Women Who Return: Revisiting the Figure of Odysseus in Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda

This thesis is anchored in the idea of a ‘female Odysseus’ in French cinema where the films analysed explore space, the female body, and female subjectivity. It investigates chronologically selected films by Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda, which form an intriguing dialogue in cinema, reflecting the filmmakers’ interests in literature and art. The thesis draws on spatial theory, in the first place Giuliana Bruno’s readings of a ‘body map’ and a ‘body-city’ which link the body and space. By contrast Marc Augé’s non-lieu is seen to illustrate places as autonomous, not tied to protagonists’ minds and bodies. Further means of mapping and sense are examined through Maurice Merleau-Ponty on spatiality of perception and knowledge, Michel de Certeau on spatial practice, and Laura U. Marks on haptic visuality. I offer the concept of ‘syntopy’ in my analysis of the coexistence of spaces, whether subjective or objective. Female subjectivities, inspected in phenomenological and metaphysical dimensions, also shape and remap spaces. Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler and Sara Ahmed’s work on gender and queerness lead the way to explore female-identified subjectivities and their meanings in contemporary voyage and myth. Starting from Hiroshima mon amour (1959), the first chapter delves into myth’s refashioned vitality, idea and value in the contemporary world. Marguerite Duras’s female protagonist can be aligned with Odysseus, unpacking the relation of space, memory and subjectivity. Resnais’s filming and montage create the superposition of story, landscape and cityscape, allowing space to become haptic and multidimensional. While his Hiroshima is forged as a non-lieu, Resnais’s use of syntopy invites anticolonial and anti-Eurocentric reflections on historical trauma. His filmmaking voyage then comes to the unlocatable hotel in L’année dernière à Marienbad (1961), as discussed in chapter 2. Here, syntopy relates to body and perception, inviting memory, the (projected) present and future to exist all at once. Marienbad is both a dissociation and a multiplicity that encompasses imagination, reminiscence, and even a ghost’s perspective, ultimately persuading us to rethink the ontology of (filmic) space. Here, getting lost endows the female Odysseus with freedom. Agnès Varda, studied in chapters 3, 4 and 5, reveals more ambition and intention in approaching the Greek myth. I see Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962) as a miniature of The Odyssey, presenting the journey of a woman who searches for peace and her own subjectivity, depicting precarity, vulnerability and mortality as part of the voyage. A subjective, female cartography of Paris counters the capitalist and patriarchal urban narrative whilst the shadow of the Algerian War renders, as in Resnais, a similar implicit reflection on (anti-)colonialism. Varda’s Nausicaa (1970) combines autobiographical narrative and a documentary on Greece’s coup d’état, enquiring into Greece’s ‘real’ political image and her ‘real’ Greek origin. Varda blurs reality and fiction, reshaping the definition of ‘home’ through immigration and exile, renewing self-narrative in her cinécriture. The female Odysseus can be her own rhapsode, as she embodies the story (as she is filmed) and the creator (as she films) simultaneously. Finally, Varda’s Sans toit ni loi (1985) is constructed with a clear commitment to purely spatial movement, without a ‘home’ guiding the journey nor any fixed location, revealing simultaneously precariousness and freedom. For Mona, an angry female Odysseus, walking is both an existential practice, as defined by Heidegger, and a rewriting of the law, as envisioned by Irigaray and Butler. Varda pans her lens from Mona to marginalized people and plants, painting a ‘real landscape’ of France. The film, as a final chapter and most concerted rebellion, opens up the portrayal of a contemporary female Odysseus and her potential to shutter the current patriarchal, capitalist system that used to define woman and home.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Wang, Xinyi

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Wilson, Emma

• Film Studies
• Gender Studies
• Myth
• Homer's afterlife
• Alain Resnais
• Agnès Varda
• French Cinema
• Rive Gauche
• Feminism
• Space
• Body

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/3d877939-c7b8-4e71-b613-4cae0cce1e91/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.123084

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/392361