Kelley Conway
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252039720
- eISBN:
- 9780252097829
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252039720.003.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter highlights Agnès Varda's place in New Wave cinema history. It illustrates how Varda's ever-shifting profile has evolved from avant-garde precursor to the “grandmother” of the New Wave. ...
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This chapter highlights Agnès Varda's place in New Wave cinema history. It illustrates how Varda's ever-shifting profile has evolved from avant-garde precursor to the “grandmother” of the New Wave. Yet what remains consistent here is her commitment to storytelling that foregrounds isolated people in distinctive settings in both documentary and fiction films. Varda's ongoing journey reveals an artist who needs to create, who is in motion and incapable of ceasing, making do with whatever resources are available to her (including harnessing that creativity toward visual arts and installation when funds for filmmaking were scarce), remaining eminently pragmatic even when attacking new challenges.Less
This chapter highlights Agnès Varda's place in New Wave cinema history. It illustrates how Varda's ever-shifting profile has evolved from avant-garde precursor to the “grandmother” of the New Wave. Yet what remains consistent here is her commitment to storytelling that foregrounds isolated people in distinctive settings in both documentary and fiction films. Varda's ongoing journey reveals an artist who needs to create, who is in motion and incapable of ceasing, making do with whatever resources are available to her (including harnessing that creativity toward visual arts and installation when funds for filmmaking were scarce), remaining eminently pragmatic even when attacking new challenges.
Alison J. Murray Levine
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781786940414
- eISBN:
- 9781789629408
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786940414.003.0004
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter considers three films by French documentary auteurs who late in their careers, chose to make road movies of sorts: Chris Marker’s Chats perchés/The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004); Agnès ...
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This chapter considers three films by French documentary auteurs who late in their careers, chose to make road movies of sorts: Chris Marker’s Chats perchés/The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004); Agnès Varda’s Les Plages d’Agnès/The Beaches of Agnes (2008); and Claudine Nougaret and Raymond Depardon’s Journal de France (2012). It suggests that all three films share an experiential impulse, understood as an invitation to experience space in a mobile, exploratory mode, and the potential to unsettle, de-center, and displace the viewer. Instead of fulfilling the conventional authoritative role of documentary commentary that describes or explains, the narrative instance provides instead a multiple, fragmentary, and unstable narrative center, which comes into being through incomplete journeys with uncertain destinations.Less
This chapter considers three films by French documentary auteurs who late in their careers, chose to make road movies of sorts: Chris Marker’s Chats perchés/The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004); Agnès Varda’s Les Plages d’Agnès/The Beaches of Agnes (2008); and Claudine Nougaret and Raymond Depardon’s Journal de France (2012). It suggests that all three films share an experiential impulse, understood as an invitation to experience space in a mobile, exploratory mode, and the potential to unsettle, de-center, and displace the viewer. Instead of fulfilling the conventional authoritative role of documentary commentary that describes or explains, the narrative instance provides instead a multiple, fragmentary, and unstable narrative center, which comes into being through incomplete journeys with uncertain destinations.
Delphine Bénézet
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231169752
- eISBN:
- 9780231850612
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231169752.003.0003
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter continues to look into the specificity of Agnès Varda's films within its historical context and also uses a revisionist perspective concerning hardcore auteurism. It revisits the idea of ...
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This chapter continues to look into the specificity of Agnès Varda's films within its historical context and also uses a revisionist perspective concerning hardcore auteurism. It revisits the idea of the filmmaker as the all-mighty single auteur of her films by focusing on the collaborative nature of filmmaking, by reassessing the role of other contributors like the editor and the composer, and by looking at Varda's own performances of authorship. Taking La Pointe Courte and Agnès de ci de là Varda as examples, this chapter aims to reconsider some of the filmmaker's preoccupations across time and to evaluate what sort of contribution other artists and collaborators have made to Varda's cinema. This in-depth analysis shows how each of these projects is the result of a complex amalgam of efforts, encounters and influences.Less
This chapter continues to look into the specificity of Agnès Varda's films within its historical context and also uses a revisionist perspective concerning hardcore auteurism. It revisits the idea of the filmmaker as the all-mighty single auteur of her films by focusing on the collaborative nature of filmmaking, by reassessing the role of other contributors like the editor and the composer, and by looking at Varda's own performances of authorship. Taking La Pointe Courte and Agnès de ci de là Varda as examples, this chapter aims to reconsider some of the filmmaker's preoccupations across time and to evaluate what sort of contribution other artists and collaborators have made to Varda's cinema. This in-depth analysis shows how each of these projects is the result of a complex amalgam of efforts, encounters and influences.
Isabelle Mcneill
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748638918
- eISBN:
- 9780748671014
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748638918.003.0003
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter explores the role of filmic, or ‘screened’, objects in memory. It specifically examines the virtual museums of Agnès Varda, Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard. It is noted that Godard's ...
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This chapter explores the role of filmic, or ‘screened’, objects in memory. It specifically examines the virtual museums of Agnès Varda, Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard. It is noted that Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma and Marker's Immemory could not be more different in some ways. Varda's L'Île et elle gave a series of interlinked encounters with objects of cultural memory. It also serves as an important reminder of the contingency involved in all engagements with cultural memory objects. Les Plages d'Agnès is explicitly an autobiographical film, a cinematic memory journey that inevitably centres on the figure of the filmmaker herself. The screening of objects in the imaginary museums of moving image texts shows the ways in which material things form a part of the social frameworks of memory, where film both mirrors the functioning of cultural memory and forms a part of it.Less
This chapter explores the role of filmic, or ‘screened’, objects in memory. It specifically examines the virtual museums of Agnès Varda, Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard. It is noted that Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma and Marker's Immemory could not be more different in some ways. Varda's L'Île et elle gave a series of interlinked encounters with objects of cultural memory. It also serves as an important reminder of the contingency involved in all engagements with cultural memory objects. Les Plages d'Agnès is explicitly an autobiographical film, a cinematic memory journey that inevitably centres on the figure of the filmmaker herself. The screening of objects in the imaginary museums of moving image texts shows the ways in which material things form a part of the social frameworks of memory, where film both mirrors the functioning of cultural memory and forms a part of it.
Isabelle McNeill
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748638918
- eISBN:
- 9780748671014
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748638918.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
A vital rethinking of memory and the moving image for the digital age, this book investigates the role of the moving image in cultural memory, considering the impact of digital technologies on visual ...
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A vital rethinking of memory and the moving image for the digital age, this book investigates the role of the moving image in cultural memory, considering the impact of digital technologies on visual culture. Drawing on an interdisciplinary range of theoretical resources and an unusual body of films and moving image works, the book examines the ways in which recent French filmmaking conceptualises both the past and the workings of memory. Ultimately the book argues, memory is an intersubjective process, in which filmic forms continue to play a crucial role even as new media come to dominate our contemporary experience. The book introduces new ways of thinking about the relation between film and memory, arising from an interdisciplinary study of theories and films; explores the French context while drawing theoretical conclusions with wider implications and applicability; provides detailed close readings of varied moving image works to aid theoretical explorations; moves away from auteurist approaches, examining work by canonical directors including Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker and Agnès Varda alongside that of less well-known filmmakers such as Claire Simon and Yamina Benguigui; and brings together thinkers such as Bergson, Deleuze, Bazin and Barthes with, for example, Rodowick and Mulvey, in an interweaving of theories. Works considered include Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1989–98), Yamina Benguigui's Mémoires d'Immigrés (1997), Chris Marker's CD-ROM Immemory (1998), Claire Simon's Mimi (2003), Michael Haneke's Caché (2005) and Agnès Varda's multi-media exhibition, L'Île et Elle (2006).Less
A vital rethinking of memory and the moving image for the digital age, this book investigates the role of the moving image in cultural memory, considering the impact of digital technologies on visual culture. Drawing on an interdisciplinary range of theoretical resources and an unusual body of films and moving image works, the book examines the ways in which recent French filmmaking conceptualises both the past and the workings of memory. Ultimately the book argues, memory is an intersubjective process, in which filmic forms continue to play a crucial role even as new media come to dominate our contemporary experience. The book introduces new ways of thinking about the relation between film and memory, arising from an interdisciplinary study of theories and films; explores the French context while drawing theoretical conclusions with wider implications and applicability; provides detailed close readings of varied moving image works to aid theoretical explorations; moves away from auteurist approaches, examining work by canonical directors including Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker and Agnès Varda alongside that of less well-known filmmakers such as Claire Simon and Yamina Benguigui; and brings together thinkers such as Bergson, Deleuze, Bazin and Barthes with, for example, Rodowick and Mulvey, in an interweaving of theories. Works considered include Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1989–98), Yamina Benguigui's Mémoires d'Immigrés (1997), Chris Marker's CD-ROM Immemory (1998), Claire Simon's Mimi (2003), Michael Haneke's Caché (2005) and Agnès Varda's multi-media exhibition, L'Île et Elle (2006).
Delphine Bénézet
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231169752
- eISBN:
- 9780231850612
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231169752.003.0002
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter examines a sample of selected films of Agnès Varda and argues that her cinematographic practice has always engaged with the corporeal, and that as a consequence it constitutes a decisive ...
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This chapter examines a sample of selected films of Agnès Varda and argues that her cinematographic practice has always engaged with the corporeal, and that as a consequence it constitutes a decisive contribution to feminism. The three pieces chosen — L'Opéra Mouffe, Daguérréotypes and Les Veuves de Noirmoutier — were shot years apart and span Varda's career. The first two films can be considered as part of the ‘cinéma de quartier’ (‘local cinema shooting’) that Varda frequently practices. Both were shot in Paris and focus on a well-defined space and its residents. The conditions of exhibition of Les Veuves de Noirmoutier were different from those of the two earlier films selected, but this installation piece makes for a more comprehensive and wide-ranging corpus. Analysing the role of bodies in the films, and discussing the experimental and essayistic nature of Varda's work, the chapter establishes how the subjective and personal intersect with collective experiences and memory.Less
This chapter examines a sample of selected films of Agnès Varda and argues that her cinematographic practice has always engaged with the corporeal, and that as a consequence it constitutes a decisive contribution to feminism. The three pieces chosen — L'Opéra Mouffe, Daguérréotypes and Les Veuves de Noirmoutier — were shot years apart and span Varda's career. The first two films can be considered as part of the ‘cinéma de quartier’ (‘local cinema shooting’) that Varda frequently practices. Both were shot in Paris and focus on a well-defined space and its residents. The conditions of exhibition of Les Veuves de Noirmoutier were different from those of the two earlier films selected, but this installation piece makes for a more comprehensive and wide-ranging corpus. Analysing the role of bodies in the films, and discussing the experimental and essayistic nature of Varda's work, the chapter establishes how the subjective and personal intersect with collective experiences and memory.
Delphine Benezet
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231169752
- eISBN:
- 9780231850612
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231169752.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Agnès Varda, a pioneer of the French New Wave, has been making radical films for over half a century. Many of these are considered by scholars, filmmakers, and audiences alike, as audacious, seminal, ...
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Agnès Varda, a pioneer of the French New Wave, has been making radical films for over half a century. Many of these are considered by scholars, filmmakers, and audiences alike, as audacious, seminal, and unforgettable. This book considers her production as a whole, revisiting overlooked films like Mur, Murs and Documenteur (1980–1981), and connecting her cinema to recent installation work. This study demonstrates how Varda has resisted norms of representation and diktats of production. It also shows how she has elaborated a personal repertoire of images, characters, and settings, which all provide insight on their cultural and political contexts. The book offers new readings of this director's multifaceted rêveries, arguing that her work should be seen as an aesthetically influential and ethically driven production where cinema is both a political and collaborative practice, and a synesthetic art form.Less
Agnès Varda, a pioneer of the French New Wave, has been making radical films for over half a century. Many of these are considered by scholars, filmmakers, and audiences alike, as audacious, seminal, and unforgettable. This book considers her production as a whole, revisiting overlooked films like Mur, Murs and Documenteur (1980–1981), and connecting her cinema to recent installation work. This study demonstrates how Varda has resisted norms of representation and diktats of production. It also shows how she has elaborated a personal repertoire of images, characters, and settings, which all provide insight on their cultural and political contexts. The book offers new readings of this director's multifaceted rêveries, arguing that her work should be seen as an aesthetically influential and ethically driven production where cinema is both a political and collaborative practice, and a synesthetic art form.
Delphine Bénézet
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231169752
- eISBN:
- 9780231850612
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231169752.003.0005
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter considers how Agnès Varda articulates a model of cinema that subverts classical theory. It analyses this model by determining how Varda approaches space when she films or when she sets ...
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This chapter considers how Agnès Varda articulates a model of cinema that subverts classical theory. It analyses this model by determining how Varda approaches space when she films or when she sets up installations. It also identifies the notable common elements in her works. An analysis of her projects shows that space is neither objective nor topographic. It is not a blank canvas or a tabula rasa on which the filmmaker can build anything that she wants, but a perspective closer to that of cultural geographers who argue that space is socially constituted through the interaction of boundaries, representations and practices. Varda's films and installations represent how lived or inhabited space is known phenomenologically through participation in or inhabitation of the world. The chapter discusses first the notion of motional geography and then moves to the relational modus operandi of Varda's work.Less
This chapter considers how Agnès Varda articulates a model of cinema that subverts classical theory. It analyses this model by determining how Varda approaches space when she films or when she sets up installations. It also identifies the notable common elements in her works. An analysis of her projects shows that space is neither objective nor topographic. It is not a blank canvas or a tabula rasa on which the filmmaker can build anything that she wants, but a perspective closer to that of cultural geographers who argue that space is socially constituted through the interaction of boundaries, representations and practices. Varda's films and installations represent how lived or inhabited space is known phenomenologically through participation in or inhabitation of the world. The chapter discusses first the notion of motional geography and then moves to the relational modus operandi of Varda's work.
Delphine Bénézet
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231169752
- eISBN:
- 9780231850612
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231169752.003.0006
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter considers Agnès Varda's cinécriture, her unique approach to conceiving cinema as an elaborate and potentially powerful combination of moving images, sound, and music. It begins with a ...
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This chapter considers Agnès Varda's cinécriture, her unique approach to conceiving cinema as an elaborate and potentially powerful combination of moving images, sound, and music. It begins with a section establishing Varda's unorthodox subjects and practices of production, concentrating on four films that illustrate her unique praxis: Elsa la Rose, Uncle Yanco, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, and Deux Ans Après. It then discusses Varda's cinécriture as based on an embodied vision of the world by looking into the films Ydessa, les ours et etc., Réponses de Femmes and 7p., cuis., s. de b., … à saisir. These films support the notion that corporeality forms as the core of Varda's cinema of interpellation. Like other forms of enunciational address, such as the direct gaze into the camera, the bodies of the people on screen call the audience's attention.Less
This chapter considers Agnès Varda's cinécriture, her unique approach to conceiving cinema as an elaborate and potentially powerful combination of moving images, sound, and music. It begins with a section establishing Varda's unorthodox subjects and practices of production, concentrating on four films that illustrate her unique praxis: Elsa la Rose, Uncle Yanco, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, and Deux Ans Après. It then discusses Varda's cinécriture as based on an embodied vision of the world by looking into the films Ydessa, les ours et etc., Réponses de Femmes and 7p., cuis., s. de b., … à saisir. These films support the notion that corporeality forms as the core of Varda's cinema of interpellation. Like other forms of enunciational address, such as the direct gaze into the camera, the bodies of the people on screen call the audience's attention.
Delphine Bénézet
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231169752
- eISBN:
- 9780231850612
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231169752.003.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This introductory chapter provides an overall description of the works of French New Wave film director Agnès Varda. It first looks into her Salut les Cubains! (1964), a distinctive political ...
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This introductory chapter provides an overall description of the works of French New Wave film director Agnès Varda. It first looks into her Salut les Cubains! (1964), a distinctive political documentary, mostly made of animated photographs that she took on trips to Cuba in December 1962 and January 1963, a period filled with political and social changes in Cuba. The photos feature many of the traits found in Varda's other artistic projects. It is informed by its political and historical context and shaped by the conditions in which it was made. The strategies that Varda deploys in her films testify to her lasting commitment to represent women within history. This concern not only with women on screen but with the act of ‘filmer en femme’, as she calls it, makes her an important figure in the fields of film, gender, and cultural studies.Less
This introductory chapter provides an overall description of the works of French New Wave film director Agnès Varda. It first looks into her Salut les Cubains! (1964), a distinctive political documentary, mostly made of animated photographs that she took on trips to Cuba in December 1962 and January 1963, a period filled with political and social changes in Cuba. The photos feature many of the traits found in Varda's other artistic projects. It is informed by its political and historical context and shaped by the conditions in which it was made. The strategies that Varda deploys in her films testify to her lasting commitment to represent women within history. This concern not only with women on screen but with the act of ‘filmer en femme’, as she calls it, makes her an important figure in the fields of film, gender, and cultural studies.
Domietta Torlasco
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816681099
- eISBN:
- 9781452949093
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816681099.003.0002
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Chapter two (“Digital Impressions”) questions Derrida’s definition of impression as inscription by turning to Varda’s film The Gleaners and I and asserting “gleaning” as the figure for a heterodox ...
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Chapter two (“Digital Impressions”) questions Derrida’s definition of impression as inscription by turning to Varda’s film The Gleaners and I and asserting “gleaning” as the figure for a heterodox mode of archiving, one that moves beyond the distinction of content and form in order to gather what remains, what is left behind, and what is thrown away.Less
Chapter two (“Digital Impressions”) questions Derrida’s definition of impression as inscription by turning to Varda’s film The Gleaners and I and asserting “gleaning” as the figure for a heterodox mode of archiving, one that moves beyond the distinction of content and form in order to gather what remains, what is left behind, and what is thrown away.
Kelley Conway
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252039720
- eISBN:
- 9780252097829
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252039720.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Both a precursor to and a critical member of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda weaves documentary and fiction into tapestries that portray distinctive places and complex human beings. Critics and ...
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Both a precursor to and a critical member of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda weaves documentary and fiction into tapestries that portray distinctive places and complex human beings. Critics and aficionados have celebrated Varda's independence and originality since the New Wave touchstone Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) brought her a level of international acclaim she has yet to relinquish. The book traces Varda's works from her 1954 debut La Pointe Courte through a varied career that includes nonfiction and fiction shorts and features, installation art, and the triumphant 2008 documentary The Beaches of Agnès. Drawing on Varda's archives and conversations with the filmmaker, the book focuses on the concrete details of how Varda makes films: a project's emergence, its development and the shifting forms of its screenplay, the search for financing, and the execution from casting through editing and exhibition. In the process, it explores the artistic consistencies and bold changes in Varda's career and reveals how one woman charted a nontraditional trajectory through independent filmmaking. The result is a book that reveals the artistic consistencies and bold changes in the career of one of the world's most exuberant and intriguing directors.Less
Both a precursor to and a critical member of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda weaves documentary and fiction into tapestries that portray distinctive places and complex human beings. Critics and aficionados have celebrated Varda's independence and originality since the New Wave touchstone Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) brought her a level of international acclaim she has yet to relinquish. The book traces Varda's works from her 1954 debut La Pointe Courte through a varied career that includes nonfiction and fiction shorts and features, installation art, and the triumphant 2008 documentary The Beaches of Agnès. Drawing on Varda's archives and conversations with the filmmaker, the book focuses on the concrete details of how Varda makes films: a project's emergence, its development and the shifting forms of its screenplay, the search for financing, and the execution from casting through editing and exhibition. In the process, it explores the artistic consistencies and bold changes in Varda's career and reveals how one woman charted a nontraditional trajectory through independent filmmaking. The result is a book that reveals the artistic consistencies and bold changes in the career of one of the world's most exuberant and intriguing directors.
Delphine Bénézet
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231169752
- eISBN:
- 9780231850612
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231169752.003.0004
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter examines Agnès Varda's ethics of filming and attempts to establish her as a cinéaste passeur, a mediator not only between the filmed subjects and the spectators, but also between a ...
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This chapter examines Agnès Varda's ethics of filming and attempts to establish her as a cinéaste passeur, a mediator not only between the filmed subjects and the spectators, but also between a specific space and time and the moment of the screening. It emphasises the factors that dictate Varda's decisions when creating a film, and identifies the two basic elements that serve as foundation for Varda's ethics of filming — relationality and connections. During filming, Varda, as an ‘author’ sees herself as an ‘intermediary who gives her voice to those who have none’. Her approach is based on the encounter with the other, and marked by a consistent concern for the capture and preservation of images. This is most evident in the four films discussed in the chapter: Mur, Murs, Documenteur (1980–81), Sans Toit ni Loi, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, and Le Lion volatile (2003).Less
This chapter examines Agnès Varda's ethics of filming and attempts to establish her as a cinéaste passeur, a mediator not only between the filmed subjects and the spectators, but also between a specific space and time and the moment of the screening. It emphasises the factors that dictate Varda's decisions when creating a film, and identifies the two basic elements that serve as foundation for Varda's ethics of filming — relationality and connections. During filming, Varda, as an ‘author’ sees herself as an ‘intermediary who gives her voice to those who have none’. Her approach is based on the encounter with the other, and marked by a consistent concern for the capture and preservation of images. This is most evident in the four films discussed in the chapter: Mur, Murs, Documenteur (1980–81), Sans Toit ni Loi, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, and Le Lion volatile (2003).
Lucy Fischer
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252036613
- eISBN:
- 9780252093661
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252036613.003.0008
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter examines Agnès Varda's The Gleaners and I (2000), an elision of documentary with autobiography that connects—through Varda's own working life, spanning feminist and postfeminist ...
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This chapter examines Agnès Varda's The Gleaners and I (2000), an elision of documentary with autobiography that connects—through Varda's own working life, spanning feminist and postfeminist generations—to women's early film practice. The film depicts an extended “road trip” that Varda takes in order to encounter and film a variety of people who “glean” things—be their plunder the traditional rural harvest or urban garbage. In noting Varda's extension of the significance of “gleaning” for food to a woman's practice of collecting, the chapter delineates an encounter between a sensibility culturally defined as feminine with the feminized throwaway culture of mass consumerism. Authorship figures, then, as a form of creative recycling or bricolage.Less
This chapter examines Agnès Varda's The Gleaners and I (2000), an elision of documentary with autobiography that connects—through Varda's own working life, spanning feminist and postfeminist generations—to women's early film practice. The film depicts an extended “road trip” that Varda takes in order to encounter and film a variety of people who “glean” things—be their plunder the traditional rural harvest or urban garbage. In noting Varda's extension of the significance of “gleaning” for food to a woman's practice of collecting, the chapter delineates an encounter between a sensibility culturally defined as feminine with the feminized throwaway culture of mass consumerism. Authorship figures, then, as a form of creative recycling or bricolage.
James Tweedie
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- June 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780190873875
- eISBN:
- 9780190873912
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190873875.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Agnès Varda’s Vagabond (1985) begins and frequently returns to images of the French landscape, and it constructs an allegory that binds the stories and images of its main character, the nation, and ...
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Agnès Varda’s Vagabond (1985) begins and frequently returns to images of the French landscape, and it constructs an allegory that binds the stories and images of its main character, the nation, and the land. At the heart of this and Varda’s subsequent films is an engagement with the significance of the land as a fragile part of an ecosystem, a gendered space, and a powerful symbol of the nation and its patrimony. Rather than view the landscape as an unbreakable link between the nation and the national past preserved in nature, she frames the natural world as a modern phenomenon in a state of ruin and develops an aesthetic of the landscape attuned to this condition. In Vagabond and her later digital documentaries Varda imagines her relationship to the land and history as a process of gleaning from the vibrant possibilities left behind after the process of modernization has run its course.Less
Agnès Varda’s Vagabond (1985) begins and frequently returns to images of the French landscape, and it constructs an allegory that binds the stories and images of its main character, the nation, and the land. At the heart of this and Varda’s subsequent films is an engagement with the significance of the land as a fragile part of an ecosystem, a gendered space, and a powerful symbol of the nation and its patrimony. Rather than view the landscape as an unbreakable link between the nation and the national past preserved in nature, she frames the natural world as a modern phenomenon in a state of ruin and develops an aesthetic of the landscape attuned to this condition. In Vagabond and her later digital documentaries Varda imagines her relationship to the land and history as a process of gleaning from the vibrant possibilities left behind after the process of modernization has run its course.
James Tweedie
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199858286
- eISBN:
- 9780199367665
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199858286.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter is organized around a specific scene and action performed repeatedly in French new wave cinema: characters walking through the city. These emblematic rambles through urban space often ...
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This chapter is organized around a specific scene and action performed repeatedly in French new wave cinema: characters walking through the city. These emblematic rambles through urban space often unfold without apparent aim or direction, as getting somewhere becomes a secondary consideration and the film concentrates instead on the urban context and the act of walking itself. The films focus on the youthful body in a city undergoing its own process of demolition and renewal, and these scenes stage that interaction between people and the urban environment. Individual cases studies include Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, the documentary and fiction filmmaking of Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 Less
This chapter is organized around a specific scene and action performed repeatedly in French new wave cinema: characters walking through the city. These emblematic rambles through urban space often unfold without apparent aim or direction, as getting somewhere becomes a secondary consideration and the film concentrates instead on the urban context and the act of walking itself. The films focus on the youthful body in a city undergoing its own process of demolition and renewal, and these scenes stage that interaction between people and the urban environment. Individual cases studies include Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, the documentary and fiction filmmaking of Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7
Domietta Torlasco
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816681099
- eISBN:
- 9781452949093
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816681099.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The Heretical Archive examines digital films and multimedia installations that cite and manipulate film materials, arguing that they contribute to redefining our memory of cinema as well as our ...
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The Heretical Archive examines digital films and multimedia installations that cite and manipulate film materials, arguing that they contribute to redefining our memory of cinema as well as our understanding of the archive. By interrogating the relationship between memory and creativity, the book proposes a notion of archiving that privileges the reopening of cinema’s perceptual and political textures over their passive preservation and reiteration. What is at stake is not faithfulness to a certain established tradition, but rather the calling into being of future genealogies. Digital works that quote a celluloid precursor do so by responding to their antecedent through its interstices and invisible spaces, through the unsaid or unseen, thus inaugurating a new aesthetic and political future for the specific film in question. The book argues that digital films and installations that directly appropriate film materials can affirm themselves as agents of critical reflection, transforming they way in which we understand both twentieth-century cinema and psychoanalysis as a theory of the archive. It’s the first book to methodically engage with Derrida’s Archive Fever from the viewpoint of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of perception; to read digital artworks as realizations of the potential of a psychoanalytic archive that takes Antigone rather than Oedipus as its point of departure; and to offer a groundbreaking conceptualization of montage (editing) as folding rather than cutting.Less
The Heretical Archive examines digital films and multimedia installations that cite and manipulate film materials, arguing that they contribute to redefining our memory of cinema as well as our understanding of the archive. By interrogating the relationship between memory and creativity, the book proposes a notion of archiving that privileges the reopening of cinema’s perceptual and political textures over their passive preservation and reiteration. What is at stake is not faithfulness to a certain established tradition, but rather the calling into being of future genealogies. Digital works that quote a celluloid precursor do so by responding to their antecedent through its interstices and invisible spaces, through the unsaid or unseen, thus inaugurating a new aesthetic and political future for the specific film in question. The book argues that digital films and installations that directly appropriate film materials can affirm themselves as agents of critical reflection, transforming they way in which we understand both twentieth-century cinema and psychoanalysis as a theory of the archive. It’s the first book to methodically engage with Derrida’s Archive Fever from the viewpoint of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of perception; to read digital artworks as realizations of the potential of a psychoanalytic archive that takes Antigone rather than Oedipus as its point of departure; and to offer a groundbreaking conceptualization of montage (editing) as folding rather than cutting.
Martine Beugnet
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748641604
- eISBN:
- 9780748651221
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748641604.003.0003
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter focuses on post-war cinema, considering how an emerging extreme cinema deals with political conflicts and concerns about France's involvement in traumatic historical events in ways very ...
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This chapter focuses on post-war cinema, considering how an emerging extreme cinema deals with political conflicts and concerns about France's involvement in traumatic historical events in ways very different to the tradition of political, social realist filmmaking. It discusses the ‘sensory overload’ of the ‘cinema of sensation’ by comparing Agnès Varda's classic art film, Cléo de 5 à 7 (France, 1962) and Claire Denis's ‘blood-soaked gore opus’, Trouble Every Day (France, 2001). It explores how both films, though separated by forty years, work with categories emblematic of the post-war cultural shift identified by Kristin Ross in her important study of post-war French society, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies (1999). Through references to disease, both films evoke the legacy of French colonial history, and in doing so, each connects the individual and the filmic body with the national body and history's festering wounds.Less
This chapter focuses on post-war cinema, considering how an emerging extreme cinema deals with political conflicts and concerns about France's involvement in traumatic historical events in ways very different to the tradition of political, social realist filmmaking. It discusses the ‘sensory overload’ of the ‘cinema of sensation’ by comparing Agnès Varda's classic art film, Cléo de 5 à 7 (France, 1962) and Claire Denis's ‘blood-soaked gore opus’, Trouble Every Day (France, 2001). It explores how both films, though separated by forty years, work with categories emblematic of the post-war cultural shift identified by Kristin Ross in her important study of post-war French society, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies (1999). Through references to disease, both films evoke the legacy of French colonial history, and in doing so, each connects the individual and the filmic body with the national body and history's festering wounds.
Lisa Saltzman
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226242033
- eISBN:
- 9780226242170
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226242170.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
What happens when the idea of the photographic portrait gets reconstituted elsewhere, for example, in ways that repeat yet re-imagine the logic of Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests and Agnès Varda’s ...
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What happens when the idea of the photographic portrait gets reconstituted elsewhere, for example, in ways that repeat yet re-imagine the logic of Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests and Agnès Varda’s Daguerreotypes, but in video art? What happens when we are brought face to face with an opening, of the category of the photographic portrait, indeed, of the photographic object? What are the implications of video work that mines and mimes the conventions of photographic portraiture to produce static, durational encounters with stillness in a medium that is anything but? Such projects may once and for all release the photographic portrait from its quest to fix its fugitive subject, and, do so in ways that have important implications for the history and future of the medium. Leaving behind notions of truth, touch and trace so critical to each of the preceding chapters to focus instead on the concept of time, the chapter concludes with an extensive analysis of the work of Gillian Wearing, whose negotiation of subjectivity and surrogacy, trauma and temporality finds its most forceful expression in her pieces involving the durational video portrait, a format that she shares with, among others, Thomas Struth and Tacita Dean.Less
What happens when the idea of the photographic portrait gets reconstituted elsewhere, for example, in ways that repeat yet re-imagine the logic of Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests and Agnès Varda’s Daguerreotypes, but in video art? What happens when we are brought face to face with an opening, of the category of the photographic portrait, indeed, of the photographic object? What are the implications of video work that mines and mimes the conventions of photographic portraiture to produce static, durational encounters with stillness in a medium that is anything but? Such projects may once and for all release the photographic portrait from its quest to fix its fugitive subject, and, do so in ways that have important implications for the history and future of the medium. Leaving behind notions of truth, touch and trace so critical to each of the preceding chapters to focus instead on the concept of time, the chapter concludes with an extensive analysis of the work of Gillian Wearing, whose negotiation of subjectivity and surrogacy, trauma and temporality finds its most forceful expression in her pieces involving the durational video portrait, a format that she shares with, among others, Thomas Struth and Tacita Dean.
Domietta Torlasco
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816681099
- eISBN:
- 9781452949093
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816681099.003.0003
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Chapter Three (“Folding Time”) takes up the question of the virtual and shows how Pierre Huyghe’s video installation The Ellipsis and Chris Marker’s CD-ROM Immemory transform film history in a ...
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Chapter Three (“Folding Time”) takes up the question of the virtual and shows how Pierre Huyghe’s video installation The Ellipsis and Chris Marker’s CD-ROM Immemory transform film history in a reservoirs of virtual traces for the emergence of future memories. The chapter ends by proposing Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the fold to reinterpret that most distinctively cinematic operation, the edit.Less
Chapter Three (“Folding Time”) takes up the question of the virtual and shows how Pierre Huyghe’s video installation The Ellipsis and Chris Marker’s CD-ROM Immemory transform film history in a reservoirs of virtual traces for the emergence of future memories. The chapter ends by proposing Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the fold to reinterpret that most distinctively cinematic operation, the edit.
