Finding a Voice: Varda's Early Travelogues

Abstract

If the essay film is an audiovisual equivalent of the written essay, its “voice” can be far more elusive than the writer’s. Bill Nichols characterized the documentary voice as the procedures by which a nonfiction film orchestrates its perspective. “By voice I mean … that which conveys to us a sense of a text’s social point of view, of how it is speaking to us and how it is organizing the materials it is presenting to us” (50). The documentary voice must of course be distinguished from literal voices on the soundtrack, which may be those of an authoritative narrative voiceover (an important—but by no means the sole—constituent of the overall voice) or the voices of others within/outside the images. Semantic relations between voiceover narrations and the documentary voice may vary from strict correspondence to deliberate ironic counterpoint; when we consider the vast expressive potentials of verbal language and film “language”—relationships among mise-en-scene, cinematography, picture editing, voices, sounds, music, and so on— we begin to see how complex their relationships in many nonfiction films can be. Agnes Varda’s nonfiction filmmaking career can be usefully seen as the story of the refining and maturation of her cinematic voice. This occurred in part through her unusual insistence on authoring as many aspects of her films as possible. By late in her career with Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000), Agnes/Varda—that is, the persona in the film and the real director—are both investigator and cinematic gleaner, in frame and out; a camera operator, framing shots-within-the-shot, discussing her video camera and including its inadvertently-made footage; onscreen, both interviewer and a model posing to imitate painting. The voiceover narration is that of Varda; and when we hear a rap song, the lyrics are hers, too. By Les Plages d’Agnes (2008), the filmmaker has wholly become her own subject.