L'Opéra-Mouffe

Agnès Varda did not make a feature film in the seven years between La Pointe Courte and Cléo de 5 à 7 (she attempted, unsuccessfully, to make the adventure comedy La Mélangite). Based on a commission from the France Tourism Development Agency, she produced two short promotional documentaries (about the French Riviera and the chateaux on the Loire) that were conceived much more ironically than was expected from advertisements for the beauties of France. As an act of defiance and using a 16 mm camera, she shot “for herself” the silent black-and-white film diary L’Opéra-Mouffe (1958), expressing, in a strikingly subjective and instinctive rather than tightly structured manner, the ambivalent feelings experienced by a woman during pregnancy (joy and hope, but also anxiety and uncertainty when looking at unhappy people who were once also children) and showing a nude female body in an intentionally non-erotic way. With this film, which never received official distribution, Varda wanted to draw attention to the numerous possibilities of cinematographic representation of women and the feminine experience. By rejecting the established ways of expressing feminine subjectivity, she became the first to appear as a feminist director. L’Opéra-Mouffe is also an example of local shooting (“cinema de quartier”), which draws on topics from a specific environment for which the artist has an affinity, in this case Rue Mouffetard in Paris (Daguerreotypes is another example of such a film in Varda’s filmography). (04/06/2019)