Sans toit ni loi (1985)

1. Sans toit ni loi (1985)

2. Agnès Varda • Varda studied art history and photography and worked as the official photographer for the Théâtre National Populaire – reflected in careful, sometimes ‘painterly’ composition in the films.

3. La Pointe courte, 1954 O saisons, ȏ châteaux 1958

4. First film La Pointe courte (1954) borrows structure from Faulkner’s The Wild Palms: two alternating narrative threads. • Edited by Resnais, well-known New Wave director of Hiroshima mon amour (1959). • Compared to Italian neorealism e.g. La Terra trema (Visconti, 1948).

5. Revisionist ‘Tourist’ Shorts • Ô saisons, ô châteaux, Du côté de la côteand L’Opéra-mouffe (1958) subvert norms of the tourist film genre. • L’Opéra-mouffeas • ‘documentairesubjectif’.

6. A marginal figure in French cinema? • Linked to Left Bank of New Wave. • Outside mainstream production and distribution circuits. • ‘Rediscovered’ every ten (odd) years (Prédal 1991): Cléo de 5 à 7 (1961), L’une chante, l’autre pas (1976), Sans toit ni loi (1985), Jacquot de Nantes (1990), LesGlaneurs et la Glaneuse (2001), Les Plages d’Agnès (2008). • Marginal subjects including the Black Panthers and Los Angeles graffiti artists

7. Varda and feminism • Varda’s involved with the Women’s Movement ‘committed rather than militant’ (Smith 1998: 8) • Involvement in issues of reproductive freedom, family planning, domestic relations • L’une chante, l’autre pas (1976) reconstructs famous trial around French abortion laws • Few happy heterosexual couples in Varda’s films – mainly solitary women and female friendships

8. InLe Bonheur (1965), • appearances prove deceptive.

9. The Complexities of Varda’s Mise-en-Scène

10. Varda and documentary aesthetics • Style characterised by ‘poétique du quotidien’ • ‘cinécriture’ = writing directly in images • Incorporation of documentary into fiction films: Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962), L’une chante, Sans toit… • Political documentaries: Salut les Cubains (1963), Loin du Vietnam (1967), Black Panthers (1968) • Personal documentaries: L’Opéra-Mouffe (1958), Daguerréotypes (1975), Jacquot de Nantes, Les Glaneurs… • Fiction-documentary pairs: Mur murs + Documenteur (1981); Kung Fu Master + Jane B. parpar Agnès V. (1987)

11. Cléo de 5 à 7 (1961) • DramatisesCléo’s trajectory ‘from object to subject of vision’ (Flitterman-Lewis 1990: 269)

12. Narrative structure in Sans toit ni loi • Experimental narrative structure recalls Citizen Kane (1940) • Also similar to nouveau roman – film dedicated to Nathalie Sarraute, author of Portrait d’un inconnu (1947) • Cinematic influence of Godard and Resnais: ‘With Godard it shares the episodic narration that fragments linear causality into a series of “situations” – each with a demonstrable social lesson, and each with an invitation to the spectator’s critical judgment. It also shares his interest in the blending of different discourses and mixed modes into a film collage that interrogates its own methods […] Likewise, Vagabond shares with Resnais as complicated a temporal construction as can be achieved in film, weaving threads of narration into sequences that disappear and return with a compelling fluidity, while structures of memory (such as the flashback, for example) are rendered with the reality of present perception.’ (Flitterman-Lewis 1990: 298-9)

13. Sans toit ni loi and feminist film theory • Laura Mulvey (1975) argued that, in mainstream narrative cinema, men are active agents of the narrative, women are passive and tobe looked at • Effects of Varda’s narrative structure and multiple points of view: 1. ‘it causes a disengagement from the story – thus preventing it from becoming an ideological film about vagrancy’; 2. it ‘unfix[es] the gaze, to render it inoperable’; 3. ‘Varda subverts the traditional codes of classic narrative cinema which depict man as the gender on the move and woman as static’. (Hayward 2000: 272)

14. Sandrine Bonnaire • Varda mainly cast non-professionals she met while researching the film • Bonnaire began career aged 15 in A nos amours (Maurice Pialat, 1983) • Worked with auteur directors: Pialat, Chabrol, Rivette, Leconte – often plays strong, rebellious young women including Joan of Arc! (Jeannela Pucelle, 2004)

15. References • Biró, Y., ‘Les cariatides du temps, ou le traitement du temps dans l’oeuvre d’ Agnès Varda’, Etudes cinématographiques, 179-186, 1991, pp. 41-55. • Flitterman-Lewis, S., To Desire Differently: Feminism and the FrenchCinema, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. • Hayward, S., ‘Beyond the Gaze and into Femme-Filmécriture: Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi (1985)’, in S. Hayward and G. Vincendeau (eds.), French Film: Texts and Contexts, London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 269-280. • Mulvey, L., ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16, 3, Autumn 1975, pp. 6-18. • Prédal, R., ‘Agnès Varda: une oeuvre en marge du cinéma français’, Etudes cinématographiques, 179-186, 1991, pp. 13-39. • Smith, A., Agnès Varda, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998.