Flowing and Unfolding: Films by Agnès Varda, Mia Hansen-Løve and the Literature of Annie Ernaux
I have not heard anyone use the word introspection recently, perhaps introspection is too close to self-absorption or even solipsism, but to me the word implies looking into oneself with the ultimate goal of understanding one’s relationships with others and one’s interaction with the world. The Stanford dictionary of philosophy grants it more weight, suggesting that: “introspective knowledge can serve as a ground or foundation for other sorts of knowledge.” (Eric Schwitzgebel)
Recent Nobel prize-winner Annia Ernaux has taken introspection to new depths, through her examination of her own memories, she has paradoxically come to show readers something important about the human condition, specifically the feminine human condition in the contemporary world.
But what is the point of writing if not to unearth things, or even just one thing that cannot be reduced to any kind of psychological or sociological explanation and is not the result of a preconceived idea or demonstration but a narrative something that emerges from the creases when a story is unfolded, and can help us understand–endure–events that occur and the things that we do? A Girl’s Story (98)
Ernaux is not alone these days in her painstaking investigations of the inner lives of women. I would like to look at a certain class of educated white European women, who have been charting their passage through the social and personal landscapes of the later 20th and early 21st centuries. 1 Tessa Hadley in the U.K. has written a set of books whose narrators, more fictionalized than Ernaux’s autofictional subjects, engage in introspection concerning their place in the social world, their erotic experiences and relationships. Mia Hansen-Løve and Joanna Hogg, following Agnès Varda, have been making films which exist on the edge of the interior and exterior lives of their characters. Like Ernaux, these writers and filmmakers create narratives out of various interpolations of documentary and fiction.
I find that this group of writers and filmmakers all happen to be working on a set of problems, subjects and themes that have only been able to be articulated recently, although they have been mapped out by an earlier generation, notably in the work of Simone de Beauvoir, whom Ernaux mentions in her books, and Virginia Woolf. Autonomy and the ability to be able to work on one’s art are in the forefront of the subjects here; they are entangled with the philosophical problem of accepting freedom by negotiating an awareness of what we now call the construction of gender. Questions arise about how the sexual freedom and economic independence of educated women in the later twentieth and early twenty-first century play out in fiction and memoir. How do women’s sexual and erotic lives relate to lived experience and to fiction? I believe that these questions and others of their ilk, have only recently been confronted directly, they have been around in women’s work since Sappho, but tended to be oblique or superseded by traditional narrative forms, with beginnings, endings and points of highest tension and what has been called the marriage plot.
Clair Wills discusses Ernaux’s Les Armoirs vides (Cleaned out) in terms of plots. There is no plot or not one powered in any straightforward sense by the experience of abortion. She quotes Ernaux: “Books are silent on this topic.” Wills continues: “what is it about plots that render the realities of women’s sexual lives invisible?”
This group of books and films tend to unfold in time and place, tracing character interactions but do not follow any traditional narrative arc. My sense is that because, as Wills and Ernaux explain, there is no pattern in which the stories of contemporary women fit: these artists are all looking for new shapes for the stories of women’s lives. Memory, introspection and a documentary approach to both writing and filmmaking characterize their work: Hansen- Løve, like Ernaux, has discussed this search for a new form in interviews:
I feel like I’m literally diving into my own experience. I try to forget about anything else and find the structure of the film that reflects my experience of life. For me, it’s really about trying to be faithful to that.
The nature of introspection, especially if we think of it as a form of knowledge, leads to works which are characterized by an open form and an acceptance of uncertainty. Many feminist thinkers, from Carol Gilligan to Judith Butler have proposed that knowledge about the world is gained and produced through relationships, while a masculine model of knowledge tends toward rules, judgments and hierarchies working to legitimize and preserve a patriarchal system. These women artists produce work in which points of view alternate between subjective and objective perspectives as they attempt to locate new ways to represent feminine experience of the world.
Before Hansen-Løve and Ernaux produced their compelling oeuvres Agnès Varda made a film, Documenteur: An Emotion Picture (1981) about a single mother grieving the separation from her husband, but trying to make a new life with her son in a cheap section of Los Angeles. We follow Emilie through mundane activities, moving from one place to another, putting bags into the trunk of a car, rescuing and cleaning a couch from a dumpster. Her character lives in a run-down marginal neighborhood far from the glamor of the city as it is often depicted. Indeed, this film is closely connected with a documentary Varda made about murals in Los Angeles —Mur-Murs (1981 ) and there are many cut-aways to the Chicano murals and the faces of the people in the neighborhood. She creates a character, a French woman who is typing for a filmmaker, but she seems to be a surrogate for Varda who was alone with her son in Los Angeles at the time. In addition to the interpolation of fiction and documentary—Varda pioneered this style—she attempts to show Emilie’s inner life. 2 . How do we picture inner lives, subjectivity in film? In this case, Varda cuts away to a full body male nude, to some completely revealing shots of a supine man. Instead of some diffuse emotion, we find that Emilie misses the body of her husband. The eroticism was ahead of its time in 1981 and the film virtually disappeared until it was remastered and rereleased by Criterion in 2015. Varda made a film specifically about abortion, On Chant L’autre, non (One Sings, the Other Doesn’t) in 1977 during the time that abortion was being made legal in France.
It is this documentary footage that paradoxically works to reveal inner lives. First, because it sets up a polarity between the inner life of the characters and the external world for the viewer providing a counterpoint to interiority; second because they are often subjective shots, that is, from the character’s point of view and third because any cutaway, or break in the narrative sequence of shots disrupts, however subtly or extremely, the film’s continuity, and asks the viewer to consider the status of the fiction.
Photos From Documentuer: Emilie in L.A. and a documentary shot of a person in the neighborhood.
While Ernaux mixes the insights of a novelist with sociology–she documents the times and places she lives through— and philosophy, particularly with respect to the phenomena of class, which is key to her work. Varda is subtle, but almost all of her films contain documentary photographs of people at hand, in most cases, not of the elite. Varda calls her work cinema écriture, or cinema writing, following the manner in which new technologies were described in Greek words, and the example of photography, or literally writing in light. All of these women speak about finding a new language to express their experiences and ideas.
There are uncomfortable truths about women’s inner lives in Mia Hansen-Løve’s film, Goodbye First Love, (Un Amour de jeunesse 2011) and in Ernaux’s later life, in her later forties, when she has a consuming affair with a man she hardly knows. Getting Lost ( Se perdre 2021) is about the manner in which women obsess about relationships, letting everything else in their lives be obscured by the image they create of the man with whom they are in love and or erotically involved. We watch Camille, in Goodbye First Love, cling to the memory of a lover who was more interested in experiencing the world than in pursuing a relationship and wish she would get on with things, while remembering our own socially constructed ideas about first love. Ernaux’s raw diary entries expose the actual working of her mind, causing an acute sense of frustration in the reader who follows along. I find myself frustrated with their behavior and at the same time, I feel that I have to come to terms with the tendency they both portray of women to, in de Beauvoir’s words: “succumb(s) to the temptation of self-abandonment.”
And yet it is the search for freedom and a sense of self beyond the traditional or, if you will, patriarchal narratives that fuels the books and films. In contrast to Camille, who, at the beginning of the film is very young, Nathalie (Isabelle Huppert) in Things to Come (L’Avenier 2016) doesn’t seem to care that her husband has found someone else. When the husband tries to create some drama out of his abdication by sending a showy bouquet of flowers, Nathalie unceremoniously and without anger, dumps them in the garbage. She is a professor of philosophy, intellectually and economically autonomous; her children are grown. Later in the film Hansen-Løve has her comment: “Total freedom, I’ve never experienced it. It’s extraordinary.”
Photo: Isabel Huppert in Things To Come
Who would women be if they were not seen though a male lens, if they were written in, as feminist philosopher, Helène Cixous proposes, white ink. 3 These fictions at the edge of documentary, or documentaries on the edge of fiction can tell us what women will write, make films about once they have ceased to be the object of the gaze. In all of these works we find women disentangling themselves from an internalized male gaze by exploring the myriad events which constitute their social, artistic and erotic being. Their nuanced approach to their relationships reflects, not just the cultural moment, but the cultural moment filtered through an educated woman’s psyche.
The ethical person, as portrayed by de Beauvoir, is driven by passion. Unlike the egoistic, maniacal passion of the tyrant, however, the ethical passion of the artist-writer is defined by its generosity—specifically the generosity of recognizing the other’s singularity and protecting the other in their difference from becoming an object of another’s will. (Simone De Beauvoir, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Archive).
Hansen-Løve and Varda create fictions which are connected with their own lives and the lives of their families which means that these works will portray the role of women as caretakers of children and aging parents. Think how far these subjects are from the fictions, the genres of men’s actions in the world. The women in her films are curators, translators, philosophy professors and filmmakers all balancing familial relationships and their dedication to their intellectual inquiry. One Fine Morning (2022) follows Sandra (Lea Seydoux) as she negotiates the illness and death of her father, and an affair with a married man. We see her sitting on a train, travelling between her work, her father, her daughter and her lover. We sense the tedium, complications and heartbreak of caregiving, we accept the ambivalence and lack of resolution; it is so much like our own lives. The filmmaker, whose style is not particularly involved with decentering the male gaze at the level of the shot, still largely and subtly makes films from a woman’s point of view. Her style is lush, there is a great deal of pleasure in her view of the world. Location shooting, 4 mobile framing and long takes give her characters a sense of freedom, as well as allowing us to see the world in which they live. Eden (2014 ) is about her brother’s absorbing passion for the house music scene; his story is told from a sister’s point of view, full of empathy, care and love.
Many of the main characters in these films have children: their mothers balance their professional or artistic lives with love for their children. In an interview accompanying One Sings, The Other Doesn’t (On chante l’autre, non 1977) Varda talks about the advantages of bringing her son to the film set. “They are beings who keep us from becoming too stupid, too intellectual, too serious, too structured, too logical. They always bring us a certain freshness. They shatter the adult world with their freshness.” Amour de jeunesse is based on Hansen-Løve’s first love and her subsequent relationship with a man who she marries who helps her in her career, One Fine Morning is based on her personal experience of taking care of her father, and the philosopher at the center of l’Avenir is, presumably, her mother.
Aftersun (2022) directed by Charlotte Wells is the story, framed by an adult remembering, of a holiday spent with her father when she was eleven years old. Wells’ elliptical style captures the point of view and emotional registers of a child. There are a lot of tight shots evoking the physical closeness of the child and her father and very little narrative exposition which likewise seems to represent the holiday the way a child would have experienced it. The frame and the use of video footage shot at the time further the introspective quality, and the state of mind of a person looking back to make sense of events that were unclear at the time.
Lea Sédoux in One Fine Morning translating for American Veterans visiting Normandy.
In terms of the manner in which film can depict inner lives and subjectivity, Mia Hansen-Løve constructs a character in Bergman Island (2021), a film filled with sly allusions to the fate of a woman filmmaker in contrast to her male peers, who drifts off into her own screenplay, while accompanying her more famous husband on a residency on Ingmar Bergman’s island, Faro. At the end of the film a man who has been cast in her film, appears on the Island, blurring the lines between overlapping fictions so that the boundaries between the film she is in and the film she is creating dissolve.
Claire Wills examines the manner in which “the history of the novel can’t be understood separately from the history of sexuality, by which I mean the cultural dimensions of sex, including gender,” in order to look at the way abortion has been written about and written out of fiction and film. Both Ernaux and Varda consider this most feminine of experiences; Audry Diwan has made a searing and grisly film based on Ernaux’s Happening (L’evenment 20). Interestingly, class figures prominently in their works on the subject as it does in American filmmaker’s extraordinary Never, Rarely Sometimes Always (Eliza Hittman 2020) which follows two small-town girls to New York to find an abortion provider.
While the filmmakers who must work with surfaces are able to picture the inner lives of their characters, they do not, in general, go to the profound and disturbing internal places from which Ernaux examines her sense of self. Eranux writes extensively about her family, the changing world she passes through, the problem of class, and of what has variously been called betrayal, transclass, defection and in French transfuges de classe. In addition to de Beauvoir and Duras (also an important influence of Varda) Ernaux is famous for her study of the French sociologist Pierre Bordieu. Her interpolations, again reminding one of Varda, of certain documentary elements in her writing show how social conditions, patriarchy, events, consumer society among other phenomena show the workings of class.
The painful experience of a woman’s moving from one class to another, is at the core of her work. Like the filmmakers looking for a new filmic language, she has scouted out new forms of writing which can express feminine experiences of family and sexuality but she also sees these institutions and identities as the result of class formations.
To write is precisely to give myself the right, not only to say that, but also to denounce the hierarchies, the cultural domination that implicitly put a working woman at the bottom of the social scale. It is to want to turn social indignity into dignity, to give justice to the dominated. (David Broder, 67)
Standard genres, which are closed forms, do not really work for this kind of investigation. Happening and A Girl’s Story are painful narratives first, of working through a memory of sexual violence, and second, an illegal abortion. There are aspects of the bildungsroman in these narratives, but they do not resolve in success; the bildungsroman is not taking apart in the social order. They invert the narrative by looking back at events to work through trauma, and less obviously destabilizing experiences and hopefully find a feminine sexual identity, not created by an inimical other, the subtle controls of a patriarchal culture. This kind of story, this introspection, is not really dramatic, they don’t address an external conflict. They ask: how did I get here rather than recounting a series of actions that resolve in the future.
Ernaux writes in L’evenment ( Happening 2000)
I want to become immersed in that part of my life once again and learn what can be found there. This investigation must be seen in the context of a narrative, the only genre able to transcribe an event that was nothing but time flowing inside and outside of me. (20)
Freeing themselves from what Wills calls the “marriage plot” in many different ways and carefully examining the interactions of family, allows these women to become writers and filmmakers. Instead of “Reader, I married him,” we get: how I made a movie or wrote a book. Hansen-Løve touches this somewhat obliquely in Bergman Island and Amour de jeuness although Camile becomes an architect. Becoming a writer is absolutely central to all of Ernaux’s books. Christine in Tessa Hadely’s Late in the Day is able to resume painting, rather like Lily Briscoe, once the dramas of her social circle and husband’s defection have run their course. Joanna Hogg’s elliptical The Souvenir (2019) traces her path to becoming a filmmaker through examining a strange and disorienting love affair. Souvenir II (2021) directly portrays her experiences with her first film. Another important British writer, Rachel Cusk who has written a book entitled: A Life’s Work : On Becoming a Mother, which evokes the struggle to balance writing and child-rearing, notes in an essay about Ernaux that: “If it remains difficult for women to make art about their own lives, it is because femininity still has no stable place in culture.” Becoming a writer or a filmmaker is not an end: it’s a beginning.
There is more to say here: more films to watch and books to read by women who are looking within as they navigate these unstable places, where memory, fiction, objective and subjective modes unfold and flow.
Sources
A Girl’s Story. Alison L. Sayer. Trans. NY: Penguin Random House (2016)
Bergoffen, Debra and Megan Burke, "Simone de Beauvoir", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = .
Cusk Rachel Annie Ernaux Has Broken Every Taboo of What Women Are Allowed to Write NYT May 8, 2023.
De Beauvoir, Simone The Second Sex Vintage 2011 trans: Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier.
Ernaux, Annie. Happening trans. Tanya Leslie NY: Seven Stories Press (2000)
Hansen-Løve, Mia: Interview: with Eric Korn Indy Wire February 202
“Nobel Prize Winner Annie Ernaux Speaks on How Class Shapes Her Writing.” David Broder. Trans (10 08 2022) https://jacobin.com/2022/10/annie-ernaux-working-class-literature-nobel-prize
Raganelli, Katja Women Are Naturally Creative: Agnès Varda, a 1977 documentary featuring an extended interview with Varda shot during the making of One Sings, the Other Doesn’t
Schwitzgebel, “Introspection”, Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Fall 2024 Edition, 2024. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/introspection/
Wills, Clair: “Quickening or How to Plot an Abortion.” London Review of Books 45:6, March 16, 2023 5
Notes
- Virginia Wolfe from her perch in an elite white world described the dynamics of exclusion, subjugation and oppression, in A Room of One’s Own, which in turn, describe the manner in which racial inequities and homophobia, exist. Likewise, for the observations of DeBeauvoir, although her voyages to Chicago actually gave her first hand observational knowledge of the dynamics of racial oppression. ↩
- Varda pioneered a style in which she mixes documentary into her fiction films. Her first feature-length film, La Pointe Courte (1955) centers on a couple’s return to the Mediterranean town of Pointe Courte where she shoots the local landscape and includes non-actors, the people who live there, in her film. An interpolation of a street performer who swallows frogs, famously appears when Cléo leave the confines of her life to wander through Paris. In another scene we hear an actual report on the radio about the war in Algeria. Cléo de cinq a sept (Cleo from Five to Seven 1962). These early films are part of the style of the New Wave, following Italian Neo-Realism which relies heavily on location shooting. Many of Varda’s later films, The Gleaners and I (Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse, 2000 ) Faces Places, (Visages Villages 2017 ) are first person documentaries or essay-films. ↩
- Feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous wrote a famous essay, The Laugh of the Medusa, (1975) proposing that instead of writing with the phallic pen, women would write with white ink, coming from the bodily fluids, in other words, to use the body as sources of power and inspiration that would be capable of describing the feminine experience more closely. She calls this embodied form of language écriture feminine. ↩
- Shooting on location is not exactly documentary, but close to it, recording of the exterior world in place and time by default. This crucial element of style, along with mobile framing, presumes a different relationship to the boundaries of fiction than of films shot on a set. If we remember that film editing is actually a kind of collage, we can see that the close-up, which is one of the most important ways of revealing the inner world of a character, is an interpolation of a point of view, into the stream of shots that make a film. Varda and Ernaux clearly document the world they or their characters live in. Varda and cinematographer, Nurith Aviv, on a more extreme level, usually by photographing the faces of passers by, Hansen-Løve through film style. ↩
- https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n06/clair-wills/quickening-or-how-to-plot-an-abortion ↩
Janina Ciezadlo has published film and art criticism in The Chicago Reader, Newcity, Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, The New Art Examiner and others. Scholarly essays on Jean-Pierre Melville, Livres d’artist and representations of cities have appeared in various journals. She has just finished a book, based on courses she taught at Columbia College, Chicago and the University of Illinois, Chicago on representation of cities in film, photography and art. She continues to exhibit her prints, photographs and watercolors. Thank you to George Christensen for recruiting me to TFF.
