Feminist Film Manifestos X

In 1960s France, a new cinema was emerging from the very core of the student movements whose aim was to discover freer stylistic and narrative forms far removed from traditional formats. This was also the time when a second wave of feminism was sweeping Europe, influencing the work of female filmmakers and fuelling their desire to create a new feminist counter-cinema. The filmmaker Agnès Varda was a key player in both movements, both nourishing and being nourished by them. Her films are full of previously overlooked female subjectivities, of new ways to film desire, of a curious and empathetic approach towards realities alien to her own experiences. At a time when everything was yet to be invented, Varda and many of her peers laid the narrative, aesthetic and formal foundations of feminist filmmaking.

Today, more than fifty years later, hundreds of filmmakers have been inspired by Varda's work to imagine stories from other times and lands. The director's power has been disseminated via projects spread all over the world, some taking on the filmmaker's legacy in its entirety whilst others extract fragments. So what is the view of Agnès Varda's legacy today? To what extent does it continue to resonate in how we make films?

SESSION 1: Friday, 8 November 2024 at 6:30 pm 

Several questions reverberate time and again throughout Agnès Varda's filmography: what bodies can we film from the perspective of desire, free from threat or punishment? How can we go on talking about the violence we're subjected to without reproducing it? By creating disobedient female characters, far removed from the archetype of eternal victims, the French director gave us some keys to begin to formulate possible answers to these questions. The two works that make up this session update the filmmaker's reflections within the context of the present-day, when the political and cinematographic panorama has radically changed.  

Ara crema, Núria Gascón, Spain, 2020, 1'. Original version (Introduced by the filmmaker) 

A sofa, a fire, a silhouette. A home going up in smoke. After thirteen years of mental and physical confinement in the same house, it has taken another confinement to take a fresh look at these images. Family photographs (1990-2000's) and personal video footage filmed in 16mm and MiniDv between March and April 2019 during a house move and the burning of the sofa, edited during lockdown, April 2020.

Morvern Callar, Lynne Ramsay, United Kingdom, 2002, 97'. In English with Catalan subtitles

Morvern Callar is a young woman working in a small Scottish industrial town. When her boyfriend commits suicide, leaving behind the manuscript of a novel and a note asking for it to be published, Morven decides to pretend she's the author of the book and embarks on a journey in search of her independence and freedom. An update of Vagabonde (Agnès Varda, 1985) set at the beginning of a new century in which deindustrialisation, job insecurity and globalisation would affect a generation of young people.

SESSION 2: Saturday, 9 November 2024 at 6:30 pm

Filmed in the city of Oakland 20 years apart, these two works examine the creativity and political reflection adopted by the African-American community to confront the structural violence of American society. Both are set in two very different historical periods: the first, a documentary shot by Varda in 1968, at the height of the Black Panther movement; the second, a fictional film by Cauleen Smith from the 1990s, a decade in which police brutality and racial tension made it necessary it reinvent different forms of struggle through community organisation and cultural movements.

Black panthers, Agnès Varda, France, 1968, 31'. In English with Spanish subtitles 

Oakland, 1968: protests break out in response to the arrest of Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panthers. Agnès Varda, who was in the city at the time, came across these demonstrations and decided to film them. The result is a militant and pedagogical piece that reflects different facets of the situation whilst also capturing the energy of the encounters through the demonstrators' faces, their gestures, the songs they sing and the slogans they shout.

Drylongso, Cauleen Smith, United States, 1998, 86'. In English with Catalan subtitles

Pica Sullivan is a young student with a project: to photograph the African-American men around her as evidence that they existed given their "endangered" status. Drylongso is the debut film of the visual artist Cauleen Smith, made during her time at university. With a leisurely pace and an aesthetic inherited from the cinematic revolutionary movements of the 1960s, the director combines genres such as thriller, love story and documentary to explore her community's pervasive violence and mortality. At the same time, she presents a vivid, detailed portrait of East Coast African-American culture through the community's places, fashion and music.

SESSION 3: Sunday, 10 November 2024 at 6:30 pm

The two works that make up this session reflect the debates of a generation of filmmakers brought up within the ranks of the feminist struggles of the 1970s in Europe. What does it mean to be a woman? Are there specifically female ways of filming?

Réponse de femmes, Agnès Varda, France, 1975, 8'. In French with Spanish subtitles

"1975. International Women's Year". A French television station asks 7 female directors to answer the question "What is a woman?" in 7 minutes. This is the answer given by the filmmaker Agnès Varda who, with a great deal of irony, problematises the proposed starting point from the social imaginary of difference feminism, emphasising the particularities of the female experience and highlighting women's plurality of identities.

Filmer le désir, Marie Mandy, Belgium, France, 2000, 60'. In French with Catalan subtitles

"Being a woman filmmaker is like cooking without a recipe" says a narrator at the beginning of Filmer le désir. Faced with a tradition in which female bodies have been filmed as objects of desire, what new codes of gaze can be generated by female cineastes? How can a new language of desire, sensuality and sexuality be created? By giving the floor to fifteen female filmmakers, including Agnès Varda, this documentary takes a snapshot of the feminist filmic concerns of an era and lays the foundations for continuing to address the languages of desire.

 

Related activities: Workshop Looking at (Ourselves) Animals. Manifesto for a human-animal filmic relation, with Xiana do Teixeiro.