Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Women on the Move: The Politics of Walking in Agnès Varda

2012; Edinburgh University Press; Volume: 6; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3366/dls.2012.0049

1755-1684

Asli Özgen Tuncer,

French Literature and Critical Theory

This article focuses on images of walking in Agnès Varda's films – Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962), Sans toit ni loi (1985), and Les Plages d’Agnès ( 2008 ). The activity of walking (as urban flânerie, circular travelling or walking backwards) is central to these films, and can be seen as a corporeal practice that not only interweaves striated and smooth spaces but also offer a gender-sensitive, political contemplation on the forces of striation and smoothing as well as a re-invention of space. The women in movement in Varda's films embody a transgression of stratified territories such as the image-oriented society of the spectacle in Cléo, myths of adolescence and settled living in Sans toit ni loi, or the boundaries of aging in Les Plages d'Agnès.