Mediatizing Poverty: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Adaptation in Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi

Abstract

As a fictional adaptation of the life of a real-life drifter (Setina Arhab), Agnès Varda’s 1985 film Sans toit ni loi presents the filmmaker with certain ethical questions. How can one ethically mediatize the poverty of others? How can one create and sell images of the poor which do not voyeuristically, hypocritically, or reductively exhibit them? Can one represent those who may refuse representation? I claim that Varda engages with these questions via a metafilmic reflection on the two means by which she might adapt Setina to the cinematic screen: documentation and aestheticization. Whereas Varda first seems to side with the plasticity of aestheticization over the strict mimesis of documentation, she then problematizes such a choice by dialogically questioning her decision not merely to document Setina but to transform her into a protean aesthetic spectacle for exhibition. This analysis reveals that Mona’s death by exposure is not random but rather concretizes Varda’s ethical concerns with the act of capturing and exhibiting—with mediatizing—life.

Keywords:

• Representation
• metafilmic
• self-reflexive
• Setina
• rape
• commodification

Notes

1 Varda’s autobiography reveals the many plot points lifted from her encounter with Setina (Varda par Agnès 167).

2 The following anecdote makes clear that Sans toit ni loi is fundamentally, for Varda, a portrait of Setina: “Sandrine Bonnaire […] describes how Varda attempted to equate her with Settina [sic] to the point where ‘[c]ela commençait sérieusement à me gonfler, je n’étais tout de même pas Settina [sic]’” (Smith, “Strategies” 90).

3 When Madame Landier offers to let her stay in her car overnight, Mona worriedly responds, “Vous allez m’enfermer?” After being reassured to the contrary, Mona nevertheless continues to demonstrate a preoccupation with capture. If she gets bored, she says, she will recite to herself the conjugation of an irregular English verb like “to catch”: “To catch, caught, caught, et cetera” (51:58).

4 At the risk of reading too metafilmically, one might underscore that the flashback to Mona’s rape is triggered by an avowal of culpability in which Madame Landier narrates her guilt using an English-derived expression which recalls the immobilization that haunts the act of filming for Varda: “Oh, c’est bizarre… cette fille que j’avais prise en stop. Elle revenait plusieurs fois, comme un reproche” (1:01:45, my italics).

5 If we return now to Varda’s metafilmic comments in Jane B. par Agnès V., cited above, we can better hear how, for her, representation is linked to erotic possession. Of L’Inconnue de la Seine, Varda says that “tout le monde pouvait fantasmer sur elle.” Birkin, she claims, offers herself to all: “tu t’offres à l’imagination de chacun.”

6 Varda recounts having filmed documentary interviews with Setina, the results of which were “[n]ot very interesting” (Conway 155). To interest viewers in the fate of drifters like Setina, Varda turned to the power of the image rather than to character psychology. “What is needed is more spectacle or image or the unexpected and less story, psychology,” she wrote in a preparatory note for the film (Conway 67, italics in original). Yet, as we will see, such a strategy is not without risks.

7 I am indebted to Philippe Met for having first indicated to me this aesthetic waffling.

8 Wild identifies this as a “Cretan representation of the Gorgon Medusa with tusks” (100).

9 Varda specifically visualizes this activity as painting via a shot/reverse shot in which the tree figures paint strokes of wine dregs over the glass of the telephone booth and thus over Mona’s face (1:41:47).

10 This would not be the first time that Varda metafilmically represents herself via a male proxy. DeRoo notes that the male magician of Daguerréotypes is a stand-in for Varda (104). Similarly, Varda refracts herself here not only through Madame Landier but through a range of male proxies (e.g., Paolo, the rapist, the disguised villagers).

11 This scene, in which Mona is pursued by monstrous figures associated with the act of filmic representation within the confines of a labyrinthine village and across a glass pane, recalls Varda’s imagining of Birkin as Ariadne, pursued by a monster-camera within and across the panes of a glass labyrinth, and her forewarning to Birkin: “Il y a un monstre qui la poursuit, il y a un monstre qui te poursuit” (1:09:02). For Varda, representation threatens to turn monstrous.

12 Mona is elsewhere identified with a tree. She associates herself with the death of diseased plane trees (1:00:00), and, in the shot of the discovery of her dead body, a migrant worker drops a pile of (vine) branches in the foreground in an audible echo of both her own fall to her death and that of the film’s felled trees. Wild similarly notes that “an enormous truck loaded with what appears to be gigantic cut logs” visually backs Paolo’s confession of desire for the lone Mona, while Hayward underscores that “[t]rees are framed as Mona is raped” (Wild 96, Hayward 277).

13 In the introduction to his interview with Varda, Jean Decock notes that the hill Mona dies on is “like a Golgotha” and that her journey toward it, marked by stumbling, is like the way of the cross (Varda, “Interview” 139, 142).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marcus Dominick

Marcus Dominick is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is currently completing a dissertation entitled Science, the Self, and Skepticism: Posthuman Fictions of Post-1960s France. Beyond his interest in the intersection of literature, philosophy, and history, Marcus has a particular interest in French and Francophone film and has published an article on Claire Denis’s White Material.