Agnès Varda: Between Film, Photography, and Art by Rebecca J. DeRoo (review)

In her 2017 book, Agnès Varda: Between Film, Photography, and Art, art and media historian Rebecca DeRoo examines the work of Agnès Varda through a multimedia lens. She interrogates the critical reception of Varda's work, illustrating how conventional interpretations have reified the very ideologies that Varda sought to impugn.

In chapters two and five respectively, DeRoo examines how La Pointe Courte (1955) and Daguerréotypes (1976) commingle documentary and fiction. La Pointe Courte contrasts the fictional narrative of a Parisian couple on vacation with vignettes of the fishing community based on the island, whereas Daguerréotypes documents the lives of trade workers on the Rue Daguerre in Paris. Both films feature references to vernacular photography, betraying a tension in the separation between the working class and the bourgeoisie. While La Pointe Courte was read by critics as neorealist, DeRoo argues that it instead complicates neorealist aesthetics through its portrayal of the working class, the bourgeoisie, vernacular photography, and Renaissance painting. Similarly, in Daguerréotypes, Varda alludes to petits-métiers (the photographic tradition seeking to document trade workers of nineteenth century Paris in the midst and the aftermath of Haussmannian renovations) in her representations of Parisian trade workers, rendering spectral the romanticized topos of bourgeois Paris. Whereas other critics have read Daguerréotypes as sentimental and apolitical, DeRoo asserts that its liminal portrayal of Paris is tactfully political in its own right.

Chapters three and four address Le bonheur (1965) and L'une chante, l'autre pas (1977), which both thematize women's work. In Le bonheur, a man's wife dies, and he marries the woman with whom he was cheating. She then becomes surrogate mother to his children. L'une chante (a musical), however, explores female friendship within the context of the 1960s women's liberation movement. DeRoo examines intermediality in Le bonheur through the presence of women's magazines and advertisements. The film was often read as anti-feminist, but DeRoo instead maintains that Varda uses the magazines parodically, highlighting rather than promoting the devaluation of women's work. L'une chante, on the other hand, is overtly feminist in its treatment of women's liberation. DeRoo argues that the film's contrast between image, music, and narrative operates in a Brechtian manner which interrogates the ideological underpinnings of "musical" as a genre. While addressed in L'une chante, the gendering of genre is a point that merited more discussion in her analysis of Le bonheur. The choice of melodrama and musical (canonically associated with women) illuminate the way in which these films challenge generic hegemony, underlining the complexity and importance of the work women's cinema can do.

Chapters six and seven of the book are concerned with autobiography and memory. In chapter six, DeRoo discusses Varda's 2006 art installation L'île et elle, which explored Varda's relationship with her late husband, Jacques Demy. The final chapter addresses the film Les plages d'Agnès (2008), an autodocumentary on the processes of aging and remembering. Critics, DeRoo contends, have tended to place these works comfortably in the realm of the sentimental without considering the emotional and political complexity of that sentiment. L'île et elle comprises two levels: one replete with tourist bric-a-brac from the island where Varda and Demy vacationed, another filled with reconfigured personal artifacts such as Demy's film reels. DeRoo's reading of the piece presents a beautiful meditation on Varda's portrayal of grief. The piece, DeRoo advocates, also serves as a pointed critique of the corporatization of the art world through Varda's use of tourist knick-knacks and her choice to show at the Fondation Cartier. In her chapter on Les plages, DeRoo remarks that critical reception is dominated by rosewater readings of the film. While not denying the film's emotional dimension, she advocates that the...