Agnès Varda, Sara Gómez, and the Communist Semidocumentary

Abstract: Taking Sara Gómez's cameo in Agnès Varda's 1963 photomontage documentary Salut les Cubains (France) as a starting point, this article juxtaposes Varda's work with Gómez's De cierta manera (1977, Cuba) through the lens of semidocumentary. Gómez's film, shot mostly in postrevolutionary 1973–1974, argues that the everyday has not yet been sufficiently transformed. Machismo, racism, sexism, and classism continue to pervade Cuban society. As Gómez argues through a playful disorientation that breaks boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, people are much more willing to transform society than they are to transform their mindsets and everyday behavior. The article argues that Varda's playful, winking, yet deeply critical work between fiction and nonfiction in films such as Documenteur (1981, France and United States) and Lions Love (… and Lies) (1969, France and United States) aligns ethically, aesthetically, and politically with the semidocumentary form of De cierta manera . Juxtaposing Varda and Gómez through a socialist feminist as well as a formalist lens reveals a shared affinity between the two, one in which the political is expressed through a dialectical relation between "story" (fiction) and "history" (nonfiction). In Varda's and Gómez's oeuvres, the viewer is meant to perform the difficult work of reconciling multiple "truths." By contrast with contemporaneous auteurs—i.e., Santiago Álvarez, Jean-Luc Godard, etc.—Varda's and Gómez's cinematic pedagogy is porous and flexible. However, as this article argues, their ideological commitments are no less rigorous for the tenderness and affective power of their filmmaking.