Identity self-portraits of a filmic gaze. From absence to (multi)presence: Duras, Akerman, Varda Lourdes Monterrubio Ibáñez To cite this version: Lourdes Monterrubio Ibáñez. Identity self-portraits of a filmic gaze. From absence to (multi)presence: Duras, Akerman, Varda. Comparative Cinema , 2016, 8, pp.63 - 73. hal-02611850 HAL Id: hal-02611850 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02611850 Submitted on 27 May 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. ARTICLES · Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. IV · No 8 · 2016 · 63-73 Identity self-portraits of a flmic gaze. From absence to (multi)presence: Duras, Akerman, Varda Lourdes Monterrubio Ibáñez ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Te present article aims to analyze the nature of the flmic Marguerite Duras, Chantal Akerman, Agnès Varda, self- self-portraits of three of the greatest directors in francophone portrait, flmic gaze, frst-person enunciation, identity and cinema: Marguerite Duras, Chantal Akerman and Agnès alterity, presence and absence. Varda. Tey all generate an identity self-portrait that shows the essences of their respective flmic gazes. Tree self-portraits that describe a route from absence to (multi)presence, from identity to alterity and intersubjectivity, from fction to autobiography, from artistic to intimate space, from literary presence to that of visual arts, and which share the same primordial desire: the vindication of their female flmmakers’ status through cinematic refexion. Marguerite Duras only showed her image in one single work, Te Lorry (1977), to then embody, through her voice-over, diferent female characters who remain absent from the flmic image. A duality-identifcation is then generated between the flmmaker and the fctional characters, and the latter compose a self-portrait in absence of the director in Le navire Night (1979), Aurélia Steiner (1979), Agatha and the Limitless Readings (1981) and Te Atlantic Man (1981). Chantal Akerman, while dividing herself into flmmaker and actress at the beginning of her career, created three works that represent her existential self-portrait: News from Home (1977), Down Tere (2006) and No Home Movie (2015). Films of a diaristic nature where the self-portrait is constructed through the confict with maternal alterity and self-identity, and which is embodied by the dialectic presence-absence of Akerman in the flm. Finally, Agnès Varda creates a self-portrait of the multipresence born from her interest in alterity, from the portraits of others created in Jane B. for Agnès V. (1988) and Jacquot de Nantes (1991), and which she continues in Te Gleaners and I (2000). In Te Beaches of Agnès (2008) the meeting between autobiography and art installation enables her to generate multiple self-images, present and past, real and fctional, in order to achieve a collage-puzzle of herself. Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. IV · No 8 · 2016 63 IDENTITY SELF-PORTRAITS OF A FILMIC GAZE. FROM ABSENCE TO (MULTI)PRESENCE: DURAS, AKERMAN, VARDA Te flmic self-portrait has been analysed by diferent authors portray the self. Its fux moves through time, it transports a as one of the forms of the ‘cinema-I’ described by Philippe never-completed image in the process of an ever-expanding Lejeune in Cinéma et autobiographie: problèmes de vocabulaire future’ (GRANGE, 2015: XXIII-7). (1987), and used to transpose the question of autobiography from literature to cinema. Te diferent discursive modes of this In accepting this unavoidable presence-absence dialectic, the ‘flmic writing of the self’ include clearly identifable devices, author puts forward two considerations that we will take as such as the diary or the letter, and more elusive ones, like the point of departure for our study. Firstly, as far as presence the self-portrait, all of them fusing and confusing in distinct is concerned, the notion of self-portrait goes beyond the experiences: dimension of mere self-representation: ‘[…] although the flmic self-portrait is difcult to elucidate, ‘Making a self-portrait does not just mean presenting the this doesn’t mean that it lacks a playing feld, provided that the actual image, it means proposing a search for the image as an autobiography’s portrait of a life is replaced by the inscription of imperceptible, piercing presence of an absence that plagues us life, and the narrative anchor to the discontinuous record of the all. A self-portrait is a presentation of our obsession with always self, which is regulated by reminiscence and poetic meditation’ being someone else, of fnding ourselves in an untraceable (FONT, 2008: 45). place that is impossible to locate, when we would so desire to determine its position. Like a leap in the dark, the self-portrait Raymond Bellour, meanwhile, uses Michel Beaujour’s work on is the experience of a journey through the spaces, times, and literary self-portrait (1991: 3) as a starting point to ofer in his layers that run through those worlds we think we inhabit, but Autoportraits (1988) a defnition of flmic self-portrait through which actually inhabit us’ (GRANGE, 2015: XXIII-4). fve attributes, while previously highlighting its diferences from autobiography: As Beaujour says: ‘Trapped between absence and human ‘Te self-portrait is thus located on the side of the analogical, being, the self-portrait must make a detour to produce what the metaphorical and the poetic rather than on that of the will essentially always be an intertwining of anthropology narrative: “It tries to build its coherence through a system of and thanatography’ (1980: 13). Secondly, the self-portrait mementos, repetitions, superpositions and correspondences ‘condenses and presents, on several fronts, a cinematic thinking’, between homologous and replaceable elements, in such a way and this implies not only ‘describing the self in cinema’, but also that its general appearance is one of discontinuity, anachronistic ‘describing cinema itself’. Both qualities ‘give of mirror fashes juxtaposition, montage”. While autobiography is defned by a in which they can observe each other; they can progress together temporal closure, the self-portrait appears as a never-ending at evolutionary distances’ (GRANGE, 2015: XII-17). Using this totality, where nothing can be delivered in advance, because its characterization, we will call this flmic experience an identity author announces: “I’m not going to tell you what I did, but self-portrait, because it seeks the expression of the flmmaker’s rather who I am”. Te author of self-portraits begins with a identity through her flmic gaze, as the materialization of question that reveals an absence from the self, and everything her cinematic thinking, overcoming the limitations that the can end up being an answer; he so moves seamlessly from a application of a mere generic perspective would entail. As void to an excess, and doesn’t know clearly either where he is Domènec Font says: going or what he is doing […]’ (BELLOUR, 1988: 341-342). ‘Te “writing of the self” has the same imprecise outlines and the same heretical status as the essay flm, and is frequently Next, the author presents the reasons why digital technology tied in with it: it is a personal writing that exists within a ‘seems to lend itself more to the adventure of self-portrait than difcult generic frame rather than in a less problematic clear cinema does’ (BELLOUR, 1988: 344). Tese writings of the self characterization’ (2008: 47). were produced in France during modern cinema as a result of the expression of subjectivity in flm work, and according to Tis article aims to discuss and compare the nature of the Bellour’s comments on self-portrait, they proliferated from the identity self-portraits of three of the greatest flmmakers in 1980s onwards. francophone cinema: Marguerite Duras, Chantal Akerman and Agnès Varda. Te choice of these three authors is justifed In L’autoportrait en cinéma (2008), Françoise Grange concludes not only by their contributions to the shaping of the flmic that the defning essence of the flmic self-portrait lies in the self-portrait, but also by the engaging itinerary they trace impossibility of its fxing: from modern to contemporary cinema through diferent axes: from absence to (multi)presence, from identity to alterity and ‘Te flm takes its images, erases and replaces them. Tis intersubjectivity, from fction to autobiography, from the artistic permanent absence is a symptom of cinema’s potential to to the intimate. Tey are experiences of the flmic self-portrait 64 Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. IV · No 8 · 2016 LOURDES MONTERRUBIO IBÁÑEZ that share the same, primal desire: to vindicate their status as truck] as well, of course, as I can be all women […] Anyway, I’ve female flmmakers through cinematic refection, through their reached this point: talking about myself as if about someone thinking about cinema. As Varda states in Filmer le désir (Marie else, getting interested in myself as someone else would interest Mandy, 2002): ‘Te frst feminist gesture consists of saying […] me. To talk with myself, perhaps, I don’t know’ (DURAS, 1977: I look. Te act of deciding to look […] the world isn’t defned 132). As Youssef Ishaghpour notes, there is an ‘irrepressible by how I am looked at, but by how I look at it’. identity and duality of Duras and the woman in the truck’, that ‘consists of talking about the self by saying ‘she’: a fckleness of Marguerite Duras.