Between women: Gesture, intermediality and intersubjectivity in the installations of Agnès Varda and Chantal Akerman

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe works of Agnes Varda and Chantal Akerman span two generations of female influence in the sphere of contemporary visual culture in France. Both film-makers have seized upon the richly intermedial potential of film, photography, video and installation, while acknowledging their own status as figures engaging with the marginal politics of auteurist film-making. This article interrogates how the recent installations, ‘Les Veuves de Noirmoutier/The Widows of Noirmoutier’ (Varda, 2005) and ‘Marcher a cote de ses lacets dans un frigidaire vide/To Walk next to One's Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge’ (Akerman, 2004), stage an encounter between the cinematic, ethical and spatial practices of each female auteur, the female subjects of their moving-image work, and their viewers. By invoking concepts of gesture from Giorgio Agamben, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and recent writing on dance and film, the article explores the intermedial potential of gesture as a framework for examining processes of meaning-making, spat...

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