Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television

This volume provides an overview of the landscape of mediated female agencies and subjectivities in the last decade. In three sections, the book covers the films of women directors, television shows featuring women in lead roles, and the representational struggles of women in cultural context, with a special focus on changes in the transformative power of narratives and images across genres and platforms. This collection derives from the editors’ multi-year experiences as scholars and practitioners in the field of film and television. It is an effort that aims to describe and understand female agencies and subjectivities across screen narratives, gather scholars from around the world to generate timely discussions, and inspire fellow researchers and practitioners of film and television.

     

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Oct 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9783030561000

Book preview

© The Author(s) 2020

D. Sezen et al. (eds.)Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Televisionhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56100-0_1

1. Introduction

Diğdem Sezen¹  , Aslı Tunç²  , Feride Çiçekoğlu³   and Ebru Thwaites Diken³  

(1)

Department of Transmedia, Digital Art and Animation, School of Computing, Engineering & Digital Technologies, Teesside University, Middlesbrough, UK

(2)

Department of Media, Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey

(3)

Department of Cinema, Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey

Diğdem Sezen (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

Aslı Tunç

Email: [e-mail]

Feride Çiçekoğlu

Email: [e-mail]

Ebru Thwaites Diken

Email: [e-mail]

Keywords

Female agencyFemale subjectivity#MeToo

Harvey Weinstein, once one of the most powerful film producers and a titan of Hollywood, probably never anticipated such a disgraceful end to his career. On a chilly day in a New York City courtroom in March 2020 he looked puzzled and frail on a wheelchair while his final sentence was read out to him. The jury had found him guilty of two of the five charges he faced and sentenced him to 23 years in jail for sexual abuse. Six women who had testified against him were in tears holding one another tight. This was the kind of cathartic scene that we mostly see in movies.

This scene deeply resonated with us during the last stages of editing this book, the product of a long period of collaboration, the final two years of which coincided with a worldwide transformation in how female agency and subjectivity is perceived, especially in film and television. Our editorial team consists of four women academics in the fields of film, television, media, and transmedia storytelling, from different generations and backgrounds. Our paths have crossed at İstanbul Bilgi University over the last two decades, since the beginning of this century. When we first started out it was beyond our imagination that the period of our collaboration for organizing an international conference on Female Agency and Subjectivity in Film and Television (April 10–13 2019, İstanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul) and editing the outcome of the conference in this book would be marked as a cathartic transformation highlighting our title.

Many things have indeed changed since October 5, 2017¹ when the New York Times first broke the story of high-profile actresses accusing Weinstein of sexual assault. With the help of social media and the #MeToo hashtag, women all around the world started to share their own experiences of harassment or assault. The floodgates had been thrown open. The culmination of similar cases fueled a global #MeToo movement and numerous revelations about many prominent men in media, journalism, and politics shook those sectors to its core. Accusations were almost identical: powerful men had used their influence to intimidate and coerce women into performing sexual acts or enduring sexual harassment against their will. With the Weinstein case, the mainstream media conveniently focused on the famous actresses who identified themselves as victims. Yet, the MeToo movement galvanized complaints in other industries as well, such as tech companies in Silicon Valley, auto-plants or service sectors like tourism. Many well-known women in the entertainment sector jumped on the bandwagon, as in Oprah Winfrey’s speech² promising young women that a new day is on the horizon at the Golden Globe Awards in 2018. Time Magazine declared the MeToo Movement and The Silence Breakers its Person of the Year.

#MeToo definitely opened a new chapter in how scriptwriters of films and TV series began to challenge gender norms and focus on strong women character representations touching on controversial themes, stories of the margins, especially by those most vulnerable to sexual violence—women of color, Indigenous women, queer and trans youth. Those third-rail subjects not only inspired millions but unsettled them. While the Weinstein scandal was tarnishing the reputation of famous film and television celebrities (including Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Spacey, Louis C. K., Ben Affleck, Brett Ratner, James Toback, Matt Lauer, and Charlie Rose) streaming platforms like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime added new productions of female-injected series to their watch lists. For instance, women-centric series such as Big Little Lies and The Handmaid’s Tale won big at the Golden Globes and Emmys. HBO had to equalize pay for men and women, and The Crown agreed to pay its male and female leads equally.

After Kevin Spacey was fired from the show House of Cards, Robin Wright stepped into the lead as a bigger success. In the midst of all the developments mandating women in the director’s chair, studios’ mentoring programs, and actresses’ demands on producing roles to have more control, the #MeToo movement revealed the continuing lack of women shaping female characters and storylines. Of the top 100 grossing films of 2017, women represented 8% of directors; 10% of writers; 2% of cinematographers; 24% of producers and 14% of editors, according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University.³

A New York Times analysis has found that, since the Weinstein scandal broke, at least 200 prominent men have lost their jobs after public allegations of sexual harassment, yet only forty-three percent of their replacements were women. Of those, one-third is in news media, one-quarter in government, and one-fifth in entertainment and the arts.⁴

Although no other nation has experienced anything close to the US, the impact of the #MeToo movement was nonetheless global in the media and entertainment sectors, yet at times complicated. For instance, in France where seduction is treated as cultural norm, actress Catherine Deneuve co-signed a letter depicting #MeToo accusers as puritanical. Scandinavia, long a bastion of gender equality, was not totally immune. In Norway, reports of harassment in media organizations were followed by a petition signed by almost 500 women complaining of harassment and abuse in the acting profession.⁵ Women in Italy, Spain and other European countries began to speak out, detailing how they were discriminated against and sexually exploited. According to United Nation Women Report estimates, between 2016 and 2019 #MeToo and its sister hashtags garnered 36 million social media impressions from many parts of the world across languages and beyond borders.⁶

This #MeToo explosion included Turkey (under the hashtag #SenDeAnlat), where domestic violence, sexual assault and harassment cases remain alarmingly high. According to the We Will Stop Femicide Platform, consisting of different women’s rights NGOs, 41% of women living in Turkey have suffered from sexual assault at least once in their lives, and 93% of women have experienced some form of sexual harassment.⁷ Similar to Hollywood, though, the #SenDeAnlat movement was spearheaded by celebrities such as Sıla Gençoğlu, one of the country’s most popular female singers, filing a legal complaint against her boyfriend, actor Ahmet Kural, accusing him of violence and revealing the details on social media in 2018.

Amidst this turmoil, our incentive to organize an international conference on Female Agency and Subjectivity in Film and Television turned out to be a more timely intervention than any of us could have foreseen. The passing of Agnès Varda on March 29, 2019 put her on the agenda, even more than she had been during the previous years, due to her lifelong devotion to gender equality and her unique vision of filmer en femme. Just a month before her passing, her final film Varda par Agnès (2019) premiered at Berlin Film Festival. Her joy of life, resilience and intimacy was celebrated as an alternative to the masculinist policies poisoning the film industry in that final festival she attended with her daughter and producer, Rosalie Varda, and her entire crew. The global response to her passing manifested a deep love and appreciation of not only her work but her life in general and demonstrated how it was no longer possible to demarcate the personal lives from the works of artists. The tone of the consensual global obituary for Varda was starkly different from the controversial one for Bernardo Bertolucci, who had passed a few months earlier in November of the previous year. His oeuvre was no longer mentioned with the idolization that usually favored the masculine cinéastes of the twentieth century. The sexual harassment in his 1972 film Last Tango in Paris became part of his legacy. Bertolucci had revealed that during the rape scene in the film a stick of butter was used as lubricant without informing Maria Schneider, the actress who was nineteen at the time of the shooting. Bertolucci argued that it was necessary to humiliate Schneider in order to make his film. I wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress, he had said. I wanted her to react humiliated. His passing did not end the criticism and his words were no longer taken as a sign of his genius as a filmmaker but of misogyny, and abuse of power.⁸

How Bertolucci’s legacy was marked was yet another sign that the myth of the masculine singular was shattered. The process had neither been sudden nor without an academic background. Geneviève Sellier’s monograph La Nouvelle Vague: Un cinéma au masculin singulier (2005), translated as Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema by Kristin Ross (2008) highlighted, more than a decade ago, that a change was coming.⁹ Agnès Varda herself was one of the vanguards of that change, throughout a career spanning more than six decades. Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000) her first film with a digital camera, which she started shooting on the first day of the year 2000, marked a new period not only in her career, but in female agency behind the camera at the beginning of the new century.

The structure and progression of this book highlights the transformation briefly outlined above. There are three sections, each devoted to a different aspect of the conference title: The women behind the camera, women on screen, and women in context and culture: representational struggles across genres and platforms.

The first section starts out with Colleen Kennedy-Karpat’s article on Agnès Varda and the Singular Feminine with reference to Geneviève Sellier’s aforementioned monograph. Focusing on Varda’s representation of Godard in a pastiche of silent slapstick (Les Fiancés du Pont Macdonald, 1962) that appears in Cléo from 5 to 7 and of JR in Faces Places (2017), Kennedy-Karpat highlights the politics of memory in Varda’s work and shows how Varda’s resilience, including her acceptance of her own vulnerability, helped transform the canon. Feride Çiçekoğlu’s article "Female Agency in Pelin Esmer Films: The Play (2005) and Queen Lear (2019)" highlights the freedom and flexibility of the digital camera and tracing the example of Pelin Esmer shows how it empowered women directors in the new century. Çiçekoğlu argues that the two films of the director Esmer from 2005 and 2019, following a group of women from a southern province of Turkey over fourteen years from their initial attempts to form a theater group to their travelling troupe performing for the villages of the region, stand witness to the empowerment of women both behind the camera and on screen. Ebru Thwaites Diken elaborates on how the distinction between the inside and the outside is operationalized in a gendered fashion in Susanne Bier’s three films: The Brothers (2004), In a Better World (2010), and Bird Box (2018) in her article The Feminine Indistinction in Susanne Bier’s Cinema. She finishes with a controversial and provocative question as to whether blindness can be considered subversive due to a complete lack of the gaze, which is essentially masculine, referring to Irigaray. The final article of this section Consuming Bodies, Abject Spaces: Ana Lily Amirpour’s Transcultural Expressionism is by Joanna Mansbridge. Mansbridge discusses how A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) and the director’s follow up feature, The Bad Batch (2016) use metaphors of vampirism and cannibalism, illuminating the violent fantasies animating relations within an economically divided, transcultural United States.

The second thematic section, Women on Screen, contains contributions focusing on women’s screen representations. Aslı Tunç examines the character Claire Underwood from the Netflix drama House of Cards (2013–2018) by questioning whether Underwood is a feminist warrior or a Shakespearean villain by revisiting the concept of female evil and focusing on the themes of motherhood, seduction, and madness. Luca Barattoni self-formation in TV series Orphan Black (2013–2017). Ayşegül Kesirli Unur and Nilüfer Neslihan Arslan focus on Netflix Original series GLOW (2017) and question its self-reflexive approach through a comparative analysis of the show and its inspiration, the 1980s cable TV show GLOW: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (1986–1989). Mihaela P. Harper discusses HBO’s miniseries Sharp Objects (2018) as women’s storytelling representing internal and external lives of the three generations of women and highlights how the series complicates the relationship between self and body, self-consciousness and cultural context. Derya Özkan and Deborah Hardt assess the contents of female-driven stories on Netflix through story arcs and inquire how the selected shows feature and emphasize female agency.

The third section concentrates on the representational struggles across genres and platforms. Şirin Erensoy analyzes two examples, Ex-Machina (2014) and Westworld (2016–) and argues that film noir’s femme fatale today has evolved into emancipated female robot: the fembot as a figure of resistance. Kenan Behzat Sharpe approaches the crime dramas Persona (2018) and Happy Valley (2014–2016) and explores the themes of women’s agency, violence and trauma, and the political meaning of memory and forgetting. Feyda Sayan-Cengiz traces ideal female subject along the lines of neoconservative and neoliberal discourses of gender by analyzing popular Turkish daytime TV show Bridal House. Nazan Haydari focuses on Filmmor International Women’s Film Festival as a site of activism by drawing from the programming strategies published on the festival catalogs and she explains how the Filmmor IWFF becomes an inclusive ground for solidarity, resistance and agency of women. Diğdem Sezen, finally, discusses the machine gaze for women’s representation in algorithmically driven visual culture and plays with algorithmically driven machine vision technologies and film images to generate questions on glitches, errors and ambiguities of interactions of machine vision systems and film images.

References

Berglund, Nina. 2017. Sexual Harassment Complaints Soar. News in English.no: News and Views from Norway. https://​www.​newsinenglish.​no/​2017/​11/​17/​sexual-harassment-complaints-soar/​. Accessed 20 March 2020.

Carlsen, Audrey (et al.). 2018. #MeToo Brought Down 201 Powerful Men. Nearly Half of Their Replacements Are Women. New York Times, October 23. https://​www.​nytimes.​com/​interactive/​2018/​10/​23/​us/​metoo-replacements.​html. Accessed 22 March 2020.

Elahe, Izadi. 2018. ‘A New Day is on the Horizon’ Read Oprah Winfrey’s Stirring Golden Globes Speech. Washington Post, July 1. https://​www.​washingtonpost.​com/​news/​arts-and-entertainment/​wp/​2018/​01/​07/​a-new-day-is-on-the-horizon-read-oprah-winfreys-stirring-golden-globes-speech/​. Accessed 14 April 2020.

Kanto, Jodi; Thowey, Megan. 2017. Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades. New York Times, October 5. https://​www.​nytimes.​com/​2017/​10/​05/​us/​harvey-weinstein-harassment-allegations.​html. Accessed 14 April 2020.

Morris, Regan. 2020. Is #meToo Changing Hollywood? BBC News, March 3. https://​www.​bbc.​com/​news/​world-us-canada-43219531. Accessed 22 March 2020.

North, Anna. 2018. The disturbing story behind the rape scene in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, explained. Vox, November 26. https://​www.​vox.​com/​2018/​11/​26/​18112531/​bernardo-bertolucci-maria-schneider-last-tango-in-paris. Accessed 20 March 2020.

Sen, Purna. 2019. What will it take? Promoting cultural change to end sexual harassment? https://​www.​unwomen.​org/​en/​digital-library/​publications/​2019/​09/​discussion-paper-what-will-it-take-promoting-cultural-change-to-end-sexual-harassment#view. Accessed 20 March 2020.

Sellier, Genevieve. 2020. Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema. https://​www.​dukeupress.​edu/​masculine-singular/​. Accessed 14 April 2020.

We Will End Femicide Platform 2020 February Report. http://​kadincinayetleri​nidurduracagiz.​net/​veriler/​2897/​2020-february-report-of-we-will-end-femicide-platform. Accessed 21 March 2020.

Footnotes

1

Kanto, Jodi; Thowey, Megan. 2017. Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades. New York Times, October 5. https://​www.​nytimes.​com/​2017/​10/​05/​us/​harvey-weinstein-harassment-allegations.​html. Accessed 14 April 2020.

2

Elahe, Izadi. 2018. ‘A New Day is on the Horizon’ Read Oprah Winfrey’s Stirring Golden Globes Speech. Washington Post, July 1. https://​www.​washingtonpost.​com/​news/​arts-and-entertainment/​wp/​2018/​01/​07/​a-new-day-is-on-the-horizon-read-oprah-winfreys-stirring-golden-globes-speech/​. Accessed 14 April 2020.

3

Morris, Regan. 2020. Is #meToo Changing Hollywood? BBC News, March 3. https://​www.​bbc.​com/​news/​world-us-canada-43219531. Accessed 22 March 2020.

4

Carlsen, Audrey (et al.). 2018. #MeToo Brought Down 201 Powerful Men. Nearly Half of Their Replacements Are Women. New York Times, October 23. https://​www.​nytimes.​com/​interactive/​2018/​10/​23/​us/​metoo-replacements.​html. Accessed 22 March 2020.

5

Berglund, Nina. 2017. Sexual Harassment Complaints Soar. News in English.no: News and Views from Norway. https://​www.​newsinenglish.​no/​2017/​11/​17/​sexual-harassment-complaints-soar/​. Accessed 20 March 2020.

6

Sen, Purna. 2019. What will it take? Promoting cultural change to end sexual harassment? https://​www.​unwomen.​org/​en/​digital-library/​publications/​2019/​09/​discussion-paper-what-will-it-take-promoting-cultural-change-to-end-sexual-harassment#view. Accessed 20 March 2020.

7

2020 February report. 2020. We Will End Femicide Platform. http://​kadincinayetleri​nidurduracagiz.​net/​veriler/​2897/​2020-february-report-of-we-will-end-femicide-platform. Accessed 21 March 2020.

8

. North, Anna. 2018. The disturbing story behind the rape scene in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, explained. Vox, November 26. https://​www.​vox.​com/​2018/​11/​26/​18112531/​bernardo-bertolucci-maria-schneider-last-tango-in-paris. Accessed 20 March 2020.

9

Sellier, Genevieve. 2020. Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema. https://​www.​dukeupress.​edu/​masculine-singular/​. Accessed 14 April 2020.

Part IWomen Behind the Camera

© The Author(s) 2020

D. Sezen et al. (eds.)Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Televisionhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56100-0_2

2. Agnès Varda and the Singular Feminine

Colleen Kennedy-Karpat¹  

(1)

Department of Communication and Design, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey

Colleen Kennedy-Karpat

Email: [e-mail]

Keywords

French New WaveAutobiographyDocumentaryMemoryAgency

The title of this essay riffs on the ingenious title of Geneviève Sellier’s monograph La Nouvelle Vague: Un cinéma au masculin singulier (2005), which was rearranged for its English translation, to reduced effect, as Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema (trans. Kristin Ross, 2008).

Time spares no one, and few filmmakers have found more ways to explore and express this fact than Agnès Varda: from the pop star killing time in Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), to the rotting potatoes in The Gleaners and I (2000); from her loving reconstitution of her husband’s youth in Jacquot de Nantes (1990), to the exploration of her own memories in her last documentaries, including The Beaches of Agnès (2008), Faces Places (2017), and her final work Varda par Agnès (2019).

When cinema loses one of its luminaries, their passage is usually marked through predictable rituals of public mourning. It is not at all surprising that the immediate aftermath of Varda’s own death saw an outpouring of love and memories of her life and work from cinéphiles around the world. The narrative of recognition holds firm, but what sets apart these elegies for Varda is their tone. For comparison, the death of Bernardo Bertolucci in late 2018 was just as widely acknowledged, though in a way that more or less followed the script for a director of both global repute and lengthy career. By and large, the tributes he received focused on the past: on his place in cinema history; on his achievements as a director; and, from many commentators, statements about why his treatment of women should merit an asterisk, at the very least, to qualify the methods used in making these assessments.

For Varda, however, this script seemed to veer off course, with tributes that focused not only or not as much on historical import, but rather on more subjective, personal measures of her impact. Part of this de-emphasis on the past can be explained by Varda’s near-continuous output and media presence until her death at age 90 in March 2019, which put an abrupt end to a late-blooming, upward trajectory. Fittingly enough, the honorary Palme awarded to Varda for lifetime achievement at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015 was hardly her final success: her 2017 feature documentary, Visages Villages (released under the English title Faces Places), was nominated for an Oscar and netted a slew of other awards; Varda par Agnès débuted out of competition in Berlin only a month before her passing. Neither slowing down nor slipping into obscurity, Varda used the experience of her advancing years to breathe new life into her art with groundbreaking, multimedia work that won her new audiences and garnered unprecedented public recognition.

The tributes to Varda have certainly not ignored her contribution to film history, but evaluative assessment of her life’s work often gives way to personal memories and private feelings about what her life has meant. Beyond standard measures of respect, an astounding proportion of the tributes in publication and on social media are framed by gratitude, citing her as a major inspiration for their own cinematic, artistic, and critical pursuits. While this observation may be limited to my own Twitter feed, it would be worth a more formal examination of the social media response to Varda’s death, particularly as compared to memorializations for similarly positioned figures that have been proffered through the same platforms. There could be many such candidates for comparison—Bertolucci is just one—but the most apt will eventually and probably inevitably be Jean-Luc Godard.

Friends Old and New (Wave): Varda and Godard

The specter of the still-living Godard, whose career in many ways has run parallel to Varda’s (though their paths diverge in equally meaningful ways), is in fact the provocation for this study. When Faces Places appeared on the 2017 program for the Gezici Festival (Festival on Wheels) in Ankara, I immediately purchased a ticket; while I awaited the screening, in the intervening days I read reviews. Some of them described the failed encounter with Godard that concludes the film, but none had prepared me for the extent to which Godard punctuates the movie by his absence. Nor was I prepared to take in the uncanny physical resemblance between midcentury Godard and the film’s young co-director, the French photographer and street artist JR.

Since watching Faces Places, it is precisely the question of Varda’s agency that has bothered me most insistently. Why would Varda, whose accomplishments are many and enviably varied in their scope, choose to spend the precious little time left for her art dwelling on Godard? To be sure, this was absolutely her choice, and for better or for worse, interpersonal and professional connections have defined Varda’s career. For the better: Alain Resnais edited her directorial début La Pointe Courte (1955), a film he admired enough to say, on the record, that he wished he had directed it. For the worse: this same feature film, released four years before the infamous Cannes festival of 1959 that launched the Nouvelle Vague, inspired Varda’s generationally nonsensical title as the mother or, in a more recent and even more irritating variant, the grandmother of the New Wave.¹ Again, for the better: Varda directed a segment of the political anthology film Loin du Vietnam (1968) along with some of her New Wave peers as part of her antiwar activism; still, for the worse: her contribution to Loin du Vietnam was cut from the distributed version. Varda’s marriage to fellow director Jacques Demy also had its moments of better and worse, some of which were echoed in films like Documenteur (1981), which creates a deeply personal fiction whose resonance comes from Varda’s own personal life. After Demy’s death from AIDS-related complications in 1990, Varda devoted a considerable portion of her career to her late husband’s work and memory. The specifics of Varda’s multiple cinematic engagements with Demy and his films merit a book of their own, and it is not my intention to approach this topic in the limited scope of this essay. But in her late and most personal documentaries, Varda occasionally expanded her address beyond Demy to other New Wave peers—all of whom were men—while also framing these documentaries to varying degrees as self-assessments that treat her own work. In the context of these intimate, self-exploratory films, Godard figures prominently and repeatedly.

Varda certainly isn’t alone in situating herself among her brothers in cinema. The interviews compiled in T. Jefferson Kline’s volume show that her interlocutors over many decades frequently imposed this context on their shared conversations.² Varda scholar and curator Rebecca DeRoo has also noted interviewers’ enervating tendency to treat Varda as less than a truly independent filmmaker by drawing and even demanding comparisons to Demy or other male contemporaries; however, DeRoo proposes that Varda sought to evade this limited and limiting conception of her work by strategically promot[ing] myths of her own naiveté and separateness, including the oft-repeated story of how she had only seen ten films before embarking on a filmmaking career of her own.³

Varda’s selective embrace of her New Wave connections, particularly in films that she herself has directed, should therefore be read with a mind to divining its underlying strategy. In Varda’s late films, Godard certainly represents himself, but he also serves as a synecdoche for an entire peer group (minus Demy, who merits separate consideration given the depth of their intimate relationship). How Varda deals with Godard in her work should indicate why she felt it was important to publicly and repeatedly negotiate this relationship, indeed these multiple relationships where personal and professional affinities intertwined.

Godard’s first appearance in a Varda film coincides with the crest of the New Wave. Varda recruited Godard, Anna Karina, and a few other familiar faces from their circle to make the film-within-a-film Les Fiancés du Pont Macdonald / The Lovers of Macdonald Bridge, a pastiche of silent slapstick that appears in Cléo from 5 to 7. Godard is the protagonist, and he appears on camera without his signature sunglasses. Beyond this film’s immediate contribution to Cléo, Varda invites further scrutiny of this moment in both The Beaches of Agnès and Faces Places.

In Beaches, Varda includes stills from Macdonald and its production in an aside that she presents while reminiscing about how she and Demy interacted with one another on set and with one another’s films. She visually interrupts this train of thought with five shots of Godard, in various poses, and narrates them in voiceover, in French: Je veux signaler en passant que Godard, par amitié, avait accepté d’être filmé sans lunettes noires. J’aimais ses beaux yeux, et son cinéma. (Fig. 2.1).

../images/492963_1_En_2_Chapter/492963_1_En_2_Fig1_HTML.jpg

Fig. 2.1

Five sequential shots in The Beaches of Agnès (2008), each derived from a still photograph, all of which feature Jean-Luc Godard on the set of Varda’s film-within-a-film Les Fiancés du Pont Macdonald (1962)

This mention is truly in passing, for Varda moves quickly both visually and in her narration from one set to another, from her films to Demy’s, from their films’ settings to their stars—and somehow, in the midst all of this, voilà Godard. Before this aside, Varda had been sharing memories of her 1966 film Les Créatures, particularly how she filmed Michel Piccoli and Catherine Deneuve on the island of Noirmoutier, a location with deep personal resonance that also meant Demy spent more time on her set than was his habit. Then, after Godard, Varda resumes her reminiscing about Demy, talking about her time on Demy’s sets taking photographs, and finally segues into explaining how Demy’s success with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), another film with Deneuve, led to their joint stint in California in the late 1960s. Godard’s cameo may be jarring, but the pacing of this interlude—which functions, essentially, as the cinematic equivalent of a footnote—blends so seamlessly with the surrounding sequence, and its duration is so brief, that its incongruity barely registers.

Including Godard in Beaches may have been inevitable, as this is the film where Varda most directly addresses her place within the New Wave. But this confluence of history cannot answer the question why here? Why choose this particular moment in the film, literally in the middle of a seemingly unrelated line of thought? It could be a concession to the very nature of memory: it can be intrusive; it has no obligation to move chronologically; it does not guarantee a coherent narrative. Still, this is a curious insertion for several reasons. Firstly, the film refrains from naming Cléo as the film that features these shots of Godard sans lunettes, even though the same sequence includes other films’ titles in the visuals and/or narration. Those who know Cléo will recognize these shots, most likely precisely because of Godard’s presence in them; still, Varda relies on her spectators’ intertextual knowledge to connect them to their original context. Bringing up Cléo after Les Créatures also muddles the chronology of her filmography, perhaps suggesting that somehow it was Les Creatures—a notorious flop—that inspired Godard to remove his glasses on camera. More curiously still, Varda does not insist on the glasses’ role in the story told in Macdonald: Godard’s character sees everything darkly through the glasses, including the death of his fiancée (played, of course, by Karina). When he removes his glasses—and finally throws them into the river (!)—her life is restored, and his life returns to normal. This rather elaborate gag, which cast Godard in a role that required considerable self-awareness, is reduced in Beaches to the simple fact that Godard once removed his glasses on camera.

Finally, and perhaps most provocatively, the way Varda’s language frames these five shots introduces some ambiguity about what actually prompted this act. Godard avait accepté d’être filmé, he accepted to be filmed without his glasses—but who made this request? And then who filmed it? Obviously, Cléo is Varda’s film, but her own narration elides not only the film’s title, but also her authorship of it. The English subtitles on this version, though, register a different sense to Varda’s utterance, reading: "I want to point out that Godard, in friendship, let me film him without his dark glasses (emphasis added). This translation makes explicit Varda’s place as the filming subject, which frames Godard all the more clearly as an object for her camera’s gaze. The second line of Varda’s narration further highlights Godard’s objectification: J’aimais ses beaux yeux, et son cinéma / I loved his beautiful eyes and his cinema." The objectified eyes on camera—by inference, Varda’s camera—come first, followed by Godard’s own subjective eye behind the camera.

The visual component of this sequence also underscores Varda’s ambiguous positioning in this narration. At this moment in Beaches, she includes just five shots of Godard, all of them created from still photographs. The first two also include Demy, creating a visual bridge between Godard and the overarching topic of Demy’s and Varda’s set visits. Varda also appears in the first shot, though her face is buried in Demy’s shoulder as they embrace. Meanwhile, Demy’s gaze is fixed on Godard, who is wearing his glasses and who seems to be talking to Demy. There is no visible sign here or indeed in any of these shots of Varda interacting directly with Godard. The second shot shows a different couple, Godard and Karina, who occupy roughly the same frame space as Demy and Varda in the first shot. But here, Varda is entirely absent, and Demy takes center frame while once again conversing with Godard, who is still (again?) wearing his glasses. Karina and the woman in the left of the frame gaze at Demy; the men look beyond the frame, neither at one another nor at the women. Demy’s engagement with Godard captured in these two shots—they are amicable, perhaps even close—suggests that the friendship that compelled Godard to take on this project (and take off his glasses) may well have been Demy’s rather than Varda’s.

In Faces Places, Varda returns to Macdonald and the fated lunettes even more emphatically as she coaxes a similar gesture from Godard’s doppelgänger JR. Over the course of the film, Varda comments repeatedly on JR’s glasses, using Godard’s acquiescence in 1962 as leverage to convince JR, more than half a century later, to remove his dark glasses for her camera. Expanding beyond the level of a brief aside, as the glasses were in Beaches, in Faces Places glasses and vision form a key part of what Kelley Conway identifies as the film’s four main motifs: Varda’s diminished sight, JR’s sunglasses, the park bench conversations, and the phantom presence of Godard.⁴ The act of removing dark glasses is especially useful in establishing an active parallel between JR and Godard that transcends the mere coincidence of their strong physical resemblance. Such repetitions that