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6 - Feminist Nomads: The Politics of Walking in Agnès Varda

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 November 2024

Asli Özgen
Affiliation:
Universiteit van Amsterdam
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Summary

Abstract

Moving the focus to the insurgent social movements of May ‘68, this chapter investigates how walking, wandering, or marching changed its on-screen meaning in the French Nouvelle Vague. Arguing against the male-dominant historiography of this period, it analyses the articulation of dissent through walking in Agnès Varda's filmography. Through the analysis of three films—Cleo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7, 1962), Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond, 1985), and Les plages d’Agnès (The Beaches of Agnès, 2008)—the chapter explores feminist aesthetics and cinematic pedestrianism as a dissentient tactic. The chapter argues that the cinematic pedestrianism of women protagonists in these films embodies the feminist intersectional repertoire of activism, such as walking and marching in the city, to challenge gendered and heteronormative constructions of space.

Keywords: Nouvelle Vague, walking, nomadology, feminism, Agnes Varda

“[Nomadism] is the intense desire to go on trespassing, transgressing.”

‒ Rosi Braidotti

In the final pages of Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Gilles Deleuze detects a continuity in the voyage form from Italian Neorealism to the French Nouvelle Vague. He writes, “It is here that the voyage-form is freed from the spatiotemporal coordinates which were left over from the old Social Realism and begins to have value for itself, or as the expression of a new society, of a new pure present.” Among the examples Deleuze gives are: “the return journey from Paris to the provinces and from the provinces to Paris in Chabrol (Le beau Serge and Les cousins)”; the “wanderings which have become analytical instruments of an analysis of the soul,” such as in Rohmer's Contes Moreaux (Six Moral Tales, 1963–1972); Rivette's “investigation-outing” in Paris nous appartient (Paris Belongs to Us, 1961); and the “flight-outing” of Truffaut in Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player, 1960), and Godard in À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960) and Pierrot le fou (1965). In these films, Deleuze sees the birth of a new line of characters on the move, barely concerned by the events that happen to them, and who “experience and act out obscure events which are as poorly linked as the portion of any-space-whatever that they traverse.”

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Chapter
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Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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