Self-Indexing and Shifting Spectators in Varda’s Vagabond
Adapted from a lecture given at the Filmmuseum Pottsdam, July 6, 2016.
It’s unfortunate that Agnès Varda only began to assume the status of a major filmmaker after her husband died and she became known as the custodian of Jacques Demy’s precious legacy. Prior to that, she was mainly known, affectionately but somewhat condescendingly, as a sort of mascot of the French New Wave whose public profile remained almost as superficial as that of her eponymous heroine in Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962). And the troubling, ironic sting at the end of La Bonheur (1965) tended to be either misunderstood or ignored. Thanks to the diversity of her films, stylistic and otherwise, she was easy to overlook due to her reluctance to brand herself, unlike her male colleagues.
One fascinating trait that Varda shared with her late husband, however, was the compulsion to become a tireless indexer and cross-referencer of her own work. But instead of bringing back her fictional characters in subsequent films, as Demy did, she more often brought back her locations and her interview subjects. And she went far beyond Demy in becoming her own explicator and analyst, in effect telling her audience what to look for and even how to find it. Two years after she made The Gleaners and I (2000), she filmed a series of updates that became a DVD extra. Whenever a particular gleaner appeared in Two Years Later (2002), one could hit a flashing potato icon in the upper right corner of the frame with one’s remote control that carried one back to the same gleaner in the original film, engaging in a kind of instantaneous time travel.
A twelve-minute extra on the Criterion edition of Vagabond about the film’s deployments of both music and “dolly” shots (also known as “tracking shots” or, in French, “travelings”) serves as a kind of critical cheat-sheet by Varda that allows us to understand significant aspects of the film’s form and meaning. She explains that she wanted a woman composer to furnish the music for the film’s twelve dolly shots moving from right to left—the camera accompanying Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire), her homeless, teenage heroine, as she walks alone down a road but often not following the same trajectory as her, deviating into separate paths at different angles and sometimes moving past her. Moreover, around ten minutes pass between any two of these consecutive shots, yet Varda forges an implied continuity between them by beginning each shot and camera movement with the same object (e.g., a street sign, phone booth, piece of farm machinery, tree branch) with which the previous shot ended. Thus these dozen shots can be said to “support” the narrative like twelve evenly spaced tent poles even while they continually alter our viewpoints in relation to Mona, moving into and away from identification with her and her own vantage points. This perpetual drift comprises a kind of visual music, so it seems natural that Varda would want musical accompaniments for these dozen shots.
She explains that after discovering Joanna Bruzdowicz and her first string quartet, she got Bruzdowicz to adapt a dozen of her thematic variations in that work for each of the dolly shots. So while the shifting relationships of the camera towards Mona replicates our own shifting relationships with her in terms of our sympathy with and understanding of her character, this becomes reflected in the unresolved harmonies of the plaintive music.
This armature is also complicated by the various “witnesses” of Mona—the people she encounters during her seemingly aimless wanderings, who are interviewed or shown conversing about their final impressions of her, as in a documentary—people who are absent from these dolly shots and from this DVD extra. In certain ways, these “witnesses” are like the people Interviewed by the semi-invisible news reporter in Citizen Kane; in other respects, they sometimes evoke the gossiping townsfolk in The Magnificent Ambersons, with Varda’s narration at the beginning being gradually overtaken by various members of a theatrical chorus. Sometimes we agree with these voices and sometimes we don’t. Either way, they basically function as our surrogates and stand-ins, representing possible attitudes that we might take towards Mona, whom Varda refuses to “explain” or sentimentalize, apart from the mythological notations offered at the beginning and end of the picture. (Mona is respectively introduced as if emerging from the sea and later stained by wine resembling blood at a wine festival shortly before her death.)
This woman of mystery reminds me of John Cassavetes’ A Woman of Mystery, his last fully achieved work—a play he wrote and directed, starring Gena Rowlands as a “bag lady”, that I was lucky enough to see at the Court Theater in West Hollywood in May 1987, during its two-week run. (I have written elsewhere and in much greater detail about this event, at www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/cassavetes-prelude-and-postscript/) As in A Woman of Mystery, Varda’s Sans toit ni loi (meaning “without shelter, without law”--a play on the French expression sans foi ni loi, which means “godless, lawless”), this is a work about us as well as a work about the homeless—a work about how we both relate and fail to relate to homeless people. The tragic premise of Cassavetes’ play is that the lack of definition—meaning the lack of social definition--assumed by homeless people alienates both them from us and us from them, which is quite close to Varda’s concept. Rowland’s character, a lady wandering the streets with a shopping cart, remains every bit as ambiguous as a Samuel Beckett character; as with Mona, we remain clueless about both where she’s from and where she’s going.
The way we usually view film syntax is to regard a shot as something roughly equivalent to a declarative sentence, but Varda at her best is always at least partially an investigative journalist who regards a shot as a question looking for (but not necessarily finding) an answer. This gives her an unexpected kinship with filmmakers as otherwise disparate as Roberto Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Otto Preminger, Abbas Kiarostami, and, indeed, Cassavetes. So many of her basic strategies in Vagabond are Involved with shifting our perspectives, making our emotional and intellectual roles as spectators as restless and as unstable as Mona herself. She clearly took pains to avoid making the character too sympathetic or too unsympathetic.
Each time I resee Vagabond, I’m reminded almost incongruously of Robert Bresson due to the aspects of rural France present in the worlds that Mona passes through—worlds that remind me of Au Hasard Balthazar and Mouchette (with Mona functioning like the donkey Balathazar or the girl Mouchette as a catalyst for revealing French society) and even portions of L’argent. In many of his greatest works, Bresson is also concerned with solitary women and the way they’re judged and treated (usually misjudged and mistreated) by their communities.
Vagabond isn’t really a survey of homeless people in the same way that Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse is a survey of gleaners. But it’s important to note that Varda did extensive research on the homeless before making this film. She based Mona on a homeless teenager she met during her research, who plays a bit part in the film, and other people she encountered during her travels, homeless and otherwise, make appearances as themselves (such as the philosophical shepherd who puts Mona up for a spell and the older man who recounts some of his past as a homeless orphan).
By mixing “real” people with her actors, Varda joins the forefront of what might be regarded as a progressive and provocative strain in cinema, blurring the assumed boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, that can be traced all the way from Robert Flaherty to the present. (Although this isn’t widely known, it’s worth mentioning that Nanook’s “wife” in Nanook of the North was actually “played” by Flaherty’s girlfriend at the time.) It’s another source of the film’s narrative instability--to which we should add various digressions, such as the material about dead trees, and the professor (Macha Méril) whom Mona meets and who almost dies of electric shock, which may or may not be intended as metaphorical commentaries on or cross-references to Mona’s death but doesn’t clearly function as such.
Significantly, Vagabond is dedicated to Nathalie Sarraute (1900-1999), a literary writer known especially for her shifting perspectives and points of view and the indeterminacy in much of her fiction. (Her discussion about the film with Varda comprises another DVD extra.) This evokes the French view of cinema as literature by another means that can be traced back to the 1920s and perhaps even earlier—a tradition reflected, for instance, in the quarterly magazine Trafic (1991-2021) launched by Serge Daney that I’ve often written for, a literary magazine about cinema containing no illustrations apart from a single photo on the cover of each issue. (Godard concludes his video 2 X 50 Years of French Cinema with a compact summary and celebration of that tradition, entitled “From Diderot to Daney” and quoting a sliver of text from each.) Moreover, the contrapuntal form of Varda’s first feature, La Pointe Courte (1955), was inspired by Faulkner’s The Wild Palms. So if one considers the degree to which Faulkner was clearly influenced by film—from the present-tense opening of Light in August to the reference to Eisenstein in The Wild Palms—Varda was only returning the compliment. And inVagabond, she’s freely borrowing from the novelistic tradition known as the picaresque.
by Jonathan Rosenbaum