This the second of four undergraduate lectures in which I explore how the thought of Michel Serres can inform film studies. I embarked upon the lectures as a speculative experiment, but in writing them I became convinced that there are rich resources in Serres’s thought for generating novel and engaging readings of films that often depart from critical orthodoxy in productive ways, just as does Serres’s thought itself. I post the lectures here in their original form, reflecting the conventions and register of spoken delivery. My hope is that they can be a stimulation to scholars of film studies and scholars of Serres’s thought alike.
This week we continue our exploration of how the thought of Michel Serres can generate interesting and productive readings of films. We are going to treat ourselves this week to a second film by Agnès Varda. The 1985 Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi), which you have now all seen. tells the story of the final weeks in the life of a young vagrant woman Mona, played by Sandrine Bonnaire.
It is set in the département of Languedoc-Roussillon, in the South of France, the landscape of which is—as we shall see—central to the way in which the film unfolds.
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. It generally has a pejorative connotation. We might think of someone “fearing neither god nor man”; we might think of a bandit or a pirate. As Laurent Dechery describes it, law in this context “is what ties the individual to the collective”, whereas Mona “has no rights and no obligations”.[1]
As well as the film’s title, Mona’s name is also rich with meaning. 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”. As Mona herself says to the soixante-huitard goatherd, for her “seule, c’est bien” (“Alone is good”).
Some critics have seen Sans toit ni loi as a second part of Cléo’s story:
As early as 1961, in Cléo de 5 à 7, we watch as Cléo moves from narcissistic doll to a questioning adult, gazing at and reflecting on life around her and life itself. Sans toit ni loi picks up where that film ended in terms of the path followed by the main female character. In fact, Flitterman-Lewis has referred to Sans toit ni loi as the remake of the earlier Cléo.[2]
We leave Cléo as she begins to resist conforming to the expectations of others, but when we meet Mona she has travelled a lot, lot further down that road.
There are also, however, parallels between Cléo and Mona that would lead us to think of them not as consecutive but as parallel. Cléo is almost destroyed by seeking desperately to please others; Mona is destroyed by refusing to conform to the expectations of others. However, the narrative arc of both protagonists is ultimately sombre: it is likely that Cléo will die from the disease she is harbouring, the parasite inside of her, and Mona does die though, as we shall see, in her case she herself is the parasite.
There are also strong parallels between the genre of the two films. 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. I’ve been trying all my life to put into fictional films the texture of documentary. Like in Vagabond, with the exception of Sandrine Bonnaire and a few others, all the other people are real workers, real people in the fields. But I asked them to say my words, so it still is written; it’s not improvised at all. I asked them to do it, we rehearsed, but because they knew how to behave with their own tools in their own surroundings, they acted very much like people within a documentary.[3]
In this sense we might say that both films are transgressive, mixing the genres of documentary and fictional storytelling that have been customarily kept distinct since the origin of film in the documentary-style real-life shots of the Lumière brothers and the fantastical imaginative romps of Georges Méliès.
Sans toit ni loi is also one of the very few films that have already been brought into conversation with Michel Serres’s thought, in Ross Chambers’ book Loiterature.[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. The result is covert social criticism that casts doubt on the values good citizens hold dear—values like discipline, organization, productivity, and, above all, work.[5]
As we will see in relation to Mona later on in this lecture, loiterature in general is a resistance to the dominant paradigm in Western modernity of efficiency and productivity. It is reminiscent of the famous refrain of Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, the eponymous antihero of which mounts a campaign of resistance to the Wall Street firm for which he works by repeatedly meeting the demands placed upon him with the reply “I would prefer not to”.
Chambers reads Sans toit ni loi through Serres’s 1980 book Le Parasite (The Parasite), in which Serres weaves in and out of the different meanings of the term “le parasite” in French:
[…] the term ‘parasite’ has three meanings in French, not two as in English. The parasite in French is firstly someone who eats at the table of another, without being invited: that’s the parasite of the Latin and Greek comedies. Then there’s the sense drawn from parasitology, the parasite which can even be a microbe, from the single cell creature to the insect, and which feeds on a host. 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]
This multifaceted notion proves to be an illuminating lens through which to focus Varda’s film, because—as I argued last week for topological space and time in relation to Cléo—it helps us to think about more than just Mona’s character, and to bring together multiple elements of the film which otherwise might be treated separately.
The most obvious parasite in the film is ceratocystis fimbriata, the disease that afflicts the plane trees and that is described (@49.10) as “a fungus that’s like a cancer”. It was brought to the region, or so it is thought, by U.S. soldiers in the Second World War (@49.54). With the juxtaposition of the presence of soldiers and the evocation of cancer, how can we not think once more of Cléo?
The second parasite in the film is, of course, Mona herself. Mona is a parasite insofar that she has ceased to work a regular job and now lives off what she can beg and steal from others, as well as from little jobs here and there. 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. Indeed, Mona repeatedly asks for things in the film: @9.26 she knocks on a door and is sent to the outdoor fountain to drink; @10.10 she asks for a cigarette; @10.30 she asks for matches; @28.40 David complains that “while I had grass she was cool”, but when he went out cold she left; @40.36 she steals some cheese. The soixante-huitard goatherd explicitly calls Mona a parasite in a derogatory sense, dismissing her with the term when she refuses to cultivate the field of potatoes that he has offered to her.
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. Mona is no more committed to the cause of environmentalism than she is to that of capitalism.
Another expression of Mona’s outsider status in the film is her lack of cleanliness and her smell. 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. The link works semantically in French in a way that is lost in English. The French for cleanliness is “propreté” and property is “propriété”; the adjective “propre” can mean both “clean” and “own”.
This contrasts starkly to Yolande, for example, who is employed as a cleaner. 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. What do we make of this dirtiness? Serres gives us a way of reading it in Le Parasite:
Washing is a social act; purifying one’s space is an act of welcoming, or a religious, amorous, collective, or hostal act. The more the body is dirty, the more the niche is soiled with feces, the more the person is attached to his property. The host is clean; the parasite is dirty; I mean that it is only clean for itself.[7]
Cinematographically, of course, this is quite a challenge given that odour cannot be directly communicated through film, as Laurent Decherey explores:
Varda, a film-maker of the gaze, presents smell as the dominant sense in this audio-visual work. This is thus the presence of an absence. The first challenge of this film is to make apparent a sense which does not belong to the medium of cinema. Mona’s stench is primarily evoked by the remarks of those who meet her, along with their physical reactions to her. Smell is also visually represented by her: Mona always wears the same clothes, day and night, whatever the weather. Finally, smell is represented by the metaphorical value of an image or an action that makes us think of another sense. The image of a bird is also a representation of its song, that of a cake represents its taste, that of a flower its perfume. Thus it is often when they are washing that the characters mention Mona’s dirtiness.[8]
Dirt, once more like Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to”, is a gesture of resistance, a refusal to enter the smooth circulation of bodies and capital that characterises the society Mona has rejected ever since she quit her secretarial job. In Sans toit ni loi, dirt is political.
Finally, Mona’s death is as a direct result of her being an outsider. 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. However, like the parasite that needs to be “in but not of”, exclusion spells death.
When Serres’s account of the parasite comes into its own in helping us understand Mona’s role in the film is in its insistence on a double action: the parasite is both a foreign body that feeds off its host and a facilitator of relations, both an uninvited guest and the static noise that carries a message.
There is a tendency in the criticism of this film to stress the negative, uninvited element of Mona’s character at the expense of her role as a positive initiator of relationships, as for example in Laurent Decherey’s treatment of the film:
She is worn out, with no rights and no obligations. As she owes nothing to anyone, there can be nothing owing to her. She follows neither rules nor people; her journey seems totally random and her only will is completely negative. Mona’s name is “no”.[9]
Similarly, Barbara Quart argues that Mona is “someone who says no to everything so totally as to look like independence itself”.[10] As Varda herself says in an interview with Quart:
AV: The way the story is told is not to be pitiful, not for understanding, that is not what it is about. 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]
Now, Mona is most definitely an outsider, someone who has bought out of the structures that sustain modern Western society, and someone who says “no”. In terms of modern Western capitalism, she has gone off the map, off balance sheet. 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. Il y a moi” (“There is no-one left. There is me”). In terms of the normal calculations of a modern society, Mona does not count as a person. She is not a player with a stake in the game. We learn that she used to have a job in “steno-dactylo”, taking dictation. There could hardly be a job that is more directly or obviously about doing exactly what your employer wants, quite literally being dictated to, and it could hardly be more of a contrast with the life Mona has chosen for herself.
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. Mariah Devereux Herbeck explains:
In 11 of the 12 tracking shots, the camera neither focuses on nor follows Mona. She either walks into and out of the view of the camera as it tracks to the left or the camera pans over her and past her. In both cases, at the end of each tracking shot the camera rests on any number of diverse objects ranging from a tractor to an old tire on a street sign. During an interview, Varda explained that these tracking shots serve one purpose—to display Mona’s incessant wandering through the countryside: “The tracking shots are Mona walking, she is just one part of the already existing countryside. 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]
It is almost as if Mona is not visible to the camera, just as she is largely invisible to society. She drifts in and out of shot in the same way she drifts in and out of relationships, while members of society are distracted or busy doing other things. 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 did not want to know everything there was to know about Mona. She is, more than anything else, a mystery, and that’s as it should be. The film is a puzzle, with not all of the pieces present. Certainly, I am sympathetic to this outcast character, but I’ve not romanticized her or glorified her. She is who she is; she makes no demands on others; she doesn’t want to share her life. I’m not interested in analyzing her. It doesn’t matter to me about her past, if she was loved or unloved as a child. I’m interested in who she is at the moment we see her.[13]
Detached and set apart from society, Mona is also set apart from her own biography; she is no longer tied to her past, just as she is no longer tied to the trappings of late modern culture.
Mona, however, is not the only parasitic figure in the film, perhaps not even the main one. There are also:
- 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)
- 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. For example, there is the man who leaves Mona’s tent pulling up his trousers (@18.00), and the sequence in which Mona is raped in the woods, a place symbolic of the absence of law (hence the French ‘Robin des bois’, literally ‘Robin of the woods’, knowing in English as Robin Hood, @1.03.42).
- There is the episode of giving blood, another instance of non-reciprocal and non-economic activity.
- Then of course there is the generalized parasitism in which all the characters take from the land and its produce, in just the same way that Mona is parasitic on society.
- And finally, but by no means least importantly, people parasitize Mona with their words, appropriating her life, fitting her into their story, framing her for their own ends in their to-camera dialogue.
So—just as Michel Serres says in Le Parasite—parasitism in Sans toit ni loi is not an isolated phenomenon but a general condition of existence: before we are anything else, we are all parasites first.
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. It’s just like we will never know exactly what she is, because she says very little, and the impression she makes on people and what they say could, little by little, build a portrait like a puzzle with a lot of missing pieces. And so for me, a puzzle is a space. It’s something in which you build an image, which at the end should make sense, but if pieces are missing, they are like empty spaces, making like a little city by themselves. Each piece is like a little landscape of nothing. And I think the big nothing in the middle of Mona is important.[14]
In a separate interview, Varda stresses how this is not a reciprocal relationship, which draws her reflections closer to the parasitic paradigm: “Vagabond is really constructed about different people looking at Mona-like building together an impossible portrait of Mona. This is not back and forth”.[15]
The characters in the film occupy the blank space that is Mona with their own favoured theories, parasitizing her in the process, taking without giving back, using her symbolically and linguistically in the same way that she uses them for food and shelter. In fact, our very first encounter with Mona is of this sort. 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. The investigators, just like everyone else, want to inscribe her in a story; domesticate her. They reduce her to the calculable, measuring the diameter of the ditch in which she is lying (2 metres 50, we are told, @3.58), and remarking that she has “no papers” (@3.46). She was, we are authoritatively informed, “saisi par le froid” (“taken by the cold”, @3.40).
After this tone-setting opening scene in which the farm workers and police reconstruct her death in quantifiable, calculable units of knowledge, a host of characters fall over each other to explain and interpret Mona: the men who see her naked on the beach and who then look at bawdy postcards and nonchalantly boast about having “it” for two francs, where the pronoun is ambiguous between the postcard and Mona herself; the truck drivers; the farmer’s daughter who projects onto Mona a fantasy of freedom, speculating that “the girl who came for water was free” and concluding “I’d prefer to be free” (@10.42);
the blanket judgment that Mona belongs in the category of “female drifters, all alike: loafers and men-chasers” (@15.38); Yolande, who says direct to camera “I wish Paulo would dream with me… like the couple in the château” (@22.25); Mme Landier who comments while on the phone that “there’s a weird girl in my car” (@52.40) and “she’s taken root in my car” (@53.10), who, we feel, has only picked Mona up so that she can talk to her friends about her later; Jean-Pierre’s admission “I am frightened of her because she disgusts me” (@1.34.50); the hippie goatherd who tries to force his interpretation of Mona on her with the judgment on her lifestyle, telling her that by proving herself useless she in fact helps the system she rejects, and condemning her lifestyle with the epithet “It’s wrong, not wandering” (“c’est l’erreur, c’est pas l’errance”, @1.04.24).
For everyone in the film, Mona represents something, and for everyone in the film, Mona represents something different.
All these are instances of “fixing” Mona. All the shots in which people talk about her are static and the interviewees are seated or otherwise unmoving, reflecting the inflexible interpretative grid into which they are forcing her. The shots of Mona walking, by contrast, are dolly shots.[16]
In fact, the statements about Mona say more about the characters making those statements than they do about her. And this is where Mona’s parasitism becomes more complex, and closer to Michel Serres’s account of the parasite. Because Mona is not simply an undefined object, a blank canvas upon which people paint their desires and fears. 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”. Moreover, it is a substance “that precipitates a process or event, especially without being involved in or changed by the consequences.”[17]
As a catalyst Mona is active, she manipulates the other characters in the film, and what their testimonies about her show, crucially, is that Mona has changed them.[18]
For Varda, Mona not only shows individuals to themselves, but also shows up the limits and fragilities of modern Western society:
AV: With Mona, I would say it’s our society’s contradictions that come out very clearly. We have all these social ideas that we should have night shelters, Salvation Army, welfare, charity, to help out other people, but we don’t know what to do when people don’t want to be helped. There is a contradiction in our indifference and caring at the same time.[19]
And lest we think that we, the viewers, are exempt from the way in which Mona reveals people, Laurent Decherey notes how we are inexorably drawn into the same dynamic:
So Mona becomes our personal and social unconscious. For the farmer who gives her lodging, she is “erring, not wandering”; for the maid who has no sympathy for her, she represents romantic love; for Madame Landier, who gives her money for weed, she represents her bad conscience towards a daughter she never had; for the manager she is the bad model her own daughter must not follow; for the garage attendant she is the expression of the dirt he has on his hands and in his mind… And for us, what does she represent?[20]
We, too, parasitize her too because we try to make sense of her life and death, try to interpret her resistance to interpretation—which is exactly what I am doing in this lecture at the moment. However, we are not allowed to identify with Mona or feel great sympathy, even when she is raped. She refuses to give back to us in a reciprocal relationship: She is not presented to us as a figure evoking great pathos, pulling on our viewerly heart-strings. Nor is she presented as an odious character we love to hate. We are kept at a distance from her, just as she seeks to keep the rest of society at a distance. We cannot coopt her into our neat economy of theories and interpretations, just as she will not let herself be coopted into the financial and relational and economy that governs the lives of the other characters. In a 1986 interview, Varda voices this unease, this frustration with Mona:
And how do we respond to such a person? Can we accept that some people simply do not want to give to us? We, as do the witnesses, the people she meets in the course of her wanderings, will respond to someone like Mona in a variety of ways. Some will admire her guts to live as she does; some will find her revolting. I’ve not judged her in the film, so I hope the viewers will have their own feelings about her, just as the witnesses do.[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. Quite to the contrary, because Mona’s life can only be represented in pure movement, the absence of goals and projects”.[22]
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.
So Mona resists interpretation, but makes interpretation possible; she reveals everyone else, but keeps herself hidden. 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. But, since all relation will involve a kind of impedance, just like every electrical current, noise is also necessary to every relation. 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.[23]
Furthermore, Mona also performs in Sans toit ni loi the function of what Serres calls the “quasi-object”. He explains the quasi-object in The Parasite through the game of “hunt the slipper”,[24] in which players sit in a circle and have to pass a slipper from hand to hand without the player in the middle of the circle being able to identify who is in possession of the slipper. If the player in the middle correctly identifies who holds the slipper at a given moment, she trades places with the new victim. 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]
Like the slipper in the game, Mona creates the relationships of the film. As she passes from one location and from one relationship to another she weaves communities out of previously unrelated individuals. She is the element that is not part of the system, but that nevertheless makes the system of relationships in the film. Mona is the possibility of all interpretation in the film, though she does not herself interpret.
This understanding of Mona as quasi-object allows us to bring out a further layer of complexity in Ross Chambers’ argument in Loiterature. For Chambers: “Mona parts company with loiterature, which is overwhelmingly a first-person genre. She cannot or will not write; she must therefore be written about”.[26] This is true as far as it goes, but it misses something of the complex role of the quasi-object. To be sure, Mona does not herself inscribe, but she is not simply the object of others’ inscription either. She is also its possibility. 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. 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.[27]
She is the quasi-object passing through the film, in relation to which all its language and interpretations position themselves. She is does not merely the passive object of the description offered about her by the groups and individuals in the film; she makes them: “This quasi-object, when being passed, makes the collective, if it stops, it makes the individual. If he is discovered, he is ‘it’ [mort]. Who is the subject, who is an ‘I,’ or who am I? The moving furet weaves the ‘we,’ the collective; if it stops, it marks the ‘I.’”[28]
In The Parasite Serres goes even further, arguing that, in a game like hunt the slipper, or like his own beloved sport of rugby, the body of the player is the object of the ball, not the other way round. The ball is the sun around which the players orbit:
The ball is played, and the teams place themselves in relation to it, not vice versa. As a quasi-object, the ball is the true subject of the game. It is like a tracker of the relations in the fluctuating collectivity around it. The same analysis is valid for the individual: the clumsy person plays with the ball and makes it gravitate around himself; the mean player imagines himself to be a subject by imagining the ball to be an object—the sign of a bad philosopher. On the contrary, the skilled player knows that the ball plays with him or plays off him, in such a way that he gravitates around it and fluidly follows the positions it takes, but especially the relations that it spawns.[29]
So in conclusion, to say that Mona is characterized by negation and refusal is true, but not the whole truth. She is also the quasi-object who, precisely in her very refusal to participate in the relational and economic circulation of society, brings into being the individuals and communities that take it upon themselves to define her and, in so doing, reveal themselves to us.
[1] Laurent Dechery, “Autour de Mona dans Sans toit ni loi d’Agnès Varda”, The French Review 79:1 (2005) 139.
[2] Ruth A. Hottell, “Flying through southern France: Sans toit ni loi by Agnès Varda”, Women’s Studies 28:6 (1999) 684.
[3] Melissa Anderson, “The Modest Gesture of the Filmmaker: An Interview with Agnes Varda”, Cinéaste 26:4 (2001), 24-27.
[4] Ross Chambers, Loiterature (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).
[5] https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/university-of-nebraska-press/9780803263925/
[6] Serres, Michel, and Raoul Mortley. “Chapter III. Michel Serres”, in French Philosophers in Conversation, ePublications@bond, 1991, 57. Available at http://epublications.bond.edu.au/french_philosophers/4/
[7] Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982) 145. “Se laver reste un acte social, purifier son espace est un geste d’accueil, religieux, amoureux, collectif, hôtelier. Plus le corps propre est sale, plus la niche est breneuse, plus la personne est attachée à sa propriété. 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.
[8] CW’s translation. “ Cinéaste des regards, Varda présente l’odorat comme le sens le plus fort de cette œuvre audio-visuelle. Cette présence est donc celle d’une absence. Le premier défi de ce film c’est de faire apparaître un sens qui n’appartient pas au médium du cinéma. La puanteur de Mona est surtout évoquée par les commentaires des témoins et leurs réactions corporelles. L’odorat est aussi représenté visuellement par sa cause: Mona porte toujours les mêmes vêtements, de jour comme de nuit et quel que soit le temps. Il l’est enfin par la valeur métaphorique d’une image ou d’une action, celle qui nous fait penser à un autre sens. L’image d’un oiseau c’est aussi la représentation de son chant, celle d’un gâteau son goût, celle d’une fleur son parfum. 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).
[9] « Usée ; elle est sans droit et sans obligation. Comme elle ne doit rien à personne, il n’y a pas pour elle de retour possible. Elle ne suit ni règle ni personne ; son cheminement semble totalement lié au hasard et à sa seule volonté qui est entièrement négative. Le nom de Mona est non. » Laurent Decherey, “Autour de Mona dans Sans toit ni loi d’Agnès Varda”, The French Review 79:1 (2005) 139.
[10] Barbara Quart and Agnès Varda, “Agnès Varda: a conversation”, Film Quarterly 40:2 (1986-1987) 3.
[11] Barbara Quart and Agnès Varda, “Agnès Varda: a conversation”, Film Quarterly 40:2 (1986-1987) 5.
[12] Mariah Devereux Herbeck, Wandering Women in French Film and Literature: A Study of Narrative Drift (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) 235.
[13] Agnès Varda and Rob Edelman, “Travelling a Different Route: An Interview with Agnès Varda”, Cinéaste 15:1 (1986), 20.
[14] Marie-Claire Barnet, Shirley Jordan, “Interviews with Agnès Varda and Valérie Mréjen”, L’Esprit Créateur 51:1 (2011), 188.
[15] Barbara Quart and Agnès Varda, “Agnès Varda: A Conversation”, Film Quarterly 40:2 (1986-1987), 6.
[16] Phil Powrie, “Heterotopic Spaces and Nomadic Gazes in Varda: From Cléo de 5 à 7 to Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse”, L’Esprit Créateur 51:1 (2011) 68-82, 72.
[17] Mariah Devereux Herbeck, Wandering Women in French Film and Literature: A Study of Narrative Drift (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) 130.
[18] See Flitterman-Lewis 1996: 314.
[19] Barbara Quart and Agnès Varda, “Agnès Varda: A Conversation”, Film Quarterly 40:2 (1986-1987), 9.
[20] CW’s translation. “ Mona devient alors notre inconscient personnel et social. Pour le berger qui l’héberge, elle est “l’erreur pas l’errance”; pour la bonne qui ne l’a pas “à la bonne”, elle représente l’amour romantique; pour Madame Landier, qui donne du blé pour de l’herbe, sa mauvaise conscience vis-à-vis d’une fille qu’elle n’a jamais eue; pour le régisseur, le modèle que sa fille ne doit pas suivre; pour le garagiste, l’expression de la saleté qu’il a sur les mains et dans la tête…. Et pour nous, que représente-t-elle?” (Laurent Dechery, “Autour de Mona dans ‘Sans toit ni loi’ d’Agnès Varda”, The French Review 79:1 (2005) 138-147, 146).
[21] Agnès Varda and Rob Edelman, “Travelling a Different Route: An Interview with Agnès Varda”, Cinéaste 15:1 (1986), 21.
[22] “La mort de Mona ne transforme pas sa vie en destin. Tout au contraire, puisque la vie de Mona ne peut se représenter que dans le pur mouvement, l’absence de but et de projet”. Laurent Dechery, “Autour de Mona dans ‘Sans toit ni loi’ d’Agnès Varda”, The French Review 79:1 (2005) 138-147, 138.
[23] Steven Connor, “Parables of the Para-”, available at http://stevenconnor.com/para.html.
[24] In French the ‘jeu du furet’ (literally ‘game of the ferret’), in which one player, in the centre of a circle of other players, has to discover an object that is being passed quickly from hand to hand, generally on a string. See http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/furet
[25] Serres, Le Parasite 303/The Parasite 225-6.
[26] Ross Chambers, Loiterature (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999) 45.
[27] Ross Chambers, Loiterature (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999) 41-2.
[28] Serres, The Parasite 225. “Ce quasi-objet, en courant, fait du collectif : s’il s’arrête, il fait l’individu. Si celui-ci est découvert, il est mort. Qui est sujet, qui est je, ou qui suis-je ? Le furet, mobile, tisse le nous, le collectif ; qu’il s’arrête, il marque le je.” (Serres, Le Parasite 303).
[29] Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time, trans. Roxane Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995) 108.
