Old Haunts

Agnès Varda’s Vagabond (1985) begins and frequently returns to images of the French landscape, and it constructs an allegory that binds the stories and images of its main character, the nation, and the land. At the heart of this and Varda’s subsequent films is an engagement with the significance of the land as a fragile part of an ecosystem, a gendered space, and a powerful symbol of the nation and its patrimony. Rather than view the landscape as an unbreakable link between the nation and the national past preserved in nature, she frames the natural world as a modern phenomenon in a state of ruin and develops an aesthetic of the landscape attuned to this condition. In Vagabond and her later digital documentaries Varda imagines her relationship to the land and history as a process of gleaning from the vibrant possibilities left behind after the process of modernization has run its course.