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Reflected Reflexivity in Jane B. par Agnès V.

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 28; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10509200902820324

1543-5326

Cybelle H. McFadden,

Linguistics and Discourse Analysis

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Starting in the 1970s and 80s, feminist artists, especially female American and Anglophone artists and photographers, included their bodies in their work: Valie Export, Sarah Lucas, Carolee Schneemann, Cindy Sherman, and Annie Sprinkle, for example. Carolee Schneemann was one of the first contemporary female artists to use her body in her work to change meaning associated with it. See Schneemann's More Than Meat Joy (New Paltz, NY: Documentext, 1979) and Imaging Her Erotics (Cambridge Press: MIT Press, 2002). This phenomenon also occurred in the video work of Sadie Benning and Vanalyne Green in the 1980s and 90s. 2. For a discussion of the significance of digital technology in Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, see Maryse Fauvel's "Nostalgia and Digital Technology: The Gleaners and I (Varda, 2000) and The Triplets of Belleville (Chomet, 2003) as reflective genres," Studies in French Cinema 5 (2005): 219-229. Agnès Calatayud also underscores the importance of digital technology for the self-portrait in Jean-Luc Godard's JLG/JLG–autoportrait de décembre (1995) and Varda's Les glaneurs et la glaneuse. See "Les glaneurs et la glaneuse: Agnès Varda's Self-Portrait" Dalhousie French Studies 61 (Winter 2002): 113-123. 3. Mireille Rosello, "Agnès Varda's Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse: Portrait of the Artist as an Old Lady," Studies in French Cinema 1 (2001): 29. 4. Sophie Cherer, "Moi Varda, Toi Jane." 7 A Paris, 15 March 1988: 24. "Je voulais inventer une forme où, avec mon imagination, je fasse passer Jane par tant de fictions et de déformations qu'à la fin on la retrouve. On m'a dit: 'Tu tournes avec Jane.' J'ai dit: Non, je tourne autour de Jane." All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 5. Agnès Varda, Varda par Agnès (Paris: Editions Cahiers du Cinéma, 1994): 185. 6. Alan Williams, Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992): (357). 7. Throughout her career, Varda has explored female subjectivity through a variety of female characters, for example, her investigation of the construction of female subjectivity in Cléo de 5 à 7 (1961) and Sans toit ni loi (1985), explicitly questions social conventions of femininity. Cléo de 5 à 7, Varda's second film, is her first attempt to interrogate female subject formation, images of women, and societal standards of beauty. As a cinematic figure, Varda is noteworthy for feminist film theorists, since she is one of the few female contemporary directors in France who identifies herself as feminist. I would agree with Sandy Flitterman-Lewis' assertion, however, that some of Varda's most revolutionary films do not put forward an overt feminist polemic. Films such as Cléo de 5 à 7 and Le Bonheur (1965) "posit a feminist critique of patriarchal structures through their critical explorations of both the production of femininity and its representations, yet they are often not understood as such," argues Flitterman-Lewis in To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990): 215. L'une chante, l'autre pas, on the other hand, puts forward a feminist topic, but follows traditional cinematic conventions. Despite the mixed reception by feminist critics, Varda sealed her status as a feminist filmmaker with the making of Sans toit ni loi (the English title is Vagabond) in 1985. The body of a young woman named Mona is found in a ditch at the beginning of the film and the rest of the film reconstructs events and encounters with people leading to the moment of her death. Even though the constitution of the female subject, Mona, depends on the perspectives, fantasies, and desires of others instead of herself, Smith considers the film as treating "almost entirely the possibilities of woman representing woman" (140). Cléo, Mona, Jane, and herself are different female protagonists through which Varda comments on representation of women and does her part in altering traditional representations. 8. Varda, Varda par Agnès, 184. "J'allais enfin pouvoir faire, obligée par elle, un film en plusieurs étapes espacées. Un portrait comme autrefois, en prenant son temps. … en tout cas lutter contre cette incroyable contrainte qui consiste à tourner pendant six semaines, huit semaines, dix semaines en continu …." 9. Jane B. par Agnès V., VHS, directed by Agnès Varda (Paris: Ciné Tamaris, 1987). "Justement, c'est comme si, moi, j'allais filmer ton autoportrait, mais tu ne seras pas toute seule dans le miroir. Il y a aura la caméra qui est un petit peu moi et tant pis si j'apparais parfois dans le miroir ou dans le champ." 10. "Portraits d'artistes, Agnès Varda: ma bobine," Les amphis de la 5ème. la 5ème. December 28, 1998. 11. Varda asks Jane: "Pourquoi je t'ai demandé de faire ce film, tu crois?" Varda, Jane B. par Agnès V. 12. Varda, Jane B. par Agnès V. "Parce que tu es belle?" 13. Varda does not include the fact that Birkin, born in 1946 in London, made her acting debut at age seventeen at the Haymarket Theatre and then her singing debut in a musical at the Prince of Wales Theater. 14. Jane Birkin's official Web site, . Accessed September 2, 2004. 15. Peter Knapp has also taken photos of her that emphasize her physical beauty and attractiveness (Cherer 23). 16. Alison Smith, Agnès Varda (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998): 134-35. 17. See Lidia Guibert Ferrara's Reclining Nude (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2002) for an understanding of the long tradition of the female nude in painting. 18. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (New York: The Viking Press, 1972): 20. 19. See Lidia Guibert Ferrara's Reclining Nude. 20. See Berger's Ways of Seeing for a comparison of Titian's Venus of Urbino and Manet's L'Olympia. He considers the woman in the latter painting, "cast in the traditional role, beginning to question that role, somewhat defiantly" (63). 21. "La beauté, c'est une scandale!" 22. Varda, Varda par Agnès, 191. 23. I am using Laura Mulvey's term from "Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema": "the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning" in Feminism and Film Theory. Ed. Constance Penley. New York: Routledge, 1988): 58. 24. Smith, Agnès Varda, 137. 25. "Portraits d'artistes, Agnès Varda: ma bobine" "Tous les autoportraits sont truqués, les siens et les autres, et donc j'ai fait pour elle un autoportrait truqué et effectivement je suis rentrée dans l'autoportrait qui est aussi truqué qu'un autre …" 26. "Il faut seulement que tu suives la règle du jeu et que tu regardes la caméra le plus souvent que possible. Dedans, il faut que tu regardes dedans, sinon tu ne me regardes pas." 27. Anneke Smelik, And the Mirror Cracked: Feminist Cinema and Film Theory (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998): 123. 28. Karen Blixen, "The Blank Page," in Last Tales. (New York: Random House, 1957): 103. 29. Ibid., 104-5. 30. Elisabeth Bronfen refers to anecdotes that even raise questions about her death, including a researcher who went to the prosperous Hamburg factory where the plaster casts were made and met the factory owner's living daughter who bore an uncanny resemblance to the death mask. See Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992). 31. "Je suis Jane B. Je suis née anglaise. Maintenant je mesure cinq pieds et sept puces. Pas de signes particuliers. Pas de dons exceptionnels. Mais je suis là. Vous me regardez …." 32. Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman, VHS, directed by Chantal Akerman. (New York: First Run/Icarus Films, 1996). 33. See Bronfen's Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic for a detailed analysis of this tradition. 34. Jane Birkin's official Web site, . Accessed September 2, 2004. The album cover features Birkin half naked and wrapped in a black cloth. She had to insist to use the photo taken by her daughter, Kate Barry, since it predominantly displays her back and not her face (see ). 35. Varda, Varda par Agnès 184. Jane Birkin plays a sexy grandmother in Catherine Corsini's Mariées mais pas trop (2003). This film, plus her more recent projects, shows that Birkin is still very active—and continues developing her career in both as an actress and singer. It is interesting that she plays a sexy grandmother, for example, there is a scene in which she is trying on a sexy black gown and showing it off to her granddaughter who stares at her in disbelief. The character that Birkin plays is on a mission to help her granddaughter fall in love, seduce, and land a rich husband. Is this simply an example of type casting? Or is it an exploration of the notion of a sexy and sexually active older woman in a film by a female director? 36. Ibid. "Moi je trouve au contraire que la quarantaine est un âge magnifique pour les femmes parce que—justement à cause de leurs craintes—elles sont vulnérables. Je crois fermement que la peur de quelque chose rend les gens plus sensibles." 37. The theme of the time passing is also an important preoccupation for Varda in Les glaneurs et la glaneuse as she herself confronts aging and death. Varda's preoccupation with the passage of time contrasts with artists who in general try to stop or freeze time. 38. "Portraits d'artistes, Agnès Varda: ma bobine." "Ce que j'ai recherché dans le parcours, non pas idéal, mais dans le parcours choisi, dans le parcours le plus proche de mon projet, c'était d'enlever tout pesanteur … d'enlever … tout cérémonial qui pourrait entendre à dire: 'Je sais sur elle, elle sait sur moi, nous avons construit une identité.' Non, je voulais que ça soit toujours loupé, toujours fuyant, toujours à atteindre. ‥ Je ne crois pas qu'on atteint l'autre si vous voulez, on n'atteint pas le portrait de l'autre, on tend un portrait de l'autre…" 39. Jodi Cranston, The Poetics of Portraiture in the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 140. 40. "Au cinéma, c'est vingt-quatre portraits différents par seconde ou par heure." 41. "This is not the camera of the film" à la René Magritte. 42. Smith 136. "Moi si j'accepte qu'un peintre ou un cinéaste fait mon portrait … oui je veux bien me déformer … mais c'est comme avec toi. L'important c'est l'œil derrière la caméra, la personne derrière la brosse à peintre. Je m'en fous un peu de ce que tu fais avec moi, du moment que je sens que tu m'aimes un peu." 43. Gainsbourg acknowledges the difficulty of the task: "C'est difficile" and Jane responds: "Ce serait mieux le prochain coup." 44. "Portraits d'artistes, Agnès Varda: ma bobine." 45. Boxes' official Web site, . Accessed June 27, 2007. 46. This phenomenon of first filming others to film herself is later developed in Les glaneurs et la glaneuse.