One of the ongoing questions that guides this video essay concerns how, and why, we are drawn to the films that speak to us. As scholars, cinephiles, and video essayists, what is the ineffable process of choosing our objects of study and admiration? As Catherine Grant writes: “Perhaps exploring these pleasures, and their attached poignancies … can enable us to get in touch with important aspects of film spectatorship that seem to be less accessible or even inexpressible in other (differently constrained) forms of scholarly work.”1 In this video essay, I take Agnès Varda’s Documenteur as my prompt for this thought experiment and ask: How do the films we love become part of us, and follow us like shadows?
In Shadow Self: On Agnès Varda’s Documenteur, I am interested in blurring the borders between academic and creative work, fiction and nonfiction, and biography and autobiography to explore how these categories and disciplines might overlap and inform one another. Combining scenes from Documenteur, an autofictional portrait of Emilie, a French mother in Los Angeles, with original audio and video I recorded in 2023 and 2024, I interweave reflections on Varda’s biography and formal choices with moments from my life as a parent of young children. As Nora Alter suggests, video essays “galvanize the observer into the role of full-fledged participant into the construction of meaning, supplying the audiovisual essay with metaphors of relationality and participation in a medium that in its mass manifestations has been associated with passivity.”2 Blending film history and analysis and autoethnography, I re-edit and remix scenes from Documenteur, paying particular attention to Varda’s use of le vrais gens, or real people, and insert original footage and silhouettes of my hands and face to echo and engage with Varda’s strategies.3 By placing my voice and image in the video essay, and mediating Varda’s footage, I seek to represent my active, participatory spectatorship, and to acknowledge how my life as a mother shapes my relationship with Documenteur.4
In my academic life, I seldom acknowledge the centrality of childrearing in my daily existence, and while creating this video essay, my decisions to insert original footage or comment on my role as a parent have, at times, felt like a risk or a presumption. Ultimately, through the editing process, I came to recognize that part of my enduring fascination with Documenteur stems from the ways that Varda’s film collapses perceived divides between fact and fiction and suggests an alternate path for the parent-artist or parent-scholar, one in which the pauses and digressions endemic to pursuing creative and scholarly work while raising children do not derail the process but become intrinsic to a project’s structure and narrative. In Documenteur, we see the results of Varda’s improvisatory, collaborative relationship with her editor and actor, Sabine Mamou, who plays Emilie, a role based on Varda’s life, while Varda’s eight-year-old son, Mathieu Demy, plays Martin, Emilie’s child. By collaborating with those closest to her to embody aspects of her own life, Varda and her creative team create a fictional world rooted in an emotional truth that exists as a shadow, or double, of their lived reality.5 As making this video essay has taught me, my life as a parent—which shadows my life as an academic—both disrupts and guides my work. As a result, in Shadow Self, I have chosen to highlight, instead of remove, the interruptions, tangents, and repetitions that are inevitable aspects of parenthood. Through my selection of scenes from Documenteur which focus on Emilie as a parent, and by incorporating recorded conversations with my son into this video essay, I trace Emilie and Martin’s fictional mother/son relationship and ask the viewer to consider what is real, what is invented, and how the two might intersect.
As Varda described: “In Documenteur, I tried something new, which was to introduce a space-time of silence between moments of great emotion, to allow the audience the time to get there or to hear in themselves the aftershocks of the emotions displayed, the echo of the words, forgotten memories. It’s as though I wanted to use their own lived time in the film’s time.”6 Through Varda’s singular attention to a mother’s daily labors, and the ways that Documenteur asks viewers to spend their own “lived time” within its narrative structure, I see an invitation to enter the “film’s time” to explore embodied modes of performance and scholarship. Exploring the interrelationships between female autonomy and the demands of caretaking, Shadow Self asks why certain films speak to certain viewers and queries the line between truth and invention.
: :
Endnotes
- Catherine Grant, “The Remix That Knew Too Much? On REBECCA, Retrospectatorship and the Making of RITES OF PASSAGE,” The Cine-Files, 7 (2014).
- Nora Alter, The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 321.
- So Mayer, “The Heart of Documentary,” The Criterion Collection (August 11, 2020).
- As Laura Mulvey suggests, videographic criticism, in particular the act of visually “remixing” a film, allows the maker to create a dialogue between “two spectatorships”—that of a possessive spectator and a pensive spectator. See “Delaying Cinema: An Interview with Laura Mulvey,” Aniki 1, no. 1 (2014): 90.
- As editor Sabine Mamou remembered, “She wanted to do a home movie: the characters of the film were her son, and friends of hers or mine. We would shoot and edit and shoot. What I lived through this film was being very close to the process of creating. Seeing Agnès shooting a feature film without any scenario.” See Roger Crittenden, “Sabine Mamou,” Fine Cuts: Interviews on the Practice of European Film Editing, 2nd ed (New York: Routledge, 2018), 6.
- J. Kline, Agnes Varda: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 115.
Sadia Quraeshi Shepard