19

BEYO ND THE GAZE AND INTO

FEMME-FILMÉCRITURE
Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi (1985)

Susan Hayward

Agnès Varda’s filmic production has been little heralded by feminist critics,
least of all by those in the United States and the United Kingdom where her
work has been dismissed by such critics as the late Claire Johnston as
reactionary and certainly not feminist.1 Curiously, Varda’s work is often
passed over in silence in anthologies on women’s film — and yet she herself
claims to be an avowed feminist. The debate here, however, is not going to
centre on the global issue of a feminist cinema but rather will endeavour to
demonstrate how Varda’s 1985 film Sans toit ni loi is as much political as it is —
and because it is - feminist in its conception and message.
Implicit in Jacqueline Rose’s discussion (1986, 203ff.) of Comolli and
Metz’s film theory debate is the idea that, for film to be political, it must
eschew its mainstream proclivity to reproduce an ‘imaginary identity’ (203).
In other words cinema which ‘appears as a type of analogical machine for the
programming of identity’ (203) cannot be political. In a somewhat similar
vein, Claire Johnston argues that ‘The camera was developed in order to
accurately reproduce reality and safeguard the bourgeois notion of realism
which was being replaced in painting’ (1976, 214). She also points out that a
direct consequence in cinema of this ‘law of verisimilitude’ is ‘the repression
of the image of woman as woman and the celebration of her non-existence’
(211). Elsewhere, but very much connected to this notion of non-existence,
Maureen Turim defines film as a presence which speaks and hides absence
(1986, 234). Film, unlike theatre, is the absent spectacle — the spectacle of
absence. In this respect, therefore, it would seem to provide the perfect
vehicle of expression for women as film-makers and makers of feminist films.
As Jutta Briickner so astutely points out: ‘the cinema offers us a place to
focus our own desires for particular images, to explore our own experience of
linguistic and visual absence, for we have always been made into images
instead of acquiring our own’ (1985, 121) Similarly, Johnston proposes that

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feminist film cannot rely purely and simply on a retransmission of women’s

issues, it has to go further and take male and Hollywood iconography to task.
And in essence this sums up her reproach to Varda in the past —i.e. that her
film-making practices could be recuperated into the dominant ideology.2
Sans toit ni lot is a reinscription of an original and real text. Varda’s first
idea - to make a film about road people/vagrants (male and female) in the
winter, who perish from the cold - became substantially modified when she
encountered a hitchhiking vagabond, Settina. The starting point, then, is
this young woman’s experience. However, the representation of this experi­
ence - through a series of flashbacks which, at times, even become imbri­
cated - is intentionally non-realistic. Essentially the structure of the film,
which is made up of forty-seven episodes, takes to task the issue of image
construction or, as Tim Corrigan puts it, ‘the fetishizing action of the male
perspective’ (1986, 267). By extension, Varda’s cinematic writing — cinécri-
ture3 as she terms it - goes counter to the established canons of western
film-making practices.
Let us take the issue of image construction first. The film is about a young
woman, Mona, who has perished from the cold. Upon this corpse, numerous
persons attempt to transfix a meaning (already a contribution). Eighteen
visions of Mona are presented by those who saw her. However, as the film
makes transparently clear, Mona refuses to be co-opted into any image. In her
refusal of all social discourses — which her preponderant mutism serves to
reinforce - she defies identification, will not be made other. Her peripatetic
and solitary existence is a deliberate choice (‘being alone is good’, ‘cham­
pagne and the road, that’s good’, ‘I move’) and functions metonymically for
her unfixability and unnamability/ Her rejection of social and sexual pro­
ductivity, which her choice implies, erases the hegemonic image of women -
she leaves no trace, as Varda’s voice-over comments: ‘this death leaves no
traces’. The film is a series of gazes, of one-way exchanges from different
specular positions. Each contributor fixes their gaze not on Mona but on their
perception of Mona as a figure of their desire. As such, each portrait offered
up to the spectator is revealing of the relator and not of the one related. The
effect is to empty the mirror of ascribed meanings. Male discourses (whether
uttered by men or women) cannot produce her identity. Mona’s indepen­
dence from a fixed identity is an assertion of her altérité (her otherness); her
autonomy from male fetishization is an obligation to recognize her différence —
woman as an authentic and not a second sex.5 As an authentic sex, Mona both
attracts and repels - meanwhile she remains indifferent, impassive to the
violence of these responses. On a basic level these two responses originate
from our sense of smell - and indeed sex and smell are very closely inter­
related. Symbolic of Mona’s indifference to others’ reactions is her very filth,
her uncleanliness and smelliness. And it is in Jean-Pierre’s flashback-
‘portrait’ of her that we can perceive most clearly what Varda is saying about
image construction.

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His ‘narration’ is imbricated first (about half-way through the film) in the
‘narration’ of the paleontologue Mme Landier (the tree specialist who is also
his boss) and then latterly (towards the very end of the film) in Yolande’s (the
maidservant to his aunt) ‘narration’. His initial meeting with Mona is via his
boss who tells him to go and have a look at her, as if she were a specimen (one
of her specimens). Mona steps out of Mme Landier’s car —Jean-Pierre has
just circled halfway round it peering in as if she were in a specimen glass —
her filthy hair whips around her face in the wind (she looks almost Medusa­
like) and she asks him if she frightens him. The next shot is of Jean-Pierre in
his apartment with his wife, Eliane. She has just emerged from a bath (!) and
is wrapped around with a towel. Jean-Pierre tells her about Mona and how
her hair reminded him of his wife’s; at this juncture he is fondling her hair —
Eliane rightly reads the subtext and refuses to make love, obliging him
instead to attend to her toenails.
To Mona’s filth is immediately contrasted Eliane’s pristine cleanliness. The
sexual transference speaks for itself: physically aroused by Mona he attempts
to gratify his desire through his wife. What attracted him? Doubtless,
Mona’s evident availability so sharply contrasted with his wife’s persistent
refusals. Conversely, what prevented him from acting? Mona’s refusal,
through her filth, to signify for him his image of woman. And there is a
further connotation, transpiring in this instance from the similitude in their
hair — to which he draws attention — for it implies a very fixed image of
woman in his mind (i.e. one woman is very much like another).
In the closing part of the film, he re-encounters Mona — who is flipped
out on drugs — at Nimes railway station. This time it is he who is in the
glass container: he holes up in the telephone booth both to hide away from
her and to call Mme Landier who is desperately seeking Mona; and it is
now Mona who roves around outside the ‘specimen’ cabinet. She is, how­
ever, oblivious to his identity. At this point he shouts out (not even
down the receiver which he is waving about quite hysterically) ‘she frightens
me because she disgusts me’. This scene is in direct counterpoint to
the earlier meeting when he had seen her as object. Now she is subject
(‘she frightens me’, rather than ‘I am frightened of her’), he is object —
the specimen in the glass cabinet. The contrast here is between his
total awareness of her identity, which frightens him because it is beyond his
control, and her complete denial of him through her oblivion. She is
presence, he is absence.
Mona assumes her filth just as she assumes her marginality, she answers
to no one and thanks no one. In so doing she creates her own image and
simultaneously destroys the ‘Image of Woman’. Equally, her speechlessness —
which is in direct contrast to the volubility of those who would fix her -
points to the moment pre-linguistic (that period of life which precedes the
institution of patriarchal language) where the locus is the body-female in all
its ‘intimated reality of sensuousness’ (Bruckner 1985, 121).

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By now it should be becoming clear that Varda bases her films on contrast
and counterpoint; she also structures them around the dialectics of alter­
nation and the theme of replacement (Audé 1981, 142). Thus she says: ‘this
dialectic, this ambiguity, this contradiction between the filmic negatives of
one’s inner life and the actual images of life as it is lived, this is the subject
matter of all my films’ (Audé 1981, 141). And in talking about Sans toit ni loi
she again states this dialectic inside/outside: ‘there are people who are ‘inside’
in the warmth, comfortably installed and others outside, in the cold, with
not much idea of where they will sleep’ (<Cinéma 85, 332, 2).
Evidently her cinécriture reflects this structuring of ‘a reality’ — a first
aspect of which is the use of the shifting point of view (employed as early as
her first film La Pointe courte). And in this film there are eighteen different
points of view. This replacing of one vision by another, this proliferation of
points of view, around one object, Mona, has a threefold effect. In the first
instance it causes a disengagement from the story - thus preventing it from
becoming an ideological film about vagrancy;6 this is not a film about ‘les
nouveaux pauvres’ (the new poor) but - amongst other things — about how
a particular vagrant woman lives her solitude. In the second instance, the
effect is to unfix the gaze, to render it inoperable. Because there are so many
points of view, Mona cannot be caught in any of them. In this criss-crossing
of gazes, Mona has already moved on or has not yet arrived. Varda represents
this phenomenon visually through the contrasting images of Mona’s wander­
ings and her speculators’ immobility, and, structurally, through alternately
imbricating or fragmenting the portraits. Thirdly and finally, through this
contrast of movement versus immobility, Varda subverts the traditional
codes of classic narrative cinema which depict man as the gender on the
move and woman as static.
Interestingly, the structuring of the portraits finds a ready reflection in
Varda’s use of the tracking shot. The tracking shot is Mona’s sign, as is the
music that accompanies it. Of the fourteen tracking shots employed, all
frame Mona at some juncture and all but three are accompanied by her
theme. And here the parallels between shot and portrait become striking.
With regard to the ‘orchestrated’ tracking shots there are three different
compositions, in terms of the spoken portraits there are three types. And just
as there are unorchestrated tracking shots so too there are silent portraits,
most remarkably Assoun’s.
The composition of the ‘orchestrated’ tracking shots is as follows: in the
first instance, either the camera and frame ‘abandon’ Mona and go on to focus
on an object, or she exits the frame; in the second, through her positioning in
the frame she splits the horizontal tracking shot line either by crossing it
(moving from the back to the foreground and exiting front-frame), or by
remaining stationary as the camera continues its tracking movement and
stops on an object; and in the third instance, both camera and Mona stay in
tandem and come to a halt together. Two further points - both pointing to

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the contingency of her existence - Mona is rarely at the beginning of the

tracking shot, she either walks in or is picked up by the camera and, equally
significant, in all of these tracking shots she and the camera, when on the
tracking shot line, move from right to left - this movement serving as a
metaphor for both the flashback and, even more significantly, death.
This visual representation of the flashback, then, points predominantly to
the idea of discontinuity —only the last two orchestrated tracking shots are
in tandem and therefore continuous. This discontinuity is similarly present
in the portraits —all of which are forms of flashback, but most of which are
fragmented. There are just six stories where the portrait and images are in
tandem (i.e. Mona arrives and the person whose path she has crossed
immediately picks up the description). Otherwise they assume two forms.
The first form is a flashforward within a flashback, that is to say, we see the
end of the story or encounter before we perceive the occurrence which pre­
ceded or brought about that encounter. For example, towards the very
beginning of the film the demolition man tells the truck driver of his
encounter with Mona (he discovers her in some derelict chalets he is about to
raze to the ground) and there is a flash-shot of him peering in on her; much
later, about half-way through the film, we see Mona arriving at these chalets
and adopting them as her shelter.
The second form, far more digressive in fact, is a form whereby an initial
flashback is interrupted by the insertion of other flashbacks only to be picked
up again at some later juncture. Either the interruption is felt as a complete
cut, as in the goat farmer’s story (in an episode in the first half of the film, we
see Mona arrive, stay at and leave the farm and then some twelve episodes later
in the latter half of the film we see and hear the goat farmer’s summing up of
the encounter). Or the flashback becomes fragmented by the imbrication of
another portrait within the existing one. In this instance both get inter­
rupted by a further flashback or series of flashbacks. Yolande’s story and Mme
Landier’s are the two exemplars of this most dense of all digressive structures.
The tracking shot is a natural icon for a road movie as are the stops in
between (think for example of Easy Rider). Thus when Varda states in an
interview that ‘the whole film is one long tracking shot . . . we cut it up into
pieces, we separate the pieces and in between them are the “adventures’”
(Cinématographe, 114, 1985, 19) it might seem that she is following the
canons of this particular genre. However, from its very inception this film
goes counter to the canonic laws. First, it is filmed going backwards down
the road (the tracking from right to left); second, the narration is a series of
flashbacks all interwoven rather than an ordered sequence of events which
lead inexorably to a bad end (Easy Rider) or a reasonable resolution (Paris,
Texas) - furthermore, in Varda’s film the spectator and the speculators
already know the end; third, the tradition is for the point of view to be that
of the roadster(s), but in this film it is everyone else’s but Mona’s that is
given; fourth, the roadster is in this instance a woman on her own; fifth, a

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road movie implies discovery, obtaining some self-knowledge — but this is

not the purpose here: in her filth and her solitude, Mona has acquired her
identity, her marginality, and gazes uninterestedly past the others — includ­
ing us. And her death, which she finally stumbles upon by tripping over an
irrigation pipe, leaves us silent in its irony, coming as it does to she who
emerged Aphrodite-like from the sea and whose pursuit of and longing for
drinking water punctuates the entire film.
As with all texts - be they myths, allegories, film genres, whatever -
whenever Varda makes reference to them she does so dialectically and con-
trapuntally. Thus water is not just an agent of cleansing and irrigation or
refreshment, it is also a source of life and death. Water is immediately within
this film associated with the birth of Aphrodite, the goddess of desire who
yields to Dionysus the god of the vine. She is also the death-in-life goddess
who every year, in remembrance of destroying the sacred king, bathes in the
sea and rises again renewed. After her first bathe in the sea, Mona only seeks
out water for refreshment; ‘other women bathe (Eliane and Mme Landier),
Mona doesn’t ’. Thereafter, Mona roams the vineyards of the Hérault encrust­
ing herself in her dirt. But unlike Aphrodite she will not yield to the pagan
dionysians whose assault on her own filth with their lie-de-vin she cannot
accept. This ‘rape’ of her identity, this sullying by another, is untenable -
hence her reaction. This patriarchal pagan rite (only the men can dress up as
the wine gods and daub the women) is not the cause of her death, but is a
contributing factor, and for two reasons. First, the male rite withdraws sus­
tenance (as a result of the festivities she cannot obtain any bread). Second, the
violence of her rejection of their ritual practices and of the implicit tyranny
of the gaze (she blockades herself in a telephone booth and screams, counter­
pointing her earlier reduction to a specimen by Mme Landier and again
Jean-Pierre’s own violent reaction to her at his loss of identity) aggravates her
already advanced stage of hypothermia.
When we first see Mona’s body it is covered with reddish stains, looking
very much like blood. There is then a flash-shot of people mopping down a
telephone booth (by now this object is becoming a pertinent symbol of
enclosure rather than of an opening up of the horizons of communication)
which is covered in red stains of some indistinguishable sort. Only the end
shots of this film make clear what that red is. The series of flashbacks which
separates these two sets of shots serves - through the images of Mona’s
living gestures - to show how her filth is accrued and her clothing dimin­
ished; and the last memorable trace on her body, the red stains, is the last to
receive elucidation. We know as early as the beginning of the film that foul
play has been ruled out, thus the film’s structure is also an uncovering of
how her body got there and in that state.
An entire film in flashback to explain a death or murder is part of the
classical canon (Murder, My Sweet) but an entire film in flashback to eluci­
date one shot is not. To suffuse one shot with so much signification is to

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Sans toit ni loi - above: Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire); below: Mona hitchhiking.
 VA R D A S S A N S T O I T N I L 0 1

impregnate it with geological proportions of textural significance whose

structures are as deep as they are dense, and whose references within those
structures traverse discourses ancient and modern. I mentioned earlier the
digressive structure of Varda’s flashback construction and the analogically
digressive composition of her tracking shots. These are aspects of her femi­
nist cinécriture which are political because - as with feminist writing7 which
refuses to inscribe contours - in their digressiveness they go counter to domi­
nant male film-making practices and are, therefore, counter-cinematic. And
it is also true that her particular approach of textural intertextualization (a
mise-en-abyme of different textures: painting, sculpture, photography, etc.,
cinépeinture as she calls it) is equally counter-cinematic in that it works ‘in
opposition to the naturalized dominant male discourse to produce textual
contradictions which would de-naturalize the workings of patriarchal ideol­
ogy’ (Cook 1985, 198). These textual contradictions create gaps in represen­
tation ‘into which woman’s representation can insert itself’ (ibid.). Varda
makes frequent reference to the painterly quality of her films and to her
desire to leave gaps, des creux. And certainly her painterly references stretch
from the quattrocento to the realism of Courbet and Millet. Similarly, her
filmic references are drawn from the silent era and also from contemporary
cinema - and, as I have already indicated, many genres are re-represented.
Let us now consider the opening shot of the film — a very slow zoom. I
will use this one shot to show how it establishes immediately the notion of
intertextuality and the function of textual contradiction, both of which run
throughout the film. Traditionally, a zoom transports the viewer from one
space to another (and therefore one time to another) in such a way that
perspectival time and space are dissolved. Varda, in slowing it down as she
does, makes both time and space perspectival, and in so doing creates the
intervals, the spaces or gaps in between which are not normally perceptible.
The slowness of the zoom allows time in between to perceive the shifting of
planes from foreground to background. Through this counter-cinematic
practice, the zoom becomes de-naturalized and does not conform to the domi­
nant ideology. Colliding with this technological subversion is the implicit
subversiveness of the painterliness of Varda’s shot. From the lighting (a
luminous pale blue) to the slow tracerly movement across the terrain - from
the trees in the foreground to those in the background upon a rounded
hillock - this shot is reminiscent of Piero della Francesca’s fresco Resurrection
of Christ (1474?) with the hill of Golgotha8 in the background - the hill
where Jesus was crucified. The reference to Francesca, the greatest Italian
painter of the quattrocento,9 is particularly vital because he too subverted the
then dominant painterly practices. He was the discoverer of a new vision in
painting with a precise definition of volumes in space, a sense of interval and
a new treatment of light. Not only was he a canon-breaker on the visual
front, he also took the chronological nature of aesthetic religious narration to
task. Eschewing the prevalent formalistic and diegetic representation of the

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biblical allegories, he chose rather, for the sake of symmetry and a sense of
interval, as in the fresco Legend of the True Cross (1452—9), to group his scenes
out of chronological sequence. Through the slow zoom, Varda refers back to
this vital subversiveness of the quattrocento and also towards her own film-
making practices. Similarly, the mise-en-scène is both ancient and modern. It is
Golgotha of the crucifixion - the Christian myth of life and death; and it is
equally Van Gogh’s canvas La Route aux cyprès (1890) — perceived later in
both Mona’s and Mme Landier’s collection of postcards. Finally, it is also —
through this last reference — an intertextualization-through-inversion of
Alain Resnais’ documentary Van Gogh (1947). In his film, Resnais uses
zooms, pans and tracking shots of Van Gogh’s paintings themselves to recre­
ate the life of the artist. In her film, Varda inverts Resnais’ initial oxymoron
of painting as the cinematic shot (whereby stasis becomes movement and in
so doing creates a life —in this instance, Van Gogh’s), and in Sans toit ni loi,
movement becomes stasis (i.e. the shot as painting) signifying death.
In just this single shot, texts and intertexts are immediately juxtaposed for
the purpose of contradiction — so too are their textural representations (i.e.
the plasticity of paint as a texture is distinct from that of celluloid). Simul­
taneously, these textual contradictions cause a constant shifting and thus
indeed a rift between the multi-layered planes of time and space. These
contradictions unfix rather than transfix meaning and the whole of the film is
similarly infused with this unease of the insaisissable. Visual presence is made
absence: that which is there cannot be seized - there are no contours which
define.
Varda treats objects in a similar intertextual and dialectical fashion. A
brief look at how she reworks the signification of certain objects will show
how they serve to intensify the digressive texturality of her cinécriture. In this
instance, I shall focus on the representation of death which is, after all, a
dominant discourse within the film.
Trees are amongst the many objects that link or punctuate the film and, as
with most of the other objects, are more readily associated with violence and
death than with regeneration and life. Trees are framed as Mona is raped.
Trees (plane trees) have been ‘colonized’/‘raped’ by a deathly American-
imported fungus (gift of the Second World War). Mona immediately identi­
fies with their destiny: ‘si elles crèvent, pensez à moi’ (‘if they perish, think of
me’), she says (my stress).
Walls, doors and shutters almost invariably shut Mona out, only at best do
they conceal her from the police. They are symbolic of her numerous evic­
tions, the last of which is fatal. In accidentally setting fire to her refuge (a
derelict house shared with other drop-outs), David - a former acquaintance
of hers - deprives her of her protection from the cold. Incidentally, this
eventuality is foreshadowed in an earlier episode when David — who was
then shacked up with Mona in an unlived-in mansion - gets into a fight
with robbers and drops his oil lamp. That time the house miraculously does

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not catch fire. In this second occurrence, however, it is David’s violence (he
attacks the squatters who owe him money) which causes the fire. In film
culture, it is women who are most often associated with fire — that most
obvious of death symbols. Here it is associated with David and not Mona —
he brings the fire and plunders her home. Moreover, David is allegorically
associated with death and with the imagery of the opening shot of the film.
For he is (as he says) the wandering Jew. The one who insulted Christ on his
way to Golgotha and who was condemned to wander about the world until
Christ’s second coming.
Plastic tents and cloches, intended to warm the earth for growth and
germination, offer poor comfort to Mona and will ultimately serve to encase
her corpse. Indeed, in the closing episode we are reminded of the symbolism
of the greenhouse in Renoir’s La Règle du jeu where it is the site of André
Jurieu’s death (in fact Mona’s twitching movements as she lies dying are very
reminiscent of Jurieu’s).
Death also crosses Mona’s path in the form of the gravedigger whose
hooded cloak masks his face. Cloaked and masked as he is he recalls the
character of Death in Bergman’s Seventh Seal. Earlier, there is another refer­
ence to this same film, this time to the sound and image construct of its
opening sequence. In Bergman’s film, the Knight awakens and washes him­
self in the sea, the sound-track is Bergman in voice-over reading from the
Book of Revelations. In Varda’s film, we hear her voice-over - the only
voice-over of the film - accompanying the shot of Mona emerging, cleansed,
from the sea. At this point she is also Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (1485). Thus,
again the dialectical tension of life and death is represented and, too, tension
in a textural sense because of the simultaneous reference to two contrasting
modes of visual imagery. As was pointed out above, to place a painterly
reference alongside a cinematic one is to represent immobility and move­
ment simultaneously. But this oxymoron gathers even further layers of con­
tradictions when one considers that both Botticelli’s painting and Bergman’s
film are inscribed within yet another text or even a series of texts: the fictional­
ized documentary of Settina’s/Mona’s story/portrait.
Fact and fiction, documentary, a road movie in flashback, Greek, pagan
and Christian myths, contrastive visual discourses — just so many texts all
interwoven and rewritten within a digressive structure that, in the end, the
film itself maintains the enigmatic mystery of an incomplete (in the sense
that it cannot be completed) jigsaw puzzle. We cannot fix the film any more
than we can fix Mona, and it is in this de-fetishization of the text as well as
the body-female that Varda asserts her own brand of feminist film-making
practices.

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Notes
1 See her article, ‘Women’s Cinema as Counter-cinema’ (1976). And also Louise Heck-
Rabi (1984), who provides a very comprehensive study of Varda’s critical acclaim.
2 This is a point of view I do not share, incidentally, and one which I have argued
against elsewhere (ASMCF Review, 33 (1988)).
3 Interview, 24 Images, 27 (1986).
4 The original title of this film was going to be A saisir, obviously intended ironic­
ally (see Sheila Johnston’s review in Films and Filming, 3 80 (1 9 8 6 ), 41).
5 For further discussion on the authentic sex, see Sigrid W eigel’s article ‘Double
Focus’ (1 9 8 5 , 7 8 -9 ).
6 Olivier Dazat makes this particular point in comparing this film to earlier forms of
the road movie. See his article in Cinématographe, 11 (1985).
7 Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous both speak of the necessity for ‘feminine’ writing
to traverse discourses and thus ‘set fire to fetishized words, appropriate terms, well-
constructed forms’ (Weigel 1985, 75).
8 Jean Decock ( Visions, 35 (1986)) identifies the symbolism of the hill but I believe
he gets the painterly reference wrong. It is almost certainly not an Italian primitive
as he claims, but a direct reference to the quattrocento. See also note 9.
9 As early as her first film, La Pointe courte, Varda refers to the painterliness of the film
and makes specific reference to Piero della Francesca (interview in Cahiers du
cinéma, 165 (1965)).

Selected bibliography
Audé Françoise (1 9 8 1 ) Ciné-modèles cinéma d’elles: situation des femmes dans le cinéma
français 1956-1979 , Lausanne, l’Age d’Homme.
Brückner, Ju tta (1 9 8 5 ) ‘Women Behind the Camera’, in Gisela Ecker (ed.) Feminist
Aesthetics, London, The Women’s Press, 1 2 0 -4 .
Cook, Pam (ed.) (1 9 8 5 ) The Cinema Book, London, British Film Institute, 202.
Corrigan, Timothy (1 9 8 6 ) ‘The Tension of Translation: Handke’s The Left-handed
Woman , in Eric Rentschler (ed.) German Film and Literature: Adaptations and
Transformations, New York and London, Methuen, 2 6 0 —75.
Heck-Rabi, Louise (1 9 8 4 ) Women Filmmakers, Metuchen and London, The Scarecrow
Press, 3 2 2 -5 2 .
Johnston, Claire (1 9 7 6 ) ‘Women’s Cinema as Counter-cinema’, in Bill Nichols (ed.)
Movies and Methods, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2 0 8 —17.
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cinéma réel, ArtSept, 1.
Rose, Jacqueline (1 9 8 6 ) Sexuality in the Field of Vision, London, Verso.
Smith, Alison (1 99 8 ) Agnès Varda, Manchester and New York, Manchester University
Press.
Turim, Maureen (1 9 8 6) ‘Textuality and Theatricality in Brecht and Straub/Huillet:
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Transformations, New York and London, Methuen, 2 3 1 —4 5 .
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Weigel, Sigrid (1 985), ‘Double Focus: On the History of W omen’s W riting’, in
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Appendix

Agnès Varda (1928-): filmography

1954 La Pointe courte
1957 0 saisons, ô châteaux (short)
1958 L ’Opéra Mouffe (short)
1958 Du côté de la côte (short)
1959 Cocotte d’azur (short)
1960 Champagne (short)
1961 C lé o d e îà l
1963 Salut les Cubains (short)
1965 Le Bonheur
1965 Chroniques de France (sketch in collective film)
1966 Eisa et la rose (short)
1966 Les Créatures
1967 Loin du Vietnam (sketch in collective film)
1968 Uncle Yanco (short)
1968 Black Panthers (short)
19 6 9 Lions Love
1970 Nausica
1975 Daguerreotypes
197 5 Réponses de femmes (short)
1976 Plaisir d’amour en Iran (short)
1976 L ’une chante, l’autre pas
1980 Murs, murs (short)
1981 Documenteur (short)
1982 Ulysse (short)
1983 Une minute pour une image (170 two-minute films)
1984 Les Dites cariatides (short)
1984 Sept pièces, cuisine, salle de bain, à saisir (short)
1985 Sans toit ni loi
1986 T ’as de beaux escaliers tu sais (short)
1987 Jane B. vue par Agnès V
1987 Kung Fu Master
1991 Jacquot de Nantes
1993 Les Demoiselles ont eu 25 ans
1995 Cent et une nuits de Simon cinéma
1995 L’Univers deJacques Demy

Other films cited in the text

Easy Rider, Denis Hopper (USA 1969)
Murder My Sweet!Farewell My Lovely, Edward Dmytryck (USA 1944)
Paris, Texas, Wim Wenders (USA 1984)
La Règle du jeu (Rules of the Game), Jean Renoir (1939)
The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman (Sweden 1957)
Van Gogh, Alain Resnais (1948)

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