Abstract
This article describes the advantages of teaching Agnès Varda’s early short film L’Opéra-Mouffe, known in English as Diary of a Pregnant Woman, in an introductory course on film form. This award-winning, sixteen-minute film offers a compelling demonstration of the core characteristics of the essay film, along with readily teachable examples of visual metaphor, cinematography, sound, and editing. Its cultural and auteurist contexts can also complement a variety of curricular topics, including the French New Wave and Left Bank creators, post-war France, and feminist filmmaking. Finally, its focus on Varda’s personal experience of pregnancy also makes L’Opéra-Mouffe an ideal vehicle to introduce radical feminist pedagogies that recognize and value personal experience as a valid way of knowing about the world.
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