Avoid Contact with the Eyes and Skin, May Cause Irritation: Agnès Varda’s La Pointe courte (1954)
Avoid Contact with the Eyes and Skin, May Cause Irritation: Agnès Varda’s La Pointe courte (1954)

Summary/Abstract: When, through highly atypical financial and creative means, French filmmaker Agnès Varda’s first feature film The Pointe Courte (La Pointe courte, 1954) first appeared on cinema screens, a fragment of contemporary commentators thought it hampered by “defects,” “blunders” and “follies.” Its perceived infirmity compounded further by a “rather irritating intellectual dryness,” implying contact with the film may cause itching. A more material, rather than intellectual engagement with the film, then, may offer a means to overcome such reservations; a piste this article pursues. In doing so, I draw on the thought of contemporary French thinker Jean-Luc Nancy and his proposition that all images are flowers and the mobilised look such thinking engenders oscillates between an optical gaze and a haptic graze. A look mobilized thanks to the contact it makes with wood’s textured, internal ornament and which undoes the material myopia by which the film’s existing critical landscape has itself been hampered.

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