Confronting Contradictions: Genre Subversion and Feminist Politics in Agnès Varda's L'une chante, l'autre pas

Abstract

French filmmaker Agnès Varda's career has been largely defined by contradiction. She is acknowledged as influential, yet often discussed independently from the advanced filmmaking practices and intellectual debates of her New Wave generation. Her musical, L'une chante, l'autre pas, was particularly misunderstood: film critics and feminist scholars praised the film's feminist storyline, but found that the unexpected musical numbers undercut the seriousness of the feminist message, resulting in a film that is ultimately incongruous. Through archival excavation of Varda's sources, I argue that the film's incongruity was in fact intentional, an expansion of advanced filmmaking theories and strategies, in dialogue with influential Brechtian texts and contemporary feminist debates. This essay reveals specific social and economic factors that influenced the production and reception of the film and reconsiders apparent contradictions in Varda's career.

Acknowledgements

Portions of this paper were presented at the 2008 Conference of the Society for the Study of French History; I thank the conference organisers and members of the audience for their helpful comments. Tom Gunning, Hunter Vaughan, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Ivone Margulies, and Anton DiSclafani offered excellent suggestions for this essay. I am deeply grateful to Agnès Varda for granting me interviews and extended access to her personal archives as well as Anita Benoliel at Ciné-Tamaris for facilitating my archival research. For consistency, I cite the English subtitle translations of the song lyrics throughout this essay. Textual translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own.

Notes

 [1] Sellier describes Varda as the ‘lone woman filmmaker’ associated with the New Wave (Sellier 2008, p. 61). See also Vincendeau (2007, n.p.) and Hayward (1992, p. 30).

 [2] An important exception was, of course, Cléo de 5 à 7 (1961), which employs Brechtian motifs such as chapter headings to represent the pop star's transformation from narcissistic identification with stereotypical images of feminine beauty to a socially mediated understanding of herself as subject. See Flitterman-Lewis's groundbreaking analysis (1996, pp. 277–279). In her recent analysis of Cléo, Orpen explicitly invokes these Brechtian motifs, though they were not commonly discussed as Brechtian at the time: ‘The extreme linearity of the narrative is quite Brechtian and leads to moments of spectator distanciation and alienation (or Verfremdungseffekt), as indeed do the chapter headings’ (Orpen 2007, p. 29).

 [3] Varda was recognised by the Cahiers, in interviews and reviews of her films that appeared in the journal, but her involvement was limited to these interactions. See Narboni et al. (1977) and Dubroux (1977). Smith and Neupert quote Varda's description of her first meeting with the ‘young turks’ of the Cahiers: ‘[J]e pourrais dire que Chabrol, Truffaut, Rohmer (qui avait un autre nom), Brialy, Doniol-Valcroze, et Godard étaient réunis ce soir-là. Je suivais mal la conversation. Ils citaient mille films et proposaient je ne sais quoi à Resnais, tous parlant vite, bavardant avec animation, assis partout y compris sur le lit. Moi, j'étais là comme par anomalie, me sentant petite, ignorante, et seule fille parmi les garçons des Cahiers’ (Smith 1998, pp. 6–7). (‘I think Chabrol, Truffaut, Rohmer [who had a different name], Brialy, Doniol-Valcroze, and Godard were there that evening. I had trouble following the conversation. They quoted thousands of films and suggested all sorts of things to Resnais, they all talked fast, chatted brightly, and sat everywhere including on the bed. I seemed to be there by mistake, feeling small, ignorant, and the only woman among the guys from the Cahiers’ [Neupert 2002, p. 63]). Neupert asserts that ‘Varda would always have a tangential relation to the Cahiers critics’ (2002, p. 63) whereas Smith positions Varda closer to the Left Bank filmmakers Resnais, Demy, and Marker, an often-invoked categorisation that merits further study. Powrie and Reader's important history references Varda's apparently exceptional status: ‘Varda … beyond doubt is French cinema's leading woman director … and Varda for a very long time was—certainly so far as non-French audiences were concerned—seemingly the only one of her kind’. See Powrie and Reader (2002, pp. 25–26). See also Prédal (1991).

 [4] Scholars typically divide Brecht's immense influence on French cultural debates and cinematic practice from the 1950s to the 1970s into two phases: a formal experimentation with technique from the late 1950s to 1968; and a highly politicised investigation of filmic form, production, and reception from 1968 to the late 1970s (evidenced, for example, in the work of Jean-Louis Baudry, Jean-Louis Comolli, and Jean Narboni) (Brady 2006, pp. 307–309; Lellis 1982, pp. 160–162). Brady identifies a number of factors that contributed to Brecht's influence in this period, such as a highly publicised visit of the Berliner Ensemble to Paris and a French translation of Brecht's collected works. Furthermore, prominent figures, including Roland Barthes and Jean-Luc Godard, as well as leading cultural journals, such as the Cahiers du cinéma, were investigating Brecht's texts (Brady 2006, pp. 307–308). In contrast to the more formal implementation of Brecht's methods to focus on anti-illusionist, anti-narrative strategies, after the protests of 1968, filmmakers and theorists adopted Brechtian concepts to respond to the calls to politicise culture. For instance, in 1968, Godard began to explore agitational filmmaking with the collective ‘Groupe Dziga Vertov’, with this work culminating in the 1972 film, Tout va bien, which is a fictional story of a factory strike, and uses as its guiding premise Brecht's text ‘The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre’. Lellis argues that this film and its analysis were central in articulating the Cahiers' aesthetic and political positions in the early 1970s (1982, pp. 137–142).

 [5] The Cahiers proclaimed: ‘Les théories de Brecht ont aujourd'hui une importance décisive, idéologiquement et politiquement, dans le champ du cinéma’ (‘Today Brecht's theories are of decisive importance, ideologically and politically, in the field of cinema’). See in particular ‘Le “Groupe Dziga Vertov”’ (1972, p. 5). See also Lellis's exhaustive study (1982, pp. 76–79, 137–142). Lellis also examines Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's contemporaneous interest in Brecht and the Cahiers' discussion of their work.

 [6] Sources often evoke Varda's use of Brechtian alienation devices in her first film, La Pointe Courte. See Armes (1976, p. 100), Arnault (1967, p. 41) and Flitterman-Lewis (1996, pp. 234, 237).

 [7] Although Tout va bien includes, for example, one female worker's account of sexual harassment on the factory floor, her voice is one among many in the film. On the contradictions in Godard's representations of women, see, for example, Mulvey and MacCabe's landmark essay (1980) and Sellier's more recent analysis (2008). On Brechtian devices in the work of Marguerite Duras, see Günther (2002, pp. 30, 64).

 [8] Flitterman-Lewis asserts: ‘although Varda's more avowedly feminist films, such as L'une chante, l'autre pas … are quite explicit in their concern with women's issues, they fail to offer a serious challenge to the dominant structures of representation, a challenge which forms the core of any alternative cinema’. She continues: ‘L'une chante, l'autre pas expresses an assertively feminist content through fairly traditional cinematic means’ (1996, pp. 215–216). Smith contends: ‘Compared with L'opéra mouffe, Cléo, and Sans toit ni loi, L'une chante, l'autre pas is a straightforward film. It is largely concerned with watching its protagonists, whose doings are narrated …. The time structure … is relatively traditional’ (1998, p. 108).

 [9] Important musicals have, of course, challenged racial and gender clichés, such as The Jazz Singer (1927), or more recently, Dancer in the Dark (2000). On Fritz Lang's challenges to the musical genre via Brechtian methods, see Gunning (2001).

[10] Audé calls the film ‘reassuring’ and the music ‘sugary’; she argues that the film has a ‘fonction rassurante’ and the music is ‘charmante plutôt que mordante… Tout cela est sucré … (1981, p. 145); Forbes terms them ‘women's movement jingles’ (1992, p. 89); Oukrate (1977, p. 65) describes the film as ‘the Women's Liberation Movement done by Walt Disney’ (‘C'est Walt Disney au MLF’).

[11] Demy was also Varda's husband. On Godard and Demy reworking the genre of the musical, in films such as Une femme est une femme (1961), Les parapluies de Cherbourg (1964), and Les demoiselles de Rochefort (1967), see, for example, Hayward (2005, p. 274), Powrie and Reader (2002, p. 26), Rosenbaum (2004, pp. 32–37, 223–229), Ross (1995, pp. 98, 203–204), and Wilson (1999, p. 43). On musical conventions in Varda's and Demy's films of the 1950s and early 1960s, see Bogart (2001).

[12] Altman asserts, ‘pairing off is the natural impulse of the musical,’ achieved not only through the plot, but also via split screens, dance choreography, and/or the repetition of a melody (1989, pp. 31–32). Of course Altman was referring to the Hollywood musical's popular years, from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s, when the conventions of romance and the happy ending became typical of the genre (p. 268).

[13] On female friendship films more broadly as a ‘challenge to heterosexism’, see Wilson (2001, p. 266).

[14] My analysis here is indebted to Hayward's assertion that Varda's representation of ‘feminism in a popular culture structure (the musical)’ is subversive (Hayward 1992, p. 33; 2005, p. 323).

[15] Varda wrote the song lyrics, in collaboration with François Wertheimer and the members of Orchid (Micou Papineau, Joëlle Papineau, and Doudou Greffier), who wrote the music.

[16] French lyrics courtesy of Ciné-Tamaris.

Sliding under Amsterdam's bridges

on a Dutch sightseeing boat

go the knocked-up, screwed-up ladies

the damsels and mamselles afloat.

The awkward and idiot madams

sadly abused by their Adams.

We're taking, if you please,

a cruise for abortionees.

[17] ‘We laughed and spouted away, unafraid of ridicule’.

[18] ‘Amsterdam on the sea, I'll remember the tulips and bikes, you see’.

[19] On the notion of the cliché, and the subversion of ideological aspects of a genre, see Deleuze (1983, pp. 282–289).

[20] Willett (1964, p. 37). Brecht sought spectators' critical awareness over emotional identification or ‘empathy’. Hayward argues: ‘To reproach Varda for lack of depth in characterisations is to miss the point’ (Hayward 1980, p. 174).

[21] Agnès Varda, interviews with the author (2006b and 2008).

[22] Oh it's good to be a bubble

It's beautiful to be a balloon

a workshop for molecules

a beautiful ovule …

[23] A woman in the audience interjects: ‘Your song is ambiguous. It also suits the right-to-life movement [mouvement du Laissez-les-vivre]. Ultimately, you make women who don't want to have kids feel guilty’. Pomme responds: ‘I don't say “have kids”, I say when you're pregnant, you should feel things yourself and not listen to the state or church or family benefits office. I use various images of women to show how I feel and sing about it’.

[24] This also appears to reference the exhibition practice initiated by third-world radical cinemas during the 1960s, such as the cinema nuovo in Brazil (itself deeply influenced by Brecht), which frequently stopped films halfway through so that the audience could debate their social and political messages.

[25] See Brecht on the idea of a moral tableau performed by the characters (Willett 1964, pp. 38–39).

[26] Brecht especially admired Chaplin's ‘gestic way of performing’, with his silent, denaturalised, parodic gestures puncturing the film's illusionism and thwarting character development, conveying instead the imbalances in social relations. See Eddershaw (2006, p. 281). Varda was undoubtedly also aware of the assembly line scenes in René Clair's A nous la liberté (1931), a central reference point in the French tradition of the film musical, known for its self-reflexivity, irony, and social critique.

[27] Intertitles were of course used in New Wave films, including Varda's Cléo de 5 à 7 (1961) and Godard's Vivre sa vie (1962).

[28] Poor mama

a double shift she's working

it's underpaid and exhausting.

Friedrich Engels once did say

that in the families of today

the bourgeois is the man

the proletarian is the woman.

He was right,

daddy Engels,

he was right

’cause at home

father is the bourgeois

the proletarian is ma ….

[29] On Varda's feminist activity in this period, see Amiel (1975, p. 50), Smith (1998, pp. 103–104) and Varda (1994, pp. 106–109). Varda has signalled the importance of Shulamith Firestone's and Kate Millett's work for developing her feminist perspectives, investigating the family as the site where gender roles are learned, and emphasising the family, sex, and love as sources of women's oppression. See Amiel (1975, p. 50) and Audé (1981, p. 140).

[30] Mon corps est à moi, unpublished script, Ciné-Tamaris archives.

[31] For a summary of state aid to French cinema in this period through the CNC, see, for example, Jäckel (2007, pp. 22–24).

[32] Lellis (1982, pp. 6, 160). Williams explains that the Cahiers' ‘key points of reference were Marx and Lenin, particularly as interpreted by Louis Althusser, who argued that notions of base and superstructure had to be rethought in terms of practices—economic, political, and ideological. This approach was informed in different ways by structuralism and semiotics …, Lacanian psychoanalysis, … the deconstructionist insights of Derrida and Foucault’, and Maoist principles, which were used to analyse cinematic production, distribution, and reception and the ideological effects of film form. During this period, Williams contends: ‘While Cahiers du cinéma certainly did its best to keep pace with feminist “counter-cinema”—the work of Agnès Varda, Coline Serreau, Chantal Akerman, and above all Marguerite Duras … the only contemporary film-makers deemed truly worthy of its consideration were the Dziga Vertov group and the team of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’. See Williams (2004, pp. 266–267). On the Cahiers' political orientations during this period, see also Harvey's extensive analysis (1978).

[33] On French cinema's broader dialogues with Hollywood, see Tarr (2007, pp. 4–6).

[34] One review published in 1978 notes that the film had already reached 350,000 viewers in France (McCormick 1978, p. 28).