Jenny Chamarette (University of Cambridge)
Mourning a Life not yet over: Agnès Varda's spectral bodies and temporalised spaces
The films, photography and installations that comprise the collective oeuvre of Agnès Varda cannot be considered in isolation from one another. Of course, there are significant biographical reasons for this, but in the case of Varda’s works, this sense of a collective oeuvre is particularly endorsed via a key aspect: Varda’s body and its relation to the spaces that it does (and sometimes does not) occupy.
When analysing works of contemporary visual media for a substantial period of time, and in particular when analysing works by one particular artist, inevitably one cannot help but seek out traces of personal subjectivity that contribute to an interpersonal subjective encounter with and between an art work. This imaginary or sometimes tangible subjective force has taken many names – agency, intersubjectivity, voice. Often, the power of this subjective encounter with the artwork is induced by the suggestion of human contact; in particular the implication or suggestion of a bodily form. Varda’s most recent film, Les Plages d’Agnès (2007) is a meditative recuperation and revisiting of earlier film material, and indeed of earlier material incarnations of Varda’s body and the bodies of those she has lost. These spectral bodies are often indicated by their absence as much as by their presence, and the spaces of these spectral figures are often bound and unbound by a temporality that is not exclusively beholden to linear, or even narrative conceptions of time.
Running counter to the conceptualisation of modes of mourning as ossified, pathological or solipsistic, this paper suggests that by cinematically recapitulating temporalised spaces and reconfiguring embodied spaces, mourning becomes a fluid, productive enterprise. Such an enterprise recognises the dangers of an ossified past and looks towards a mobile, shifting mode of cinematic mourning; of mourning a filmic life that is not yet, and may never be, over.
When analysing works of contemporary visual media for a substantial period of time, and in particular when analysing works by one particular artist, inevitably one cannot help but seek out traces of personal subjectivity that contribute to an interpersonal subjective encounter with and between an art work. This imaginary or sometimes tangible subjective force has taken many names – agency, intersubjectivity, voice. Often, the power of this subjective encounter with the artwork is induced by the suggestion of human contact; in particular the implication or suggestion of a bodily form. Varda’s most recent film, Les Plages d’Agnès (2007) is a meditative recuperation and revisiting of earlier film material, and indeed of earlier material incarnations of Varda’s body and the bodies of those she has lost. These spectral bodies are often indicated by their absence as much as by their presence, and the spaces of these spectral figures are often bound and unbound by a temporality that is not exclusively beholden to linear, or even narrative conceptions of time.
Running counter to the conceptualisation of modes of mourning as ossified, pathological or solipsistic, this paper suggests that by cinematically recapitulating temporalised spaces and reconfiguring embodied spaces, mourning becomes a fluid, productive enterprise. Such an enterprise recognises the dangers of an ossified past and looks towards a mobile, shifting mode of cinematic mourning; of mourning a filmic life that is not yet, and may never be, over.
