Studies in European Cinema

ISSN: 1741-1548 (Print) 2040-0594 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rseu20

Between women: Gesture, intermediary and

intersubjectivity in the installations of Agnès Varda
and Chantal Akerman

Jenny Chamarette

To cite this article: Jenny Chamarette (2013) Between women: Gesture, intermediary and
intersubjectivity in the installations of Agnès Varda and Chantal Akerman, Studies in European
Cinema, 10:1, 45-57

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1386/seci.10.1.45_1

Published online: 06 Jan 2014.

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 SEC 10 (1) pp. 45–57 Intellect Limited 2013

Studies in European Cinema

Volume 10 Number 1
© 2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/seci.10.1.45_1

Jenny Chamarette
University of London

Between women: Gesture,

intermediality and
intersubjectivity in the
installations of Agnès Varda
and Chantal Akerman

Abstract Keywords
The works of Agnès Varda and Chantal Akerman span two generations of female Agnès Varda
influence in the sphere of contemporary visual culture in France. Both film-makers Chantal Akerman
have seized upon the richly intermedial potential of film, photography, video and moving image
installation, while acknowledging their own status as figures engaging with the French cinema
marginal politics of auteurist film-making. This article interrogates how the recent installation art
installations, ‘Les Veuves de Noirmoutier/The Widows of Noirmoutier’ (Varda, gesture
2005) and ‘Marcher à côté de ses lacets dans un frigidaire vide/To Walk next to mediation
One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge’ (Akerman, 2004), stage an encounter between subjectivity
the cinematic, ethical and spatial practices of each female auteur, the female subjects
of their moving-image work, and their viewers. By invoking concepts of gesture from
Giorgio Agamben, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and recent writing on dance and film,
the article explores the intermedial potential of gesture as a framework for examining
processes of meaning-making, spatial experimentation and spectatorial physicality
in these recent moving-image installations.

45
Jenny Chamarette

The works of Agnès Varda and Chantal Akerman span two generations of
female cultural influence in the sphere of contemporary visual culture in
France: the former since the beginnings of the nouvelle vague, and the latter
as a leading figure of contemporary avant-garde, experimental and exilic film-
making practices. Both film-makers have seized upon the richly intermedial
potential of film, photography, video and installation, while acknowledging
their own status as figures engaging with the marginal politics of auteurist
film-making. As female auteurs who have shifted their screens and moving
images into gallery and museum spaces, Varda and Akerman’s approaches
to the spaces of film exhibition and their relation to contemporary art take a
rather different trajectory, compared to the patterns of commercial distribu-
tion favoured by other female film-makers in France in the past decade.
This article interrogates the ways in which the recent installations, ‘Les
Veuves de Noirmoutier/The Widows of Noirmoutier’ (Varda, 2005) and
‘Marcher à côté de ses lacets dans un frigidaire vide/To Walk next to One’s
Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge’ (Akerman, 2004), stage an encounter between
the cinematic, ethical and spatial practices of each female auteur, the female
subjects of their moving-image work and their viewers. While both instal-
lations engage thematically with feminine intersubjectivity and marginalized
feminine discourse between mothers, daughters and widows, I argue that
these works complicate the cultural grounds of viewing ‘women film-makers’
and ‘women on film’ through gestural frameworks that resonate intermedi-
ally between the spaces of film, the spaces of moving-image installation and
the migratory spaces of the viewer. In this, my approach has resonances with
the recent scholarship of Francesco Casetti on film experience and the relo-
cation of cinema (2009, 2012) and Bolter and Grusin’s work on remediation
(2000). However, the concerns of this article focus mainly on the agency and
intervention of spectatorial and material bodies within the installations via the
migration of gesture from bodily to technological realms, rather than the tech-
nologies that facilitate such agency.
In order to explore concepts of migration, circulation and other modes of
movement and gesture, I invoke concepts of gesture from Giorgio Agamben,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty and recent writing on gesture in dance and film. The
‘women’ that I am attempting to think ‘between’ in the title of this article
acknowledge the auteurist figures of Varda and Akerman as film-makers
making film installations, but this betweenness has rather more to do with the
women that figure in the moving images of the installations – which, in both
cases, include the bodily presence of the film-maker. In particular, this article
interrogates the intermedial potential of gesture as a framework for examin-
ing the migration of affect and forms of embodied engagement, particularly
with regard to spatial experimentation and spectatorial physicality in these
moving-image installations.
In this article, I reflect upon the intersubjective ‘space between’ as a manner
of enfolding filmic practice, filmic exhibition and filmic experience within the
installation space. I argue that the installations of Varda and Akerman do not
offer an entirely radical departure from the spatial conditions of cinema view-
ing, or gallery viewing for that matter. Rather, they encourage a spatial dyna-
mism of the screen and the spectator to produce meaningful encounters with
the work, in a manner that traverses the expressive medium of the screen, and
the space of cinema, and the bodily relations of spectators to space. Gesture,
in all its philosophical and embodied complexity, offers a means of thinking
about intermediality and intersubjectivity, as a migratory, transitory process of

46
 Between women

meaning-making. The imaginary dialogue that I set up between the installa-

tions of these two grandes auteures explores the particular role of gesture as it
migrates from on-screen representation and mechanical apparatus, towards
the embodied, affective and participatory logic of the works.

Thinking gesture
In order to conceptualize gesture beyond the figurative and the symbolic,
I begin with two interrelated interpretations of the concept, from the sphere
of politics and the ethics of the image, and from phenomenology. In his well-
known short essay on gesture and the cinema, ‘Notes on Gesture’, Giorgio
Agamben (Agamben 2000: 58) states the following:

The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a

means visible as such. It allows the emergence of the being-in-a-medium
of human beings and thus it opens the ethical dimension for them.
(emphasis added)

Agamben argues in this essay that gesture in an image encapsulates two mutu-
ally antithetical strands. One, the image shifts the status of the ephemeral and
motile gesture of the human body into a fixed object – a thing – and two, the
image at the same time calls into being a sense of motion at work somewhere
in that represented object (Agamben 1992: 51). Agamben’s broader political
argument in his short essay turns towards the value of a philosophical thinking
of cultural means without the particular fixity or political violence of a cultural
end – a thinking of pure mediality, or betweenness. Agamben synthesizes the
two antithetical positions of the image’s fixity (or the fixing of the body, or
the object, via the image) and the calling into being of motion, to argue that,
like the image, gesture itself is a medial form: it brings into the realm of the
visible the mechanical rendering of movement or dynamism. By revealing
mechanicity or, read another way, by revealing the bodiliness of being human
towards other bodies, gesture is in itself always ethical in its mediality, in the
process of its evolution into signifying layers of meaning. It is this element of
gesture in particular that would seem to elucidate thinking about between-
ness and intersubjectivity.
Gesture is the exhibition of mediality; it is the making visible of between-
ness. Gesture in an image foregrounds its mediality, and, in doing so,
foregrounds the necessary mediation of all dynamic encounters with the
world. If one might interpose the perspective of phenomenologist Maurice
Merleau-Ponty here, gesture makes visible the notion of being-with-and-
through-others. When Merleau-Ponty famously states in his Phenomenology
of Perception, ‘The word is a gesture, and its meaning a world’ (Merleau-Ponty
1962: 184), gesture incorporates the medium, the meaning and the presence
of subjective expression within the world (and of the world within subjective
expression). As he later elaborates with regard to gesture, painting and artistic
expression, gesture is not simply linguistic (nor is language simply gestural),
but it is inherently relational:

If it is characteristic of the human gesture to signify beyond its simple

factual existence and to inaugurate a meaning, it follows that every
gesture is comparable to all others. They all arise from a single syntax.
Each gesture is both a beginning and a continuation which, insofar as

47
Jenny Chamarette

1. I am particularly it is not opaque and enclosed like an event that is complete once and for
indebted in this
article to the notions
all, has a value beyond its simple presence and is allied in advance with
of ‘ghosting’ and of or an accomplice in all other expressive efforts.
the ‘migration of (Merleau-Ponty 1973: 79–80)
gesture’ in the work
of Lesley Stern and
Deidre Sklar, and in For Merleau-Ponty, the notion of gesture is relational to all other forms of
the collected volume expression, as well as to the subject and the world. Gesture is always an
edited by Carrie Noland
and Sally Ann Ness, exchange between subject and world that makes visible their betweenness and
Migrations of Gesture, mutuality. Gesture is consequently what transmits expression, but also the
but also to Derridean
notions of the spectral,
modality through which expression is made perceivable. Furthermore, gesture
which I have explored is both ephemeral and constantly unfolding between modes of expression.
elsewhere with regard In an analysis that engages specifically with the ephemerality and constant
to Varda’s installations
(see Chamarette 2011). migration of gesture from medium to medium, Carrie Nolan suggests that

every instantiated gesture is, in a sense, its own undoing in that its
displacement – from body to body, from temporality to temporality,
from one medium to another, or from one cultural location to another,
unfixes the gesture from its inscription in a trace structure and releases
it into potentially new networks of expressiveness based not on the
differences among (gestural) signs, but on the differences among the bodies
executing them (emphasis added).
(Noland 2008: xvi)

Nolan highlights that gesture becomes a kind of ghostly discursive prac-

tice, shifting the grounds of its support, whether the support is a mechanical
apparatus or an organic, fleshy body.1 There seems to be a parallel, however
ghostly, between the mediation of a body, and the mediation of a screen,
through gestural movement. This parallel, which is a parallel of mediation,
or of relationality, rather than a parallel of representation, does not seek to
elide or ignore the difference between bodies and screens. However, it may
acknowledge the possibility of the transmission, doubling or migration of
discursive, embodied or relational practices – gestures – from a moving image
to a viewer, via a sense of embodiment that is not given over entirely to the
screen or the image. That gesture may be mimetic, and significatory, but it
may also simply be the grounds from which mediation makes itself appar-
ent: a mediation which is visible both on screens and in the spaces between
screens and viewers, and which acknowledges their fundamental mutuality.
How, then, to engage with gesture in order to interrogate the shifting
spatial dynamics and ‘betweenness’ that operate in Varda and Akerman’s
installations? Agamben’s ethics of the gesture that is always at work in the
image seems at first to be a distant relation to the issues of spectatorial move-
ment, feminine representation and intersubjectivity, which this article intends
to explore. Nonetheless, combined with the more recent approach of Nolan
and the phenomenological approach of Merleau-Ponty, it gives a ground from
which gesture can be explored fruitfully as, at one and the same time, ethi-
cal, intermedial and transitory between physical bodies, pro-filmic bodies and
the material apparatus of screen-based installations. If gesture is always inter-
medial, then it allows us to consider the mediation of spectators to screens,
as well as the mediation of bodies on screen, in the ongoing circulations of
moving-image installation.
Lesley Stern’s writing on the delicate interrelation between things,
gestures, performativity and affect seems particularly relevant here as a

48
 Between women

mediating stage between Agamben, Merleau-Ponty and moving-image instal- 2. The installation has
notably been discussed
lation. In an excellent meditation on gesture and ‘thinginess’, Stern (2001: 329) by Griselda Pollock
writes, ‘Gestures migrate between everyday life and the movies, but where (2010), whose detailed
the gestural often goes unnoticed in the everyday, in the cinema … it moves contextual, experiential
and psychoanalytic
into visibility’. The moving image brings to the fore the visibility of quotid- engagement with the
ian gesture, and, as a result, it also displays a constantly shifting relationship, installation’s parts
through gesture, to the world that extends beyond the screen. This seems to and whole forms the
basis of a meditation
capture so appositely the ‘betweenness’ of an encounter with the moving- on fragmentation,
image installations of Varda and Akerman: the migration of gesture, of move- the traces of text
throughout Akerman’s
ment, from screen to the spaces of its exhibition, via the bodies of viewers, oeuvre and the return
establishes a moment from which it becomes possible to discuss intermedial- of the maternal figure
ity (from film to installation, from image to body, and back again) and inter- within her work.
subjectivity. As Deidre Sklar (2008: 102) puts it, ‘Gesture migrates between 3. ‘Les Veuves de
quotidian and framed performances as well as between media’. Where the Noirmoutier’, large
mural panel, 3 m ×
thematic issues of the two installations focus so closely upon performances of 4 m with fourteen
feminine intersubjectivity, connectedness and a sharing of affect, their formal openings, one 35mm
structures invite these complex performances to be shared beyond the screen film of 9 min 30 sec on
a loop, digitized and
and towards the installation viewer, via the mediation of gesture. with added sound,
fourteen video films
of 3 min 30 sec with
‘To Walk next to One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge’ sound via headphones,
fourteen monitors
and ‘The Widows of Noirmoutier’ surrounding the screen,
fourteen chairs and
The shift of the spaces and sites of cinema from auditorium to gallery and fourteen headphones
museum has experienced a surge in critical interest in recent years (to name (2004–2005).
but a few, see Balsom 2009; Connolly 2009; Mondloch 2010; Nardelli 2009).
Studies of Film and Art History are struggling to take account both of the
cultural, historical and spatial specificity of moving-image installation, and its
inevitable bonds with experimental film, cinema, video art and other forms of
contemporary lens-based and site-specific artworks (for instance, see Casetti
2012). In this context, the work of Varda and Akerman is not exactly new, but
forms part of what might be described as a broader cultural phenomenon at
the intersection between cinema and exhibition practice. Nonetheless, rather
than attempting to contextualize the installations by Varda and Akerman
more broadly, this article interrogates the gestural specificity that comes to
light when engaging closely with them, but acknowledges particularly lasting
relationships to cinematic form that the auteurist presence of each film-maker
brings to the spaces of the installations.
Before attempting a sort of gestural dialogue between installations, film-
makers and viewer, this close engagement necessitates description. Varda’s
work has perhaps been more widely presented and engaged with previously
(cf. Chamarette 2011; Jordan 2009), and for this reason I will keep my descrip-
tion of ‘The Widows of Noirmoutier’ briefer than that of ‘To Walk next to
One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge’, which to date has had a more limited
viewership, or at least a smaller critical reception.2
Varda’s installation ‘The Widows of Noirmoutier’ was first exhibited in the
private Galérie Martine Aboucaya in Paris in 2005, and a year later was exhib-
ited as part of a much larger exhibition in the private Fondation Cartier, also
in Paris, and again in 2009 at the Sert Gallery in the Carpenter Center for the
Visual Arts, Boston.3 The multi-channel video installation was composed of
fourteen video screens, set into the wall of the gallery and arranged in rectan-
gular form around a central larger screen, onto which a digitized 35mm looped
film of some nine and half minutes was projected. Sound had been added to

49
Jenny Chamarette

4. ‘Marcher à côté de the central screen, projected into the room, while fourteen chairs, arranged
ses lacets dans un
frigidaire vide’, video
in a manner parallel to the fourteen video screens, were laid out before the
installation, two parts. network of screens. Each chair had attached to it a set of headphones; each set
First part: tulle on emitted the soundtrack of the video on the facing wall that corresponded to
construction with
two video projections; the relative position of the chair in the rectangle. The larger screen projected,
second part: double- in one long take, a long shot of women – widows, inhabitants of the island
image video projection of Noirmoutier on the west coast of France – dressed in black, circling a large
on wall and a single-
image video projection trestle table, placed upon a listless, grey and windswept beach, depicted in a
on tulle 16/9 screen, subdued filmic colour palette. The widows’ clothes are whipped and shaped
black and white, 24 min
(2004).
by the wind, as each woman moves slowly around the trestle.
The videos contained shorter recorded loops: moving portraits of each
woman, speaking openly about her own widowhood, the memories she has
of her husband, the objects he has left behind. The videos are visually rich, the
mise-en-scène cluttered by domestic objects, almost baroque against the pared-
down elements of the central tableau: black-clad women, a trestle on the
beach. Where the widows move slowly across the central screen, in the videos
they are predominantly immobile, seated, facing the camera. The white space
of the gallery serves as a foil to the illumination of the screens; the sounds of
the gallery intermingling with the soundtrack of the central screen; the immo-
bility of viewers sat upon the chairs acting as a foil to the gentle movements
depicted in the central tableau, and echoing the immobility of the widows and
their face-to-camera interviews.
Akerman’s installation ‘To Walk next to One’s Shoelaces in an Empty
Fridge’ also had its first exhibition in a private gallery in Paris, a year or so
previously, in 2004, and has also travelled to a number of public and private
institutions.4 It was exhibited in Tel Aviv in 2006, and in the Camden Arts
Centre, London, in 2008. The installation itself offers certain kinds of repeti-
tions of acts seen before in Akerman’s film-making. In particular, the instal-
lation employs techniques of the epistolary and of intimate writing, evoking
News from Home (Akerman, 1977), and of the domestic space, particularly the
kitchen, as is so prominent in films such as Demain on déménage/Tomorrow We
Move (Akerman, 2004), and her early films, Saute Ma Ville/Blow Up My Town
(Akerman, 1968) and Jeanne Dielmann, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
(Akerman, 1975).
In the instantiation of the exhibition where I had the opportunity of view-
ing it, the two-room installation adjoined two other works of Akerman’s:
Femmes d’Anvers en Novembre/Women from Antwerp in November (Akerman,
2007) and an installation of Akerman’s film Hôtel Monterey (Akerman, 1972).
Already this spatial arrangement determined the non-consecutive manner
in which one was permitted to explore the installation, since the rooms
demanded no specific order of viewing, and there was no particular separa-
tion between Women from Antwerp in November and ‘To Walk next to One’s
Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge’. One room contained two translucent tulle
screens, each about 3 metres in height, self-supporting upon a frame that
stretched concave and convex. The two screens were separated from one
another, but from certain perspectives invited a contemplation of shape, as
a spiral, or as interconnected passageways. A revolving projector concealed
in the corner of the room both illuminated the room and the screens, and
projected swirling sections of French text that rose up onto the screens clock-
wise and counterclockwise (see Figure 1).
The movement of text across and between each screen encouraged move-
ment, as opposed to stasis; passage through, behind and between the screens,

50
 Between women

Figure 1: ’To Walk next to One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge’ (Akerman,

2004). Chantal Akerman. Installation view at Camden Arts Centre, 2008.
Photo © Andy Keate.

as opposed to contemplation. The act of ‘reading’ the screen also became

a physical act of bodily movement, where passive observation precluded
comprehension of the text, and active pursuit of reading precluded static
positioning. Edna Moshenson (2006: 19) likens the spiral movements in this
room to the travelling shot, drawing a connection between mechanical move-
ments and the conventions of cinematic style, where ‘cinematic language and
style [are] tools for amplifying meaning, so that [Akerman] could cope with
charged traumatic subjects without rendering them banal’.
The passage and movement implicated cinematically, but without the
‘vertical’ moving image as conventionally conceived, shifted into a more
familiar cinematic format in the adjoining room. Darkened, rather than illu-
minated, this room contained two screens, hung one in front of the other. The
closer screen was composed of transparent tulle, thus permitting the more
distant screen to be viewed through the former, while still images of a diary,
illegible handwritten text, and of domestic objects were projected onto it. The
relative soundlessness of the previous room became apparent as the diegetic
voices of Akerman and her mother echoed in the room, and resonated with
the still images projected onto the front screen, while originating from the
rear. In spite of the possibility of a static viewing position, the double screen
set-up permitted a spectatorial look behind and beyond the projections, draw-
ing attention not only to the black-and-white illuminations, but to the dark-
ened room beyond it. The split-screen projection of a looped film on the rear
screen further complicated the processes of splitting and doubling.
The scene that played out on the loop portrayed an intimate dialogue
between Akerman and her mother (see Figure 2). The repeated image on
the left-hand side remained blurry and out of focus, while the image on the
right retained clarity in its long take, close-up focus on the faces and hands
of Akerman and her mother. The narrative scrutinizes the deciphering of

51
Jenny Chamarette

Figure 2: ‘To Walk next to One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge’ (Akerman,

2004). Chantal Akerman. Installation view at Camden Arts Centre, 2008.
Photo © Andy Keate.

Akerman’s maternal grandmother’s journal: as it is written in Polish, Akerman

cannot read it herself, and yet Akerman’s mother, physically frail and with a
fading grasp of her unused mother tongue, struggles too with the act of trans-
lation. The diary itself is not made prominently visible in the film: instead,
the camera lingers in one long take upon the hands and faces of Akerman
and her mother, displaying the gestures of intimacy between mother and
daughter. Akerman’s mother’s voice erratically switches between translating
and remembering, while Akerman, shifting in and out of the frame, gently
murmurs words of encouragement. This initiates a moment of tenderness
based around an intimate record of Akerman and her mother’s past that
can only ever be partially transcribed, repeated and enacted. As Moshenson
(2006: 19) describes, the moving image, and its context in the installation,
‘gives expression to the constant tension that exists in Akerman’s work
between writing and cinema, between a text that is also an image (in the first
part) and an image that becomes a text (in the second part)’.

Gestural bodies: Erratic passage and repetition; circuitry

and participation
As this article has elaborated, the intermediality and migration of gesture
offers a means of thinking beyond the cinematic dichotomies of text and
image. The gestures of the static shot and the travelling shot, of intimacy and
separation, of errance and digression, of textuality and the power of the image
were integrated in the two rooms of Akerman’s installation, through means
that are profoundly ‘in between’. In ‘To Walk next to One’s Shoelaces in an
Empty Fridge’, the two rooms, distinct as they were, appeared to contaminate
one another with light and sound. The brightly illuminated space of the first
room disrupted the cinematic darkness of the second room, foregrounding
the non-auditorium-like experience of the installation, and drawing attention

52
 Between women

to its relationship to spaces beyond its own screening. Similarly the sound-
track of the looped film from the second room leaked into the first, combining
spoken words with written text in a manner that appeared both accidental,
and holistically relevant to the encounter with the installation as a whole. The
twinned rooms and screens seemed to encourage erratic repetition, nonlin-
ear bodily movement, and dynamic shifts in attention and distraction, moving
close to, and away from the screens. As light and sound interfered with and
infiltrated each space, the erratic, leaky relationship between the two spaces,
the two doubled screens and the doubled images became audible and visible,
via the passage and movement of the viewer’s body.
I would like to note at this point my own individuated viewing experience,
not simply as a form of phenomenological record, but as a means of discussing
further the relationships of gesture and movement invited and exposed by this
interaction. At some moment in passing between the two rooms, my affec-
tive experience shifted dramatically, creating a kind of epiphanic moment. At
some undesignated point, in space and in time, during my passage back and
forth between the two rooms, I recalled the repetition of spoken phrases in
the darkened room that emerged in textual form across the spiral screens of
the illuminated room.
This moment of repetition, or recall, not within either space but between
the two, instigated an affectively powerful moment that was a result of, i
rather than in spite of, my erratic passage between the two rooms: a moment m
that drew upon a realization of the betweenness of the revolving text and the p
spoken word, the intimate murmurs and gestures and the presence of my body
as words cascaded over it. Amy Taubin (2005) argues that the diary Akerman
reads from in this video acts as a ‘Rosetta Stone’, not just for this work, but
for all of Akerman’s work. But it seemed to me that the moment of epiphanic
recall or realization, twinned with a powerful affective encounter, was not a
moment of parallel textual translation, but a recognition of physical repetitions
of spoken and written utterance, transformed across different spatial planes of
the cinematic, and of my own, erratic and repeated movements between the
two rooms. The mediality of gesture here – of my gesture of moving between
spaces, and of the gestures of spiralling and looped repetition on the screens –
seemed to entwine both my viewing encounter as spectator, and the spaces of
the installation. The erratic passage of my body between rooms and screens
became part of the affective relationality exposed through the intimate portrait
between two women: mother and daughter, and the physical acts of writing,
inscription, projection and reading, the impossibility of translation and the
partiality of recall.
Gesture, as a form of intersubjective mediation between cinematic presen-
tations of feminine intimacy and spectatorial physicality, takes place in Varda’s
installation too, but in a rather different fashion. Unlike the open, erratic, inter-
penetrated spaces of Akerman’s installation, which provoked a sort of spiral-
ling repetition of singular spectatorial engagement, Varda’s installation seemed
to prefigure relative layers of isolated and communal engagement on the part
of the spectator in a manner closer to a circuit or network, rather than a spiral.
In ‘The Widows of Noirmoutier’, the parallel arrangement of chairs invited
participation at a level more closely akin to the cinematic viewing conven-
tions of passivity (noted by Jordan 2009: 585). As spectators sat to occupy a
chair and placed the headphones on their heads, this action simultaneously
blocked off the sounds of the gallery space, and positioned the spectator
frontally towards the screen, thus deliberately precluding the observation of

53
Jenny Chamarette

the passage of others through the space. This action established a kind of
‘plugging in’ to the circuitry of the installation, an act which enabled close
attention to the intimate audio-visual portraits of each widow: to the sounds
of their voices as well as the contours of their faces and the mise-en-scène of
their daily lives. It also directed attention towards the specificity of one widow:
the woman whose spoken voice could be heard through the microphones.
By diminishing attentiveness to the whole installation, and by engaging with
one element of its circuitry, the spectator also became a static element, but
nonetheless was performative in and ephemeral to the installation itself. By
sharing in the intimate histories of the widows, this act also curiously blocked
engagement with the scene and space of the installation in its broader sense.
And yet, upon removing the headphones, spectators are made aware of the
positioning of others, sat immobile before a video screen in a manner that
repeats, gesturally, the immobile sitting of widows before the video camera.
A strange reflexive circuitry of communal and isolated experience takes place,
where the bodies of the spectators – sitting or standing – become crucial loci
for the migration of gesture from screen to space.
Distinct from Akerman’s installation, ‘The Widows of Noirmoutier’
seems to enact a gestural and participatory logic of circuitry and circula-
tion, both in its form, and in its modes of viewing. Rather than the spatial
segregation and erratic passage of spiral, fragmentary motion evoked
and produced in the encounter with Akerman’s ‘To Walk next to One’s
Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge’, Varda’s installation invokes movements
that are more ritualized and communal, perhaps on occasion mimetic of
the screen movements in the central tableau image. The gestural repetition
of movement activates and deactivates the viewer as, at one moment, a
viewing subject immersed in the narrative, the voice-based, figurative and
plastic detail of one aspect of the installation, and at another, a viewing
subject engaged actively in the processes of viewing critically, reflexively,
the spaces of the installation and the levels of participatory engagement of
other viewers. The rudimentary apparatus of the chairs and headphones
extends the circuitry of the video screen that conventional exhibition prac-
tice would be at pains to disguise, drawing attention to the circuitry of the
mechanical apparatus, as well as drawing upon the parallels in movement
between spectators and the filmed women.

Between women: gesture, gender and intermediality

While Varda’s installation operates within a gestural mode of collective
circuitry, and Akerman’s within a fragmented gestural mode of solitary and
erratic perambulation, these gestural modes migrate between the appa-
ratic tools of moving-image screening, and find themselves relocated in the
bodily movements of the spectator. In this sense, both pieces perhaps gesture
towards a proximity of embodied viewing experience with the restructured
and spatialized viewing screen, a space initiated between women in the repre-
sentations of the installations, but whose betweenness and intersubjectiv-
ity traverses the boundaries of the screen, viewer and gender. Whereas the
installations initiate their narratives from moments of contact and an intimate
sharing of affect (albeit in radically different ways) that constitute instances of
profoundly feminine intersubjectivity – between mothers and daughters, and
between widows – this is not to say that this intersubjectivity could be exclu-
sively constituted as feminine in the context of gesture. Rather, these moments

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 Between women

of feminine intersubjectivity instigate a complex pattern of movements:

cinematic, embodied, mechanical, spatial, textual, which introduce migrations
of gesture across all of these forms.
In her recent work on installation art, Giuliana Bruno (2007: 17) states that

In the gallery or the museum, one has the recurring sense of taking a
walk through – or even into – a film and of being asked to reexperience
the movement of cinema in different ways as one refigures its cultural
ground of ‘site-seeing’. Entering and exiting an installation increasingly
recalls the process of inhabiting a movie house, where forms of emotional
displacement, cultural habitation, and liminality are experienced.

Although I would ostensibly agree with Bruno that installations in the gallery
or museum often reveal an unworking, displacement or deconstruction of the
material, the apparatus and the modes of viewing cinema, I would also argue
that installations such as those of Akerman and Varda do not simply refig-
ure the cultural grounds of the viewing practices and visible ‘machinery’, so
called, of cinema. By experimenting with the shape and multiple presence of
screens, their spatial organization and their interaction in the unsealed world
of the gallery space, these installations foreground embodied relationships
to gesture in their spectators, and gestural relationships to meaning. These
gestures foreground intertextual relationships to other cinematic works, refer-
ences to cinematic practices and art exhibition practices, affective responses
and the performative qualities of movement when it is framed within the
contexts and spaces of the moving image.
Akerman’s bodily presence seems far less significant than the presence
of her authorial voice, as writer of the text that spirals across the parallel
screens, or the presence of her auteurist influence in the collaborative work of
an installation. Varda, on the other hand, foregrounds her own body, rather
than her own texts, by placing herself as a mute, humming widow in one of
the fourteen videos. Nonetheless, the bodies, positions and movements of the
widows in ‘The Widows of Noirmoutier’ seem to pertain both to the structures
of movement of spectators, and to their relative levels of engagement – their
‘plugging in’ or out of the performative circuitry of the installation space. In
both cases, the intermediality of gesture – as mode of meaning-making that
transmits across media and modalities – offers a fruitful avenue of exploration
for thinking about the affective, embodied, moving relationships of viewers to
the spaces of screens. As Deidre Sklar (2008: 95) puts it, ‘built upon the hard-
wired migration of sensory experience across sensory modalities, we construct
embodied schema that migrate across media’. Gesture appears to be just one
of those embodied schema that migrate not simply across media, but across
modes of experience, of intermediality, of intersubjectivity.

References
Agamben, G. (2000), ‘Notes on gesture’, Means without End: Notes on Politics
(trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino), Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, pp. 49–61.
Balsom, E. (2009), ‘A cinema in the gallery, a cinema in ruins’, Screen, 50: 4,
pp. 411–27.
Bolter, J. D. and Grusin, R. (2000), Remediation: Understanding New Media,
Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press.

55
Jenny Chamarette

Bruno, G. (2007), Public Intimacies: Architecture and the Visual Arts, Cambridge,
MA, and London: The MIT Press.
Casetti, F. (2009), ‘Filmic experience’, Screen, 50: 1, pp. 56–66.
—— (2012), ‘The relocation of cinema’, NECSUS, 2 (Autumn), http://www.
necsus-ejms.org/the-relocation-of-cinema/. Accessed 5 May 2013.
Chamarette, J. (2011), ‘Spectral bodies, temporalised spaces: Agnès Varda’s
motile gestures of mourning and memorial’, Image (&) Narrative, 12: 2,
pp. 31–49.
Connolly, M. (2009), The Place of Artist’s Cinema: Space, Site and Screen, London
and Chicago: Intellect.
Jordan, S. (2009), ‘Spatial and emotional limits in installation art: Agnès
Varda’s L’Île et Elle’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: Sites,
13: 5, pp. 581–88.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962 [1945]), Phenomenology of Perception (trans. Colin
Smith), London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
—— (1973 [1969]), ‘The indirect language’, The Prose of the World (trans. John
O’Neill, ed. Claude Lefort), Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
pp. 47–114.
Mondloch, K. (2010), Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art, Minneapolis:
Minnesota University Press.
Moshenson, E. (ed.) (2006), ‘Chantal Akerman: A spiral autobiography’, in
Chantal Akerman: A Spiral Autobiography, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of
Art, pp. 13–35.
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porary art’, Journal of Visual Culture, 8: 3, pp. 243–64.
Noland, C. (2008), ‘Introduction’, in Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness (eds),
Migrations of Gesture, Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota
Press, pp. ix–xxviii.
Pollock, G. (2010), ‘The long journey: Maternal trauma, tears and kisses in
a work by Chantal Akerman’, Studies in the Maternal, 2: 1 & 2, http://
www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk/back_issues/issue_three/documents/pollock.pdf.
Accessed 20 February 13.
Sklar, D. (2008), ‘Remembering kinesthesia: An inquiry into embodied cultu-
ral knowledge’, in Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness (eds), Migrations
of Gesture, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press,
pp. 85–111.
Stern, L. (2001), ‘Paths that wind through the thicket of things’, Critical
Inquiry, 28: 1, pp. 317–54.
Taubin, A. (2005), ‘Mother’s Day: Amy Taubin on Chantal Akerman’, Artforum,
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tag=content;col1. Accessed 30 November 2010.

Suggested citation
Chamarette, J. (2013), ‘Between women: Gesture, intermediality and intersub-
jectivity in the installations of Agnès Varda and Chantal Akerman’, Studies
in European Cinema, 10: 1, pp. 45–57, doi: 10.1386/seci.10.1.45_1

Contributor details
Jenny Chamarette is Lecturer in Film at Queen Mary, University of London. Her
monograph Phenomenology and the Future of Film: Rethinking Subjectivity beyond
French Cinema was published in 2012. Her research discusses intermediality,

56
 Between women

phenomenology, embodiment and affect in contemporary visual and moving-

image culture, in Europe, North America and the Middle East. She has partic-
ular interests in the cultural, political and embodied relations between cinema
and the museum, gallery and archive, and artist’s moving image, and an
emerging interest in curatorial practice.
Contact: Lecturer in Film Studies, School of Languages, Linguistics and Film,
Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK.
E-mail: j.chamarette@qmul.ac.uk

Jenny Chamarette has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

57
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