Agnès Varda: Feminist Auteur

By Charlotte Butler | 14.02.2021

Agnès Varda’s death ushered her into the cinematic hall of fame. Publications around the world labelled her the “grandmother of the New Wave” and celebrated her indelible contribution to feminist filmmaking. Obituaries and articles from The New York Times to The Paris Review united in their focus on several key contours of Varda’s legacy: her feminism, her collaborative method, and her influence on the French New Wave. These contours became the coordinates of “Agnès Varda the auteur.” This tendency in criticism, to assign expectations to an artist’s legacy, is crucial to understanding the dangers of auteur theory. Developed by French film theorists Alexandre Astruc and André Bazin, auteur theory (as it was coined by Andrew Sarris in 1962) elevates the role of the director as the film’s “author,” and argues that the “author’s” vision creates consistency in a director’s body of work. While undeniably tempting as a theoretical paradigm, auteurism risks subsuming creative freedom into an identifiable, restrictive formula. By considering Astruc, Bazin, and Sarris’ foundational texts against the feminist responses of Pauline Kael and Laura Mulvey, this article will consider Agnès Varda as a new paradigm of Feminist Auteur, not due to any stagnant aesthetic consistency in her oeuvre, but rather due to a fierce feminist objective that drives all of her films and is expressed uniquely in each of them. By examining two of her most celebrated films — Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962) and Vagabond (1985) — I will argue that, in form and content, Varda “authored” films that gleefully problematize simple concepts of “female identity” in favour of plurality and transformation. 

The concept of auteurism was popularized by Alexandre Astruc in his 1948 article “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo.” His essay elaborated an exciting new theory of film “authorship.” In conceiving of film language in this manner, Astruc astutely paved the way for experimentation and contravention of cinematic codes, a reinvention of cinema that is both personal and cultural: “Direction is no longer a means of illustrating or presenting a scene, but a true act of writing. The filmmaker/author writes with his camera as a writer writes with his pen. How can one possibly distinguish between the man who conceives the work and the man who writes it?” (Astruc 1948). Astruc consistently emphasizes the centrality of individual creativity made manifest through cinema. André Bazin elaborated on Astruc’s foundational text in his critique “La Politique des Auteurs,” which was published in the Cahiers du Cinéma in 1957. In the essay, Bazin asserts the difference between auteur and metteur-en-scene and argues that this distinction disappears when one considers the concept of auteurship as a sophisticated and deep interaction between individual and material: “auteurs are a subject to themselves; whatever the scenario, they always tell the same story, or, in case the word ‘story’ is confusing, let’s say they have the same attitude and pass the same moral judgments on the action and on the characters” (Bazin 1957). Bazin summons critic Jacques Rivette when he quotes, “an auteur is someone who speaks in the first person” (Bazin 1957).

Heavily-influenced by the Cahiers du Cinéma thinkers and Bazin’s “politique des auteurs,” Andrew Sarris coined the phrase “auteur theory” in 1962 in his article in Film Culture. This introduced the type of criticism already prominent in the Cahiers to American film circles. In setting out to clarify what is meant by “auteur theory” and maintaining that film should be a medium of personal artistic expression, Sarris suggested that the best films were those imprinted with their makers’ signature flair. Sarris’ argument centres on three primary competencies that a director must achieve in order to be designated “auteur”: the first is technical competence, the second is the director’s body of work, and the third is the creation of interior meaning through a body of work. Sarris visualizes his tripartite theory by way of three concentric circles: “the outer circle is technique; the middle circle, personal style; and the inner circle, interior meaning. The corresponding roles of the director may be designated as those of a technician, stylist, and an auteur” (Sarris 453). In the realm of “interior meaning,” Sarris emphasizes the centrality of the director’s soul or “élan”: “It is not quite the vision of the world a director projects nor quite his attitude toward life […] Lest I seem unduly mystical, let me hasten to add that all I mean by ‘soul’ is the intangible difference between one person and another […] Sometimes, this difference is expressed by no more than a beat’s hesitation in the rhythm of a film” (Sarris 453). For Sarris, this injection of “élan” is what distinguishes a “genuine director,” an auteur, from a “quasichimpanzee” in a director’s chair. 

There are many problems with Sarris’ argument, which fellow American critic Pauline Kael diligently picks apart in her satisfying, feminist-oriented article “Circles and Squares” (1963). Kael destabilizes Sarris’ credibility right off the bat by attacking his identification of an “essentially feminine narrative device” as a means of recognizing the link between Raoul Walsh’s Every Night at Eight (1935) and his later film High Sierra (1941): “The point is that one of the screen's most virile directors employed an essentially feminine narrative device to dramatize the emotional vulnerability of his heroes” (Sarris 454). Kael responds in pointed jest: “Is it more feminine than masculine to be asleep, or to talk in one’s sleep, or to reveal feelings? Or, possibly, does Sarris regard the device as feminine because the listening woman becomes a sympathetic figure and emotionally understanding in this ‘virile’ context?” (Kael 13). While it does not end up being a focal point of her own essay, Kael’s jab at Sarris allows her to rupture his authority on her way to asserting more fundamental critiques. 

Kael dissects Sarris’ argument premise-by-premise, thereby liberating the “auteur” from a formulaic conception to one that recentres and celebrates individual creativity. She critiques Sarris’ suggestion that a director’s prior work suffices in identifying their subsequent work as worthy of acclaim. Making the facetious statement that “Renoir’s a genius, so anything he does is a work of genius” (16), Kael argues: “This could almost be a capsule version of the auteur theory (just substitute Hatari! for Carola) and in this reductio ad absurdum, viewing a work is superfluous, as the judgment is a priori. It’s like buying clothes by the label: this is Dior, so it’s good” (Kael 16). Kael’s excellent article shifts the focus from comfortable a priori decisions about a director’s worth to a consideration of each work as worthy of careful consideration. Furthermore, unlike Sarris’ emphasis on “technical competence” as a criterion for auteurism, Kael states, “the greatness of a director like Cocteau has nothing to do with mere technical competence: his greatness is in being able to achieve his own personal expression and style” (Kael 14). She pits Cocteau against the logical conclusion of Sarris’ “ideal” auteur formulation: “Their ideal auteur is the man who signs a long-term contract, directs any script that’s handed to him, and expresses himself by shoving bits of style up the crevasses of the plots” (Kael 17). In no way does Kael dismiss artistic genius and intertextuality in a director’s work; rather, she seeks to rediscover artistic genius by liberating the director from complacency masquerading as consistency. 

Kael’s critique of complacency applies not only to directors but to critics as well: “Criticism is an art, not a science, and a critic who follows rules will fail in one of his most important functions: perceiving what is original and important in new work and helping others to see” (Kael 14). Taking Sarris’ claim that “to argue against the auteur theory in America is to assume that we have anyone of Bazin’s sensibility and dedication to provide an alternative and we simply don’t” (Sarris 452), Kael responds: “I take [this] to mean that the auteur theory is necessary in the absence of a critic who wouldn’t need it. […] The greatness of critics like Bazin in France and Agee in America may have something to do with their using their full range of intelligence and intuition, rather than relying on formulas” (Kael 14). Kael rhetorically-body checks Sarris’ emphasis on categorization, suggesting that the critic becomes “expendable if categories replace experience; a critic with a single theory is like a gardener who uses a lawnmower on everything that grows […] They wanted a simple answer, a formula; if they approached a chef they would probably ask for the one magic recipe that could be followed in all cooking” (Kael 21). Kael’s essay thus enacts a crucial intervention in auteur theory, elevating close individual attention over critics’ impulse to categorize. While Sarris’ essay threatens to perpetuate stagnant favouritisms, Kael prioritizes experience and openness, which, as we will see, is crucial to appreciating Agnès Varda’s work. However, before we shift to Varda, we must attend to Sarris’ lame response to Kael’s critique. 

Sarris published “The Auteur Theory Revisited” in 1977, as an attempt to address critics such as Kael, who Sarris argued had straw-manned his argument. Rather than persuade his readers, “The Auteur Theory Revisited” is resigned in tone and unconvincing in content. Sarris tries to match Kael’s mocking, incisive rhetoric with his own, but the result comes off as bitter and resentful: “Despite all my disclaimers, qualifications, and reservations, however, a composite image of the auteurist emerged in anti-auteurist writings. Auteurists were invariably male […] They never bathed because it took time away from their viewing of old movies. […] They preferred trash to art” (Sarris 1977). Sarris’ article reads more like an apology than a defence: “A great deal of confusion has been caused by the assumption that auteurism was inseparably linked with the personal tastes of individual critics. […] I must bear a large part of the blame for this confusion” (Sarris 1977). Throughout “The Auteur Theory Revisited,” Sarris mitigates the validity of his claims to the point of invalidating them: “The auteur theory […] is a pattern theory in constant flux […] a workable hypothesis […] At this late date I am prepared to concede that auteurism is and always has been more a tendency than a theory, more a mystique than a methodology, more an editorial policy than an aesthetic procedure ” (Sarris). As is by now clear, it is in shifting from Sarris to Kael that we find a vision of auteurism that befits Varda. 

Kael’s emphasis on originality and creativity over rote technical competence creates the crucial bridge to Varda’s feminist filmmaking. In particular, it is Kael’s elevation of plurality and eclecticism over formula that aligns her with Varda’s career. According to Flitterman-Lewis, “Varda’s ongoing journey reveals an artist who needs to create, who is in motion and incapable of ceasing, making do with whatever resources are available to her (including harnessing that creativity toward visual arts and installation when funds for filmmaking were scarce), remaining eminently pragmatic even when attacking new challenges” (Flitterman-Lewis 268). Varda’s films explore what it means to be a woman in film, both on the screen and in her own experience. According to Jefferson Kline, a professor at Boston University, Varda was aware of the barriers that confronted women: “She was very clear about her feeling that the New Wave was a man’s club and that as a woman it was hard for producers to back her” (Kline). However, over the course of her fifty-year, twenty-one-film career, Varda never let the man’s club stop her. In finding strategies to overcome the suppression of female authority on screen, Varda’s films exude a potent feminist force that combats the kind of objectifying gaze that Mulvey identifies in her essay. However, Varda’s challenge to “the unconscious of patriarchal society that has structured film form” extends far beyond the screen (Mulvey 60), as she confronts both the canon itself and the auteurs who populate it. This reading is enforced by Mulvey’s comment that “the cinema poses questions of the ways the unconscious (formed by the dominant order) structures ways of seeing and pleasure in looking” (Mulvey 61). The dominant order here is not only how audiences are made to “see” images on a screen, but also how audiences are made to understand cinematic value and authorial worth. 

Varda’s fierce cinematic vision is evinced by two of her most well-known films: Cléo de 5 à 7 and Vagabond, which tell utterly different stories united by a common focus on female identity. This focus on female identity is carved into relief when we consult Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975). In the essay, Mulvey uses Freud’s theory of phallocentrism to examine the ways in which film “reflects, reveals, and even plays on the straight, socially-established interpretation of sexual difference” (Mulvey 581). Mulvey views the power dynamic between active/male and passive/female in light of the techniques of Hollywood cinema, where women were perceived as passive trophies to virile male protagonists, “tied to [their] place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning” (583), and where film is presented to the audience as a “hermetically-sealed world which unwinds magically […] producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic phantasy” (Mulvey 583). If Mulvey’s theory acknowledges the patriarchal structures that objectify women, Varda films can be viewed as attacking those structures by producing heroines who are as much the subjects of identification as they are its focus. If classical film “controls images, erotic ways of looking, and spectacle,” Varda’s films liberate these images and transforms them into subjects in their own right, thereby facilitating personalities for women that had hitherto been codified in highly confining ways. 

The second film of Varda’s career, Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962), interrogates categories and definitions of womanhood while acknowledging the social pressures that construct femininity. The film follows a pretty blonde pop singer, Cléo Victoire, who passes two anxiety-ridden hours of a long summer day awaiting the results of a medical examination that will determine whether she has fatal cancer. According to Flitterman-Lewis in To Desire Differently, “The film traces the process by which Cléo, the woman-as-spectacle, becomes transformed into an active social participant, rupturing the oppressive unity of identity and appropriating the gaze for herself in a new appreciation of others in the world around her” (Flitterman-Lewis 210 1990). Having seemingly always been defined by her attractiveness and femininity, what Mulvey terms a female character’s “to-be-looked-at-ness,” the turning point of Cléo’s transformation occurs during a song rehearsal session in which lyrics evoking absence, lack, and death force Cléo into a sudden recognition of her identity, a recognition concomitant with both a new social awareness and a rejection of established definitions of her. According to Flitterman-Lewis, “Cléo’s transformation hinges on the turn of a phrase: ‘How do I look?’ This question is displaced from its passive, objectified meaning (‘How am I seen, how do I appear in the eyes of the world?’) to its active complement (‘How do I see, how is the world viewed by me?’)” (Flitterman-Lewis 279 1990). This question sets in motion her emergence from objectification into subjectivity.

The viewer is made to experience the force of Cléo’s transformation — from object to subject of desire — through Varda’s virtuosic camera use. Cléo’s relationship with/over the camera changes as she assumes the power of subjective vision. The first half of the film reinforces a conventional, fetishized image of female beauty that presents Cléo as a spectacle for erotic contemplation. Medium shots and long shots that track Cléo in her lingerie in her bedroom, or follow her as she walks through a store perusing hats. However, as Cléo’s new vision of herself and her world take hold, the camera increasingly comes to occupy her perspective. This effect occurs most notably in Chapter Four, when Cléo dawns a pair of dark glasses and strolls to a nearby cafe. Her dark glasses become the instrument of both vision and insight. The camera takes a medium shot of Cléo’s face as she surveys the room, which shifts to a point-of-view shot. By becoming anonymous, Cléo thus sees, and in seeing others, she begins to see herself. Far from being defined merely by what she “provokes” or “represents” as Mulvey warns in her essay, the audience of Cléo de 5 à 7 sees its heroine move from object to subject. Varda’s use of point-of-view shots combats what Mulvey identifies as the film's fantastical indifference. Cléo moves from being defined by“to-be-looked-at-ness,” as she comes to see, look, and know herself.

Varda’s later, and possibly best-known film, Vagabond (1985), enacts an equally forceful, albeit different kind of feminist intervention. While Cléo de 5 à 7 takes place within a confined diegetic time of two hours, Vagabond tells an extended story of a defiant young drifter named Mona, found frozen to death in a ditch in the first scene of the film. While Cléo challenges the patriarchal conventions Mulvey diagnoses on the level of subjectivity and the gaze, Vagabond enacts this intervention on the level of form through its narrative structure. Rather than tell the story chronologically from Mona’s perspective, Varda pieces together the story through flashbacks told by those who encountered her. According to Geetha Ramanathan in Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women’s Films (2007), “Varda then works within a voyeuristic narrative structure, reminiscent of stories that seek to solve the enigma or riddle of femininity” (40). In “Visual Pleasure,” Laura Mulvey suggests some of the possible ways that the dominant look of masculinity in the cinema might be deconstructed: “It is the cinematic code and their relationship to formative external structures that must be broken down before mainstream film and the pleasure it provides can be challenged […] The voyeuristic-scopophilic look that is a crucial part of traditional filmic pleasure can itself be broken down” (68). Vagabond’s deconstruction of traditional cinematic viewing structures disperses and democratizes vision from singularizing stories into a series of partial views.

While Cléo’s feminist intervention derives from inhabiting Cléo’s perspective through the camera, Vagabond’s intervention derives from withholding Mona’s perspective by distributing the telling of her story amongst several perspectives. According to Flitterman-Lewis, “In this the spectator’s position is linked to neither male nor female specifically; the composite portrait of Mona traverses gender lines” (298). Vagabond thus does away with singularizing narratives in favour of a story that embraces a plurality of perspectives. According to Flitterman-Lewis, “Mona’s story is a complex intersection of narration, vision, and sexuality. Each witness who encounters her narrates the accounts, as the camera renders a vision of the events, sometimes offering a view unanchored in the narration as well. All of these texts, both narrated and described, hinge on this curious woman” (291). In withholding Mona’s gaze, Varda ensures that her heroine is never captured by the camera. 

For Mulvey, classical cinema is structured on masculine desire; its looks coincide with the male protagonist’s gaze. The spectator’s power of vision is not over the female character, a woman constructed as the object of desire, but over all the images and their interrelation; it is a power of questioning rather than one of possession. According to Flitterman-Lewis, “In this we see [Mulvey’s] Oedipal narrative destabilized in favour of a multitude of views, partial impressions offered by each of the narrative ‘episodes’ and by each of her viewers a puzzle to grapple with — instead of the vicarious experience of Oedipus himself” (Flitterman-Lewis 299). Renouncing the absolutism of an authoritative view, Varda proposes an identification with looking itself, a viewing process that allows a perpetual variability of spectatorial positions and favours indeterminacy over rigid, fixed meanings. At the end of the film, Varda presents a shot of ridges being traced in sand, as Varda’s own narration provides the voiceover: “No one claimed the body, so it went from a ditch to a potter’s field. […] She left her mark on them. They spoke of her, not knowing that she had died. I didn’t tell them. Nor that her name was Mona Bergeron. I know little about her myself, but it seems to me she came from the sea” (Vagabond). By making her own position one of uncertainty and doubt, Varda renounces her authorial omnipotence at the same time as she foregrounds it. Like the audience, Varda herself is left to question Mona’s fate. Crucially, Varda’s insertion of her own voice into the narrative also calls back to Astruc’s emphasis on the “camera style,” and his understanding of the filmmaker as an “artisan of language” (Astruc). Varda echoes Astruc’s “caméra-stylo” when she inserts her own voice into the diegetic space of Vagabond. By rupturing the fictional boundary between creator and creation, Varda acknowledges the mark she, the auteur makes on her text. 

Having explored the myriad ways in which Agnès Varda disrupts traditional modes of looking and inserts a fiercely feminist presence into a traditionally white-male-dominated canon, it seems counterintuitive to label her a Feminist Auteur. To use the term threatens to contain her legacy within the rigid categories that Kael derides in her critique of Sarris. However, I would argue that, to designate Varda as Feminist Auteur is to reappropriate the theory of auteurism not as a restrictive formulation, but as a recognition of the possibility for continuity in vision without complacency in style. As is the case with each of Varda’s films, which range from documentary to fiction to political commentary, Cléo de 5 à 7 and Vagabond are two stunningly different films united by their fierce focus on female stories. While Cléo ends with an affirmation of life, Vagabond begins with a mysterious death. While Cléo’s climax comes with its protagonist’s emergency from objectification into subjectivity, Vagabond’s evasive narrative structure preserves its heroine’s identity by dispersing her story to multiple witness accounts. In the same way that Vagabond never provides a clear answer about Mona’s death, Varda’s stylistic shifts defy the categorization of a containable “Varda” style. Her unique and varied films can be viewed as a collection of delightful questions that each ask: what does it mean to be a woman? Sandy Flitterman-Lewis puts it well when she states: “Varda is interested in questions, not answers, seeing those questions not as limitations, which is how traditional masculine hierarchies of value understand them — conceiving of questions as ‘not having the answer’ — but as options that allow the productive engagement in the act of questioning itself” (314). Varda thus replaces the grand narratives and stagnant formulas of an identifiable authorial style with a cohesive authorial mission that manifests itself differently in each of her films. Through her method, Varda does away with dominant ways of “seeing” in pursuit of a diverse, eclectic vision of what it means to be a woman.

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