JCM312/French Feminism, Continued: Agnès Varda (Lecture)

From Screenpedia
Jump to navigationJump to search
The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.

Feminist film production

  1. Documentary
    • Do not pretend to "objectivity"
    • Autobiographical (structured like a personal diary)
  2. 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
  3. 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
  • 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)
    • One feature: Lions Love
      • First film with english-speaking cast
      • Gerome Ragni, James Rado, co-authors of Hair, in cast
  • 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
    • Vietnam war
      • Far from Vietnam episode (1967)
  • 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
  • Cinematography
    • Camera movement that does not follow action, but acts independently
  • "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.

External links