JCM312/French Feminism, Continued: Agnès Varda (Lecture)
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Feminist film production
- Documentary
- Do not pretend to "objectivity"
- Autobiographical (structured like a personal diary)
- Socialist Realist
- Not "socialist" in an economic sense
- Derived from 1930s Russia
- 1932: Joseph Stalin decreed "socialist realism" as official policy: "On the Reconstruction of Literary and Art Organizations"
- Art must support the Revolution; no stylistic experimentation allowed
- More generally speaking: fiction film from a feminist perspective
- Feminist morality tales
- Didactic fiction films
- Women's cinema as counter cinema
- Rooted in Wollen's principle of "counter cinema," as in Godard's work
- Classical cinema's form, its style, is seen to be patriarchal.
- Thus a feminist content requires a feminist style
Agnès Varda
Chronology
- 30 May 1928 born (Brussels)
- Late 1940s: professional still. Photographer
- Working initially in the theater
- For Jean Vilar's Theatre National Populaire
- 1951-'61 And then for magazine photo stories
- 1954 first short. La Point courte
- Edited by Alain Resnais
- Direct antecedent of the New Wave
- Varda associated with the "literary" elements of n.w.
- "Left Bank" or Rive Gauche intellectuals
- Intellectuals living on the left bank of the Seine River
- Le nouveau roman (French: "new novel") of Alain Robbe-Grillet & Nathalie Sarraute
- "Left Bank" or Rive Gauche intellectuals
- 1961 first feature film, Cleo from 5 to 7
- 1962 married director Jacques Demy
- 1968-'69 worked in U.S.
- Two shorts: Uncle Janco and The Black Panthers (about Huey Newton)
- Black Panthers on UbuWeb:
- http://www.ubu.com/film/varda.html
- One feature: Lions Love
- First film with english-speaking cast
- Gerome Ragni, James Rado, co-authors of Hair, in cast
- Two shorts: Uncle Janco and The Black Panthers (about Huey Newton)
- Early 1970s: becomes earnestly involved in woman's movement
- Socialist realist feminist films
- My Body Belongs to Me (1972)
- Pro-abortion
- One Sings, the Other Doesn't (1977)
- Two women's parallel lives
With Jacques Demy:
Thematics
- Interplay of subjectivity and objectivity
- Films in which distinction between objective "reality" and character's inner states are blurred
- Cf. Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour
- E.g., The Creatures
- In which writer's imagination blends with reality
- Closely related: interplay of fiction and documentary
- Creatures is largely improvised and features actors playing their real life roles
- Social and political issues
- Racism
- Black panthers (1968)
- The Cuban revolution, led by socialist, Fidel Castro
- Salute to Cuba (1965)
- Over 4,000 of her still photos collaged together
- Salute to Cuba (1965)
- Vietnam war
- Far from Vietnam episode (1967)
- Racism
- Feminism
- Women's issues
Narrative structure
- Women on a journey
- Both physical and emotional journeys
- Doubled story-line
- Two narratives that twine together
- Narrative experimentation
- Playing with narrative form
Visual style
- Mise-en-scene
- Location shooting
- Nonprofessional actors
- Vagabond has a mixed cast
- Sandrine Bonnaire, the protagonist, is a professional
- Cinematography
- "Symbolic" use of color and black and white
- E.g., Happiness and The Creatures
Bibliography
- Kuhn, Annette. Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.