Avoid contact with the eyes and skin, may cause irritation: Agnès Varda’s La Pointe courte (1954)

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Hardy, F.M. ORCID: 0000-0002-0304-0206, 2013. Avoid contact with the eyes and skin, may cause irritation: Agnès Varda’s La Pointe courte (1954). Acta Universitatis Sapientiae Film & Media Studies, 7, pp. 65-82. ISSN 2065-5924

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.2478/ausfm-2014-0015

Abstract

When, through highly atypical financial and creative means, French filmmaker Agnès Varda’s first feature film The Pointe Courte (La Pointe courte, 1954) first appeared on cinema screens, a fragment of contemporary commentators thought it hampered by “defects,” “blunders,” and “follies.” Its perceived infirmity compounded further by a “rather irritating intellectual dryness,” implying contact with the film may cause itching. A more material, rather than intellectual engagement with the film, then, may offer a means to overcome such reservations; a piste this article pursues. In doing so, I draw on the thought of contemporary French thinker Jean-Luc Nancy and his proposition that all images are flowers and the mobilised look such thinking engenders which oscillates between an optical gaze and a haptic graze. A look mobilized thanks to the contact it makes with wood’s textured, internal ornament and which undoes the material myopia by which the film’s existing critical landscape has itself been hampered.

Item Type:

Journal article

Publication Title:

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae Film & Media Studies

Creators:

Hardy, F.M.

Publisher:

Scientia Publishing House

Date:

2013

Volume:

ISSN: