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ABSTRACT
Agnès Varda’s science fiction tale, Les Créatures, is her only film with an extravagant plot, and it is also the film considered (by others and by herself) to be her great failure. This article argues that these two aspects of the film are related. Les Créatures can be read as a condemnation of a certain kind of unrestrained storytelling, in which an artist’s desire for invention displaces any effort to engage with the world. The novelist-hero of Les Créatures cooks up fantasies that share the freewheeling improvisation of some of Varda’s other films but lack an ethnographic or observational dimension that would tether them to reality. As a result, his story, and indeed Varda’s film, amount to a self-absorbed game-playing that Varda repudiates in spite of its eerie fascination. In this way the film can be seen as a road not taken for Varda, drawing attention to the ways in which her other films hold their fantasies accountable to a shared world, and imagining what they would be like if they didn’t.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. See Cléo de 5 à 7/Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962); Sans toit ni loi/Vagabond (1985); L’une chante, l’autre pas/One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977). These are the best-known examples, but nearly every one of Varda’s fiction films is either the working out of a simple scenario, as in La Pointe Courte (1955), Le Bonheur/Happiness (1965) and Kung-Fu Master! (1988), or a loosely organised chronicle of the characters’ lives, as in Lions Love (… and Lies) (1969), Documenteur (1981) and Jacquot de Nantes (1991).
2. Varda often compared her filmmaking to writing. She referred to her method as cinécriture, her name for an approach in which filmmakers control every aspect of their art just as writers do – that is, writing with the tools of cinema, as opposed to using those tools to adapt or imitate written screenplays or narratives (Bénézet Citation2014, 111). In an early interview she said she ‘wanted to make a film exactly as one writes a book!’ (Kline Citation1992, 3). My claim is not that Varda’s works are not literary, but that they have little interest in the kinds of narrative complication we normally associate with prose (and screen) fiction.
3. ‘C’est au niveau du scénario que tout commence à se gâter. Ayant choisi de mêler la réalité à la fiction, le jeu à la vie, Agnès Varda ne parvient pas à débrouiller son écheveau […]. En fin de compte nous sommes un peu perdus dans ce monde qui n’arrive pas à naître, où le jeu, la vie, les problèmes de la création artistique […] s’emmêlent sans jamais se dénouer.’
4. ‘Mauvais sujet, traitement compliqué.’
5. I use Kelley Conway’s translation of the work’s title (Conway Citation2015, 98).
6. In the notes to her DVD collection Tout(e) Varda (‘All Things Varda’), Varda describes the project as an unburdening: ‘Heavy, also, are the reels of some twenty copies of the film for a run that was quickly ended. It was after having released The Gleaners that the idea of recuperating these unused filmstrips occurred to me. I was given the chance to exhibit in the grand, luminous space created by Jean Nouvel for the Cartier Foundation. The ideas followed on from there: film = light filter, light = cinema, and then … I like shacks. Vallaux constructed a metal structure. Unrolling the film reels of one of the unused copies (3500 meters), I hung up the strips vertically, edge to edge, within the frames. Thinking of the movie, I said “this is the shack of failure,” but as soon as it was installed, beautiful, fully lit, I said to myself “this is the shack of cinema,” then, “this is my home”’ (Varda Citation2012, 22). Original French: ‘Encombrantes sont aussi les bobines des quelques vingt copies du film pour une sortie qui est très vite rentrée. C’est après avoir tourné les Glaneurs que l’idée de récupérer les pellicules inutilisées m’est venue. L’occasion m’était donnée d’exposer dans le grand espace lumineux créé par Jean Nouvel pour la Fondation Cartier. Les idées se sont enchaînées : pellicule=filtre de la lumière, lumière=cinéma, et puis … j’aime les cabanes. Vallaux a construit une structure en métal. Déroulant les bobines d’une des copies inutiles (3 500 m), on a accroché la pellicule à la verticale, bord à bord, dans les cadres. En pensant au film, je disais “c’est la cabane de l’échec”, mais dès qu’elle a été installée, splendide, en pleine lumière, je me suis dit “c’est la cabane de cinéma”, puis “c’est ma maison”.’
7. Bénézet posits that the cabin’s incorporation of images from Les Créatures both causes viewers to contemplate the artistic medium of cinema and ‘anchors this fragile edifice in the island of Noirmoutier’, the central locale within a larger exhibition examining the ‘poetics of space’ (Bénézet Citation2014, 103). Rebecca DeRoo observes that Les Créatures ‘combined seemingly documentary footage of the island with a fictional plot’ and thus aligns with Varda’s suggestion, in her art installation, ‘that memory is an active process; she views the past subjectively to create the present, fabricating images and fictions of her life with Demy and their work as filmmakers’ (DeRoo Citation2018, 139–140).
8. Conway discusses how the installation speaks to different audiences: film theorists who can ‘contemplate the materiality of the cinematic apparatus’, film fans who can ‘scrutinize up close the thousands of frames containing the tiny faces of Deneuve and Piccoli’, and other visitors who can ‘explore the installation’s plastic qualities’ (Conway Citation2015, 98–99).
9. ‘Cette cabane a une histoire. Il était une fois deux beaux et bons acteurs qui avaient joué dans un film qui s'était terminé en échec. En vraie glaneuse, j’ai récupéré les copies abandonnées de ce film, et on a déroulé les bobines. Et les deux beaux et bons acteurs se sont retrouvés en parois, en murs traversés par la lumière.’ English translations of quotations from the movies are taken from the 2020 Criterion edition of The Complete Films of Agnès Varda (Citation2020).
10. The strips of film hang unspooled like the movie’s DNA, caught before the moment of projection. Rebecca DeRoo argues that the exhibit speaks to the impossibility of recovering the past. She points to another element in the exhibit, a flatbed editor running reels of the film in reverse and showing images of the two actors on the editor’s separate screens, a fantasy of returning to a moment prior to the editing process (DeRoo Citation2018, 138–139).
11. An interesting contrast can be found in Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Voyage(s) en utopie’, a Pompidou exhibition characterised by André Habib as a ‘performance of failure’ (Habib Citation2014, 225). Habib argues that Godard’s project – planned, contested, scrapped and reworked continuously over a period of four years – embodies an aesthetic of failure that exists in dialectical relationship to his sense of utopian possibility. In Habib’s reading, the creative battles over the project become for Godard a ‘fantastic mythology’ of thwarted artistic ambition (225). Varda’s self-mythologising, by contrast, is one of complacent achievement; the failure has been sublimated and incorporated.
12. The film is a follow-up to Cléo de 5 à 7 and Le Bonheur, Varda’s films in which Nouvelle Vague conventions are most fully on display. It was produced by Mag Bodard, who produced Le Bonheur along with films by Demy, Resnais and Robert Bresson. Conway sees the movie as extending Varda’s connection with the New Wave, as it casts stars Deneuve and Piccoli ‘in a sci-fi-art film hybrid shot the same year as Godard’s Alphaville’ (Conway Citation2015, 56).
13. Hannah Mowat cites an interview in which Varda referred to the film as a puzzle (Mowat Citation2016, 77). The image is present in the movie itself, when Mme Quellec observes that her life is made up of scattered moments of bliss that she has to piece together; she dreams of a life that is just one piece.
14. This plot also describes Le Gambit des étoiles, the 1958 William Klein science fiction novel that sits on Edgar’s writing desk.
15. ‘C’est la mise-en-scène d’un monde chaotique mais pas absurde, comme celui où nous vivons, qui a l’air de fiche le camp de tous les côtés mais qui doit savoir où il va.’ The English translation is taken from the 2016 Criterion edition of Paris nous appartient.
16. Varda’s films are full of dress-up games: Jane B. par Agnès V., Les Cent et une nuits de Simon Cinéma/One Hundred and One Nights (1995), Les Plages d’Agnès, Les Créatures and many of the short films feature characters wearing silly costumes.
17. ‘Tout le monde dit que l’enfance est fondatrice de la structure, je ne sais pas quoi. J’ai pas beaucoup de rapports à mon enfance. C’est pas une référence pour les choses auxquelles je pense, c’est pas une inspiration. Enfin, je ne sais pas […]. Pour moi, c’est du cinéma, c’est un jeu.’ A related process plays out more fully in Ulysse (1982), a film in which Varda returns to a photograph she had taken decades earlier. Even as she tries to remember and recreate the scene from the photograph, Varda registers the idea that the meaning of such an image cannot be settled with reference to any fixed perspective, whether personal or cultural; ‘here is only the image,’ she says. (‘L’image est là, c’est tout’).
18. ‘Où vont-ils donc ? Les hommes quand ils s’en vont ?’
19. ‘Je vois un lion’ … ‘Il a disparu des cartes’ … ‘Je vois un chat’ … ‘sérénité et caprice.’
20. The Criterion translation is not literal; rather, it retains the arbitrariness with which the burglars cast about for numbers. The original, characteristically, is full of puns. Thanks to Catherine Danielou for her prolific and invaluable help transcribing dialogue and translating Varda’s memoir.
Burglar 1: Je dis neuf, comme neuf à la coque. 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9.
Burglar 2: Je dis cinq, comme le 5 à 7. 1-2-3-4-5.
Burglar 1: Alors sept, comme c’est épatant. 1-2-3-4-5-6-7.
Burglar 2: Trois petits tours, et puis … ça va !
21.
Quellec [friendly]: Et toi, Henriette – qu’est-ce que tu racontes ?
Ducasse [at chessboard]: Et voilà! Mon piège est sur toi, Henriette. Ne te gène pas. [here ‘ne te gène pas’ means ‘just go ahead’]
Quellec: Qu’est-ce que tu fais ?
Henriette: Je te regarde. Je m’amuse, ça me fait plaisir. Oui, ça me plaît de te voir impotent.
Quellec: T’as pas honte de me parler comme ça ! Je suis plus âgé que toi !
Henriette: Ah ça, oui, tu es vieux. Il y a si longtemps que tu me dégoûtes.
Quellec: Tu vas pas remuer tout ça ?
Henriette: Au moment où tu m’as entraînée j’avais 16 ans. J’ai rien osé dire. Toi, tu étais marié, tu étais déjà vieux. Et moi j’avais peur et je ne savais rien.
Quellec: Tais-toi ! Ne crie pas !
Henriette: Je dis ce que je veux, c’est la vérité ! Tu as abusé de moi. Maintenant je suis une femme respectée. Et toi, un vieux méchant, un vieux qui va mourir, parce que tout le monde te déteste !
22. ‘Je ne me rendais pas compte.’
23. ‘Ça en vaut la peine de faire ce qu’on vous dit.’
24. ‘Et moi, je serai une princesse.’
25. Perhaps the paradigm for these improvisations is Varda’s television series Une minute pour une image (1983), in which she offers speculative comments on a series of photographs, often imagining a scene or story that might have given rise to the image.
26. ‘Il cherche l’inspiration en observant les gens de l’île et en leur inventant des aventures imaginaires. Procédure classique pour un auteur.’ The film introduction was created for the Tout(e) Varda collection and is included in the Criterion Complete Films.
27. ‘Je ne sais pas à qui parler ; je finirai par parler seule ou par chanter ou par écrire.’
28. ‘J’avais envie de faire un film assez vicieux.’
29. ‘Et puis, j’ai eu peur de ma propre violence, j’ai eu peur de ce quelque chose de dégoutant collé à mon désir de scénario, peur des images qui sortaient de moi.’
30. Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse/The Gleaners and I (2000); Oncle Yanco/Uncle Yanco (1967); Daguerréotypes (1975); Visages villages/Faces Places (with J.R., 2017); Mur murs (1981); Agnès de ci de là Varda/Agnès Varda: From Here to There (2011).
31. ‘Il cherche l’inspiration en observant les gens de l’île et en leur inventant des aventures imaginaires. Procédure classique pour un auteur. J’ai essayé de me faire peur avec un jeu d’échecs où les pions seraient des vraies personnes. J’ai eu peur d’un crabe et j’ai imaginé un piège.’
32.
Speaker 1: C’est un roman français très intéressant.
Speaker 2: Vous comprenez donc le français ?
Speaker 1: Non, c’est une traduction.
Speaker 2: Ma femme et moi, nous lisons aussi un livre français. Mais ce n’est pas un roman, c’est un livre de philosophie.
Speaker 1: C’est trop sérieux pour moi. J’aime les livres amusants.
Speaker 2: Moi aussi. Mais je m’intéresse un peu …
33. ‘Je t’ennuie avec mes créatures ?’
34. The film was based on a number of works in a festival exhibition titled ‘Le Vivant et l’artificiel’. Perhaps in support of the connection I’m drawing, Varda’s 7 P. incorporates the music from Les Créatures.
35. Mylène recovers her voice when giving birth.
36. Several scholars have discussed the ways in which Varda’s ‘Cabanes’ interact with notions of home. Dominique Bluher explains that Varda associated these shacks with ideas of childhood, intimacy, hiding and dreaming, while Gill Perry sees Varda’s ‘Cabane du cinéma’ as opening up the artist’s ‘intimate spaces of reverie’ to the visitations of a public audience (Bluher Citation2021, 197; Perry Citation2016, 160). I would simply add that the cabane maintains the traces of a different kind of home, the uncanny, sterile home of Les Créatures, and that the framed images that surround the cabane are a vivid evocation of the boxed creatures of the film. In this way the cabane clings to and even enjoys the failed project it has eradicated.
37. Hannah Mowat explains that ‘a “jeu de l’échec,” in French, contains a double connotation; a game not only of chess, but also of failure’ (Mowat Citation2016, 81).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Daniel Siegel
Daniel Siegel is Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he teaches courses in film and Victorian literature. His book, Charity and Condescension, was published in 2012 by Ohio University Press.