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Browsing ESTC - Livros by Subject "Agnès Varda"
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- Authorial self-personalization and cine-vision in the film “Jane B. par Agnès V.” (1988)Publication . Chinita, Fátima"Jane B. par Agnès V." resulted from a collaboration between British actress Jane Birkin and the French film director Agnès Varda, and as the title seems to entail is a portrait of the former by the latter. Although to some extent that is the case; the ontological and artistic architecture of the film is more complicated than that. To start with, the two women are placed on a par, as artistic equals and owners of a shared imaginary, which points towards a reversibility of expression and representation, in which both authorship and depiction seem to fluctuate throughout the film. Beneath that surface level, however, Varda’s own portrayal is more important than Birkin’s. This hybrid self-reflexive film positioned hallway between fact and fiction, is a forerunner of "Les plages d’Agnès" (2008), evincing many of the same techniques in embryo. Varda (re)presents herself in the film behind the camera and as a strong enunciator of the filmic authorial discourse, revealing the apparatus and looking straight at the camera lens. This corresponds to a full-blown self-portrait in which the most appropriate film title would be "Agnès V." through "Jane B". The film undertakes an operation of “persona-lization” of both women but especially Varda, proving that the corporeal is true. Varda’s persona-lization is essentially professional, presenting the artist as creator, the hallmark of the "ars poetica" film; but imbued with an assumed authorial discourse on her own art, the most relevant aspect of what I term “cine-vison”. Thus, the film is foremost a cinematic essay.
- Varda’s recycling of life in "Les plages d’Agnès": self-representational metacinema as a discourse on creatorshipPublication . Chinita, FátimaStemming from the concept of ‘enunciation’, here posited as an act of expression, self-depiction and reasoning, this article addresses the category of the ‘self-representational metacinema’, which is a self-reflexive variety of essay film as authorial discourse, and analyses the way in which Agnès Varda’s The Beaches of Agnès (2008) is an opus about the world and thought processes of an artist as the artist is immersed in the world (of cinema). Firstly, by presenting herself, in her own body, as ‘Agnès Varda’, the director writes her identity into the film, as a first layer of filmic enunciation placed midway between reality and illusion, thus ambiguating herself as an objective person, on the one hand, and reinforcing her nature as a subjective creator (i.e. endowed with a specifically cinematic worldvision), on the other. The representation of the filmic artist at work (as ars poetica) embraces the selfportrait as a fully fledged art cinema aesthetic category. Secondly, by rethinking the world through (her) cinema, Varda adopts a phenomenological position in which the digressive nature of her cinematic writing is conveyed as a corporeal experience of being in the world, according to Vivian Sobchak with Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Varda not only interacts with the world around her but also inscribes herself in the essay film as both representation and expression, that is, matter and thought. Thirdly, the reality and illusion dichotomy, which pervades the entire film, is particularly intense in the third and final layer of enunciation, which involves mnemonic rewinding. The division of Varda’s life in several coexisting stages from which the director can extract particular memories reconciles Gilles Deleuze’s chronosigns, which imply a non-chronological time structure, with a more traditional Augustinian time as an arrow, a conception of a threefold present, and immortality beyond that. Ultimately, The Beaches of Agnes is a discourse on the power of the image and creation.