Un imaginaire collectif au féminin/masculin : Les Veuves de Noirmoutier d’Agnès Varda

Abstract

Abstract This article relativises Varda’s feminism. When she films women in her documentaries, because she is herself a woman, she is not only filming herself but is also illustrating her idea of total cinema through her representation of the couple. The installation Les Veuves de Noirmoutier (2005), in which she shows some widows who are doubly like her, first for having lost their husbands and second because they live on the same island of Noirmoutier, partakes of the same utopia. Her documentary shows a poetics of space stemming from Bachelard and Jung which is nurtured by each widow’s account, creating a collective imagination that posits the ambivalent union of the individual and the collective, of reality and the dream, of the feminine and the masculine. This article aims to show the extent to which Varda’s documentary gesture is part of this dialectical materialism of the imagination.