Qui est sujet, qui est je, ou qui suis-je ? Cléo is almost destroyed by seeking desperately to please others; Mona is destroyed by refusing to conform to the expectations of others. It generally has a pejorative connotation. She is a parasite in the derogatory sense in which the term is sometimes used to describe those who do not “pay their own way” in society. Some critics have even suggested that the direction of the tracking shots (moving from right to left) is a direct subversion of the western practice of reading from left to right, and so a further act of resistance against conventional society. I post the lectures here in their original form, reflecting the conventions and register of spoken delivery. Elle fait de brèves rencontres entre ses longues errances sans but apparent. [20] CW’s translation. In fact, our very first encounter with Mona is of this sort. [13] Agnès Varda and Rob Edelman, “Travelling a Different Route: An Interview with Agnès Varda”, Cinéaste 15:1 (1986), 20. This understanding of Mona as quasi-object allows us to bring out a further layer of complexity in Ross Chambers’ argument in Loiterature. The object creates both the collective—when it is passed from hand to hand—and the individual—when it is held and the victim designated.[25]. When she is found dead in the ditch, the investigators fall over themselves to reconstruct their story and force onto her an interpretation that will explain her, complete with measurements and documentation. Remember what she says to the truck driver who gives her a lift towards the beginning of the film (@7.00): “il n’y a plus personne. Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982) 145. In terms of modern Western capitalism, she has gone off the map, off balance sheet. [4] The book’s blurb nicely brings out the political stakes of waywardness, delay and triviality: By offering subtle resistance to the laws of “good social order,” loiterly literature blurs the distinctions between innocent pleasure and harmless relaxation on the one hand, and not-so-innocent intent on the other. And so for me, a puzzle is a space. [12] Mariah Devereux Herbeck, Wandering Women in French Film and Literature: A Study of Narrative Drift (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) 235. [21], Even in her death she denies us the neat hermeneutic closure we as viewers tend to expect: “Mona’s death does not transform her life into destiny. This contrasts starkly to Yolande, for example, who is employed as a cleaner. She follows neither rules nor people; her journey seems totally random and her only will is completely negative. Mona is no more committed to the cause of environmentalism than she is to that of capitalism. Alors que la plupart des réfugiés fuient des guerres, les médias commencent de plus en plus à parler d’une nouvelle catégorie de migrants : Sauf indication contraire ou complémentaire, les informations mentionnées dans cette section peuvent être confirmées par la base de données IMDb. Michel Serres”, in French Philosophers in Conversation, [email protected], 1991, 57. As a catalyst, as the surface on which people can project and explore their interpretations and that forces them to react with each other, Mona is a positive character: she reveals people to themselves and to us, and brings them together. [4] Ross Chambers, Loiterature (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). IPA : /sɑ̃ fwa ni lwa/ Adjective . Finally, Mona’s death is as a direct result of her being an outsider. However, we are not allowed to identify with Mona or feel great sympathy, even when she is raped. Elle ne suit ni règle ni personne ; son cheminement semble totalement lié au hasard et à sa seule volonté qui est entièrement négative. The third meaning, which was used in English a bit at the end of the nineteenth century, is that of static on the line, that is, noise within communication.[6]. C’est donc souvent quand ils se lavent que les personnages mentionnent la saleté de Mona.” (Laurent Dechery, “Autour de Mona dans ‘Sans toit ni loi’ d’Agnès Varda”, The French Review 79:1 (2005) 138-147, 140). This the second of four undergraduate lectures in which I explore how the thought of Michel Serres can inform film studies. 2 En 2015-2016, l’Europe vit une crise migratoire sans précédent. She is not a player with a stake in the game. We are kept at a distance from her, just as she seeks to keep the rest of society at a distance. In this, she functions as Serres’s parasitic static or noise that both carries and impedes a message: Noise is what impedes relation, what arises or comes between communicants. It resonates with the Greek monos, which as an adjective has a semantic range including “alone”, “unique” and “solitary”, as well as the more loaded “forsaken”. sans feu ni lieu; ne craindre ni Dieu ni diable Dans un monde idéal, tous les animaux vivraient heureux au sein d'un foyer... malheureusement nous ne vivons pas dans un monde ideal alors nous sommes la ! « Sans toit, ni loi » Exposition sur les réfugiés climatiques 1.10 – 4.12.2015, Alliance Sud InfoDoc, Lausanne Cette exposition est à la croisée de deux sujets d’im-portance mondiale qui occupent le haut de la scène médiatique et politique : la question migratoire, en raison de … Plus le corps propre est sale, plus la niche est breneuse, plus la personne est attachée à sa propriété. The way in which she has stepped away from society and become invisible to those within it is also brilliantly reflected in the way the film is shot, especially in its many tracking shots. Varda makes the point about the characters in the film parasitizing Mona with their words in an interview with Marie-Claire Barnet and Shirley Jordan: AV: The portrait of Mona is made by people speaking about her. Sandrine Bonnaire y interprète le rôle principal, celui d'une jeune femme sans abri trouvée morte. Not simply in the sense that she is the one they speak about, but in the richer sense that there would be no possibility of inscription at all, no film called Sans toit ni loi, no subjects to make an object of Mona, without her, as Chambers rightly notes: The parasite disturbs the conventional order of things, as the representative of everything that is other to it. « Sans toit ni loi est un chef-d’œuvre qui n’a pas volé son Lion d’or au dernier Festival de Venise. ... Exercices pratiques Sans toit ni loi de Agnès Varda France – 1h45 - 1985 Lycéens et apprentis au cinéma : académie de REIMS . Available at http://epublications.bond.edu.au/french_philosophers/4/. Etait-ce une mort naturelle ? But the parasite also—as in the classical figure of the parasitus—makes the party “go.” Otherness, when it is seen as forming part of a given community, stands for all the mediations that are other than the community’s business but without which its business could not get done; it’s the intermediary through which social interchanges inevitably pass; and in that sense the parasite is indispensable. Que pouvait-on savoir d’elle et comment ont réagi ceux qu’elle a croisés sur sa route, dans le sud de la France, cet hiver-là ? The shots of Mona walking, by contrast, are dolly shots.[16]. The 1985 Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi), which you have now all seen. Sa solitude augmente, elle perd son duvet. (1985). The first challenge of this film is to make apparent a sense which does not belong to the medium of cinema. She was, we are authoritatively informed, “saisi par le froid” (“taken by the cold”, @3.40). It is important to note that, although Mona is identified with the tree disease to the extent that they are both parasites, she does not feel any more affinity with the trees, or with their disease, than she does for anyone else in the film: “je m’en fous de vos platanes” (“I don’t give a stuff about your plane trees”) she says. Un article de Wikipédia, l'encyclopédie libre. [29] Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time, trans. Describe him in five words or fewer, French Philosophy Today: Summary of Chapter 1 – Badiou, A table showing who is part of the new materialism, and an argument as to why it is not a “turn”, Translation from Michel Serres’s thesis on Leibniz: “we must enrich our models of thinking which are, generally speaking, lamentably poor”, The boys who break into the empty house and steal, discussing theft as a sort of parasitism that takes without giving, outside economic conventions (@19.39), Yolande, who climbs into the house uninvited (@20.54), Jean-Pierre, the old lady’s nephew (@1.23.50). Varda, A. The film’s title is a riff on the phrase “sans foi ni loi” (“neither faith nor law”), an idiomatic way of describing someone who does not conform to social expectations but lives life according to their own rules. 2 Quels sont les éléments qui reviennent dans les différentes affiches ? There are also strong parallels between the genre of the two films. There is the episode of giving blood, another instance of non-reciprocal and non-economic activity. The succession of predatory men who want to be parasitic upon Mona, treating her as a host and then, when their advances are spurned, seeking to destroy her reputation. Her films, photographs, and art installations focus on documentary realism, feminist issues, and social commentary — with a distinct experimental style. « Sans toit ni loi » : les exclus Gisèle Dambuyant-Wargny Université Paris XIII-IUT de Bobigny ... plus ou moins permanente (être u sans feu ni lieu" ou usans domicile fixe", c'est être dépourvu d' existence sociale) » [Bour-dieu, 1997 : 162]. I did not want to know everything there was to know about Mona. She is also a catalyst that forces them to reveal themselves, to show us who they really are, as Mariah Devereux Herbeck notes: Mona incites others to action, or more specifically, to narration—a sentiment echoed in Varda’s “Press Book” for STL: “[Mona] is a catalyst, someone who forces others to react and adjust themselves in relation to her.” Despite its seemingly passive connotations, the analogy announces a liberating role for Mona since a catalyst is defined as “a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without being consumed in the process”. Finally, smell is represented by the metaphorical value of an image or an action that makes us think of another sense. [21] Agnès Varda and Rob Edelman, “Travelling a Different Route: An Interview with Agnès Varda”, Cinéaste 15:1 (1986), 21. “Se laver reste un acte social, purifier son espace est un geste d’accueil, religieux, amoureux, collectif, hôtelier. What Yolande keeps clean is the inside of people’s houses, the place where socialising happens, where property is accumulated, and Mona is excluded from the clean centre of things to the dirty and lonely exterior. To be sure, Mona does not herself inscribe, but she is not simply the object of others’ inscription either. Sans toit ni loi Agnès Varda - France - 1985 - 1h45 - couleurs Agnès Varda a réalisé Sans toit ni loi en 1985, après une longue période de repérages dans le sud de la France, pendant laquelle elle a choisi ses décors mais aussi a rencontré des vagabonds qui l’ont inspirée pour … This week we continue our exploration of how the thought of Michel Serres can generate interesting and productive readings of films. It also puns on sans toi ("without you"). It’s about what it is to be so much in the “no” situation—she says no all the time—and I don’t know why she ended up on the road and saying no.[11]. We are regularly reminded throughout the film that Mona is dirty, and that she stinks, and this sets her outside the economy of property and possessions. This is the most important principle of the parasite for Serres, that it is a disruption to a relation that is nevertheless the essence of relation; and so a disruption to a system that is itself system forming. Austin, G. (1996). Sans toit ni loi [Film sur DVD]. Laisse le temps rouler. Quite to the contrary, because Mona’s life can only be represented in pure movement, the absence of goals and projects”.[22]. In a 2001 interview, Varda reflects on her intentions for Cléo and Sans toit: In Cléo from 5 to 7, which is a fiction film, when Cléo [Corinne Marchand] is in the street and starts to look at other people, I had to have a texture of documentary so that we would believe what she sees in the street—such as the man swallowing frogs. When, towards the end of the film, she is attacked by the “tree people” and dunked in a bath of wine, it is her inability to read the situation as a local festival, and her subsequent extreme, panicked reaction, that frame her as a foreigner to the village, as someone who does not belong and who is expelled. L’hôte est propre, le parasite est sale, je veux dire par là qu’il n’est propre que pour soi.” Michel Serres, Le Parasite (Paris: Hachette, 1980) 191. The second parasite in the film is, of course, Mona herself. It doesn’t matter to me about her past, if she was loved or unloved as a child. She is rarely in the beginning of the tracking shot and she is rarely at the end [… ] It’s funny, even once she is dead, she’s still walking, even when she stops, she is walking”.[12]. As she passes from one location and from one relationship to another she weaves communities out of previously unrelated individuals. The original French title, Sans toit ni loi ("With neither shelter nor law"), is a play on a common French idiom, "Sans foi ni loi", meaning "With neither faith nor law". If the player in the middle correctly identifies who holds the slipper at a given moment, she trades places with the new victim.