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LIMITED SERIES ENTER THE VARDAVERSE: WOMEN’S LIBERATION THROUGH FILM, 1971-1977 MAR 2– APR 8, 2023
One Sings, The Other Doesn’t Thu, Mar 2 | 7:30pm | TMT
Continuing our celebration of the prolific feminist filmmaker Agnès Varda (1928–2019), whose work and influences are highlighted in the museum’s Director’s Inspiration gallery on view in the exhibition Stories of Cinema , part two of the VardaVerse explores the rich period between 1971 and 1977 when women around the world took up cameras to tease out the theories and the demands of second wave feminism through cinema. Beginning in 1971, when Varda joined hundreds of women in signing the Manifeste des 343 , a French petition started by women who obtained illegal abortions, and running through 1977, when Varda’s One Sings, The Other Doesn’t beautifully showcased an intense female friendship through the lens of the women’s movement, this series looks to radical works made by women in Belgium, Canada, Cuba, France, West Germany, Italy, Lebanon, the former People’s Republic of the Congo, and the United States to more deeply understand Varda’s films through a symbolic dialogue with her international contemporaries. Within this collection are stories of labor struggles, body politics, sex work, liberation movements, spirituality and religion, and sexuality, which, when considered together, form a snapshot of a fertile era for independent productions by and for women, just one locus of which is Varda’s vibrant, activist oeuvre. Programmed and notes by K.J. Relth-Miller.
Women Reply: Our Bodies, Our Sex ( Réponse de femmes: Notre corps, notre sexe ) with One Sings, The Other Doesn’t Thu, Mar 2 | 7:30pm | TMT Women Reply: Our Bodies, Our Sex ( Réponse de femmes: Notre corps, notre sexe ) Commissioned by the French television channel Antenne 2, Women Reply is Varda’s contribution to what was a series of seven films that aimed to answer the prompt, “What is a woman?” Decidedly second wave in its reductive consideration of gender, this short is a time capsule of white feminism and empowerment in Western society. DIRECTED BY: Agnès Varda. 1975. 9 min. France. Color. French. DCP. One Sings, The Other Doesn’t Agnès Varda’s nuanced approach to motherhood, pregnancy, and how one should live in the churning 1970s unfolds via the continent-spanning friendship of Pomme and Suzanne, played respectively by Valérie Mairesse and Thérèse Liotard, two actresses who understood that Varda was presenting them with a chance to tell a story from the mind of an explicitly feminist artist, through the language of an emerging feminist cinema. This sprawling musical,
which was not distributed widely in the US until 2018, is essential viewing for a time in which access to reproductive healthcare in the US is as tenuous as it was five decades ago. DIRECTED/WRITTEN BY: Agnès Varda. WITH: Thérèse Liotard, Valérie Mairesse, Ali Rafie, Robert Dadiès. 1977. 116 min. France. Color. French. DCP. Semiotics of the Kitchen with Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles Made the same year as Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman… , American conceptual artist Martha Rosler (b. 1943) confronts her viewer with a stone-faced, aproned woman in her kitchen. As this unhappy housewife displays and handles her cooking tools alphabetically, their meanings are recontextualized as objects not of domestic labor, but as weapons of female rage. DIRECTED BY: Martha Rosler. 1975. 6 min. USA. B&W. Digital. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles Recently named the greatest film of all time by the decennial Sight and Sound poll, Belgian filmmaker Fri, Mar 3 | 7:30pm | TMT Semiotics of the Kitchen
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