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Agnès Varda
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Contemporary Film Directors
Edited by Justus Nieland and Jennifer Fay
The Contemporary Film Directors series provides concise,

well-written introductions to directors from around the
world and from every level of the film industry. Its chief
aims are to broaden our awareness of important artists,
to give serious critical attention to their work, and to il-
lustrate the variety and vitality of contemporary cinema.
Contributors to the series include an array of internationally
respected critics and academics. Each volume contains
an incisive critical commentary, an informative interview
with the director, and a detailed filmography.
A list of books in the series

appears at the end of this book.

Agnès Varda
Kelley Conway
Universit y
of
Illin o i s
Pr e s s
U r ba n a ,
c h icago,
a nd
s pr ing fiel d

© 2015 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 c p 5 4 3 2 1
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Frontispiece: Agnès Varda (Julia Fabry, 2012). © Ciné-Tamaris
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015950937

isbn 978-0-252-03972-0 (hardcover)
isbn 978-0-252-08120-0 (paperback)
isbn 978-0-252-09782-9 (e-book)
Permission has been granted to reprint portions of the following essays:

Conway, Kelley. “A New Wave of Spectators: Contemporary Responses to Cleo
from 5 to 7, Film Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 2007): 38–47.
Conway, Kelley. “The New Wave in the Museum: Varda, Godard, and the Multi-
Media Installation.” Contemporary French Civilization 32, no. 2 (Summer 2008):
195–217.

Contents
Acknowledgments | ix
new wave cinéaste

to digital gleaner: change
and continuity in the work
of agnès varda | 1
Planning and Precision: La Pointe Courte 9
Structure and Digression: The Early Short Documentaries 26
Cultivating the New Wave Spectator: Cleo from 5 to 7 35
Improvisation and Formal Patterning: Vagabond 56
Social Criticism and the Self-Portrait: The Gleaners and I 71
From Cinema to the Gallery: Patatutopia and L’île et elle 89
Looking Backward, Moving Forward: The Beaches of Agnès 108
Conclusion 120
interview | 133
Filmography | 157
Bibliography | 171
Index | 179

Acknowledgments
When I first met Agnès Varda during a 2002 retrospective and confer-
ence I had organized at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, I did not
yet have plans to write a book about her work. Instead I was immersed
in the completion of another book and in caring for my two-month-old
baby, Charlotte. Varda’s enthusiastic engagement at that conference,
however, laid the groundwork for a warm personal connection and an
emphatic invitation to visit her production complex the next time I was
in Paris. A few years later, on my first trip to Ciné-Tamaris, Varda’s Paris
base on the rue Daguerre, my plans changed abruptly. The richness of
the Ciné-Tamaris archive, Varda’s personal generosity, and her expansion
into installation art convinced me to embark on what became the most
compelling project of my professional life so far.
Thanks, above all, to Agnès Varda for opening her archive to me and
for her engagement with this project. Thanks to Rosalie Demy-Varda
and Mathieu Demy for their tireless work in the preservation and res-
toration of the films of their parents, Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy.
I am beyond grateful for the patience and help of the amazing team
at Ciné-Tamaris: Anita Benoliel, Julia Fabry, Fanny Lautissier, Jean-
Baptiste Morin, Cecilia Rose, and Stéphanie Scanvic. Film historian
Bernard Bastide, former member of the belle équipe at Ciné-Tamaris,
has been particularly generous with his insights about Varda’s filmmak-
ing process. Thank you Cecilia Rose for supplying illustrations for the
book at the very last moment in the wake of a computer crisis. Special
thanks are also due to my research assistant, Laura Gross, fellow Iowan,
former Ciné-Tamaris intern, UW-Madison graduate, and my indefati-
gable partner on this journey from Madison to Paris to Noirmoutier

and back. Thanks also to the ever-professional and patient team at the
University of Illinois Press, Jennifer Fay, Justus Nieland, Daniel Nasset,
and Marika Christofides.
Delivering portions of this research at conferences was enormously
helpful in the sharpening of my arguments. Thank you Eric Thouvenal
and Roxanne Hamery for organizing an amazing conference in 2007
devoted to the work of Varda at the Université de Rennes. I am also
grateful to the Screenwriting Research Network, which allowed me to
share my research with its members in Brussels in 2012 and in Madison
in 2013. Nathalie Rachlin and Rosemarie Scullion organized perhaps the
most intense and pleasurable conference I have ever attended, the “Con-
temporary French Cinema and the Crisis of Globalization,” sponsored
by the Borchard Foundation and held at the Chateau de la Bretesche
in 2012.
Many scholars and friends share my belief in the importance of
Varda’s work and have inspired and helped me at various stages of this
project. David Gardner, one of the best writers I know, generously took
time away from his busy career in television to help me polish my prose
and to translate the interview with Varda. Fellow scholars of French
cinema Janet Bergstrom, Betsy Bogart McCabe, Colin Burnett, Maggie
Flinn, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Claudia Gorbman, Charlie Michael,
Richard Neupert, Geneviève Van Cauwenberg, and Alan Williams have
taught me much. The members of my 2013 Varda seminar at the UW-
Madison inspired me enormously, as do my wonderful colleagues Maria
Belodubrovskaya, David Bordwell, Eric Hoyt, Lea Jacobs, Vance Kepley,
J. J. Murphy, Ben Singer, Jeff Smith, and Kristin Thompson. Michael
Trevis was exceptionally helpful in helping me choose illustrations for
the book. I am fortunate to have good friends in Paris and Madison, such
as David Gardner, Gillian Ludwig, Angela Giovinazzo, Nelly Boireau,
Susan Zaeske, Mary Louise Roberts, and Jerilyn Goodman, who share
my appreciation of Varda.
Archival research requires considerable resources. I am deeply grate-
ful for the Hamel Family Faculty Research Grants, a UW-Madison
Graduate Summer Research Grant, and grants from the UW-Madison
Anonymous Fund and the Wisconsin Humanities Council in support
of “Landscape and Portrait: Agnès Varda’s Cinematic Geographies,” a
x | Acknowledgments

film retrospective and international conference held at UW-Madison in
2002.
Without the unwavering encouragement and love of Patrick, Sul-
livan, and Charlotte Sweet, this book would not exist. I dedicate this
book to my family.
Acknowledgments | xi

Agnès Varda

New Wave Cinéaste to Digital Gleaner
Change and Continuity in the Work of Agnès Varda
It is hardly news that Agnès Varda is fond of (one might venture besotted
by) Paris’s 14th arrondissement, where she has made her home since
first arriving on the rue Daguerre in 1951. She devoted an entire film
to the daily lives and preoccupations of the denizens of her beloved rue
Daguerre, Daguerréotypes (1974). Her second feature film, Cléo de 5
à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7, 1962) is largely set in that southern arrondisse-
ment, cradled between the green swaths of the Luxembourg Gardens
to the north and the Parc Montsouris to the south. To the west beck-
ons Montparnasse and its nightlife, while the vast walled prison and
hospital complexes bordering the neighboring 13th discourage further
exploration eastward. Cleo’s trajectory in the film constitutes a classic
Left Bank idyll that places Paris’s 14th at the epicenter of the known
world. She begins her journey in the home of a fortune teller on rue du
Rivoli in the 1st arrondissement and moves south, across the Seine, to
her apartment in Montparnasse. She skirts the Latin Quarter and the
Sorbonne, where student restlessness is already evident on the margins

of the bland postwar prosperity as the Algerian conflict played out. She
then strolls through the 14th arrondissement for much of the remainder
of the film, moving from a café in Montparnasse to the nearby train
station and eventually to that very Parc Montsouris on the southern
edge of the city, where she meets a soldier on leave from Algeria. Her
trajectory ends portentously in the 13th, at the Salpêtrière Hospital,
once a repository for prostitutes, the poor, and the criminally insane,
where a diagnosis of cancer is confirmed.
In some sense, Cleo perfectly demonstrates Varda’s prescience: her
film anticipates student unrest, reflects on upheaval and conflict in the
Maghreb, and more broadly, if literally for Cleo, foretells the societal ills
to come. Varda sees these written in the city itself, its landmarks, iconic
quarters, and stone façades. And she shows Cleo seeing these things,
seeing with a woman’s gaze, a decade before Laura Mulvey would at-
tempt to formulate looking outside of male subjectivity. Clearly this is
one reason feminist theorists and critics have taken up Varda’s work so
readily.
Varda’s own trajectory, through her career and in the world, will guide
my work here. Born in Ixelles, Belgium, in 1928 to a Greek father and a
French mother, Varda spent her adolescence in Sète, a fishing village in
the south of France. At seventeen, she moved to Paris to finish her high
school education and to attend classes at the Sorbonne and the Ecole
du Louvre. With the exception of two lengthy sojourns to Los Angeles,
she has lived at the same address on the rue Daguerre in Paris since the
early 1950s.
Like Cleo, it’s hard not to picture Varda in the 14th arrondissement,
where she is both at home and at work. Varda is all too aware of the
distinction between local and tourist, between villager and visitor, and
it is a contrast that gives texture to much of her work. Window shop-
pers on the rue Daguerre should not be surprised to find Varda herself
peddling DVD collections of Jacques Demy’s and her own work in her
shopfront studio Ciné-Tamaris, or unloading groceries or suitcases from
the trunk of her car at the sprawling residence across the street. Deep
in research in Ciné-Tamaris’s archives, I myself have been pleasantly
interrupted by Varda coming and going, insisting I break from my work
to join her for lunch. Her door seems always to be open, and the world
knows where to find her; imagine my shock answering the doorbell while
2 | Agnès Varda

Varda is rummaging through binders of old reviews or interviews on
my behalf, only to discover Jean-Pierre Léaud or Anouk Aimée, in the
neighborhood and hoping to find Varda at home. But if she is unpack-
ing suitcases, it is because she has returned from an extended stay at
her beloved Ile de Noirmoutier, spitting distance from Nantes, where
her filmmaker husband Jacques Demy grew up. And despite the heavy
gravitational pull of the 14th arrondissement, Varda’s career has taken
her from Languedoc to the gritty streets of Oakland, from Hollywood
to Havana. Each of the sections in this study traces stages of Varda’s
journey, each place shaping her art and her vision of the world, shifting
her identification between visitor and local.
Agnès Varda’s rise to the top tier of international, independent film-
makers can be framed in a paradox. In 1954, a twenty-five-year-old
woman with neither training in film production nor connections in the
film industry began work on a film called La Pointe Courte (1955),
which both evoked Italian Neorealism and anticipated by a full five
years the French New Wave. The film, made completely outside the
hierarchical system of French film production of the 1950s, provides a
realist chronicle of daily life in a fishing village and a stylized treatment
of the troubled marriage of a bourgeois Parisian couple. Varda financed
the film by forming a cooperative made up of the film’s cast and crew
(a young Alain Resnais, a year away from releasing Nuit et brouillard
[Night and Fog, 1955], generously agreed to join the cooperative and
edit her film). Not until the late 1950s would French directors conduct
similarly unconventional experiments in narrative structure, style, and
mode of production. La Pointe Courte was denied a traditional theatrical
release but was nevertheless reviewed favorably by André Bazin, who
called the film “miraculous” and praised its combination of documentary
simplicity and modernist stylization. How did La Pointe Courte happen
and where did Varda go from there? Moving from this work to those
that follow, how can we best explain and appreciate Varda’s melding of
documentary authenticity, stylistic experimentation, and social com-
mentary? How have her working methods changed through time? These
questions are central to this study.
Varda’s trajectory through film history conforms neither to the
traditional story film historians tend to tell about the French New
Wave, as Richard Neupert adeptly makes clear in his 2007 history
New Wave Cinéaste to Digital Gleaner | 3

of the movement, nor to our sense of the conventional trajectory of
independent filmmakers more generally. Varda was a professional
photographer whose initial aesthetic commitments were framed by
Modernist literature and Renaissance painting as much as anything
else. Although historically placed in the category of the “Left Bank”
with the likes of Resnais and Chris Marker, Varda’s directorial persona
and her films differ significantly from those of the Left Bank direc-
tors and should be understood on their own terms. Moreover, Varda’s
career, spanning more than half a century and still going strong, has
been unusually varied. Rather than making only fiction features, Varda
has alternated between creating documentaries and fiction films, short
and feature-length films, photography, and installation art. This un-
usual heterogeneity and exuberance in Varda’s work deserves further
exploration, as do both the consistency and the changes in Varda’s
aesthetic preoccupations and working methods over the years.
Despite Agnès Varda’s centrality to the New Wave, to European
art cinema, to experimental documentary, and to feminist film history,
her work has received far less critical attention than it deserves. Varda’s
written autobiography, Varda par Agnès, remains a precious resource
on her life and work to 1994, but this volume unfortunately has never
been translated into English and is now out of print. Until recently,
the only monograph on Varda in English was Alison Smith’s valuable
Agnès Varda, but that study concludes with the late 1990s. Since then,
Varda has embarked on a new phase in her career: in 2000, she made
Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I), her first digital film,
and in 2003 she exhibited her first multimedia installation at the Venice
Biennale, Patatutopia. In 2006, she exhibited a suite of installations, L’île
et elle (The Island and She), at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, and in
2008 Varda followed up with a feature-length documentary, Les Plages
d’Agnès (The Beaches of Agnès), which retooled the aesthetics evident
in her installations toward a cinematic memoir. These works initiated
a new chapter in Varda’s long and productive career, one that remains
ongoing and thereby calls for continued investigation.
If, as I’ve suggested, Varda was unfairly neglected by film critics
and historians in the past, happily the same cannot be said today. In
addition to the scores of articles and book chapters devoted to her films
and installations, several book-length studies of Varda’s work are now
4 | Agnès Varda

available and more are under way. Varda’s greatest commercial success,
Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond, 1985) drew a generation of feminist critics to
re-examine thirty years of filmmaking. Thus did Sandy Flitterman-Lewis
provide what I believe is a definitive and still current feminist account
of Varda’s work, To Desire Differently, despite its publication nearly
twenty years ago. Flitterman-Lewis focuses on the representation of
femininity in La Pointe Courte, Cleo, and Vagabond, deftly combining a
sophisticated analysis of Varda’s feminist aesthetics (through an emphasis
on the key issues of feminist film theory, including vision, subjectivity,
and desire) with an analysis of the broader context of French feminist
filmmaking that takes into account the work of Germaine Dulac and
Marie Epstein. Smith’s 1998 monograph explores, among other topics,
the “specifically feminine” aspects of five films (L’Opéra-Mouffe / Diary
of a Pregnant Woman, 1958; Cleo; Réponse de femmes: Notre corps,
notre sexe / Women Reply, 1975; L’Une chante, l’autre pas / One Sings,
the Other Doesn’t, 1977; and Vagabond), framing her analysis with the
question, “How to represent the feminine?” (93). Rebecca DeRoo’s two
published essays fruitfully position Le Bonheur (Happiness, 1965) and
One Sings in fresh contexts: the representation of femininity in 1960s
women’s magazines and Brechtian performance, respectively. With this
rich terrain so fruitfully mined already, I will not be focusing on Varda’s
role as a feminist filmmaker so much as her work as a woman making
films in France.
Beyond the framework of feminism, Neupert’s A History of the
French New Wave positions Varda in the context of that movement.
Delphine Bénézet focuses on Varda’s lesser-known films (including
Opéra-Mouffe, Daguerréotypes, and Mur Murs / Mural Murals, 1981),
interpreting Varda’s concerns through the lens of phenomenology and
ethics. A collection of Varda’s interviews was recently edited and trans-
lated by T. Jefferson Kline and will no doubt enhance Varda’s reputation
as one of the most insightful analysts of her own work. Again, with so
much substantial scholarship on the historical (and political) context of
the New Wave and Varda’s project through the tumultuous 1960s and
1970s, I will not try to expand on that line of inquiry here. I will, how-
ever, engage with underutilized sources in French about Varda’s work,
including her autobiography, Varda par Agnès, and the collected papers
from the first conference ever devoted to Varda’s work in France, Agnès

Varda Le cinéma et au-delà, edited by Antony Fiant, Roxane Hamery,
and Eric Thouvenel (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007). I was
also fortunate enough to have access to Bernard Bastide’s invaluable,
unpublished dissertation detailing the conception, production, and re-
ception of Cleo.
For a critical reading of Cleo, both Valerie Orpen and Steven Ungar
have contributed valuable book-length analyses. The film has in fact
already elicited so many rich analyses of space, time, and characteriza-
tion, in these studies and those of Flitterman-Lewis and Susan Hayward,
that I have not included here an extended reading of my own, focusing
instead on reconstructing the postwar cinephilic culture of France and
Cleo’s place within it. My take on the ciné-club’s role in revitalizing
postwar French culture and detailed analysis of survey responses to
Cleo solicited by Varda herself (and currently held in the Ciné-Tamaris
archive) offers a new perspective about the film’s circulation through
France of the early 1960s, one far less familiar to historians of French
cinema.
Indeed, my approach to Cleo and to all the films and installations
I explore in this book begins with the assumption that authorship in
the production of moving images is still eminently worthy of study. In
the wake of the poststructuralist turn, one can well understand how
it became unfashionable to place the living, breathing film director at
the center of one’s research. And yet most film historians never really
lost interest in discovering the aesthetic and narrative preoccupations
of individual filmmakers. My particular contribution to the scholarly
literature on Varda is borne in large part of my lucky access to her
archive over a period of many years and to my sense that attempting
to chart the changes and the continuity in her working methods would
yield interesting information about her work and one artist’s approach
to the creative process. Writing film history from the point of view of
authorship means charting the thematic and stylistic consistencies of a
filmmaker’s work over time, but it also, for me, increasingly means writ-
ing the most detailed history of film production possible. Discovering the
concrete details of the emergence of a given project, the development
and shifting forms of its screenplay, the search for financing, the casting,
the shoot, the editing, the exhibition, and reception are essential to the
questions that interest me most about Varda. (How and why does she
6 | Agnès Varda

make her films and installations? How can we chart their impact in the
culture, both commercially and critically?) Therefore these questions, so
central to Varda’s journey through the cinematic and art scene landscape,
will benefit from the greatest share of my attention. My vision of film
authorship holds that while directors are certainly acted upon by forces
outside of themselves, they also seek challenges and solve problems,
maintain certain aesthetic commitments (but abandon others over time),
and impose creative constraints on themselves (while resisting others).
I recall having breakfast with Varda in Montreal in October of 2005.
She had come to town to speak at the retrospective on her work at the
Cinémathèque québécoise and to hang an accompanying exhibition
of her photographs. We were seated by the window of a hotel dining
room, several floors above street level. As we chatted, Varda looked out
the window and spotted some homeless people across the street. Some
stood, others sat; some moved about a bit, many were encumbered with
bags. Varda could not take her eyes off of them and wondered aloud,
“What do you think they’re carrying in those bags? Where do you think
they sleep at night?” She observed their movements carefully for many
minutes. Much later, in June 2012, I saw an exhibition of Varda instal-
lations in Nantes. One of them, La Chambre occupée (The Occupied
Room), consisted of a decrepit room hidden away above the elegant
covered shopping arcade, the Passage Pommeraye, made famous in
Jacques Demy’s Lola (1961). Made to look like a squat, the room housed
an assemblage comprising a mattress propped upright, a shopping cart
holding a microwave oven, and an old stove. Video monitors installed in
the mattress, the microwave, and the stove screened footage of homeless
people, moving about and speaking of their plight. Thinking back to her
intense observation of the homeless people in Montreal, I understood
that Varda never stops looking and thinking and working. She looks at the
world around her with a rare intensity and empathy and then transforms
her thoughts and emotions into new work.
Varda’s style of authorship is distinctive in that she is particularly
skilled at recycling old strategies (such as her capacity to mix the codes of
documentary and fiction to evoke a specific place or to tell a compelling
story about marginalized people), and yet she never stops trying new
ones. The “new” for Varda can mean creating a new kind of character—
Vagabond’s utterly opaque female protagonist whose errant presence

La Chambre occupée, Paroles de squatters
(The Occupied Room, Words of Squatters, 2012).
© Ciné-Tamaris
sparks a multifaceted portrait of a region, for example—or venturing

into a new medium, as Varda did in 2003 when she began undertaking
installations for gallery exhibition. Ultimately, I hope my study reveals
the continuity and the change in Varda’s art-making strategies in order
to refine a theory about what sets her work and her process apart.
Varda’s ever-shifting profile has evolved from avant-garde precur-
sor to the “grandmother” of the New Wave. What remains consistent
is her commitment to storytelling that foregrounds isolated people in
distinctive settings in both documentary and fiction films. Varda’s ongo-
ing journey reveals an artist who needs to create, who is in motion and
incapable of ceasing, making do with whatever resources are available
to her (including harnessing that creativity toward visual arts and instal-
lation when funds for filmmaking were scarce), remaining eminently
pragmatic even when attacking new challenges.
Drawing on extensive documentation at Ciné-Tamaris, this study
will highlight Varda’s narrative and stylistic preoccupations, the pro-
duction and exhibition histories of her work, and her shifting working
methods through time. Covering Varda’s entire output is impossible in
8 | Agnès Varda

a short volume, so I will focus primarily on films and art installations for
which existing supporting documentation was rich enough to shed new
light on Varda’s work and process: the fiction films La Pointe Courte
(1955), Cleo (1962), and Vagabond (1985); the short documentaries
Varda made in the late 1950s as well as her recent feature documentaries
The Gleaners and I (2000) and The Beaches of Agnès (2008); and her
installations Patatutopia (2003), L’île et elle (2006), and Des chambres
en ville (2012). While these works may seem hand-selected as artistic
and critical triumphs, I would be hard-pressed to point to a failure, apart
perhaps from Les Cent et une nuits de Simon Cinéma (One Hundred
and One Nights, 1995), the star-studded sentimentality of which simply
misfired commercially. It can nevertheless be seen as a labor of love in
partial tribute to Jacques Demy that exhibited all the playful quirkiness
of her overarching cinematic project, yet its heavy reliance on archival
footage and extracts of others’ work pushes it outside the scope of my
study. My aim, grounded in archival research and focused on Varda’s
working methods, is to reveal both continuity and change in the long
career of one of the world’s most intriguing and original filmmakers.
Planning and Precision: La Pointe Courte

In 1954, while working as a photographer for theater legend Jean Vilar
at the Théâtre National Populaire, Varda returned to her native Sète
and shot her first film, La Pointe Courte (throughout this study, I have
opted to introduce film titles in their original language before switching
to the title best known to English-speaking audiences, if different, or
an abbreviated version thereof, i.e., Cleo, Vagabond, Gleaners, etc.). So
Varda’s journey in the world began with a trip home, at least the home of
her adolescence during the war. From this small Mediterranean fishing
village, she launched a career spanning sixty years and counting, one that
has never fit smoothly into the conventional categories of French film
history. In the 1950s and 1960s, Varda worked in an industry populated
almost exclusively by male directors, and, unlike the directors who began
their careers as film critics writing for Cahiers du cinéma, Varda was
not a voracious cinephile. As stated earlier, many film historians readily
place Varda in the indistinct category of the “Left Bank,” linking her with
Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet,

and her late husband, Jacques Demy, because of their shared commit-
ment to documentary filmmaking, aesthetic experimentation and the
nouveau roman, and leftist politics. However one places her in relation
to the New Wave, Varda’s general aesthetic and narrative preoccupa-
tions have been fairly consistent: from La Pointe Courte to The Beaches
of Agnès, Varda’s work has possessed an unusual mixture of realist and
experimental aesthetics, a focus on the specificity and the power of
“place,” and an elusive brand of self-portraiture. For the purposes of this
study, I am more interested in the latter aspects of her film technique
than in expanding on her formal or philosophical engagement with a
well-documented moment of modernist invention.
It is not immediately clear what would have impelled someone like
Varda to make a feature-length fiction film in mid-1950s France. There
were few available female role models for inspiration; the only other
woman directing films in France at this time was Jacqueline Audry, known
especially for her literary adaptations of Colette’s novels, Gigi (1949) and
Minne, l’ingénue libertine (Minne, the Libertine Ingénue, 1950). Although
Audry’s films are interesting for their surprisingly complex representations
of femininity and, in the case of Olivia (1951), a lesbian romance, Varda
would not likely have been inspired by Audry’s classical narratives and
studio productions had she even been aware of them.
Nor did Varda have an extensive knowledge of the film industry or of
film history. Instead of working her way up the hierarchy of professional
film production or writing film criticism, Varda studied literature at the
Sorbonne and art history at the Ecole du Louvre. Later she earned a
degree in photography at the Ecole Nationale de la Cinématographie
et la Photographie and then made her living shooting weddings, fam-
ily photos, and advertisements before working full-time as the official
photographer of the Théâtre National Populaire (TNP). Unlike other
directors associated with the New Wave, Varda did not participate in
France’s rich postwar culture of cinéphilie. She was not a member of
a ciné-club nor did she participate in the impassioned debates about
realism, the film director as auteur, or the nature of Hollywood cinema
that filled the pages of Cahiers du cinéma or Positif. She went to the
cinema only once a year or so and remembers seeing Marcel Carné’s
Quai des brumes (Daybreak, 1938) and Les Enfants du paradis (Chil-
dren of Paradise, 1945) as well as Walt Disney’s Snow White and the
10 | Agnès Varda

Seven Dwarfs (1937). What few films Varda had seen apparently did
not please her. She told Jacques Ledoux of the Cinémathèque Royale
de Belgique in a 1961 interview: “I wanted to make a film that I wanted
to see. . . . I wasn’t thinking at all of starting a career. I had the impres-
sion that I was going to make [only] one film” (Ledoux 1). Unlike other
directors associated with the French New Wave at that time, Varda did
not have a vast storehouse of images and narratives from Hollywood or
European films in her head, nor did she have a network of friends in
the film industry with whom she could collaborate on La Pointe Courte.
What skills, predilections, and commitments did Agnès Varda bring
to the first film in her long and productive career? One important inspira-
tion for the making of La Pointe Courte was the eponymous neighbor-
hood in the town of Sète. Sète is a small city of forty thousand in the
Languedoc-Roussillon region of southern France, far from the fash-
ionable Côte d’Azur and even further from Paris. Like so much else in
France, the filmmaking industry had always been heavily centralized,
with the vast majority of personnel and production companies situated
in the capital. Yet Varda chose Sète as the location for La Pointe Courte
for several reasons. She was clearly familiar with the town, having lived
there as a teenager during the war; Sète is also where she would meet
Vilar, who hired her as a photographer in 1951. Not only did she have
connections and close friends in the town, she loved its landscape. In a
1961 interview, Varda said, “It’s the place that gave rise to the film. . . .
I had the very precise sensation that there was something to discover
in La Pointe Courte . . . the response to a particular problem resided
in a place” (Ledoux 7–8).
The neighborhood of La Pointe Courte is a small strip of land sur-
rounded by a large tidal pool that in the 1950s supported a vital shellfish
industry. Varda uses this landscape in two ways. First, on a purely formal
level, she explores the neighborhood’s unusual textures and shapes cre-
ated by the presence of fishing nets, ropes, small boat-building ateliers,
steel structures, and wooden shacks. Second, she takes acute interest in
the fishermen and their families: how they live and speak, their political
struggles with the fisheries bureaucracy, and the rhythms of courtship,
birth, marriage, and death. Yet Varda’s interest in language and her love
of the people and places in and around Sète cannot, in the end, fully
explain the emergence of this unusual film.

In addition to the story of the villagers, Varda tells a second story,
about a couple visiting La Pointe Courte from Paris. And this is one of
the most startling aspects of La Pointe Courte: it possesses a dual struc-
ture whose narrative lines scarcely intersect. The film tells two stories,
one concerning the daily difficulties and small pleasures experienced
by ordinary fishermen and the other of an educated couple from Paris
vacationing in the fishing village where the man was raised (thereby put-
ting him in a slippery position as both local and visitor and making him
the only potential point of narrative intersection). The couple, whom
Varda does not name, is struggling through a period of malaise in their
four-year-old marriage. Varda has often noted that she was inspired
by William Faulkner’s Wild Palms, a novel that also oscillates between
two storylines, that of a convict attempting to survive a flood in 1920s
Mississippi and that of an adulterous couple in the late 1930s who run
away together and face poverty, an unplanned pregnancy, and a frantic
attempt to procure an abortion. There are no obvious connections be-
tween the two stories in Faulkner’s novel. Varda’s film, likewise, braids
together two stories while forging few links between them. As Neupert
notes, many New Wave directors, Varda included, were unusually gifted
at describing their filmmaking goals and practice. In a 1962 interview,
she speaks of her film’s structure, emphasizing the film’s challenge to
the spectator.
I had a very clear plan for La Pointe Courte: it was to present two themes,
that, while not really contradictory, were problems that canceled one another
out when set side by side. They were, first, a couple reconsidering their
relationship, and second, a village that is trying to resolve several collective
problems of survival. The film was made up of chapters, so while the two
themes were never mixed together there was the possibility for the spectator
to oppose or superimpose them. (Neupert 59–60)
The film’s movement back and forth between the two stories was thus not
intended to generate meaning in and of itself. We are not, for example,
asked to valorize the community over the couple or vice versa, nor are
we asked to view the villagers as pathetic provincials or the couple as
alienated intellectuals. Instead, the two stories, both respectful of their
subjects, sit alongside one another, occasionally sharing the same space,
presenting different registers of human problems. All we can say with
12 | Agnès Varda

certainty about the relationship between the two narrative threads is
that the town’s slow rhythms and startling landscapes seem to soften
the couple’s frustration with one another and render a provisional rec-
onciliation possible.
Varda’s use of style is just as unusual as her construction of narrative.
La Pointe Courte begins with a lengthy tracking shot that moves down a
small street flanked by the modest homes of fishermen before coming to
rest on a fisheries inspector who stealthily observes the neighborhood.
The camera weaves in and out of the small homes nearby as news of
the inspector’s presence travels through the community. The villagers,
notably the Saldino family, resist the inspectors’ attempts to search their
homes and to regulate where they can fish. Down the street, a mother
feeds spaghetti to her large family and cares for her sick toddler. The
film’s opening thus economically introduces one strand of the plot, that
of the lives of the villagers, while signaling one of Varda’s key stylistic
strategies in the film, the use of a mobile, fluid camera that is unusually
attentive to the objects, landscapes, and daily rhythms of a particular
milieu. Neupert aptly sums up Varda’s use of style in La Pointe Courte:
“An elegantly restless camera, deliberate character gesture and motion,
crisp use of shadow, long shot durations (the average shot length is
sixteen seconds), and evocative depth of field make Varda’s film one of
the most unusual and beautiful motion pictures of 1950s France” (62).
In the second scene, the film introduces its other narrative line, the
couple from Paris whose marriage is faltering. Although the two parts of
the narrative—the daily lives of the villagers and the couple in crisis—are
relatively autonomous, they are sometimes linked spatially. We catch our
first glimpse of the unnamed male character (Philippe Noiret), who lives in
Paris but is vacationing in his childhood home, in a characteristically dense
composition. The camera weaves through hanging laundry flapping in the
breeze on a sunny quay, capturing village women working and laughing.
In the background of the frame, a boy passes by in a rowboat, drawing our
attention to the depth and density of the frame. We see the man, Noiret,
from behind and overhead as he navigates through the hanging laundry,
chats with old friends, and goes to the train station to pick up his wife
(Silvia Monfort), who is arriving from Paris.
Just as our introduction to the man is understated, the appearance of
the woman, too, is handled in an unusual way. The man and the woman

enter the frame together from the bottom right of the frame, their backs
to the viewer, and then walk deep into the background and out of the
frame. They continue to walk while the camera remains behind them.
Access to the woman’s face is thus delayed for several minutes until
finally a straight-on close-up of her face occurs, followed by a high-
angle moving shot of the couple walking. Such unusual stylistic choices
occur throughout the film. Instead of using conventional two-shots and
analytical cutting, Varda often films the backs of characters’ heads, uses
unexpectedly high or low angles, and employs tracking shots that are
either unusually lengthy or that arc in unpredictable ways. Her com-
positions frequently emphasize objects (fishing nets, tools) or textures
(metal and wood) over humans. Varda’s style is seldom used to support
narrative action in a clear, direct way, although her use of style sometimes
underscores the tensions in the couple’s relationship. For example, at
one point during the couple’s initial walk through the neighborhood,
they pause on the left side of the frame, mid-ground, as a gigantic train
moves slowly and menacingly along the track toward the camera. “We
should separate,” the wife says over the grating sound of the train during
the enforced pause in their progress. More frequently, however, Varda’s
compositions and mobile framing sensitize the viewer to the textures
and the graphic qualities of the town’s landscapes. The female character
is often associated with man-made metal, while the male character is
related visually to more natural material, such as wood. Regardless, the
film is impossible to predict as it unfolds. Tensions ebb and flow, ten-
derness is proferred, then refused as the couple walks through varied
landscapes and settles into their rented room. Style, far from serving to
support or clarify the plot, often draws attention to itself, seemingly for
its own sake.
La Pointe Courte departs, then, like so many European art films,
from classical causality and narrative clarity in favor of the foreground-
ing of its unusual structure and style. Varda specifically attributes her
decision to tell two relatively isolated stories to her exposure to Bertolt
Brecht’s ideas while working at the Théâtre National Populaire:
The narrative doesn’t flow smoothly. It’s jerky and uneven. It’s almost
Brechtian. At the time, I was with Jean Vilar, listening to Brecht’s theories.
It was the idea of Brechtian distanciation. You start listening to the couple
14 | Agnès Varda

and then bam! Stop. You distance yourself. You see the fishermen, their
social lives, the difficult economic conditions they live in, you start to get
into it and then bam! Stop. Distance. Back to the couple. It could be seen
as the clash between private life and social life, which can never be joined
(Varda, La Pointe Courte DVD commentary).
Varda’s acknowledged inspirations and citations—Faulkner and Brecht—

situate her first film not so much in postwar French cinephilia, but
instead in the broader currents of mid-century modernism, with its
investment in experimental narrative forms, its refusal of spectacle and
easy emotion, and its implicit challenge to viewers.
Varda’s dialogue with modernism is particularly evident in the fourth
scene, one of the film’s richest in terms of dialogue and shot composi-
tion. Here the man and woman discuss their relationship while strolling
through varied landscapes amid fishing nets, lumber, and shacks. The
characters alternately express tenderness and anger. She wonders if they
truly love one another or merely stay together out of habit. He expresses
confidence in their love, but also frustration with her unhappiness and
her pessimistic prognosis of the relationship. Compositions that place
figures in several planes are the norm here; we often see the couple in
the foreground or the mid-ground against a background encompassing
the daily activities of villagers. In one shot, for example, the couple chats
in the middle of the frame while leaning on a wooden structure. Nets
hanging on wooden sticks surround the couple, while in the background
cyclists traverse the frame laterally. Close-ups of the couple occasionally
show their heads close together, but feature them looking in different
directions. Such shots evoke Picasso’s paintings that simultaneously show
a face frontally and in profile; they also anticipate the shots in Bergman’s
Persona that feature the heads of Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann,
strangely fused yet looking in different directions. Another shot, this
time taken from behind the wooden structure, features the couple in the
foreground with a rocky path extending out into the pond; the couple
moves into mid-frame and faces the water, backs to the camera, now
separated by nets and the rocky path. The shot composition, with its
clear graphic division of the figures of the man and woman by the rocky
path, suggests discord, and yet it is during this shot that the man says,
“But I won’t want to live any other way than with you; we chose one

another.” The viewer is kept off guard during such moments. Indeed,
throughout La Pointe Courte, it is often difficult to anticipate the couple’s
meandering movements and the fluctuating tone of their exchanges.
The film is startling not only for its setting, structure, and style, but
also for the couple’s conversations. Throughout the film, the man and
the woman walk and talk, analyzing with both bitterness and tenderness
their marriage of four years. Indeed, their meandering conversations
replace the dramatic events of a more traditional film. Apart from the
woman’s arrival in Sète and the couple’s departure at the end of the film,
very little actually happens to them. They walk, talk, watch the jousting
tournament, and prepare to return to Paris. This relative lack of causal,
decisive, or dramatic events in the film was quite intentional. Varda later
said:
I was irritated because in the few films that I had seen, it always seemed to
me that the films were preoccupied with dramas, crises, things that hap-
pened; for example . . . we see stories where the couples divorce or fight
or rather a lover arrives or rather one of the two dies. I find that too many
things always happen. . . . we never pay attention to the things between
those two moments when the people no longer love one another quite
enough but you see that they still love one another. . . . this is the case with
the couple of La Pointe Courte which is a couple on the way down, but it’s
still a couple (Ledoux 8).
This attempt to explore the “in-between” moments in the life of a couple

during long, meandering walks through a distinctive and decisively shot
landscape is something that links Varda to other European modernist
filmmakers in the 1950s and 1960s. A year earlier, Rossellini’s Viaggio in
Italia (Journey to Italy, 1954) had told the story of a middle-aged cou-
ple whose marriage has soured due to resentment and boredom, while
Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) featured protracted conversa-
tions between a man and a woman in the bars and streets of Hiroshima.
Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960), Une femme est
une femme (A Woman Is a Woman, 1961), and Le Mépris (Contempt,
1963) each contains extended scenes in which couples flirt and argue.
Antonioini’s L’Eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962) opens in the middle of one
couple’s breakup, pairs the woman with a new man, but then concludes
with the disappearance of the protagonists from the plot altogether. Prior
16 | Agnès Varda

to that, L’Avventura (1960) eliminated one of its female protagonists
early on, formed a new couple with the missing woman’s boyfriend and
her best friend, and then concluded with the probable dissolution of the
new couple. This way of treating romantic relationships—foreground-
ing tension, inertia, repetition, and uncertainty—seems a particularly
significant feature of modernist European cinema of the 1950s and early
1960s. The journey of such couples is neither an inexorable drive toward
union nor a clear rupture, but instead an uneven and unpredictable ex-
perience often characterized by abrupt tonal shifts, dialogue that trails
off or is opaque, and lingering uncertainty as to the couple’s future at the
film’s conclusion. Such couples, sometimes highly verbal and sometimes
frustratingly silent, seem very far indeed from both classical Hollywood
and conventional European cinema of the 1950s.
Varda’s couple is distinctive, even in the context of European art cin-
ema, and I argue that it is derived in large part from her direction of the
performances of Noiret and Monfort. These performances are intrigu-
ing both for their departure from the highly polished, professional, and
psychologically realistic performance styles in 1950s “quality” French
cinema and for Varda’s rare mixing of de-dramatized and naturalistic act-
ing styles. Experienced theater actors, Noiret and Monfort deliver liter-
ary, even overtly poetic dialogue in a relatively flat fashion, with minimal
modulation in volume or tone. Such austere performances result in the
generation of little emotion in the viewers and instead encourage us to
analyze the couple’s dilemma and try to understand the causes of their
frustration with one another. Jean Vilar, director of the Théâtre National
Populaire and Varda’s employer, was at this time also aiming for a style of
acting that avoided the extremes of both the actor’s complete “disappear-
ance” into the character and a radical Brechtian distanciation between
actor and character (Loyer 171). While Varda has not pointed to Vilar’s
acting philosophy as a particular influence on La Pointe Courte, it seems
likely that her direction of her actors was at least partly influenced by
her exposure to the performances she saw at the TNP. She certainly had
a specific style in mind for the performances of Noiret and Monfort. In
her 1994 autobiography, Varda explains that she wanted her actors to
sound as if they were reading their lines, not enacting them. “I wanted
the actors neither to act nor to express feelings, [only] to be there and

to say their dialogue as if they were reading it. In fact, I was thinking of
the narrators of oriental performances [and] of Egyptian sculptures of
kneeling couples or of pairs of recumbent sculptures in dark churches”
(Varda, Varda par Agnès, 44). Varda’s goal in representing the couple was
clearly not to create the impression of verisimilitude. She said as much in
a 1961 interview: “I wanted [the couple] to seem artificial [faux]. I didn’t
want people to identify with them. So I wanted them to have a certain
tone, to say things in a literary fashion, a bit stereotyped, things that in
other circumstances would be said differently. It is obvious that a couple
explaining themselves to one another does not speak like that. I wanted
this fabricated [way of speaking] to be represented theatrically, if you like.
It is a theater of the couple” (Ledoux 13). Varda was aiming specifically
for an impression of rigidity, of stasis. “As I was a photographer, I like
things that do not move. I really like portraits . . . La Pointe Courte is not
well edited. It moves from one place to another without continuity. So,
because there is no continuity, there was no obligation to have a lot of
movement. Basically, it’s like a recitative. I see it a bit like an opera; people
plant themselves and they sing. They talk. I didn’t want it to seem at all
real” (Ledoux 14). The hieratic poses of Noiret and Monfort and their
highly literary dialogue were quite unusual in the 1950s. Not everyone
understood or appreciated these performances, but Varda was unwittingly
in step with some of the most radical filmmakers of her day, Jacques Tati
and Robert Bresson among them, who in different ways, both from one
another and from Varda, also created de-dramatized performances.
The performances Varda elicited were significant not only for their
overt artificiality and absence of affect, but also for their juxtaposition
with the naturalistic performances of the villagers. The villagers, played
by nonprofessional actors who were actually residents of La Pointe
Courte, possess relatively mobile faces and bodies with which they ex-
press conventional facsimiles of emotions such as affection and grief.
Moreover, in contrast to the couple, the villagers use vernacular
language. “We’ve already shat out half our crap,” a middle-aged woman
says to her husband in reference to their life trajectory. It is difficult to
find precursors for Varda’s particular juxtaposition of an austere acting
style from her professional actors with a vibrant, naturalistic style of act-
ing from the nonprofessionals. It is as if Varda had been inspired by the
workers’ performances in Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948) and
18 | Agnès Varda

Varda working with a nonprofessional actor
on La Pointe Courte (1955). © Ciné-Tamaris
had also anticipated Antonioni’s alienated couples in L’Avventura and

The Eclipse. This mixture of acting styles is similar to the postneorealist
cinema of Rossellini, notably Stromboli (1950) and Journey to Italy, films
that also juxtapose urban northern intellectuals with southern rural la-
borers. And like both of those Italians working in the wake of neorealism,
Varda’s loyalties were divided; she is essentially a creature of the North,
but she can claim some affiliation to (certainly affinity for) the southern
community. She hovers between local and tourist. It is hard to argue,
however, for a direct neorealist influence, since Varda was unfamiliar
with the work of Rossellini or any other Italian directors at this stage of
her career. Instead Varda’s immersion in modernism (in both the literary
and the visual arts) and her exposure to Vilar’s theatrical experiments
appear to have shaped her audacious direction of performance.
Despite the apparent unlikelihood of Varda’s venturing into filmmak-
ing, much less engaging in unusual experiments in shot composition and
acting, she had long immersed herself in art and literature of all kinds.
Upon graduating from high school in Paris, Varda lived with friends in
an apartment near Pigalle and did little else but read modernist fiction
and poetry for an entire year (Varda, personal interview with the author,

2013). As a young woman in Paris, Varda surrounded herself with artists
from Sète, notably the Schlengel sisters. Andrée Schlengel, an engraver,
eventually married TNP director Jean Vilar. Valentine (Linou) Schlengel,
Varda’s closest adolescent friend, studied fine arts in Montpellier and
became a ceramicist and sculptor. Varda speaks of Linou Schlengel’s
influence on her at length in her 1994 autobiography: “She knew how to
take the time to look and shared with me her quest for beauty in forms
as varied as they were unexpected. From the sarcophagi at the Louvre
to the leprous walls of the suburbs, from a piece of fruit cut open to
the abstractions of Nicolas de Stael, from a pebble to a jewel” (Varda,
Varda par Agnès, 22). By the time she was in her early twenties, Varda
had a network of friends, working artists, who lived near or with her
in the 14th arrondissement in Paris. Although Varda may have been
uneducated about the procedures of filmmaking when she set out to
make La Pointe Courte, she had long conceived of herself as an artist
capable of launching ambitious projects.
Varda was also entirely at home with the principles of visual compo-
sition and literary experimentation. Varda’s taste for theater, literature,
and painting—she has often evoked her specific predilection for Re-
naissance painting, the work of Picasso, and the literature of Faulkner,
Dos Passos, and Woolf—were wide-ranging and shaped by her formal
schooling as well as her community of artist friends in Paris. She wrote
in her autobiography, “I loved the arts; the only magazine I bought was
Beaux Arts and the Cubist revolution seemed much more important to
me than the Russian one” (Varda, Varda par Agnès, 38). She used the
resources and skills she had at hand: a modest inheritance from her
father, a loan from her mother, the assistance of loyal friends, generous
actors at the TNP, and her experience as a photographer. But one also
must assume that the postwar climate of France, with its burgeoning
arts scene designed to encourage nonprofessionals to participate in the-
ater, music, ciné-clubs, or book clubs, along with the ongoing vitality
of modernism in the visual and literary arts, created an atmosphere in
which Varda’s experimentation seemed not only feasible but essential.
Varda’s personal energy and insatiable desire to experiment, it would
seem, have fueled her career from the beginning, but external forces
in French culture have also shaped her career. We will explore some of
these in the section on Varda’s second feature, Cleo from 5 to 7.
20 | Agnès Varda

The importance of La Pointe Courte for French film history lies as
much in its mode of production as in its unusual plot structure, dense
shot compositions, and its mélange of acting styles. By the mid-1950s,
the French film industry had long been characterized by the presence of
many small, independent production companies that managed to make
only a few films per year, but La Pointe Courte’s mode of production was
extremely artisanal even by French standards, notably because Varda
produced the film herself. She formed her own production company
in August 1954 and named it Tamaris (tamarisk) in reference to the
ornamental tree found in the Mediterranean. The film’s budget was
seven million old francs (or $14,000) (Neupert 57) at a time when the
typical film budget was closer to 150 million, with coproductions costing
Varda shooting La Pointe Courte (1955).

© Ciné-Tamaris

as much as 250 million francs (Crisp 86). Having no access to traditional
sources of financing, Varda funded the production using a small inheri-
tance she received from her father and a loan from her mother, while
the cast and crew worked for shares in a cooperative (Neupert 57). The
residents of Sète who played the roles of the villagers donated their time
and effort to the production. The size of the budget and the production’s
cooperative structure were thus highly unusual, as was Varda’s decision
to film on location, far from the centralized film studios of Boulogne,
outside Paris.
The shoot took place from August 10 to September 31, 1954. Varda
had done a considerable amount of scouting beforehand and had taken
many photographs that would provide inspiration for shot compositions:
“[C]ertain photos that I had taken while scouting were so interesting . . .
for their framing or as atmosphere, that I tried to find on the shoot the
exact conditions of décor or lighting or the type of characters” (Ledoux
69–70). The cast and crew lived together in an inexpensive rented house
near a Shell oil refinery that was located ten kilometers from Sète. Varda
slept in the garage next to the used car she had purchased for the shoot.
The only professional actors in the film were Noiret and Monfort, who
were on vacation from the TNP; all the other characters were played
by the generous inhabitants of Sète. The cinematographer, Louis Stein,
at thirty-two the oldest member of the crew, had already worked as
a cameraman for Jacques Becker, Yves Allégret, and André Cayette.
The film was shot silent because Varda could not afford synchronous
sound recording, but a sound recorder was on hand to record ambient
sound and voice. The sound recorder often malfunctioned, however,
so Varda had to reconstruct the dialogue track in Paris (Mardiguian).
Carlos Vilardebo, who had worked as an assistant director and would
become a director himself eventually, helped Varda with all manner of
practical things, such as the rental of the camera and lights; his wife,
Jane Vilardebo, served as script supervisor, production secretary, and
daily transporter of rushes to the train bound for Paris. The rushes
were screened at a local cinema, the Colisée, where the completed
film would be shown a year later to the townspeople. Varda’s childhood
friend, Valentine Schlengel, served as artistic advisor, while Bienvenida
Llorca, Varda’s friend and neighbor, came down from Paris to cook and
do laundry for the crew. Llorca served as an extra in the film as well,
22 | Agnès Varda

hanging up laundry on the quay.1 The cast and crew worked from 7:00
am to 8:00 pm each day and at the beginning of the shoot worked for
twenty-eight days in a row without a break (Varda, Ciné-Tamaris Archive,
La Pointe Courte).
Once the film was shot, Varda returned to Paris and started looking
for an editor who would be willing to work for shares in the cooperative
instead of for cash. She was advised to contact Alain Resnais, already
known for his short documentaries on art and artists, notably Van Gogh
(1948), Guernica (1950), and Gauguin (1950). Resnais had also codi-
rected, with Chris Marker, Les Statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die,
1953), a film whose critique of French colonialism and the commercial-
ization of African art caused it to be banned in France for fifteen years
after it was made (Wilson 22). Varda asked Resnais to consider editing
the film in the fall of 1954, some months before Resnais would begin
working on Night and Fog. Resnais hesitated repeatedly before agreeing
to work with Varda, in part because he felt that her aesthetic pursuits
resembled too closely his own goals (Varda, Varda par Agnès, 46). But
he eventually accepted the job and, over the course of several months,
whittled ten hours of rushes down to one and a half. Varda expressed
gratitude in her autobiography that Resnais had retained the film’s slow
pace instead of imposing a new, faster rhythm on it (Ibid.).
When it came time to distribute La Pointe Courte, Varda’s chal-
lenges were not over. In 1954, Bastide reports, when Varda created her
production company, she had registered it with the Centre National
de la Cinémathographie (CNC) as a producer of short films because
she did not have the required capital to register as a feature filmmaker
(Bastide, “La Pointe Courte,” 31–36). Varda wrote to the CNC in August
1954 to request authorization to transform her status from a producer
of short films to a producer of features. The CNC proposed two solu-
tions: increase Tamaris’s start-up capital from one million francs to five
million francs or join forces with a coproducer already authorized to
produce feature films. Neither solution was possible for Varda, so the
company retained its status as a maker of short films, which made the
legal theatrical distribution of Varda’s feature-length La Pointe Courte
impossible.
The film’s exhibition thus took place largely in the noncommercial sec-
tor of the ciné-club. For a film that never received a traditional theatrical

release, La Pointe Courte generated an extraordinary amount of attention,
largely positive. This attention was initiated by critic André Bazin, to whom
Varda had shown La Pointe Courte upon the advice of Resnais. Bazin
liked the film and advised Varda to do several things: organize a private
screening of the film at a cinema in Cannes during the 1955 Cannes Film
Festival; advertise the screening in Film Français, the film industry’s trade
paper; and invite critics and industry professionals to the projection (Varda,
“Hommage à André Bazin”). Varda took Bazin’s advice and benefited
from the numerous positive reviews that emerged from the screening,
including those written by Bazin himself.
Bazin saw in La Pointe Courte a kind of personal filmmaking that
corresponded precisely to a notion of cinema for which he had been
advocating since the late 1940s in his film criticism and lectures. Bazin
argued for a modern cinema that was innovative in terms of its style
and storytelling strategies, yet designed for a broader audience than
that of the 1920s avant-garde. In his reviews of La Pointe Courte, Bazin
approvingly distinguishes La Pointe Courte from the 1920s avant-garde
of “formal audacity” and “retarded surrealism” (La Cinématographie
française). The film’s narrative “possesses the nuances and slow devel-
opment of a novel” and the plot displays an “unexpected and necessary
relationship . . . [to its] geographical and human landscape” (Bazin, La
Cinématographie française). Bazin again distanced La Pointe Courte
from the 1920s avant-garde a few months later in the pages of Cahiers
du cinéma, stating that the film is “really far from the formal research and
the negation of subject that characterized the avant-garde of 1925 (“Petit
Journal”). Instead, Bazin approvingly notes, La Pointe Courte “is akin
to an intimate diary or, better yet, to a story in the first person that one
put, for the sake of discretion, into the third person.” Well known for his
appreciation of Italian Neorealist cinema, Bazin gave the highest compli-
ment to Varda by linking her film to Visconti’s La Terra Trema (1948),
another realist film set in a southern European fishing town; however,
he notes, Varda’s work is distinctive in its separation of the couple’s story
from that of the community (Bazin, La Cinématographie française). In
an article titled “Agnès and Roberto,” Bazin again associated Varda with
Italian Neorealism by linking La Pointe Courte to Roberto Rossellini’s
Journey to Italy.2 A few months later, Bazin wrote again in Parisien
Libéré of Varda’s particular brand of realism, noting its combination of
24 | Agnès Varda

simplicity and stylization: “Everything in it is simple and natural and,
at the same time, shorn and composed” (“La Pointe courte”). Bazin
was also struck by the film’s mode of production. In the same essay,
he wrote that the very existence of the film was “miraculous” and that
one would have to go back to Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un poète (Blood of a
Poet, 1930) to find a film “as free from all commercial contingencies in
its conception.” Varda’s unusual decision to form a cooperative among
the cast and crew was remarked upon by several film critics, as was the
film’s low budget. Another critic compared La Pointe Courte favorably
to Max Ophüls’s Lola Montès (1955), which was made the same year,
but for sixty times the cost (Davay).
Although most of the film reviews of La Pointe Courte were positive,
critics occasionally registered disapproval of Varda’s aesthetic choices.
Georges Charensol, editor of Nouvelles Littéraires and Cannes insider,
found Varda’s careful compositions “gratuitous” and objected to the film’s
dual structure. Critic and filmmaker François Truffaut (who had yet to
release a feature himself) found the shots “a little too ‘framed’” (“un peu
trop ‘cadrés’”), the dialogue too theatrical and “laborious,” and Varda’s
direction of Monfort and Noiret too “uncertain.” Truffaut’s review is
oddly malicious; he muses that Varda’s resemblance to her leading man
is not accidental and then facetiously expresses anxiety that he has spent
too much time writing about the film’s form over its content because
“it was the surest way to avoid writing the stupidities expected by the
very cerebral director.” Jacques Siclier also denigrated Varda for her
supposedly excessive intelligence: “So much intellectualism in a young
woman is distressing” (Varda, Varda par Agnès, 40).
These few dissenting voices aside, the film received enthusiastic
reviews and remained in the public attention for quite some time after
its initial screening in Cannes. La Pointe Courte was screened once more
in Paris on June 12, 1955, at the Cinéma du Panthéon, an important
art house founded in 1930 by Pierre Braunberger, who had been in the
audience with André Bazin at the private screening the previous fall.
Next the film was shown at the Studio Parnasse on every Tuesday evening
in January 1956. The Studio Parnasse was a particularly advantageous
venue for La Pointe Courte. It was known to have some of the best
film programming in Paris and its director, Jean-Louis Chéray, hosted
lively discussions after the screenings. Eleven thousand viewers saw the

film at the Studio Parnasse, including François Truffaut (again), Chris
Marker, Marguerite Duras, and Natalie Sarraute, another nouveau ro-
man adherent who would become one of Varda’s friends (Varda, Varda
par Agnès). The film was also screened in Sète at the Colisée cinema
in 1955 and every ten years thereafter. Until its 1994 release on video
and its 2007 release on DVD, the film in which Varda learned to “take
an interest” in the world she documented was nearly impossible to see.
Nevertheless, La Pointe Courte had an outsized impact on film culture
due to its unusual combination of realism and stylization, which ap-
pealed to influential tastemakers such as André Bazin, and as a result
of its independent, low-budget mode of production, which would serve
as a model for New Wave filmmakers in the late 1950s and beyond.
Structure and Digression: The Early Short Documentaries

After Varda made her first feature, it was not at all obvious that a long,
successful career as a filmmaker lay ahead of her. She continued to
work as a photographer for the Théâtre National Populaire and trav-
eled to China in 1957 for a photography project. Varda also made three
short documentaries in the late 1950s: Ô saisons, Ô chateaux (1957),
L’Opéra-Mouffe (1958), and Du côté de la côte (1958). The decision to
make short films might seem odd, given that she had already made a
critically celebrated feature-length film. In fact, making shorts was a
logical and highly beneficial move on her part. From the 1940s through
the 1960s in France, short films were ubiquitous, initially because they
were quite profitable. A 1940 law had outlawed the double feature and
put in place a mechanism whereby 3 percent of the gross receipts of a
full program (the short plus the feature film) would go to the producer
of the short film (Porcile 15). The practice continued after the war,
when the typical program consisted of a ten-minute newsreel, a short
documentary, a trailer of the following week’s feature, and finally the
feature. Most short films were documentaries and fell into one of several
well-developed subgenres: the scientific film, the film about art, and
the pedagogical film, which could focus on anything from coal mining
to barge construction.
Not only was the short film lucrative, it enjoyed an extraordinary aes-
thetic richness in postwar France. Thanks in part to the ciné-club move-
26 | Agnès Varda

ment and the active critical community, directors of short documentaries
were seen as auteurs. Jean Painlevé had been making surrealism-infused
documentaries about wildlife since the 1920s. Jean Vigo’s A propos de
Nice (1930) had shown that one could document specific places and
social realities while exploring avant-garde aesthetics. Georges Franju’s
Le Sang des bêtes (Blood of the Beasts, 1949) is both a pedagogical film
focusing on a specific work environment, the slaughterhouse, as well as a
poetic portrait of a working-class neighborhood. Alain Resnais had been
making short films about art since the late 1940s and had become well
known for his documentary about the Holocaust, Night and Fog (1955).
Also contributing to the richness of the documentary short in postwar
France was the emergence of audacious and respected producers such
as Anatole Dauman, who gave Varda the opportunity to make Du côté
de la côte (1958). Dauman’s Argos Films produced Resnais’s Night and
Fog and Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Marker’s Lettre de Sibérie (Letter
from Siberia, 1957), Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronique d’un été
(Chronicle of a Summer, 1961), and Marker’s La Jetée (1962). Varda’s
choice to make short films not only made economic sense, but it al-
lowed her to join the ranks of respected directors creating aesthetically
innovative short films. It also allowed her to play the part of the tourist,
literally plotting out her productions using guidebooks, a role that aptly
characterized the next phase in her journey as a peripatetic filmmaker.
Ô saisons, Ô chateaux (1957)

Varda’s first short film, Ô saisons, Ô chateaux, was commissioned by
the Office National du Tourisme (ONT, National Tourism Board) and
designed to promote the castles of France’s Loire Valley. For this project,
Resnais, who had edited La Pointe Courte, recommended Varda to pro-
ducer Pierre Braunberger, another risk-taking producer. Braunberger
had been active in the film industry since the late 1920s, having produced
Jean Renoir’s La Chienne (1931) and Partie de campagne (A Day in the
Country, 1936), Jean Rouch’s Moi, un noir (1958), and Resnais’s short
films on art. Braunberger recommended Varda to the ONT, which in
turn offered the commission to Varda. Varda certainly understood the
value of making a professional connection with Braunberger but did not
feel an immediate connection to the film’s subject. Nevertheless, she
departed on a scouting trip with two tools in hand: her Rolleiflex camera

Varda scouting locations for Ô saisons,
Ô chateaux (1957). © Ciné-Tamaris
and Hachette’s Guide Bleu for the region. The tourist guide served as
a tool for planning her scouting visits, but more than this it inspired the
structure of her film.
Ô saisons, Ô chateaux presents an inventory of castles whose ar-
chitectural features are explained by a voice-over, voiced by Danièle
Delorme, a well-known actress who had played ingénue roles in Jac-
queline Audry’s Gigi (1949) and Minne, l’ingénue libertine (1950). The
film initially purports to offer a celebratory history of French royal ar-
chitecture that moves from bulky defensive fortresses to the glories of
the Renaissance, but in fact, as Varda has stated, the architectural history
28 | Agnès Varda

takes up only eight minutes of the twenty-two-minute film (Varda, Varda
par Agnès, 74). In the other fourteen minutes, Varda departs from the
architectural chronology in witty and surprising ways. For example, a
shot of a fortress gives way to a shot of a model wearing a fur hat and
carrying a white fur muff, and then to a shot containing animal heads
mounted on a wall, suggesting a link between beautiful women and
trophy animals on display. No obvious explanation is provided for the
sudden appearance of fashion models in the film; they seem at first
merely to be a visual joke on Varda’s part. Later, when the models ap-
pear once again, they stroll slowly around the terraces of Chambord
wearing colorful, formal haute couture gowns borrowed from designer
Jacques Heim. The models in their elegant gowns evoke the leisurely
lives and decorative functions of aristocratic women. In a series of long
takes, Varda shows us the fabric of the gorgeous gowns fluttering in the
breeze, but ultimately she is more interested in the castles’ caretakers.
The voice-over tells us, “François I probably never imagined that the
365 rooms, complete with fireplaces, would be neither furnished nor
inhabited except during brief Court visits. Or that those who would enjoy
the palace most would be three generations of caretakers.” A caretaker
standing proudly in front of Chambord holds his family photo while the
voice-over exhorts us to pay honor to this dynasty: “Meet the caretakers’
branch of the Chambord family.”
A pattern is established, and the film then alternates between an
architectural history and digressions through the decorative, the appar-
ently marginal, or the half-forgotten. These detours take many forms: the
stylized movements of gardeners set to a jazz soundtrack, an encounter
with the last remaining trained stonecutter, a clip from the 1908 film
L’assassinat du Duc de Guise (André Calmettes and Charles Le Bargy)
during the section on the Chateau de Blois, and images of the work of
an amateur painter Varda met on a scouting trip who painted only on
Sundays and only the castles of the Loire (Varda, Varda par Agnès, 74).
Such passages supply humor, variety, and even an alternative way of
looking at history in the sense that apparently marginal actors (workers,
notably) are given as much attention as the royal figures that inhabited
the chateaux of the Loire. As she did with La Pointe Courte and with
later films such as Documenteur (1981), Vagabond, and The Gleaners

and I, Varda asks viewers to look closely and admiringly at the lives of
apparently ordinary people.
With her first documentary, then, Varda established an organiza-
tional structure she would use again and again: create a clear structure,
whether a travelogue, a typology, or an inventory of some kind, and then
supplement it with digressive, witty, or more personal material. The film
was well-received critically; it was selected for the 1958 Cannes Film
Festival and the Festival de Tours, a festival of short films where she
met her future husband Jacques Demy, and screened in theaters before
an adaptation of Molière’s Bourgeois gentilhomme (Jean Meyer, 1958).
Du côté de la côte (1958)

Varda made another short documentary for the ONT, Du côté de la côte
(1958), produced by Anatole Dauman and designed to promote the
Riviera as a tourist destination. As with Ô saisons, Ô chateaux, Varda
enjoyed a more professional mode of production; both films were shot
with a professional crew, in 35mm and in Eastman color. For Du côté
de la côte Varda was granted eight weeks to shoot a thirty-minute film.
But she nevertheless found it challenging: how to construct a compelling
documentary about a region that connoted glamour and superficial tour-
ism? Jean Vigo had already documented the poetic and the exploitative
aspects of Riviera tourism with A propos de Nice in 1930. In 1952, Paul
Paviot made Saint-Tropez, devoir de vacances, which likewise took a
gently ironic look at the desires and habits of tourists in the south of
France. And Roger Vadim’s Et Dieu créa . . . la femme (And God Cre-
ated Woman, 1955) created a durable link between the Côte d’Azur,
Brigitte Bardot, and eroticism. How to say something fresh about this
region? Varda opted for a heterogeneous and witty pastiche that both
documents the “exotic” places of the Côte d’Azur and questions its status
as a kind of Garden of Eden.
Once again, Varda turned to an Hachette Guide Bleu as her inspira-
tion, and once again she established a strong central structure for Du
côté de la côte. The guidebook’s litany of places and names provided her
central idea for the film: “I chose [to focus on] exoticism: the Russian
Church of Nice, the mosque of Fréjus, the exotic gardens and private
villas.” As she did with her first documentary, Varda fills her film with
30 | Agnès Varda

Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
Sixth Meditation.
The Inspiration Of The Scriptures.
I have read the sacred volumes over and over again, I have
perused them in very different dispositions of mind, at one time
studying them as great historical documents, at another admiring
them as sublime works of poetry. I have experienced an
extraordinary impression, quite different from either curiosity or
admiration. I have felt myself the listener of a language other than
that of the chronicler or the poet; and under the influence of a
breath issuing from other sources than human. Not that man does
not occupy a great place in the sacred volumes; he displays himself
there, on the contrary, with all his passions, his vices, his
weaknesses, his ignorance, his errors; the Hebrew people shows
itself rude, barbarous, changeable, superstitious, accessible to all
the imperfections, to all the failings, of other nations. But the
Hebrew is not the sole actor in his history; he has an Ally, a
Protector, a Master, who intervenes incessantly to command,
inspire, direct, strike, or save. God is there, always present, acting
—
"Et ce n'est pas un Dieu comme vos dieux frivoles, Insensibles

et sourds, impuissants, mutilés, De bois, de marbre, ou d'or,
comme vous le voulez." [Footnote 28]
"Not such a god as are your friv'lous gods, Insensible and deaf,
weak, mutilated, Of wood, or stone, or gold, as you will have
them."
[Footnote 28: Corneille, Polyeucte, acte iv. sc. 3.]

It is the God One and Supreme, All Powerful, the Creator, the
Eternal. And even in their forgetfulness and their disobedience, the
Hebrews believe still in God: He is still the object at once of their
fear, of their hope, and of a faith that persists in the midst of the
infidelity of their lives. The Bible is no poem in which man recounts
and sings the adventures of his God combined with his own; it is a
real drama, a continued dialogue between God and man personified
in the Hebrews; it is, on the one side, God's will and God's action,
and, on the other, man's liberty and man's faith, now in pious
association, now at fatal variance.
The more I have perused the Scriptures, the more surprised I feel
that earnest readers should not have been impressed as I have
been, and that several should have failed to see the characteristic
of divine inspiration, so foreign to every other book, so remarkable
in this one. That men who absolutely deny all supernatural action
of God in the world, should not be more disposed to admit it in the
sources of the Bible than elsewhere, is perfectly comprehensible;
but the attack upon the divine inspiration of the sacred books has
another motive, and one more likely to prove contagious. It is not
without deep regret that I proceed in this place to contradict
ancient traditions, at once respected and respectable, and perhaps
to offend sober and sincere convictions. But my own conviction is
stronger than my regret, and it is still more so because
accompanied by another conviction, which is, that the system that
it is my intention to contest, has occasioned, continues to occasion,
and may still occasion, an immense ill to Christianity.
Whoever reads without prejudice in the Hebrew and Greek the

original texts of the Scriptures, whether of the Old or New
Testament, meets there often in the midst of their sublime
beauties, I do not say merely faults of style, but of grammar, in
violation of those logical and natural rules of language common to
all tongues. Are we to infer that these faults have the same origin
as the doctrines with which they are intermixed, and that they are
both divinely inspired? [Footnote 29]
[Footnote 29: I indicate, in a note placed at the end of
this volume, some instances of these grammatical faults
met with in the Scriptures, and to which it is impossible
to assign the character of divine inspiration.]
And yet this is what is pretended by fervent and learned men, who
maintain that all, absolutely all, in the Scriptures is divinely inspired
—the words as well as the ideas, all the words used upon all
subjects, the material of language as well as the doctrine which lies
at its base.
In this assertion I see but deplorable confusion, leading to profound

misapprehension both of the meaning and the object of the sacred
books. It was not God's purpose to give instruction to men in
grammar, and if not in grammar, neither was it, any more God's
purpose to give instruction in geology, astronomy, geography, or
chronology. It is on their relations with their Creator, upon duties of
men towards Him and towards each other, upon the rule of faith
and of conduct in life, that God has lighted them by light from
heaven. It is to the subject of religion and morals, and to these
alone, that the inspiration of the Scriptures is directed.
Amongst the principal arguments alleged to prove that everything

in the sacred volumes is divinely inspired, particular use has been
made of the Second Epistle of St. Paul to Timothy, where in effect
we find the passage:—
"All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for

doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in
righteousness:
"That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished

unto all good works." [Footnote 30]
[Footnote 30: 2 Timothy iii. 16, 17.]

Is it possible to determine in words of greater precision the
religious and moral object of the inspiration?
Appeal is made to a consideration of a different description. If, it is

said, we at the same time admit, on the one side, the inspiration of
the sacred books, and on the other, that this inspiration is not
universal and absolute, who shall make the selection between these
two parts?—who mark the limit of the inspiration?—who say which
texts, which passages are inspired, and which are not? So to divide
the Holy Scriptures is to strip them of their supernatural character,
to destroy their authenticity, by surrendering them to all the
incertitudes, all the disputes of men: a complete and uninterrupted
inspiration alone is capable of commanding faith.
Never-dying pretension of man's weakness! Created intelligent and

free, he proposes to use largely his intelligence and his freedom; at
the same time, conscious how feeble his means are, how
inadequate to his aspirations, he invokes a guide, a support; and
from the very moment that his hope fixes upon it, he will have it
immutable, infallible. He searches a fixed point to which to attach
himself with absolute and permanent assurance. In creating man,
God did not leave him without fixed points; the Divine revelation,
and the inspiration of the Scriptures, had precisely for object and
effect to supply these, but not on all subjects alike and without
distinction. I refer here again to what I lately said respecting the
separation of the finite and the infinite, of the world created, and of
its Creator. At the same time that the limits of the finite world are
those of human science, it is to human study and human science
that God has surrendered the finite world; it is not there that God
has set up his divine torch; He has dictated to Moses the laws
which regulate the duties of man towards God, and of man towards
man; but He has left to Newton the discovery of the laws which
preside over the universe. The Scriptures speak upon all subjects;
circumstances connected with the finite world are there incessantly
mixed with perspectives of infinity; but it is only to the latter, to
that future of which they permit us to snatch a view, and to the
laws which they impose upon men, that the divine inspiration
addresses itself; God only pours his light in quarters which man's
eye and man's labour cannot reach; for all that remains, the sacred
books speak the language used and understood by the generations
to whom they are addressed. God does not, even when He inspires
them, transport into future domains of science the interpreters He
uses, or the nations to whom He sends them; He takes them both
as He finds them, with their traditions, their notions, their degree of
knowledge or ignorance as respects the finite world, of its
phenomena and its laws. It is not the condition, the scientific
progress of the human understanding; it is the condition and moral
progress of the human soul which are the object of the Divine
action, and God requires not for the exercise of his power on the
human soul, science either as a precursor or a companion; He
addresses himself to instincts and desires the most intimate and
most sublime as well as the most universal in man's nature, to
instincts and desires of which science is neither the object nor the
measure, and which require to be satisfied from other sources.
Whatever true or false science we find in the Scriptures upon the
subject of the finite world, proceeds from the writers themselves or
their contemporaries; they have spoken as they believed, or as
those believed who surrounded them when they spoke: on the
other hand, the light thrown over the infinite, the law laid down,
and the perspective opened by that same light, these are what
proceed from God, and which He has inspired in the Scriptures.
Their object is essentially and exclusively moral and practical; they
express the ideas, employ the images, and speak the language best
calculated to produce a powerful effect upon the soul, to
regenerate and to save it. I open the Gospel according to St. Luke,
and I there read the admirable parable:—
"There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and
fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day:
"And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid
at his gate, full of sores,
"And desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich
man's table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores.
"And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by
the angels into Abraham's bosom: the rich man also died, and
was buried;
"And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth

Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.
"And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me,

and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water,
and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.
"But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime

receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things; but
now he is comforted, and thou art tormented.
"And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf
fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot;
neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence.
"Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest

send him to my father's house:
"For I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest
they also come into this place of torment.
"Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and the prophets;
let them hear them.
"And he said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them
from the dead, they will repent.
"And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the
prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from
the dead." [Footnote 31]
[Footnote 31: Luke xvi. 19-31.]
Was it the intention of Jesus, and of the Evangelist who has

repeated his words, to describe, as they really are, the condition of
men after their earthly existence, their positive local position after
God's judgment, and their relations either with each other or with
the world which they have quitted? Certainly not; the material
circumstances intermixed with this dialogue are only images
borrowed from actual common life. But what images so strike, so
penetrate the soul? What more solemn warning addressed to men
in this life, to rouse them to a sense of their duties towards God
and their fellow creatures, in the name of the mysterious future
that awaits them?
Nothing is further from my thought than to see in the sacred books

mere poetical images and symbols; those books are really, with
respect to the religious problems that beset man's thoughts, the
Light and the voice of God; still, that Light only lights, that voice
only reveals revelations of God with man, duties which God enjoins
men in the course of their present life, and prospects which He
opens to them beyond the imperfect and limited world where this
life passes. As for this life itself, it is the object of human study and
science, not of the inspiration of the sacred Scriptures. In
disregarding this limit, in pretending to attribute to the language of
the Scriptures, used with reference to the phenomena of the finite
world, the character of divine inspiration, men have fallen with
respect both to thought and act into deplorable errors. Hence
proceeded the trial of Galileo, and numerous other controversies,
numerous other condemnations still more absurd, still more to be
regretted, in which Christianity was immediately placed in
opposition to human science, and constrained to inflict or receive
remarkable disavowals. The same is the case at the present day
with respect to numerous objections made in the name of the
natural sciences to Christianity, and which from the learned circles
where they have their birth, spread over a world at once curious
and frivolous, where they cause the Christian faith itself to be
regarded as ignorant credulity. Nothing of this kind could ever
occur, no necessity of such conflict could await the Christian
religion, if on the one side the limits of human science, and on the
other those of divine inspiration, were recognised as they really are,
and respected according to their rightful claims.
I might cite in aid of the opinion I support numerous and great

authorities. I will refer to but three, appealed to by Galileo himself
in 1615 in his letters to the Grand Duchess Christina of Lorraine"
[Footnote 32]—(who could appeal to authorities more august?)
—"Many things," says St. Jerome, "are recounted in the Scriptures
according to the judgment of the times when they happened, and
not according to the truth." [Footnote 33]
[Footnote 32: Opere Complete di Galileo-Galilei, t. ii.

chap. ii. pp. 26-64. Florence, 1843.]
[Footnote 33: OEuvres de St. Jérôme, Comment, in

Jeremiam, ed. Vallars. t. ix. p. 1040.]
"The purpose of the Holy Scriptures," says the Cardinal

Baronius, "is to teach us how to go to heaven, and not how the
heavens go." "This," says Kepler, "is the counsel I give to the
man so ill informed as not to understand the science of
astronomy, or so weak as to regard adhesion to Copernicus as
proof of want of piety:—Let him at once leave the study of
astronomy and the examination of the opinions of philosophers;
instead of devoting himself to those arduous researches, let him
remain at home, till his fields, and occupy himself with his
proper business; and thence, raising towards the admirable
vault of heaven his eyes, which constitute for him his sole mode
of vision, let him pour forth his heart in thanksgivings and
praises to God his Creator. He may rest assured that he is thus
rendering to God a worship as perfect as that of the astronomer
himself, to whom God has accorded the gift of seeing clearer
with the eyes of his intelligence; but who, above all the worlds
and all the heavens that he attains, knows and wills to find his
God." [Footnote 34]
[Footnote 34: Kepler, Nova Astronomia, Introductio, p. 9.

Prague, 1609.]
I discard, then, as absolutely foreign to the grand question that

occupies me, all the difficulties suggested to the Scriptures in the
name of those sciences whose province is finite nature. I seek and
consider in these books only what is their sole object,—the
relations of God with man, and the solution of those problems
which these relations cause to weigh upon the human soul. The
deeper we go in the study of the sacred volumes, restored to their
real object, the more the divine inspiration becomes manifest and
striking. God and man are there ever both present, both actors in
the same history. Of this history it is my present object to illustrate
the grand features.
Seventh Meditation.
God According To The Bible.
It is far from my intention to evade the questions which concern

the authenticity of the Bible, and of the respective books which
compose it. I shall enter upon them in the second series of these
Meditations, when I touch upon the history of the Christian
religion. Those questions, however, have no bearing upon the
subject which occupies me at the present moment; the Bible,
whatever its antiquity, whatever the comparative antiquity of its
different parts, has been ever that witness of God in which the
Hebrews believed, and under the law of which they lived, the great
monument of the religion in the bosom of which the Christian
religion took its birth. It is this God of whom in the Bible, and in
the Bible alone, it is my purpose to seek the peculiar and true
character.
The nations of Semitic origin have been honoured for their primitive
and persistent faith in the unity of God. Under different forms, and
amidst events very dissimilar, nearly all nations have been
polytheistic; the Semitic nations alone have believed firmly in the
one God. This great moral fact has been attributed to different and
to complex causes; but the fact itself is generally acknowledged
and admitted.
In two respects in this assertion there is exaggeration. On one side,

among the nations of Semitic origin, several were polytheistic; the
descendants of Abraham, the Hebrews, and the Arab Ishmaelites,
alone remained really monotheistic; on the other side, the idea of
the unity of God was not entirely strange even to the polytheistic
nations. The greater part, like the Hindoos and the Greeks,
admitted one sole and primordial Power anterior and superior to
their gods;—idea, vague and searched from afar, derived from the
instinct of man or the reflection of the philosopher, and which
amongst those nations became neither the basis of any religion
that deserves the name, nor any efficacious obstacle to idolatry.
The God of the Bible is no such sterile abstraction; He is the one
God at the present time as in the origin of all things, the personal
God, living, acting, and presiding efficiently over the destinies of
the world that He has created.
He has besides another characteristic, one far more striking, which

belongs to Him more exclusively than that of Unity. The gods of the
polytheistic nations have histories filled with events, vicissitudes,
transformations, adventures. The mythology of the Egyptians, of
the Hindoos, of the Greeks, of the Scandinavians, and numerous
others, is but the poetical or symbolical recital of the varied and
agitated lives of their gods. We detect in these recitals sometimes
the personification of the fancies of nations described in accordance
with their actual phenomena, some times the reminiscences of
human personages who have struck the imagination of the people.
But whatever their origin, whatever their name, each of those gods
has his individual history more or less overladen with incidents and
acts, now heroic, now licentious, now elegantly fantastic, now
grossly eccentric. All the polytheistic religions are collections of
biographies, divine or legendary, allegorical or completely fabulous,
in which the careers and the passions, the actions and the dreams
of men, reproduce themselves under the forms and names of
deities.
The God of the Bible has no biography, neither has He any personal
adventures. Nothing occurs to Him and nothing changes in Him; He
is always and invariably the same, a Being real and personal,
absolutely distinct from the finite world and from humanity,
identical and immutable in the bosom of the universal diversity and
movement. "I Am That I Am," is the sole definition that He
vouchsafes of himself, and the constant expression of what He is in
all the course of the history of the Hebrews, to which He is present
and over which He presides without ever receiving from it any
reflex of influence. Such is the God of the Bible, in evident and
permanent contrast with all the gods of polytheism, still more
distinct and more solitary by his nature than by his Unity.
This is, indeed, so peculiarly the proper and essential character of

the God of the Bible, that this character has passed into the very
language of the Hebrews, and has become there the very name of
God. Several words are employed in the Bible as appellations of
God. One of these El, Eloah, in the plural Elohïm, expresses
force, creative power, and is applied to the manifold gods of
Paganism as well as to the one God of the Hebrews. El Shaddaï is
translated by the all-powerful. Adonai signifies Lord. The word
Yahwe or Yehwe, which becomes in Hebrew pronunciation
Jehovah, means simply He is, and means self-existence, the
Being Absolute and Eternal. This name occurs in no other of the
Semitic languages, and it is at the epoch of Moses that it appears
for the first time amongst the Hebrews: "And God spake unto
Moses, and said unto him, I am the Eternal" (Yahwe, Jehovah).
"And I appeared unto Abraham, Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the
name of the All-powerful (El Shaddaï), but by my name Eternal
was I not known to them." [Footnote 35 ] Yahwe, Jehovah, is at
once the true God and the national God of Israel. [Footnote 36]
[Footnote 35: Exodus vi. 2, 3.]
[Footnote 36: I have consulted respecting the precise

sense and the different shades of meaning of the terms
expressing God in Hebrew, my learned confrère at the
Academy of Inscriptions, M. Munk, who has replied to all
my inquiries with as much clearness as courtesy.]
The history of the Hebrews is neither less significant nor less

expressive than their language; it is the history of the relations of
the God, One and Immutable with the people chosen by Him to be
the special representative of the religious principle, and the
regenerating source of religious life in the human race. This people
undergoes the destiny and trials common to all nations; it
demands, and becomes subject to, a variety of different
governments; it falls into the errors and faults usual to nations; it
frequently succumbs to the temptations of idolatry; like the others,
it has its days of virtue and of vice, of prosperity and of reverses,
of glory and of abasement. Amidst all the vicissitudes and errors of
the people of the Bible, the God of the Bible remains invariably the
same, without any tincture of anthropomorphism, without any
alteration in the idea which the Hebrews conceive of his nature,
either during their fidelity or disobedience to his Commandments. It
is always the God who has said, "I Am That I Am," of whom his
people demand no other explanation of himself, and who, ever
present and sovereign, pursues the designs of his providence with
men, who either use or abuse the liberty of action which that God
had accorded to them at their creation. I wish to retrace, according
to the Bible, the principal phases and the principal actors in this
history. The more I study, the more I feel that I am watching, as
M. Ewald has expressed it, "the career of the true religion,
advancing step by step to its complete development," that is to say,
that I am there observing the action of God upon the first steps
and upon the religious progress of the human race.
I. God And Abraham.
The history of the Hebrews, temporal and spiritual, opens with

Abraham. At his first appearance in the Bible, Abraham is a nomad
chief, who has quitted Chaldæa and the town of Haran, where his
father, Terah, descended from Shem, is still living. He is wandering
with his family, his servants, and his flocks, at first on the frontiers
and afterwards in the interior of the land of Canaan, halting
wherever he finds water and pasturage, and conducting his tents
and his tribe at one time through the mountainous districts, at
another along the plains below. Why has he left Chaldæa?
According to the Bible itself, his father was an idolater: "Your
fathers," said Joshua to the people of Israel, "dwelt on the other
side of the flood" (the Euphrates) "in old time, even Terah, the
father of Abraham, and the father of Nachor: and they served other
gods." [Footnote 37] The book of Judith contains a similar
assertion; [Footnote 38] and the Jewish and Arabian traditions
confirm, at the same time that they amplify, the statement: the
father of Abraham, they say, was an idolatrous fanatic, and his son
Abraham, having set himself against the practice of idolatry, was
upon his charge thrown into a burning furnace, from which a
miracle alone preserved him. The historian Josephus speaks of the
insurrections which took place amongst the Chaldæans on the
occasion of their religious dissensions.
[Footnote 37: Joshua xxiv. 2.]
[Footnote 38: Judith v. 6-9. ]
[USCCB: Judith v. 6-9. "These people are descendants of

the Chaldeans. They formerly dwelt in Mesopotamia, for
they did not wish to follow the gods of their forefathers
who were born in the land of the Chaldeans. Since they
abandoned the way of their ancestors, and
acknowledged with divine worship the God of heaven,
their forefathers expelled them from the presence of
their gods. So they fled to Mesopotamia and dwelt there
a long time. Their God bade them leave their abode and
proceed to the land of Canaan. Here they settled, and
grew very rich in gold, silver, and a great abundance of
livestock."]
The Bible makes no allusion to these traditions; from the very

beginning God intervenes in the history of the father of the
Hebrews. "The Eternal had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy
country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a
land that I will shew thee: I will make thee a great nation, and I
will bless thee, and make thy name great; … and in thee shall all
families of the earth be blessed. … So Abram departed, … and
Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother's son, and all their
substance that they had gathered, and the sons that they had
gotten in Haran; and they went forth to go into the land of
Canaan; and into the land of Canaan they came." [Footnote 39]
[Footnote 39: Genesis xii. 1-5.]
How had God spoken to Abraham? By a voice from without or by

an internal inspiration? The writer of the Biblical narrative occupies
himself in no respect with the question. God is for him, present and
an actor in the history just as much as Abraham is; the intervention
of God has in his eyes nothing but what is perfectly simple and
natural. The same faith animates Abraham; he issues forth from
Chaldæa and wanders through Palestine, according to the word and
under the direction of the Eternal.
He wanders through the midst of populations already established

upon the land of Canaan, and with these he lives in peace, but still,
not uniting with them; bringing them succour when attacked by
foreign chieftains; fighting in their behalf as a faithful ally,
sometimes, perhaps, in the character of a valiant condottiere
[mercenary], but remaining isolated in his capacity of nomad
Patriarch, with his family and his tribe; repelling even the gifts and
favours which might perhaps lower his character or affect his
independence. Everywhere that he halts, or that any incident of
importance occurs to him, at Sichem, Bethel, Beersheba, Hebron,
he raises an altar to his God. In his wandering uncertain life a
famine impels him on one occasion even as far as Egypt:—the first
perhaps of those shepherd chiefs who issued from Asia, and who
were so soon to invade that rich country. Abraham passes in Egypt
several years, well treated by the reigning Pharaoh; on excellent
terms with the Egyptian priests, imparting to them and receiving
from them such knowledge of astronomy or of natural philosophy
as they mutually possessed; but maintaining ever carefully the
isolation of his family, of his tribe, and of his religion. Of his own
accord, or at the instance of the Pharaoh, he quits Egypt, carrying
with him not only his flocks and his camels, but his Egyptian slaves,
and amongst others Hagar. He returns to the country of Canaan,
again wanders through several of its districts, takes part in different
events—internal troubles or foreign wars, and finally settles with his
family and dependents at Hebron, near the oaks of Mamre,
amongst the tribe of the children of Heth; but still always in his
capacity as a foreigner, and always careful as such to preserve his
character and his independence. When his wife Sarah died, the
book of Genesis tells us that,
"Abraham stood up from before his dead, and spake unto the
sons of Heth, saying,
"I am a stranger and a sojourner with you: give me a

possession of a buryingplace with you, that I may bury my dead
out of my sight.
"And the children of Heth answered Abraham, saying unto him,
"Hear us, my lord: thou art a mighty prince among us: in the
choice of our sepulchres bury thy dead; none of us shall
withhold from thee his sepulchre, but that thou mayest bury thy
dead.
"And Abraham stood up, and bowed himself to the people of

the land, even to the children of Heth.
"And he communed with them, saying, If it be your mind that I

should bury my dead out of my sight; hear me, and entreat for
me to Ephron the son of Zohar,
"That he may give me the cave of Machpelah, which he hath,

which is in the end of his field; for as much money as it is
worth he shall give it me for a possession of a buryingplace
amongst you.
"And Ephron dwelt among the children of Heth: and Ephron the
Hittite answered Abraham in the audience of the children of
Heth, even of all that went in at the gate of his city, saying,
"Nay, my lord, hear me: the field give I thee, and the cave that
is therein, I give it thee; in the presence of the sons of my
people give I it thee: bury thy dead.
"And Abraham bowed down himself before the people of the

land.
"And he spake unto Ephron in the audience of the people of the

land, saying, But if thou wilt give it, I pray thee, hear me: I will
give thee money for the field; take it of me, and I will bury my
dead there.
"And Ephron answered Abraham, saying unto him,
"My lord, hearken unto me: the land is worth four hundred
shekels of silver; what is that betwixt me and thee? bury
therefore thy dead.
"And Abraham hearkened unto Ephron; and Abraham weighed

to Ephron the silver, which he had named in the audience of the
sons of Heth, four hundred shekels of silver, current money with
the merchant.
"And the field of Ephron, which was in Machpelah, which was

before Mamre, the field, and the cave which was therein, and all
the trees that were in the field, that were in all the borders
round about, were made sure
"Unto Abraham for a possession in the presence of the children
of Heth, before all that went in at the gate of his city.
"And after this, Abraham buried Sarah his wife in the cave of
the field of Machpelah before Mamre: the same is Hebron in the
land of Canaan.
"And the field, and the cave that is therein, were made sure
unto Abraham for a possession of a buryingplace by the sons of
Heth." [Footnote 40]
[Footnote 40: Genesis xxiii. 3-20.]
Little importance does Abraham attach to his precarious condition

as a wanderer and a stranger; he has faith in God. God commands,
and Abraham obeys. God promises, and Abraham trusts. One day,
however, with a feeling of anxious humility, Abraham makes the
following prayer to God:—
"Lord Eternal, what wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless, and
there is Eliezer of Damascus shall be my heir? And behold the
word of the Lord came unto him, saying, This shall not be thine
heir, but he that shall come forth out of thine own bowels shall
be thine heir. I am God, the mighty, all-powerful; walk before
my face, be thou perfect. I will establish my covenant between
me and thee, and thy seed after thee, in their generation, for
an everlasting possession, and I will be their God. But thou
shalt keep my covenant therefore, thou and thy seed after thee,
in their generations. And Abraham believed in the Lord; and the
Eternal counted it to him for righteousness." [Footnote 41]
[Footnote 41: Genesis xv. 1-6. and xvii. 1-9.]
In these days, in the bosom of Christian civilization, obedience to

God and confidence in God are the first precepts, the first virtues of
Christianity. They were also the virtues of Abraham, and the
precepts inculcated by Abraham's history in the Bible. And the God
of Abraham, the God of the Bible, is the same who is the object of
adoration to the Christian of the present day; the same conception
as that of those philosophers of the present day who believe in
God, and believe in Him as in God Absolute and Perfect, Self-
dependent, Eternal, without the possibility or attempt to define Him
otherwise. Thousands of years have changed nothing as to the
biblical notion of God in the human soul, nor as to the essential
laws regulating the relation of man with God.
Historical tradition fully confirms the moral fact here mentioned.

Abraham has not been the object of any mystical conception, or
any mythological metamorphosis; nowhere has he been
transformed into demigod or son of God; he has ever remained the
model of religious faith and submission, the type of the pious man
in intimate relation with God. Throughout all antiquity, and in all
the East, as much for the primitive Christians as for the Jews and
Arabs, as much for the Mussulmans as for the Jews and Christians,
God is the God of Abraham; Abraham is the friend of God, the
father and the prince of believers; these are the very names that
the Gospel gives him; [Footnote 42] and the Koran, too, celebrates
him in these words:—
[Footnote 42: St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans iv.;

Galatians iii.; Epistle of St. James ii. 23.]
"And when the night overshadowed him, he saw a star, and he

said, This is my Lord; but when it set, he said, I like not gods
which set. And when he saw the moon rising, he said, This is
my Lord; but when he saw it set, he said, Verily, if my Lord
direct me not, I shall become one of the people who go astray.
And when he saw the sun rising, he said, This is my Lord, this
is the greatest; but when it set, he said, my people, verily I am
clear of that which ye associate with God. I direct my face unto
him who hath created the heavens and the earth." [Footnote
43]
[Footnote 43: Koran vi.]
The Eternal, the God One and Immutable, is the God of Abraham;
Abraham is the servant and adorer of the true God.
II. God And Moses.
The true idea of God, and the faith in his effectual and continued
providence, are the two great religious principles which the name
of Abraham suggests. This is the beginning of the history of the
Hebrews, and the origin of that ancient Covenant which, in passing
from the Pentateuch to the Gospel, has become the new Covenant,
the Christian Religion.
About five centuries later, we find the Hebrews settled in Egypt, in

the land of Goshen, between the lower Nile, the Red Sea, and the
Desert, in a condition very different from that in which they had
first been when attracted to the court of Pharaoh by the prosperity
of Joseph, the great-grandson of Abraham. The new Pharaoh
oppresses them cruelly; they are a prey to the miseries of slavery,
the contagion of idolatry, to all the evils, all the perils, physical and
moral, which can afflict a nation numerically weak, fallen under the
yoke of one powerful and civilized. The Hebrews nevertheless
persist in their religious faith, cling to their national reminiscences;
they do not suffer their nationality to be lost in and confounded
with that of their masters; they endure without offering any active
resistance; they will not deliver themselves, but they have never
ceased to believe in their God, and they await their Deliverer.
Moses has been saved from the waters of the Nile by Pharaoh's
own daughter. He has been brought up at Heliopolis, in the midst
of the pomp of the court, and instructed in the sciences of the
Egyptian priests. He has served the sovereign of Egypt; he has
commanded his troops and made war for him against the
Æthiopians. He has received an Egyptian name, Osarsiph, or
Tisithen. Everything seems to concur to make him an Egyptian. But
he remains a faithful Israelite: true to the faith and to the fortunes
of his brethren. Their oppression rouses his indignation; he avenges
one of them by killing his oppressor. The victims of oppression,
alarmed, disavow Moses, instead of supporting him. Moses flees
from Egypt and takes refuge in the Desert, amongst a tribe of
wandering Arabs, the Midianites, sprung, like himself, from
Abraham. Their chief, the sheick of the tribe, Jethro, called also
Hobab, receives him as a son, and gives him his daughter Zipporah
in marriage. The proud Israelite, who has declined to remain an
Egyptian, becomes an Arab, and leads, several years, the nomadic
life of the hospitable tribe. It is now in the peninsula of Sinai that
Moses wanders with the servants and flocks of his father-in-law. In
the centre of that peninsula, of yore a province in the empire of the
Pharaohs, but which had fallen into the possession of the pastoral
Arabs, rises Sinai, a mount with which from time immemorial,
among the neighbouring tribes, have been connected as many
sacred traditions as have ever been assigned to Mount Ararat in
Armenia, or the Himalayas in India. In this venerable spot, before a
burning bush, Moses, with a heart full of faith, hears God calling
him and commanding him to lead his people, the children of Israel,
out of Egypt. Moses is humble, distrustful of himself, just as
Abraham before him had been. "Who am I, that I should go unto
Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of
Egypt? … When I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say
unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and
they shall say to me, What is his name? What shall I say unto
them? And God said unto Moses I AM THAT I AM: and he said,
Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me
unto you." [Footnote 44]
[Footnote 44: Exodus iii. 11, 13, 14.]

Moses receives his mission from Jehovah, and feels no other
disquietude than arises from the desire to accomplish it.
In presence of such facts, with this association of God and man in

the same work, the opponents of the Supernatural still clamour:
"Why," ask they, "this confusion of divine action and of human
action? Has God need of man's concurrence? Can He not, if He will,
accomplish all his designs by himself, and through the fulness of his
omnipotence?" In my turn, I would ask them if they know why God
created man, and if God has put them into the secret of his
intentions towards the instrument whom He employs for his
designs? There precisely lies the privilege of humanity: man is
God's associate, subject to Him, yet a free agent independent of
Him; he intervenes by his proper action in plans of which only an
infinitely small part is revealed to his intelligence and reserved for
his execution. Western Asia and its history are full of the name of
Moses: Jews, Christians, and Mahometans style him the First
Prophet, the Great Lawgiver, the Great Theologian; everywhere, in
the scene of the events themselves, the places retain a memory of
him: the traveller meets there the Well of Moses, the Ravine of
Moses, the Mountain of Moses, the Valley of Moses. In other
countries and other ages, this name has been given as the most
glorious that the saints could receive: St. Peter has been styled the
Moses of the Christian Church; St. Benedict, the Moses of the
Monastic Orders; Ulphilas, the Moses of the Goths. What did Moses
do to obtain a renown so great and so enduring? He gained no
battles; he conquered no territory; he founded no cities; he
governed no state; he was not even a man in whom eloquence
replaced other sources of influence and power: "And Moses said
unto the Lord, my Lord, I am not eloquent, neither heretofore, nor
since thou hast spoken unto thy servant: but I am slow of speech,
and of a slow tongue." [Footnote 45]
[Footnote 45: Exodus iv. 10.]

There is not in this whole history a single grand human action, a
single grand event, proceeding from human agency; all, all is the
work of God; and Moses is nothing on any occasion but the
interpreter and instrument of God: to this mission he has
consecrated soul and life; it is only by virtue of this title that he is
powerful, and that he shares, as far as his capacity as a man
permits, a work infinitely grander and more enduring than that
accomplished by all the heroes and all the masters that the world
ever acknowledged.
I know no more striking spectacle than that of the unshakeable

faith and inexhaustible energy of Moses in the pursuit of a work not
his own, in which he executes what he has not conceived, in which
he obeys rather than commands. Obstacles and disappointments
meet him at each turn; he has to struggle with weaknesses,
infidelity, caprices, jealousies, and seditions, and these not merely
in his own nation, but in his own family. He has himself his
moments of sadness, of disquietude: "And Moses cried unto the
Lord, saying, What shall I do unto this people? they be almost
ready to stone me…. [Footnote 46] I beseech thee, shew me thy
glory."
[Footnote 46: Exodus xvii. 4; xxxiii. 18-20.]
And God answers him, "I will make all my goodness pass before
thee. … Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see
me, and live." And Moses trusts in God, and continues to triumph
whilst he obeys Him.
The work of deliverance is consummated; Moses has led the people

of Israel out of Egypt, has surmounted the first perils and the first
sufferings of the Desert. They advance through the group of
mountains in the peninsula of Sinai Passing from valley to valley,
they arrive "at the entrance of a large basin surrounded by lofty
peaks. Of these the one which commands the most extensive view
is covered with enormous blocks, as if the mountain had been
overthrown by an earthquake. A deep cleft divides the peak into
two.
"No one who has approached the Râs Sufsâfeh through that noble
plain, or who has looked down upon the plain from that majestic
height, will willingly part with the belief that these are the two
essential features of the view of the Israelitish camp. That such a
plain should exist at all in front of such a cliff is so remarkable a
coincidence with the sacred narrative, as to furnish a strong
internal argument, not merely of its identity with the scene, but of
the scene itself having been described by an eyewitness. The awful
and lengthened approach, as to some natural sanctuary, would
have been the fittest preparation for the coming scene. The low
line of alluvial mounds at the foot of the cliff exactly answers to the
'bounds' which were to keep the people off from 'touching the
Mount.' [Footnote 47]
[Footnote 47: Exodus xix. 12.]
The plain itself is not broken and uneven, and narrowly shut in, like
almost all others in the range, but presenting a long retiring sweep,
against which the people could remove and stand afar off.' The cliff,
rising like a huge altar in front of the whole congregation, and
visible against the sky in lonely grandeur from end to end of the
whole plain, is the very image of the 'mount that might not be
touched,' and from which 'the voice' of God might be heard far and
wide over the stillness of the plain below, widened at that point to
its utmost extent by the confluence of all the contiguous valleys.
Here, beyond all other parts of the peninsula, is the adytum,
withdrawn, as if in the end of the world,' from all the stir and
confusion of earthly things." [Footnote 48] Such was three
thousand five hundred years ago, and such is still, the place where
Moses received from God and gave to the people of Israel that law
of the Ten Commandments which resound still through all the
Christian Churches as the first foundation of their faith and the first
moral rule of Christian nations.
[Footnote 48: Sinai and Palestine in connection with
their History. By Arthur Stanley, Dean of Westminster,
pp. 42, 43. London, 1862.]
The Hebrews, at the moment when the Decalogue became their

fundamental law, were in a crisis of social transformation; they
were upon the point of passing from the pastoral nomadic condition
to that of farmers and settlers. It seems that, at such an epoch,
the political institutions of a people would, as the basis of their
government, be its most natural and most urgent business. The
Decalogue leaves the subject entirely untouched; makes to it not
the remotest, the most indirect allusion. It is a law exclusively
religious and moral, which only busies itself about the duties of
man to God and to his fellow-creatures, and admits by its very
silence all the varying forms of government that the external or
internal state of society may seem to require. Characteristic, grand,
and original, not to be met with in the primitive laws of any other
nascent state, and an admirable and remarkable manifestation of
the Divine origin of this one! It is to man's natural and his moral
destiny that the Decalogue addresses itself; it is to guide man's
soul and his inmost will that it lays down rules; whereas it
surrenders his external, his civil condition to all the varying chances
of place and of time.
Another characteristic of this law is not less original or less urgent:

it places God, and man's duties towards God, at the head and front
of man's life and man's duties; it unites intimately religion and
morality, and regards them as inseparable. If philosophers, in
studying, discriminate between them; if they seek in human nature
the special principle or principles of morality; if they consider the
latter by itself and apart from religion, it is the right of science to
do so. But still the result is but a scientific work—only a partial
dissection of man's soul, addressed to only one part of its faculties,
and holding no account of the entirety and the reality of the soul's
life. The Human Body, taken as one whole, is by nature at once
moral and religious; the moral law that he finds in himself needs an
author and a judge; and God is to him the source and guarantee,
the Alpha and Omega of morality.
A metaphysician may, from time to time, affirm the moral law, and
yet forget its Divine Author. A man may, now and then, admit, may
respect the principles of morality, and yet remain estranged from
religion; all this is possible, for all this we see. So small a portion of
Truth sometimes satisfies the human mind! Man is so ready and so
prone to misconceive and to mutilate himself! His ideas are by
nature so incomplete and inconsequent, so easily dimmed or
perverted by his Passions or the action of his free will! These are
but the exceptional conditions of the human mind, mere scientific
abstractions; if men admit them, their influence is neither general
nor durable. In the natural and actual life of the human race,
Morality and Religion are necessarily united; and it is one of the
divine characteristics of the Decalogue, as it is also one of the
causes of that authority which has remained to it after the lapse of
so many centuries, that it has proclaimed and taken as its
foundation their intimate union.
This is not the place to consider the laws of Moses in civil and
penal matters, nor to refer to his ordinances respecting the
worship, or to those that regard the organization of the priesthood
of the Hebrews. In the former of these two branches of the Mosaic
code, numerous dispositions, singularly moral, equitable, and
humane, are found in connection with circumstances indicating a
state of manners gross and cruel even to barbarism.
The legislator is evidently under the empire of ideas and sentiments

infinitely superior to those of the people, to whom, nevertheless,
his strong sympathies attach him. When we consider the Mosaic
Legislation, we find that in everything which concerns the external
forms and practices of worship, the ideas of Egypt have made great
impression upon the mind of the Lawgiver, and the frequent use
that he has made of Egyptian customs and ceremonies is not less
visible. But far above these institutions and these traditions, which
seem not seldom out of place and incoherent, soars and
predominates constantly the Idea of the God of Abraham and of
Jacob, of the God One and Eternal, of the True God. The Laws of
Moses omit no occasion of inculcating the belief in that God, and of
recalling Him to the recollection of the Hebrews. And this, not as if
they were recalling a principle, an institution, a system; but as if
they propose to place a sovereign, a lawful and living sovereign, in
the presence of those whom he governs, and to whom they owe
obedience and fidelity.
Moses never speaks in his own name, or in the name of any

human power, or of any portion of the Hebrew nation. God alone
speaks and commands. God's word and his commands Moses
repeats to the people. At his first ascending Mount Sinai, when he
had received the first inspiration from the Eternal, "Moses came
and called for the elders of the people, and laid before their faces
all these words which the Lord commanded him. And all the people
answered together, and said, All that the Lord hath spoken we will
do." [Footnote 49]
[Footnote 49: Exodus xix. 7, 8.]
When Moses, again ascending Mount Sinai, had received from God
the Decalogue, he returned, "And he took the book of the
covenant, and read in the audience of the people: and they said,
All that the Lord hath said will we do, and be obedient." [Footnote
50]
[Footnote 50: Exodus xxiv. 7.]
As the events develop themselves, the Hebrews are found far from
rendering a constant obedience: they forget, they infringe—and
that frequently—these laws of God which they have accepted; and
God sometimes punishes, sometimes pardons them; still it is always
God alone that is acting; it is from Him alone that all emanates;
neither the priests who preside over the ceremonies of his worship,
nor the elders of Israel whom He summons to prostrate themselves
from afar before Him, nor Moses himself—his sole and constant
interpreter—do anything by themselves, demand anything for
themselves. The Pentateuch is the history and the picture of the
personal government by God of the Israelites. "Our legislator," says
the historian Josephus, "had in his thoughts not monarchies, nor
oligarchies, nor democracies, nor any one of those political
institutions: he commanded that our government should be (if it is
permitted to make use of an expression somewhat exaggerated)
what may be styled a Theocracy." [Footnote 51]
[Footnote 51: Joseph. contra Apionem, ii. c. 17.]
The eminent writers who have recently studied most profoundly the
Mosaic system—M. Ewald in Germany,[Footnote 52] Mr. Milman and
Mr. Arthur Stanley in England, M. Nicolas in France—have adopted
the expression of Josephus, attaching to it its real and complete
sense. "The term Theocracy," says Mr. Stanley, "has been often
employed since the time of Moses, but in the sense of a sacerdotal
government: a sense the very contrary to that in which its first
author conceived it. The theocracy of Moses was not at all a
government by priests, or opposed to kings; it was the government
by God himself, as opposed to a government by priests or by
kings." [Footnote 53]
[Footnote 52: Geschichte des Volkes Israel, bis Christus,

ii. 188. Göttingen, 1853.]
[Footnote 53: Lectures on the Jewish Church, p. 157]
"Mosaism," says M. Nicolas, "is a theocracy in the proper sense of

the word. It would be a complete error to understand this word in
the sense which usage has given to it in our language. There is no
question here in effect of a government exercised by a sacerdotal
caste in the name and under the inspiration, real or pretended, of
God. In the Mosaic legislation the priests are not the ministers and
instruments of the Divine Will; God reigns and governs by himself.
It is He who has given his laws to the Hebrews. Moses has been, it
is true, the medium between the Eternal and the people, but the
people has taken part in the grand spectacle of the Revelation of
the Law; of this the people, in the exercise of its freedom, has
evinced its acceptance; and in the covenant set on foot between
the Eternal and the family of Jacob, Moses has been, if I may be
allowed the expression, only the public officer who has propounded
the contract. He was himself, besides, not within the pale of the
sacerdotal caste; and the charge of keeping, amending, and seeing
to the carrying out of the body of laws was not confided to the
priests." [Footnote 54 ]
[Footnote 54: Études Critiques sur la Bible—Ancien

Testament, p. 172.]
Let the learned men who thus characterise the Mosaic theocracy
pause here and measure the whole bearing of the fact which they
comprehend so well. It is a fact unique in the history of the world.
The idea of God is, amongst all nations, the source of religions; but
in every case, except that of the Hebrews, scarcely has the source
appeared before it deviates and becomes troubled; men take the
place of God; God's name is made to cover every kind of
usurpation and falsehood; sometimes sacerdotal corporations take
possession of all government, civil and religious; sometimes secular
power overrules and enslaves Religious Faith and Religious Life. In
the Mosaic Dispensation we have nothing of the kind; its very origin
and its fundamental principles condemn and prohibit even the
attempt at any such deviations. No paramount priesthood here; no
secular power playing the part of the oppressor. God is constantly
present, and sole Master. All passes between God and the people;
all, I say, so passes through the agency of a single man whom God
inspires, and in whom the people have faith, asking no other
authority than that of the revelation which he receives. No sign
here of a fact of human origin: just as the God of the Bible is the
true God, the religion that descended, by Moses, from Sinai upon
the elect people of God is the true Religion destined to become,
when Jesus Christ ascends Calvary, the Religion of the Human
Race.
III. God And The Kings.
Moses having brought out of Egypt the people of Israel, and having
conducted it through the Desert as far as the eastern bank of the
Jordan, in sight of Canaan, the Promised Land, his mission
terminates. "Get thee up," says the Eternal to him; "get thee up
into the top of Pisgah, and lift up thine eyes westward, and
northward, and southward, and eastward, and behold it with thine
eyes: for thou shalt not go over this Jordan. But charge Joshua,
and encourage him, and strengthen him: for he shall go over
before this people, and he shall cause them to inherit the land
which thou shalt see." [Footnote 55]
[Footnote 55: Deuteronomy iii. 27, 28.]
Moses has been, in the name of Jehovah, the liberator and the
legislator; Joshua is the conqueror, the rough warrior, of yet signal
piety and modesty, the ardent servant of Jehovah, the faithful
disciple of Moses. After passing the Jordan, traversing the land of
Canaan in every direction, and giving battle in succession to the
greater part of the tribes that inhabit it, he destroys, or expels, or
negotiates with them, and divides their lands among the twelve
tribes of Israel. These exchange their wandering life for that settled
agricultural life of which Moses has given them the law. The
descendants of Abraham settle as masters in the soil in which
Abraham had demanded as a favour the privilege of purchasing a
tomb.

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The Contemporary Film Directors series provides concise,

A list of books in the series

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Frontispiece: Agnès Varda (Julia Fabry, 2012). © Ciné-Tamaris

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015950937

Permission has been granted to reprint portions of the following essays:

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new wave cinéaste

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New Wave Cinéaste to Digital Gleaner | 5

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sparks a multifaceted portrait of a region, for example—or venturing

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Planning and Precision: La Pointe Courte

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Varda’s acknowledged inspirations and citations—Faulkner and Brecht—

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This attempt to explore the “in-between” moments in the life of a couple

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had also anticipated Antonioni’s alienated couples in L’Avventura and

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