Agnès Varda

Agnès Varda studied art history and photography, and the influence of the visual arts in her filmmaking has long been remarked. This discussion is the first to close in on the figure of the reclining nude which appears in her work in the form of tableaux vivants from the early film, L’Opéra Mouffe, and returns extensively in her portrait film Jane B. par Agnès V. In this film, together with cinematographer Nurith Aviv, Varda creates an cinematic reclining nude in a very slow, sensual pan across the prone naked body of Jane Birkin, from her feet to her smiling face. Here, and in another film from the 1980s, Documenteur, Varda explores reclining figures as part of her filmic experiments with emotion and rêverie, the reclining figure drawing and expressing feelings of erotic pleasure, repose, delay, melancholy, and depression. Her interest in still visual precedents in her work coalesces with her career-long feminist attention to states of female feeling and being.