Agnes Varda

À partir de la lecture que la cinéaste fait de La Terre et les rêveries du repos (1948) de Bachelard dans le film Les Plages d’Agnès (2008), ce texte explique dans quelle mesure le paysage des plages dans le cinéma d’Agnès Varda constitue un espace cinématographique que la cinéaste habite et qui habite en retour la cinéaste. Que ce soit la cinéaste elle-même ou les personnages de ses films qui les empreignent, les plages figurent le travail de son imaginaire qui poétise les images littéraires dont les personnages incarnent les métamorphoses.

Cet article est une mise en relation d'un corpus de textes autour de la notion d'unité des contraires proposée par Jean-Yves Bloch, dans son texte "Le violon et le métronome". À travers une analyse du film "Cléo de 5 à 7", il propose de revenir sur le dialogue entre une temporalité objective et subjective et la corrélation entre fiction et documentaire.

Este artigo discute como a autoria feminina foi apagada da história, e como as histórias contadas pelas mulheres são diferentes do que estamos acostumadxs a ver.

[Text in portuguese] This article discusses how female authorship was erased from history, and how women tell stories differentily of what we are used to see.

Discusses the concepts of female agency and subjectivities in film and television through cases in the last decade, investigating emerging notions in the field and introducing original research
Focuses on how the politics of gender are mediated, what kind of transformative power film and television narratives poses and how technological developments and new media forms challenge existing perspectives and re-imagine the possible future directions
Offers intercultural and international perspectives on globally distributed film and television content, as well as bringing critically acclaimed non-Western examples into focus

La participación de las mujeres en la industria audio visual no es equitativa. En Argentina hay un progreso desde la década del 90, pero es lento. Las investigadoras Agustina Pérez Rial y
Paulina Benttendorff, del Centro Cultural de la Memoria Haroldo Conti, reflexionan sobre la representación femenina en el cine y, a partir de un ciclo que organizaron sobre Agnés Varda y Chantal Akerman, observan similitudes entre las obras de estas realizadoras y las de las argentinas Celina Murga y Anahí Berneri.

When, through highly atypical financial and creative means, French filmmaker Agnès Varda’s first feature film The Pointe Courte (La Pointe courte, 1954) first appeared on cinema screens, a fragment of contemporary commentators thought it hampered by “defects,” “blunders,” and “follies.” Its perceived infirmity compounded further by a “rather irritating intellectual dryness,” implying contact with the film may cause itching. A more material, rather than intellectual engagement with the film, then, may offer a means to overcome such reservations; a piste this article pursues. In doing so, I draw on the thought of contemporary French thinker Jean-Luc Nancy and his proposition that all images are flowers and the mobilised look such thinking engenders which oscillates between an optical gaze and a haptic graze. A look mobilized thanks to the contact it makes with wood’s textured, internal ornament and which undoes the material myopia by which the film’s existing critical landscape has itself been hampered.“

Jacquot de Nantes (1991), Agnès Varda's elegy to her dying husband (film director Jacques Demy), presents an intimate love rendered through cinema by chronicling Demy's own lifelong cinephilia. A cinematic elegy or an elegy-in-progress, Jacquot simultaneously screens mortality and cinephilia: cinephilia exists as a metaphor for the undoing of a life; the creation of film and the evolution of a cinematic career build in proportion to the life that diminishes. If cinema defines Demy's past, which the film clearly suggests, Jacquot figures as the idealized ordering of his mortal time. Demy persists in the cinematic image if not in the living body. This cinephilic framing of Demy's mortality invests faith in cinema's possibility to reveal if not transcend the bounds of human mortality. This article positions Jacquot as a cinematic elegy within the frameworks of cinematic time, cinematic scale (specifically, the close-up) and cinephilia.

One of the most comprehensive books to focus on the relationship between cinema and the other arts, this volume explores types and stylistic devices of intermediality through a wide range of case studies. It addresses major theoretical issues and highlights the relevance of intermedial relations in film history, mapping the theoretical field by outlining its main concepts and the research avenues pursued in the study of cinematic intermediality, including the most recent approaches and methodologies. It also presents some major templates of intermediality through various examples from world cinema, including closer looks at films by auteurs like Alfred Hitchcock, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, and Agnès Varda. Supplemented by three new chapters dealing with phenomena which came into view since its first publication, the revised and enlarged edition of this ground-breaking volume will serve as a useful handbook to clarify key ideas and to offer insightful analyses.

A las características y condicionantes propios de las películas que trabajan sobre la filmación de fotografías, Salut les cubains (Agnès Varda, 1963) incorpora, en varias ocasiones de forma enfática, una determinada relación con la música. El análisis pormenorizado de una de las secuencias en que se produce ese contacto querrá reparar en el funcionamiento de dicha secuencia, mostrar su estructura interna, ordenar las diferentes formas de relación entre las imágenes y el sonido
que en ella se dan o valorar su relación con un referente a partir de las decisiones tomadas. |

In several moments of its footage, Salut les cubains (Agnès Varda, 1963) adds to the particularities and characteristic limitations of the films that film photographs another connection, specifically with music. Close analysis of one of the sequences in which this connection takes place is accomplished in order to examine its functioning, reveal its structure, classify the different relations between image and sound along the sequence, and reconsider its relation to a referent bearing in mind the different choices in the film.

This article explores an overlooked aspect of Agnès Varda’s pioneering La Pointe Courte (1954)—its function as a literary adaptation. La Pointe Courte was significant to the French New Wave not only in its use of American literary modernist narrative strategies but in its execution of a new model of adaptive poetics that brazenly flouted expectations of fidelity to a literary source. La Pointe Courte’s adaptation of The Wild Palms by William Faulkner—a central literary reference for French film critics after the Second World War—supplied an important, but often uncredited, blueprint for directors like Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard, whose films modelled on literary modernist prose and abstracted, deliberately unfaithful filmic adaptations would be more readily recognized by critics for their originality. Varda’s analogical literary adaptation anticipated shifts in cinematic style that would echo throughout later works by directors affiliated with the Nouvelle Vague, including Godard and Resnais. This article seeks to revise how we understand the Nouvelle Vague’s origins, which, as Geneviève Sellier has argued, has all too often been told from the perspective of the masculine singular.

O artigo pretende analisar como o conceito deleuziano de imagem-cristal potencializa uma leitura feminista de duas sequências cinematográficas realizadas em tempos distintos, por diretoras distintas, mas ambas com um elemento em comum: o uso de espelhos como objeto central de cena. As sequências em questão estão nos filmes Enigmas da esfinge (1977), de Laura Mulvey, e As praias de Agnès (2008), de Agnès Varda, e será a partir delas que será feita uma aproximação entre as aberturas analíticas da imagem-tempo e o debate sobre a condição existencial de ser mulher.

This article intends to analyze how the Deleuzian concept of crystal-image enhances a feminist reading of two cinematographic sequences made at different times by different directors, but both with one element in common: the use of mirrors as the central object of the scene. The sequences in question are in the films Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), by Laura Mulvey, and The beaches of Agnès (2008), by Agnès Varda, from which we intend to establish connections between the analytical openings of the time-image and the debate about the existencial condition of women.

The discussion about the categorization of a film as ‘ethnographic’, attending to its characteristics and whether or not is being made by a trained ethnographer, has been ‘hotly debated’ (Ruby, 2005: 159) among scholars, specifically from the area of visual anthropology. This essay will focus on the possibilities of the intertwining between anthropology and cinema. First, I will expose the different views on the ethnographic value of films. Second, I will draw on two examples of films made by Mercedes Álvarez and Agnès Varda, directors that have contributed to the innovation of the documentary genre, in order to analyse and synthesize their possible contributions to the discipline of anthropology. Lastly, I will consider the possibilities of the conversation between ethnography and film.

À travers l’œuvre foisonnante et ludique d’une cinéaste, qui comprend photographies, albums, courts et longs métrages, de documentaire comme de fiction, pour le cinéma, la télévision, l’édition artisanale de DVD et les installations audiovisuelles, cet ouvrage détaille la « méthode Varda » que la cinéaste nomme cinécriture. Entre analyse textuelle et approche comparatiste dans la tradition de l’ut pictura poesis, ces analyses organisées en cinq maîtres mots – cinécrire, réfléchir, se réfléchir, rêver et bricoler – nous invitent à reconsidérer la nature du geste du cinéaste : comme une dialectique matérialiste de l’imaginaire héritée de Bachelard dans laquelle la mise en scène du couple, à la manière des paysages avec figures en peinture, constitue une allégorie de la création ; comme une poïéthique cinématographique, qui concilie le faire et le dire, l’approche sensible et spirituelle d’un monde dans lequel l’altérité, y compris artistique, est constitutive du soi ; comme l’écriture enfin d’un mouvement à rechercher dans la profondeur d’une image, sans cesse recyclée, dont le film reconstruit la quête au terme d’un bris-collage qui se scande en trois temps de prise, de reprise et de surprise.

Réalisatrice, scénariste et photographe, Agnès Varda (Bruxelles, 1928) ―la " dame de la Nouvelle Vague " ― est la seule femme cinéaste parmi le groupe de jeunes journalistes (François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette et Alain Resnais) autour de la revue Cahier du Cinéma, qui, à partir des années 60, révolutionnèrent la culture du cinéma en France avec le mouvement avant-gardiste de la Nouvelle Vague.

This article considers questions of affect and ethics in relation to three films about waste: Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I (1999), Lucy Walker’s Waste Land (2010), and Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers (2009). Drawing from new materialist models, the article situates the ethical import of these very different films in relation to the way that they present waste as a vibrant and affectively charged medium through which we might rethink relations between people and things. It argues that a careful evaluation of the way these films generate and manage affect is crucial to an understanding of the kinds of ethical work each might be said to perform. While The Gleaners and I and Waste Land emphasize the uplifting feelings that can be generated from trash if we learn to see it differently, Trash Humpers rejects the activist, humanist ethos of Varda’s and Walker’s films in favour of an avant-garde impulse to degrade and defile. However, despite its nihilistic approach to its subject matter, this article argues that Trash Humpers’ feel-bad aesthetic does not rule out the possibility of ethical engagement. Rather, it offers important insights about the role of negative affect within an ethics of waste.

New Wave film remains the most important cinematic movement in post-war France. However, feminist film theorists argue that these films and their critical discourse promote a cultural hegemony of gender asymmetry commonly referred to as the Male Gaze. In his gaze, the modern woman becomes a masculine creation, at once anxiety provoking and ideal. This paper aims to analyze the genderization of French New Wave film, the emergence of the woman-child, and the feminine difference.

Since the appearance in the late 1950s and early 60s of the debut films of directors like Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Alain Resnais, Claude Chabrol, Agnes Varda and others, critics and scholars alike have devoted unprecedented attention to the path breaking phenomenon of the French Nouvelle Vague. While
critics have been hard pressed to find commonality on the stratum of aesthetics, politics, theory, and approaches to production among the disparate directors that comprise the French New Wave, they all necessarily recognize its lasting importance and dramatic influence not only on subsequent French film but on cinemas across the world. This genealogy can certainly be debated, but it does have the strength of tradition behind it now. In this brief article, we will emphasize on several key elements in order to define a body of critical concepts that open an initial approach to the New Wave Cinema.

This dissertation develops a comprehensive study of the influence exerted by Hollywood “genre” cinema, in particular the B-series film noir, on the French New Wave. Initially, I ask if this relationship is not the principle identifying criterion of New Wave cinema. It is, after all, a matter of record that Hollywood’s cheaply-made B-movies were championed by the critics of Cahiers du cinéma as permitting authorial self-expression and as encouraging cinematic innovation and evolution. Genre cinema subsequently remained a preoccupation for the New Wave auteurs, who made no fewer than fifty gangster and crime films between 1958 and 1965, including many of the New Wave’s most iconic films.

I therefore embark on a comparative study that considers in great detail the New Wave’s reprisal and adaptation of the film noir format, with my analyses focused not only on character and plot conventions, but also on the tropes, aesthetics and filmmaking production techniques common to both cinemas. I show how the two cinemas cross-pollinate, especially given that the French polar itself exerted influence on Hollywood film noir and that French critics were among the first to identify the new tendency towards making film noir in postwar Hollywood. I also draw a number of important conclusions. Primarily, I show that while the New Wave borrows extensively from Hollywood aesthetics, its manipulation and subversion of American film noir conventions are also at the very heart of the politique des auteurs. This politique is characterized by a profound dissatisfaction with their era, the Americanization of French society, France’s involvement in Algeria, and a reticence about the impending sexual liberation movement.

I contextualize my project within the current debate in film and French studies regarding the legacy of the New Wave, particularly in light of a tendency to cast doubt on the movement’s involvement with “the political,” as well as to dispute the New Wave’s status as a defining moment in French cinema.

French cinema has often engaged quite directly with politics. Select a film you think of as a political text, and analyse closely its formal and narrative techniques and the nature of its engagement. What counts as political in the film you’ve chosen and why? How is politics staged textually and to what effect?

Le désir et la sexualité ont trouvé des représentations poétiques dans l’œuvre de certaines femmes, notamment à travers la danse pour Maya Deren, « mère » de l’avant-garde américaine, ou par l’intermédiaire de voix féminines et intemporelles dans le cinéma de Marguerite Duras, voix qui rappellent son univers littéraire dans lequel «c’est par le manque qu’on dit la chose»36. D’autres optent pour la mise en scène d’une sexualité explicite et débordante, à l’exemple de Catherine Breillat (entre autres Une vraie jeune  lle, Romance et Anatomie de l’enfer). Elle se fait aussi violente et trash pour Virginie Despentes et sa collaboratrice Coralie Trinh Thi, qui ont réalisé le très controversé Baise- moi (2000). Ce  film marque par ailleurs un point tournant non seulement pour le cinéma des femmes, mais pour tout un pan de la cinématographie contemporaine française associé au « cinéma extrême », aussi connu sous l’appellation « cinéma du corps » selon les recherches menées par Tim Palmer. Je m’intéresserai à ces représentations du désir et de la sexualité dans le cinéma des femmes réalisé en France au tournant du xxe siècle, plus précisément à des représentations qui, mettant de l’avant une prise de position politique affirmée, voire radicale, sont vigoureusement engagées sur la voie féministe. Pour plusieurs réalisatrices, cette prise de position s’enracine dans ce geste, libérateur, qui consiste à prendre la caméra pour regarder/ lmer, geste fondamental servant l’appropriation du regard/pouvoir féminin dans une industrie où les femmes accèdent encore trop dif cilement à la réalisation.

Féminismes, sexualités, libertés
Sous la direction de Lori Saint-Martin, Thérèse St-Gelais et Caroline Désy, Cahiers de l'IREF, collection Agora, no 8, 2017, 69 pages.

Agora No8
De l’ensemble des textes réunis ici, où sont convoqués tour à tour le politique, les médias, la fiction, le théâtre et le cinéma, ressortent deux principaux fils conducteurs. D’une part, les questions de privilèges hétérosexuels, de « race » ou de classe, inséparables d’enjeux de pouvoir et de violence qui traversent presque toutes les études. D’autre part, les écueils, les défis et l’immense part de créativité liés à un désir de renouveler les représentations dominantes en montrant le plaisir et le désir au féminin pour un public lui aussi féminin (ou encore, mais les textes publiés ici l’envisagent relativement peu, relevant d’une minorité de genre). Les nombreuses controverses, contradictions et ambiguïtés relevées au fil des textes illustrent autant l’emprise des pratiques et représentations patriarcales que le riche potentiel de résistance des pratiques militantes et artistiques féministes, à condition de combattre sans cesse les nouvelles exclusions et réductions au silence.

Avec des textes de : Wendy Delorme, Isabelle Boisclair, Nicole Côté, Marie-Claude Garneau, Polly Galis, Julie Beaulieu et Élisabeth Mercier. Précédés d’une présentation de Lori Saint-Martin, Caroline Désy et Thérèse St-Gelais.

Cette publication est disponible en libre accès.

Agnès Varda’s interest in portraits is manifest throughout her work, whether in photography, in cinema, or in her video installations. Even if films like Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse [The Gleaners and I] (2000) or Les Plages d’Agnès [The Beaches of Agnès] (20080 are self-reflexive, Varda has rather been more interested in portraying others. Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s reflections in ‘The Look of the Portrait’ and L’Autre Portrait (2014), and considering the implicit temporal dimensions in the composition of the (self-)portrait, I examine Varda’s approaches to self-portraiture through the art of the portrait. Her video installation Les Veuves de Noirmoutier [The Widows of Noirmoutier] (2004) is a truly cinematic and multiple portrait, yet it is close to a traditional self-portrait. The collage-like compositions, juxtaposing contrasts or even contradictions, incorporating gaps and intervals, engage the viewer’s imagination, and remind us of earlier work such as L’Opéra-Mouffe [Diary of a Pregnant Woman] (1958), Sans toit ni loi [Vagabond] (1985) and Jane B. par Agnès V. [Jane B. by Agnès V.] (1988), which could also be seen as ‘hidden’ self-portraits.

The present article aims to analyze the nature of the filmic self-portraits of three of the greatest authors of francophone cinema: Marguerite Duras, Chantal Akerman and Agnès Varda. They all generate an identity self-portrait showing the essences of their respective filmic gazes. Three self-portraits that describe an itinerary from absence to (multi)presence, from identity to alterity and intersubjectivity, from fiction to autobiography, from artistic to intimate space, from literary to plastic arts presence, which share the same primordial will: the vindication of their female filmmakers’ status through cinematic reflexion. Marguerite Duras only showed her image in a single work, The Lorry (1977), to incarnate, through her voiceover, different female characters who remain absent from the filmic image. A duality-identification is then generated between the filmmaker and the fictional characters and these latter compose a self-portrait in absence of the author in Le navire night (1979), Aurélia Steiner (1979), Agatha and the Unlimited Readings (1981) and The Atlantique Man (1981). Chantal Akerman, while splitting into filmmaker and actress at the beginning of her career, created three works that represent her existential self-portrait: News from home (1977), Down There (2006) and No Home Movie (2015). Films of a diaristic character where the self-portrait is constructed through the conflict with maternal alterity and self-identity and which is embodied by the dialectic presence-absence of Akerman in it. Finally, Agnès Varda creates a self-portrait of the multipresence born of her interest in alterity, of the portraits of others created in Jane B. for Agnès V. (1988) and Jacquot de Nantes (1991) and continued in The Gleaners and I (2000). In The Beaches of Agnès (2008) the meeting between autobiography and art installation allows her to generate multiple self-images, present and past, real and fictional, in order to reach a collage-puzzle of herself._________________________________________________________

El presente artículo pretende analizar la naturaleza de los autorretratos fílmicos de tres de las mayores autoras del cine francófono: Marguerite Duras, Chantal Akerman y Agnès Varda. Todas ellas generan un autorretrato identitario que muestra las esencias de sus respectivas miradas fílmicas. Tres autorretratos que describen un itinerario desde la ausencia a la (multi)presencia, de la identidad a la alteridad y la intersubjetividad, de la ficción a la autobiografía, del espacio artístico al íntimo, de la presencia literaria a la plástica, y que comparten una misma y primigenia voluntad: la reivindicación de su condición de mujeres cineastas a través de la reflexión cinematográfica. Marguerite Duras solo mostró su imagen en una única obra, Le camion (1977), para a continuación encarnar mediante su voz off diferentes personajes femeninos que permanecen ausentes en la imagen fílmica. Personajes de ficción con los que se produce una dualidad-identificación y que componen así un autorretrato en ausencia de la escritora y cineasta en Le navire Night (1979), Aurélia Steiner (1979), Agatha et les lectures illimitées (1981) y L’homme atlantique (1981). Chantal Akerman, por su parte, además de desdoblarse en cineasta y actriz en el inicio de su filmografía, crea tres obras que componen su autorretrato existencial: News from Home (1977), La-bàs (2006) y No Home Movie (2015). Films de carácter diarístico donde el autorretrato se construye a través del conflicto con la alteridad materna y con la propia identidad y que se materializa mediante la dialéctica presencia-ausencia de Akerman en el mismo. Finalmente, Agnès Varda crea un autorretrato de la multipresencia que nace de su interés por la alteridad, del retrato del otro creado en Jane B. par Agnès V. (1988) y Jacquot de Nantes (1991) y continuado en Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000). En Les plages d’Agnès (2008) el encuentro entre la autobiografía y la instalación artística le permite generar múltiples imágenes, presentes y pasadas, reales y ficcionales, para alcanzar un collage-puzle de sí misma.

This chapter sets out to demonstrate that the central metaphors A QUEST IS A JOURNEY and A STORY IS A JOURNEY, both rooted in the “Source-Path-Goal” schema, strongly steer viewers’ interpretations of Varda’s films. The goal of this exercise is threefold. In the first place, since the SPG schema is often used metaphorically, demonstrating its pertinence to films sheds light on the Cognitive Metaphor Theory (CMT) axiom that metaphor primarily governs thought, and only derivatively governs language. In this respect, the current chapter ties in with my larger project of confronting CMT claims by considering them in the light of multimodal rather than verbal-only manifestations of metaphor (e.g., Forceville 2005a, 2006a, 2006b, 2008a, 2008b; Forceville and Jeulink 2008; see also Forceville and Urios-Aparisi in press). In the second place, the intention is to show that the SPG schema is a useful instrument for analyzing films that, in one way or another, are “road movies,” and to help theorize their generic features. Finally, although no exhaustive interpretation of the documentaries can be claimed, it is hoped that the analyses provide non-trivial insights into Varda’s extraordinary films.

This essay considers music’s interpretive functions in Varda’s 2008 documentary Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse. The film’s score references the director’s collaborative history with other composers throughout her career. In particular, the author is interested in what Varda’s musical collaborations can tell us about her creative process and her own sense of authorship. The author also claims that Les Glaneurs’ musical selections
allow the filmmaker to aurally signify her reflections about the state of contemporary French citizenship. Thus, this essay considers how Les Glaneurs uses French popular music to reflect on the cultural and political significance of economically
marginalized French citizens who steal out of economic necessity. The author will attend to the formal construction of the film’s heterogeneous score and discuss the musical contributions from three of Varda’s frequent collaborators, along with Varda’s participation. In doing so, the author argues that Les Glaneurs’ score gives us a fuller understanding of the director’s use of the term ‘gleaning’ in relation to her work as a filmmaker.

In this article I propose to examine the different ways in which Varda’s films accomplish a kind of metaleptic leap between levels of “fiction” and “reality,” of hypermediacy and immediacy, and to present this as an alternative to the techniques involving metalepsis used by the most famous representative of the generation of French New Wave filmmakers, Jean-Luc Godard. I have found that, most of the times, for Varda cinema is defined as an “artifice” between two layers of the “real:” the reality of herself, the personal world of the author-narrator and the reality captured by cinéma vérité style cinematography. Intermediality in these films serves as a “figuration” that on the one hand performs these metaleptic leaps from immediacy to stylized representation/hypermediacy, and on the other hand “figurates” the impossibility of such a leap. Among the films referred to in the analysis are L’opéra-mouffe (an effective collage of photographic flânerie and concept-art), Ulysse (a narrative-dramatic ekphrasis of a photograph), 7p., cuis., s. de b., ... à saisir (inspired by an exhibition entitled The Living and The Artificial), Histoire d’une vieille dame (a sort of cinematic objettrouvé recovered from the shooting of Sans toit ni loi), Daguerréotypes (a controversial documentary), Happiness (a fiction film that shocked its contemporary audience with its unusual approach to adultery), The Beaches of Agnes (an autobiographical essay film), etc.

Agnes Varda's Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000) was made by a film-maker with a history of engagement with political issues and a powerful aesthetic fascination. Reading the film in both the context of Varda's oeuvre and of its production during a period of political reawakening in France, this article suggests that despite its apparent disorder, Les Glaneurs is rigorously structured according to a principle of digression and return. This dialectic is mediated through the theme of gleaning, which serves as a bridge between the film's principal concerns: the requirements of survival and of artistic expression. Varda's technique recalls her previous films such as La Pointe Courte (1956) and Sans toit ni loi (1985) and it is in fact the autobiographical dimension of Les Glaneurs that constitutes its greatest digression from the project of social documentary. Crucially, Varda's visual curiosity allows the film to avoid didacticism or utopianism; it tacitly raises political questions but offers few answers. Les Glaneurs operates within the context of a new political cinema dissatisfied with the post-1968 narrative; however, it is not limited to a single discourse. Les Glaneurs is a plurivocal and broadly humanitarian ‘subjective documentary’ and its over-riding principle is Varda herself.