Mémoire et recyclage dans Visages Villages d’Agnès Varda : autoportrait de la vieillesse d’une réalisatrice et de son dispositif cinématographique

The aim of this paper is to study, with an intersectional approach, the tendency of Agnès Varda’s films to seek to adopt a different gaze, and to deconstruct stereotypical representations of women’s old age. This study will focus on Varda’s penultimate film, Visages Villages, in which she explores being an ageing artist who is practicing the old art of cinema, an art that is now disappearing. Particular attention will be paid to one of the film’s final scenes, in which Varda evokes the Grande Galerie of the Louvre. It is Varda’s intention, this paper will argue, to propose cinema as a medium particularly suited to representing old age. Thanks to editing, cinema – like the museum – is capable of being a place to conserve all the material traces that time has left behind.