Short Film Studies - Volume 12, Issue 1, 2022

No Bikini playfully reveals the inherent human complexities that render the body simultaneously a site of discipline and shame as well as one of freedom and enjoyment. This article explores Robin’s embodied experience of her symbolic sex change. It does so via three Lacanian ontological registers, namely: imaginary, symbolic and real.

In Black Panthers, rather than identifying with or speaking for the Black Panther Party, Varda’s cinécriture – her shot choices, camera movement and editing – allows her to insert her commentary about the group’s revolutionary potential while the members determine themselves as subjects rather than accepting their definition by the state. Her film foregrounds the politics of social space, showing how the Panthers transform spaces of circulation like the courthouse and their neighbourhoods into spaces of contestation.

This article explores how Agnès Varda’s short films Ydessa, les ours et etc… (2004) and Ulysse (1983) examine the role of the photograph in relation to memory and the past. Although the photos that each film scrutinizes have been produced and exhibited under different circumstances, they are alike in providing opportunities for Varda to inquire about their status as archival documents and interrogate the versions of the (sometimes idealized) pasts they appear to depict. While there are pleasures, in both films, for viewers gazing at such imagery, both films advocate a more reflexive approach to the fantasized histories and imagined stories on offer.

This article reappraises Agnès Varda’s formative career as she made Du Côté de la côte in 1958. To do this, it explores Varda’s situation within the post-war French film ecosystem before the French New Wave, how she engaged key practices of that overlooked era. By studying the ways Varda directly cites peer productions in Du Côté de la côte, we reveal her as heir to, and in dialogue with, a number of significant but neglected practitioners, notably women like Nicole Vedrès, Jacqueline Jacoupy and Yannick Bellon. Extrapolating from these creative protocols, we can properly gauge Varda’s primary, and long-term, affinities for short films and essay films, two formats that film studies is often reluctant to recognize, let alone canonize. Nourishing Varda’s work as a post-war short film essayist, we will also discover how applied cinephilia – intertextual deployments of film history that catalyse actual filmmaking – informed Varda’s professional rise.

This article describes the advantages of teaching Agnès Varda’s early short film L’Opéra-Mouffe, known in English as Diary of a Pregnant Woman, in an introductory course on film form. This award-winning, sixteen-minute film offers a compelling demonstration of the core characteristics of the essay film, along with readily teachable examples of visual metaphor, cinematography, sound, and editing. Its cultural and auteurist contexts can also complement a variety of curricular topics, including the French New Wave and Left Bank creators, post-war France, and feminist filmmaking. Finally, its focus on Varda’s personal experience of pregnancy also makes L’Opéra-Mouffe an ideal vehicle to introduce radical feminist pedagogies that recognize and value personal experience as a valid way of knowing about the world.

This article is an investigation into how short film ideas are conceived. It examines Ant Plant as a case study of inspiration based in bio-art, the Australian bushfires of 2020 and critical plant studies. The Ant Plant is set in an apocalyptic near future, in a burnt environment. The Guardian seeking to regenerate near-extinct species summons her brethren to deliver rare plants to her at the Greenhouse. A young woman hears the call and sets off on an arduous journey to deliver the key to a conserved plant kingdom – symbiotic Ant Plant.¹