Dorothy: Comparsion between the essay Including Ourselves and From Feminine Masquerade to Flâneuse: Agnès Varda's Cléo in the City
- In process**
The two essays are both looking into the female characters depicted in Varda’s films, and how they reflect a certain aspect in feminism and feminist cinema. “From Feminine Masquerade to Flâneuse: Agnès Varda's Cléo in the City” focuses on the film Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), meanwhile the other essay ‘Including Ourselves: The Role of Female Spectators in Agnès Varda's "Le Bonheur" and "L'Une chante, l'autre pas"’ talks about the two films mentioned in the title, as well as other films by feminist directors made in the same period.
The first essay analyzes the film Cléo from 5 to 7 – from how the protagonist is presented to ‘Cléo’s move from a position of masquerade and noidentity to subjectivity’ (Mouton 5), then to her physical move within Paris. From there the writer tries to relate women walking in the city with Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘Street Haunting’, on the experience as a woman walking in the streets of London. The latter essay looks into the context of feminist cinema and how it is related to the theories developed in the same period of time. The writer Hottell tries to suggest a history of feminist cinema that challenges the main stream cinema with various tactics. From there Hottell then analyzes the tactics Varda used in her films.
While the latter essay argues that Varda positions her female characters in the center of the film, and celebrate womanhood with that. The first essay provides a closer study to her female protagonist, and how she reflects the challenge towards stereotypes and the everyday experience of women in a city. It also echoes to what Hottell suggests, “Varda makes no apologies for foregrounding women: rather, she openly prioritizes women characters and women’s communities and includes the female spectator in much the way mainstream narrative never apologizes for male-centered “buddy” movies.” (66) In fact, the core of these tactics has always been reclaiming the subjectivity of women in films.
Hottell suggests a few tactics on Varda’s film. One of them is to celebrate friendship between female characters, as seen in “L'Une chante, l'autre pas”, in which Pomme and Suzanne built a special friendship despite being very different. Cléo, at the same time, also meets Dorothée who encourages her to explore the city and suggests another way to understand the power relation of gazing. These friendships not only acts as an subvert to “buddy” movies, but also unfolds the transformation of the women in those films, Cléo finally sees the streets in a different light. In the end of “L'Une chante, l'autre pas”, Suzanne finally discloses she cannot bear children anymore after abortion, and Pomme tells her ‘Nevermind, we will have this one together.’ The women support each other in different way, yet, still ‘describes reality in the feminine, shows it, and lives it with her characters. It is not an alternative reality – it is reality of the film.” (Hottell 66)
Mouton is interested in how the gaze works within the film. Cléo is first afraid to walk on the streets, only after encountering Dorothée and Antonie she learns another way to “look” at the world, and to be “looked”. While Hottell is more interested in how audience perceive the films, while the director uses her tactics. Hottell suggests that by offering questions in her films, Varda effectively includes audience in the film as actively participators. Seeing female characters being cenetered also provokes audience to view the films actively. Meanwhile, Mouton does not discuss how the audience perceive the film itself. She rather focuses on analysis of the film itself.
One interesting thing is these two essays both mentions cinécriture, a notion invented by Varda. Translated as “Cinema Writing”, Mouton sees it as specific way of cinematic narrative, as a ‘visual, sound and imaginative realization of film as a textual process’. By using this tactic Varda presents the transformation of Cléo in the film, for instance the sound track changed in the second part of the film. While Hottell takes it as a link to other theorists such as Helen Cixous’s ‘Ecriture Feminine’.