Avoid Contact with the Eyes and Skin, May Cause Irritation: Agnès Varda’s La Pointe courte (1954)

• Published in: Acta Universitatis Sapientiae. Film and Media Studies no. 7; pp. 65 - 82
• Main Author: Hardy, Francesca Minnie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Scientia Publishing House 2013; Scientia Kiadó
• Subjects: Theatre, Dance, Performing Arts; Agnès Varda; JeanLuc Nancy; flowering image; mobilized look
• ISSN: 2065-5924; 2066-7779

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 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.