Alison Smith,
Agnès Varda.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998.
ISBN 0 7190 5060 x
213pp
£9.95
(Review copy supplied by Manchester University Press)

Uploaded 30 June 2000

This is one of the first of Manchester University Press’s new series on French film directors. The editors indicate that the series is targeting “students and teachers seeking information and accessible but rigorous critical study of French cinema, and (…) the enthusiastic filmgoer who wants to know more.” They see it as covering not just well established directors, but also others not yet well known to anglophone students of cinema. Agnès Varda herself, of course, falls astride these apparently distinct categories, being unquestionably well established, with forty-five years of filmmaking behind her, yet little known to anglophone filmgoers. Indeed she was perhaps better known in the 1960s, when Cléo de 5 à 7(1961) and Le bonheur(1965) had been received with interest as products of the Left Bank branch of the New Wave, than she is nowadays. Yet given the considerable body of work she has produced since then – much of it more or less documentary in its orientation – it is certainly time for a new overview of her achievements, and this book provides a well informed, even authoritative account of her work and of the four most common preoccupations threading through it: namely an interest in people in the context of their community, the representation of women, time and memory, and the process of production.

Rather than dealing in chronological fashion with the director’s life and work, this authorial study takes these four principle thematic fields and deals with each one in turn across Varda’s whole output. This approach has both advantages and disadvantages. In the case of Varda, as Smith argues convincingly, whose preoccupations have not changed in any major way over the span of her career, it works better than it would have with certain others, though it inevitably runs the risk of seeming to return again and again to films partly or largely analyzed in earlier chapters. Already by page 41 we begin to meet phrases such as “which we discussed above” and “we have already touched on this subject.” On the other hand, the more usual procedure of dealing with a director’s films in chronological order runs an even greater risk of repetition with the writer striving to conceal the fact that each successive film is generating similar or related conclusions. Smith’s tactic is to provide the most detailed analysis of each film in the chapter which deals with that film’s most central thematic preoccupation. For instance, Cléo, L’une chante, l’autre pas(1976), and Sans toit ni loi(1985)are discussed under representations of women. Most of the films relating to her husband Jacques Demy are discussed under time and memory. But Jacquot de Nantes comes under performance, along with Jane B and Kung Fu Master – and this works well.

The detailed knowledge which she demonstrates of these films is most impressive. She must be one of the few critics, English or French, who has had the chance to view and analyze all Varda’s films, long and short, fiction and documentary, many of which are rarely screened, and her analyses are always thoughtful and plausible. They are also always positive, which relates perhaps to her close association with Varda, who read through the manuscript before publication. There is one partial exception, namely Le bonheur, which Smith categorizes as a chilly film, and hard to like, and perhaps because of this antipathy does not really do justice to. I myself have only seen it once, many years ago, but thought it one of the most provocative, indeed outrageous of all New Wave films, precisely because of its refusal to adopt a moral position – because, that is, of its dispassionate “chilliness”. With this minor reservation I would see this as a thoroughly admirable authorial study.

In a sense, however, the editorial introduction has led us to expect more from the books in this series than “admirable authorial studies”. Noting that any authorial study must these days run the risk of espousing a romantic view of film as the product of solitary inspiration, where “the critic’s role (is) that of discovering continuities, revealing a necessarily coherent set of themes and motifs that correspond to the particular genius of the individual,” the editors assert categorically that “This is not our aim: the auteur perspective (…) will be interrogated in certain volumes of the series, and throughout the director will be treated as one highly significant element in a complex process of film production and reception which includes socio-economic and political determinants, the work of a large and highly skilled team of artists and technicians, the mechanisms of production and distribution, and the complex and multiply determined responses of spectators.”

Yet what they categorically assert as “not their aim” is precisely what this book does, systematically discovering continuities and revealing a coherent set of themes and motifs attributed to the creativity of a single individual, namely Agnès Varda, Indeed the brief concluding comments are unequivocal in asserting that this has been the whole purpose of the book, talking of “an individual voice (…), her own preoccupations and her original vision (and) considerable formal and thematic coherence,” not to mention an inexhaustible richness of interpretation. This is unadulterated auteurism. There is next to no sign in the book of broader considerations, such as the industrial factors mentioned by the editors. Economic pressures are given two or three lines in 200 pages, and the problems of production within a director-package system such as Varda espoused, which is notorious for limiting a director’s output, though mentioned briefly are never taken up. Indeed Smith insists several times on the high degree of creative independence that Varda enjoyed. Actors were the only other personnel allowed to have had an input into the creative process, and only a few of those are mentioned at any length. There is no sense that Varda is working within an industry and amidst colleagues who were notoriously working on similar themes – time, memory, the representation of women, the foregrounding of production, realism effects – which unquestionably interacted with their presence in Varda’s films.

Even less is there any sense that she might be drawing on and working within a tradition of filmmaking, using and re-working ideas and techniques from earlier works. I cannot resist mentioning one slightly frivolous example of this. Smith notes that Varda’s film Ulysse, which I have not seen, consists of a commentary on a photo of a highly mythologized naked man and boy, with a dead goat in the foreground. Then the director introduces a live goat, which proceeds to eat the photo around which the film has been structured. This scene draws not only on a long history of mythologized goats, of which Varda is clearly well aware, but also and more specifically on the wonderful final images of a rather clumsy film called Princesse Tam-Tam (Gréville, 1935), where a French writer has taken a native North African girl and “civilized” her, making her the toast of Paris, only to see her return to her first love in the Tunisian desert. The writer sends her the book he has written about these events, called Civilisation, and the final images show the North African girl’s donkey (alright, not a goat) curling its tongue appreciatively around the title page, gathering it into its mouth, and in close shot munching meditatively on it and on all it stands for.

Any director’s work is packed with such images, characters, settings and events, drawn from a vast repertoire of elements made available to him or her by the cinema and indeed the whole culture of the period. Rather than circumscribe the author’s work – exploring the last possible internal resonance of every incident, and seeing it all as a form of personal expression only valuable if uncorrupted by external influence – it would be preferable and more challenging to identify the range of textual elements which a given director has drawn from the communal repertoire and to note the ways in which he or she has used those elements. Such a procedure would make for a far more intellectually stimulating form of auteurism, and one towards which the editors seem to be pointing in the introduction. It would however be a far more difficult task to undertake, and perhaps in raising the possibility of it the series editors were simply constructing an elaborate smokescreen which would allow them to smuggle in yet another traditional set of auteurist studies. Future volumes in the series will clarify this matter.

Anyway, within the ranks of traditional auteurist studies the present work rates very highly, and it will certainly prove useful in introducing to a wider audience a director whose work has only sporadically attracted the recognition it deserves.

Colin Crisp