Intermediality and gesture: idealising the craft of filmmaking in Agnès Varda’s Lions Love (… and Lies)

Abstract

Made on the fringes of the Hollywood industry in 1969, Lions Love (… and Lies) is little known in Agnès Varda’s filmography. Instead of considering it as an isolated experimental attempt or as an ephemeral digression, the author argues that Lions Love occupies a pivotal position in Varda’s cinema. The film brings to the fore key theoretical aspects of her aesthetics, such as the use of the classical arts as a source of inspiration filtering through the mise en scène and contrasting with its modernist features, the emphasis on the tangible reality of the cinematic medium, and finally the exhibition of the filmmaker’s practice. For the first time in her career, Varda appears herself behind and before the camera. In this perspective, the author suggests analysing Lions Love in relation to her later films such as Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000), which develops similar ideas, gestures and motifs. Inspired by Andy Warhol and pop art, but also by Picasso’s neoclassical etchings, Varda creates a self-reflexive collage in which she idealises the craft of filmmaking in response to the Hollywood industry.