Agnès Varda, her life as a feminist activist

She shifted the cinematic look on the feminine, represented characters of women themselves in perpetual displacement – loafers, vagabonds … She accompanied all the struggles and feminist movements of her time. Journey of a militant woman.

“I’m an empty body, without you, without you.” Cleo’s heartbreaking song, camera face on a black background, is echoed now that death is no longer a threat to Cleo’s hero of 5 to 7, but a reality for the filmmaker who has given a voice to women.

While the New Wave is in full swing with hero figures with wrinkled feathers, because the women resist them (Out of breath) or disappoint (the adulterous mother of the Four Hundred Blows ), Agnès Varda – the only woman stamped group – stands out. After her debut feature La Pointe Courte, Varda is not afraid to build a film about an unpleasant, selfish heroine who only thinks about her image and her career.

Cléo flips into the film at the moment of this song, Without you, passing from the status of consumer item (Cléo is a singer of variety) to that of subject questioning its reflection and that of others. Cleo starts to look. As Sandy Flitterman-Lewis has analyzed: “It ceases to be an object built by the gaze of men, and assumes the power to look.”

This is what happens when Cléo enters the room where her friend Dorothée poses nude from behind, and that the camera passes subjective view. Cléo slowly approaches her. We see men and women carving the body of the model, all in their own way, the body of Dorothea which is multiplied.

He is never sexualized either by the eyes of Cléo or by that of the camera. Along the film, Varda questions the relationship between the muse and the artist, nudity and desire. Already Varda’s camera tells us that the female body is multiple and that we can film it without eroticizing it, and even give it an aura of power. We are in 1962.

Source: Agnès Varda, her life as a feminist activist – Les Inrocks

Discover the melancholy folk of “The Wooden Wolf”

Led by the melancholy voice of Alex Keiling, the Alsatian band “The Wooden Wolf” released a 6th album last November. “Winter Variations” takes you into a folk and melancholic mood. An ode to open spaces and introspection.

“My music, I want it poetic and profound” explains the singer and composer of “The Wooden Wolf” Alex Keiling. Meeting in Strasbourg on the occasion of the group’s 6th album,  “Winter Variations”  (Deaf Rock Records)

Source CULTUREBOX: Discover the melancholy folk of “The Wooden Wolf”

The Travails of Emmanuel Macron

Macron

A new book equates the French president’s rise to a revolution. For much of France’s working and middle classes, it has been nothing short of a disaster.

Last September, French President Emmanuel Macron met an unassuming gardener on the grounds of the Élysée Palace. Introducing himself, the 25-year-old timidly explained that he was having trouble finding work. “I send résumés and cover letters… they don’t lead to anything,” he told the president. Many people in France can relate: The country’s unemployment rate hovers just below 9 percent, more than two points above the European Union average. The joblessness rate, meanwhile, is more than twice that for young people age 15 to 24.

Macron’s reaction, however, was less than sympathetic—almost as if he were hearing this problem for the very first time and wasn’t all that convinced of its seriousness. “If you’re willing and motivated, in hotels, cafés, and restaurants, construction, there’s not a single place I go where they don’t say they’re looking for people!” he exclaimed. Then he added, “If I crossed the street, I’d find you one.” Continue reading “The Travails of Emmanuel Macron” →