977  following Langlois’ death. [2] Then I decided to work on Agnès Varda and the sixties New Wave.

Once I had moved from California to Hoboken in New York, I was friends with Carlos Clarens, who was a good friend of Agnès. He had helped her write the screenplay for Lions, Love … and Lies (1969) and was an actor in the film. [3] Carlos introduced me to Agnès, and I arranged an informal meeting with her at the Mayflower Hotel on Central Park. As I came into her room, she was finishing a conversation with a woman named Susan, who turned out to be Susan Sarandon. Varda was curled up on the couch, with her feet pulled up. She was really friendly. We had this very interesting conversation on my dissertation. At that time, she had just finished L’une chante, l’autre pas (One Sings, the Other Doesn’t) (1977). I ended my dissertation with that film, and I was dubious about it. It didn’t seem to be a very adventurous film. She agreed because it’s much more straightforward than most of her other work. It’s a musical, and she wrote the music and the songs for that film. I therefore came to realise how important that film was for her. But then she also said that she was an angry feminist. She wanted to be a joyful feminist, and that’s what she tried to do in One Sings, the Other Doesn’t. And years later she realised this was not the way to go, that you couldn’t be a joyful feminist. Therefore, that film has to be reconsidered, which she was doing herself.

I felt really inspired by this conversation. When I was revising my dissertation into the book To Desire Differently, we kept in touch. She’d invited me to see her in Paris at her house, where she was equally welcoming to very famous and ordinary people. It wasn’t an empty invitation. In her house we saw the stain in the ceiling that she refers to in Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I) (2000). She refers to her house as a kind of workspace and home base. She let that sort of professional and personal intersect in terms of the friendships she made. Even though I wasn’t part of her inner circle, she did consider me a friend, somebody that she thought of.

When To Desire Differently came out, she was very pleased with it. We also had a lot of chance meetings, such as when she would come to New York, and I would bring my students to meet her. She was very interested in them, and they were just knocked out that they got to meet her.

NF: It took a relatively long time for academia to formally recognise her work, especially in France.

SFL: The first conference devoted to Varda in France in Rennes in 2007 was a really big deal, but a limited number of people attended.

I remember that when I studied in France, in every single course I had, there was nothing on women in film, nothing on Varda. Even though she was just as important as the male filmmakers. We did see Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cléo from 5 to 7) (1961), but there was no analysis of it. Women had to work so much harder than men to gain some legitimacy then, and I find this is still the case today. To Desire Differently came out of this. In 2000 Alan Riding who used to write in the New York Times interviewed her. He said something about ‘doesn’t it bother you that nobody has written about you?’ And she pointed to my book and said, no, this whole book is about me.

When I started writing about her at the time I was writing my dissertation, nothing had been written in English about her at all except very simple articles on women in film. In the early seventies, anything about women was seen as a discovery. In James Monaco’s book she only got two footnotes as Demy’s wife (Monaco 1979: 10). Others writing about her, such as Roy Armes, were very condescending in a way. She became very famous after Cléo from 5 to 7, but the Monaco thing really bothered me because all of a sudden the New Wave was described as only including these five male filmmakers, and no-one else.

Sadoul recognised early on that she was not a just a precursor, but a New Wave practitioner before the New Wave guys, when he referred to La Pointe Courte as ‘genuinely the first film of the French Nouvelle Vague’ (Sadoul 1965: 196). When we were editors of Women in Film, before we formed Camera Obscura, one of our final issues (Levitin 1974: 62-66) had an article about Agnès Varda. I don’t know if at the time she was already called the grandmother of the New Wave [4]. but that was never an appropriate title. She was still quite young, and she was marginalised.

NF: Why was she marginalised, in your opinion?

SFL: I think partly because she was a woman, and partly because she was so incredibly imaginative in what she did. She didn’t follow any of the rules, including the kind of subjective I, you know, the masculine singular of the New Wave. One of the ways that Camera Obscura started was to value women film makers and articulate a social, political, and theoretical position about the study of women artists and their work. In the first editorial, we established this differentiation between the journals that were coming out with special sections with material by women, and our desire to establish a theoretical framework. And one of them was Varda (DeRoo & King 2021).

NF: In terms of the genres and the techniques that she used, to what extent did she not fit in because what she did was too subversive? Too different?

SFL: Too different, I think. Uncategorisable. She couldn’t fit into the moulds that were acceptable.

There’s a way in which it’s easy to just disregard the power of certain women. Because it’s such an atmosphere. When Varda was young and feisty, she was disregarded and ignored. And when she’s older, she’s diffuse. Like Scorsese says, she is art. Well, could you open your mouth like twenty years ago and say something? These guys were not around to help when she needed financing. It was Ava Duvernay who financed Visages Villages (Faces Places) (2017).

NF: I would like us to explore Varda’s persona a little. In the cinema industry many women disappear past a certain age. Varda bucked the unequal gender trend and continued to film herself and underscore her age in her late eighties. In Visages Villages there is that famous reverse shot of herself contrasting with her younger self with nothing spared (Fig. 1), as well as the images of her halo of white hair superimposed over the red in her late years. There might also be an element of pride behind the lack of artifice: this is me, take it or leave it. From what you said, she was very kind, but she was also very tough. You need to be tough to make it in that world.

Fig. 1: Reverse shot and Varda’s hair in Visages Villages (2017).

SFL: Yes, absolutely. The initial part when she’s making Cléo de 5 à 7 and Les créatures (The Creatures) (1965), she’s working with Jacques [Demy]. It’s kind of an ideal thing when you’re younger, you just want that kind of relationship where you each have your own kind of thing but you’re both mutually supportive and everything. And I think that became a myth once they went to California and he went his own way, and she had to sort of struggle to continue to make it. In Les plages d’Agnès (The Beaches of Agnès) (2008) she talks about this couple on Venice Beach that has stayed together for fifty-three years or something like that and she says: ‘I was a little jealous.’

She just created this image of herself that masked a really hardcore personality. I get this sense that she was indomitable. She knew what she wanted to do, she did it. Although I kept a distance, I was always a little in awe of her.

Like in Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond) (1985), there is a warmth even though the subject is very cold. She wants Mona to refuse everything. She’s a walking negation. I had a lot of difficulty with that film for a while, although I love it now. I just wanted to shake the character; I wanted her to get some backbone. When the philosopher—the goat guy—says ‘you’re all alone now,’ this is not rebellion. This is just not wandering, it’s withering. He gives her a little plot of land and says she can raise potatoes. She doesn’t want to do it.

NF: But I also get the subversiveness from someone who chooses the margin. Mona refuses intimacy, which in 1985 France frustrated expectations, especially in terms of gender.

SFL: Except for the fact that she loves the Tunisian worker and he’s the one who says ‘well, you have to leave because my guys are coming back,’ and she can’t articulate that she wants the connection because she’s used him. Instead of working in the vineyards she’s sitting there and he’s the one doing all the extra work. But that is a kind of relationship. And with Madame Landier as well. When she leaves her, she says, ‘bread for some bread’ and then walks away and gets raped. It’s a curious kind of thing, Varda really frustrates expectations, and really twists the standards around. But Varda has such an affection for these marginal people. Not from the perspective of giving them a sentimental value. It is more about valuing the people. I called her Rabelaisian at some point because she enjoys people. Even in the sad moments.

NF: To what extent was a lot of her work about collaboration, understood in a broad sense? Here I include her work with other artists such as JR in Faces Places, as well as professional actors and crews, but also the ordinary people that she involved in her work.

SFL: When she talked about the different people that she worked with, she called them family. And even if family has to be invented, she says it’s an important concept and there is a sense in which there is both a diva and not. She’s in that family, and there is so much positive energy. It’s like everybody wants to be near her and be with her. She knows what she’s doing but she keeps it subtle. She’s not like Orson Welles or somebody who’s in control of everything visibly, in isolation. She is really an interactive kind of director. I like that idea of a company as family, and she’s kept relationships with them.

In terms of collaborating with academics, I think she was flattered that people wanted to write about her at the start of her career. It was a sign in some way that she had arrived, that she was going to be noticed. I think when she was put into the feminist box, it was like she was knocking at the door of established directors. But she did establish herself and she kept her sense of integrity. In the 1990s my friend Georgiana Colville from the University of Colorado invited Varda to her conference on twentieth-century French and Francophone Studies, where I chaired a panel of discussion of her films. Varda prefaced it by [saying] ‘I can’t stand anybody intellectualising about my films!’ I thought, ‘well, we’re going to try anyway.’

NF: There is also another way of thinking about collaboration. Would you agree if I suggested that a lot of her work is about couplings, such as putting things together, even when they’re paradoxical, such as the things that might or might not work?

SFL: I think that’s right. As she goes along in her life, she realises these things. For instance, the romance with Demy was unproblematic until it became problematic. And then she finds another way. Because everything is about connections. As a filmmaker she’s singular, but she is also engaged with others. This is her fundamental difference with the male egos of the New Wave male directors. All their work is about the personal angst in their protagonist. Virginia Woolf said, as she’s reading, a shadow fell across the page in the shape of the letter ‘I.’ I just can’t perceive anything beyond it because that ‘I’ always comes back (Woolf 1978: 83-4).

NF: I would like us to end on the reception of Varda’s work. How accessible is her work?

SFL: Anybody who sees her films becomes a fan, and she’s much more well-known now than she was at the time of Gleaners. The film re-introduced her to people like us who knew her, but also to people who had never heard of it, installing a whole new audience for her in the US.

It became this kind of ‘rite of spring,’ this moment in which, at least in New York, everybody was talking about her. Even people who have never heard of her just adore that film. It’s a film that attracts all kinds of people, whether they are scholars or not, and it’s very teachable, so students love it.

NF: Why this particular film?

SFL: I think it’s because it was a complete departure from everything else she had done. And because she really researched her subjects. She was very interested in them. It started with an observation, somebody picking up rubbish after the market was closed. For an American audience, as this kind of documentary worked into the fiction, it has an appeal. Even if you didn’t have a whole lot of background in film, you could still love this film because it was like nothing you had ever seen.

NF: Many of her films are less recognised than others. How would you explain that?

SFL: I certainly think that Cléo is the one that triggers people who are not familiar with Varda. Gleaners is another one that’s popular. Les créatures is known as a failure, and she considered it a failure, but I don’t think that’s the case.

In 1988 she made Jane B. par Agnès V (Jane B. by Agnès V.) (1987) and Le petit amour (Kung Fu Master!). When she brought that to New York, she showed only Kung Fu Master! She thought that was going to be the film that was going to be distributable. Now Jane B. is a much better and more interesting film. They really could be taken in tandem, but apparently Kung Fu Master! was just a flop. The comments about it were very harsh, people didn’t understand it. But she didn’t understand why it wasn’t going to be the kind of film that she could market.

The California films are very little referred to. Other than Varda people who know all the films, the majority have never heard of her. When people saw her or see a film they become fans, but it’s the access that’s the problem. I think the New York Film Festival has done an excellent job of publicising her work (Fig. 2). She always has crowds, like if the Alliance française shows something of hers, she has a crowd there.

Fig. 2: Flitterman-Lewis at the Varda: A Retrospective Exhibition (20 December 2019-6 January 2020), New York Film Festival, Lincoln Center.

NF: How did working in the US change her practice?

SFL: She came to Hollywood after she made Lions, Love (… and Lies)—that was a forgotten film—and she started re-evaluating it. I think she realised when she made it there was a commentary on a lot of different things on the media. It was very much an LA film. This is at the time when Jacques went back to Paris and came out as gay. She stayed in Venice Beach in LA and made a bunch of wonderful films: Mur murs (1980) and Documenteur (1981) which she called an ‘emotion’ film. She made them at a very sad time for her. Documenteur is about this kind of subtle interface between the character’s personal tragedy, between who she was and when she goes back to look after her sick partner. They relive their younger days and all the places they had travelled together. So Documenteur was a very personal kind of thing which exposed Varda herself. I could clearly see that it’s not a manufactured emotion, that the emotion guided her. And then Sabine Mamou [5] died, and that was another loss. So, I think it is a film just shrouded in loss. But it also has its happy moments, it’s a kind, delightful thing with this woman and her son played by the young Mathieu. [6]

When Varda showed the film Beaches in New York, there’s this whole section on Les Justes au Panthéon (2007). It was like a hidden memory that didn’t work for her anymore by the time she made Beaches, maybe because it was a commission. So, she foregrounds it. She puts it in her memory. But I think she got more interested in its impact as people reacted to it. It made a substantial impact because it’s such an incredible thing.

I got very interested in Les Justes at the Panthéon in January 2007 as it related to the work that I do with Varda and French ‘hidden’ children during the war. [7] When I discussed the installation with her, I felt that Les Justes is the moment that I most understood Varda. I felt that space is so much a part of her creative essence. She used to say that space was a central part of her work—just as, she used to say, the kitchen is the centre of the home.

Varda’s presence is felt through her work, in the films and mainly the installations. It comes across as a kind of spirit that is welcoming.

Notes:

[1] The Panthers’ Free Breakfast Program focused attention within the US on the need to provide healthy meals for children living in areas of social and economic deprivation to improve their academic outcomes. The initiative influenced Congress to increase funding for free lunches as part of the national School Lunch Program in 1973.

[2] Henri Langlois was a film collector and preservationist of early silent films, who went on to create La Cinémathèque française with Georges Franju  in 1936. He hid banned films during the occupation of Paris in WWII. Truffaut and Godard were influenced by his screenings of his collection in their early careers.

[3] Clarens is also author of An Illustrated History of the Horror Film (1967).

[4] Jacqueline Levitin identifies Varda as ‘Mother of the New Wave’ in their interview in T. Jefferson Kline (2014).

[5] Sabine Mamou played protagonist Emilie in Documenteur and edited the film.

[6] Varda’s son Mathieu Demy played Martin (Emilie’s son) in Documenteur.

[7] See Porton 2003, Flitterman-Lewis n.d., 2009, 2021. France’s ‘hidden children’ refers to the (mainly) Jewish children who were saved from deportation by ordinary citizens during the Nazi occupation. They were often hidden in secret locations and their identities were changed to evade the authorities.