De Sans toit ni loi à Visages villages d’Agnès Varda : Pavés dans la mer

Abstract

In a 1994 article, I analyzed the documentary-style film Sans toit ni loi (1985) by director Agnès Varda, and demonstrated her experimentation with a neutral space outside film in her quest to identify the subject Mona, a young woman found dead in a muddy ditch at the beginning of the film. Mona came from the sea, suggested Varda; all attempts by witnesses to identify Mona in the film only raised more questions and were equivalent to throwing her back to the sea. The analytical method I devised for Sans toit ni loi is just as useful for Visages Villages (2017) for unveiling mechanisms of variation and continuity in Varda’s more recent work, and for demonstrating that the director’s refusal to identify the subject in the neutral space outside film subsumes its ability to paradoxically encompass the subject’s incommensurability.

Keywords:

• Varda
• documentary films
• identity
• subject
• incommensurability

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Véronique Flambard-Weisbart

Véronique Flambard-Weisbart is a Professor of French at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles. Her research interests and scholarship include twentieth-and twenty-first-century French literature and film. U.S. correspondant for the Société d’études céliniennes (SEC), she has authored several essays on the work of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, including “Le Suaire de Véronique et l’incarnation du style émotif dans Féerie pour une autre fois” in Études céliniennes, no. 10, 2017, pp. 43–54. She has also performed interpretive dramatic readings of Céline’s work in the United States (2015), Canada, Poland (2016), and Japan (2017).