The Brooklyn Rail

Made in 1958, the sixteen-minute short L'Opéra-Mouffe (Diary of a Pregnant Woman) saw Agnès Varda do something that is still revolutionary in an artform where stories of pregnancy explored from women’s viewpoints are aberrant: she made a film from inside the changing mind of a pregnant woman. In the throes of France’s post-war brutality and recovery, a couple embraces in love and rapture. Outside, the people of the Parisian marketplace of Rue Mouffetard struggle, as captured by Varda in documentary mode. The market district is shown as plangent with alcoholism and homelessness, and simultaneously throbbing with vitality and transformation. The film is classic Varda in that it asks rigorous questions of form (early on, a round pumpkin gives way in a visual match cut to a third-trimester belly), leans toward tenderness, and pursues themes of marginality. Seeing photographs that contextualize the film at “Viva Varda!”—a recent retrospective of her life and work at Cinémathèque Française in Paris—convinced me that the experience of pregnancy is an under-examined aspect of her contribution to cinema.

L’Opéra-Mouffe brims with Varda’s trademark warmth and artistic hybridity in its flow from scripted to documentary sequences. It features no God-like authority or narrator or external framing device. One critic describes it as holding a sense of “detached awareness,” but that can’t be right, as Varda is too invested in her subjects. Despite the potential heaviness of the subject matter, the film has an airy quality, edited in a way that lets the images breathe and pulse: its view is of life tumbling forth. Varda’s early cinema was in 1958 what it would always be: her own perspective, focused on the lives of others.

Varda has said that she sensed some deep contradiction within her own mind while pregnant: optimism for her future child and a kind of anticipatory sorrow for the inevitable pain that we all encounter as the children of parents. When she thought of the homeless people who populated the market where she often shopped, she now could picture them as the babies they had once been, with soft tummies tickled by people who loved them, long before society abandoned them. With this sentiment, Varda put to lie that parenthood induces conservatism.

L’Opéra-Mouffe was made ahead of anything we could call second wave feminism. The right to abortion would not be won in France until 1975 (Varda offered her Parisian home for use for abortions before legalization), and France had been one of the later European countries to grant women’s suffrage in 1944, when Varda was a teenager. Things were worse in the colonies; Muslim women in French Algeria only won the vote in the year of L'Opéra-Mouffe’s release. Long before her death, Varda was canonized as the cutie-pie, cat-loving, miniature meta-granny of personal filmmaking, but her work was always political in unusual ways: the Algerian soldier on the street in Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) as one marker of the title heroine’s awakening; the harried and forgotten rural mother at the beginning of La Pointe Courte (1955); the visits to revolutionary Cuba in the early 1960s; the way she took seriously the counterculture and the Black Panthers during her California years.

The leaps in her thinking and visual language in L'Opéra-Mouffe can’t be explained as part of a broader social shift, and they predate the French New Wave. Rather, there is something very deep and very fundamental going on in Varda’s work here at the level of film, form, gender, subject matter, and theme—and the expansive possibilities connecting these elements. She completed a number of her early films while pregnant, and often depicted unconventional or self-destructive mothers (Le Bonheur, 1965; Kung Fu Master!, 1988). One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977) deals with an illegal abortion and stars her own children. The under-seen Les Créatures (1966) offers a perverse view of a pregnancy as a form of capture and muteness.

In the same year Varda made L'Opéra-Mouffe, she took a series of full-length self-portraits (Autoportraits enceinte). Heavily pregnant, she transforms her body into a sculptural object in a way that has precisely nothing in common with typical feminine softness, or the commercial or selfie-based pregnancy photography we see now on social media. The camera is low to the floor. In a dozen images, Varda systematically moves her body to its comfortable limits: she forms a triangle, she shifts her weight from one foot to the next, she adopts a birthing position, she leans back, she obscures her arms and hides her head, she captures a more extreme low-vantage viewpoint of her growing body. The postures are not designed to beautify, self-flatter or seduce; they are robust. It’s as if she knew it from the beginning: the pregnant body can be a zone of political strife, and it can be a strategy for artists and filmmakers to explore these ideas.

Three years earlier, Varda had taken a deeply unromanticized photo, in which a bare-faced 1950s housewife sits in a dining room. The photo is notable for its unremarkableness and for the mother’s youth. Behind her, a fruity wallpaper; in front, an immaculately set table. Her shirt is lifted and folded, making way for a very small baby whom she breastfeeds. The mother appears to be no older than a teenager and neither serene nor ashamed, just frank and unselfconscious in an era where people didn’t pose for photos daily. Another way of looking at the image is that it shows something often seen as dull: a moment in the day of a mother—at work, at home. This is interesting from the vantage point of today, a period in which some tend to think of the institution of motherhood as downtrodden, unpaid, and exploitative, and non-parental care as valid, honorable, radical.

The universe of adventurous image making that Varda seemed to augur, filled with changing bodies and minds and openness to experience, never did eventuate. At sixteen minutes, L’Opera-Mouffe is a prologue, followed by a lacuna.

If Varda were still here, I would ask her: what happened to the future of cinema that you imagined as a pregnant young woman? Why are we still so far from it?

The originality of L’Opera-Mouffe and Varda’s pregnancy photography can only be understood in the context of Western popular culture in the 1950s. The film could not have been shown in the United States or Britain or Australia, where I live, or much of the West at the time of its production. Along with sex, childbirth—“in fact or in silhouette”—and visible pregnancy were forbidden in American films by the Hays censorship code. It arrived just a few years after Lucille Ball resorted to using euphemisms—“expecting,” “with child”—for her second pregnancy on I Love Lucy. The word “pregnant” was contraband. Too direct. After all, it meant that people were having sex. This is part of the history of censorship which has pushed the pregnant body—not an identity, or a minority, or a diversity category, but a quite weird life experience—into R-rated, hard-core territory.

Around the same time Varda was hauling her film gear up and down the cobblestoned hill of Rue Mouffetard, Stan Brakhage was making a rhythmic, intimate film, Window Water Baby Moving (1959) about the birth of his first child, with his wife’s body bathing in reflected light on the cusp of delivery. This husbandly approach was continued in A Sketch on Abigayl’s Belly (1968), a 16mm visual poem by David Perry of the Sydney-based underground film movement UBU. At this time, the pregnant form, it seemed, was the domain of male experimentalists who could treat the taboo as romantic within the institution of marriage.

Today, the Geena Davis Institute employs a diverse army of researchers to quantify the on-screen protagonists who are women scientists, caregivers, people of color, queer, disabled, but not pregnant. Most frequent is the traumatized abortion film, or the trope of pregnant women in horror film, and, in particular, the prospect of their rape—an association with pregnancy and domination, fear and violence. But the term “the male gaze” doesn’t fully explain why we’re so unlikely to see a pregnant person in the background of a cinema frame or as an incidental character. Think of it this way: when was the last time you saw an on-screen character whose pregnancy does not drive the action, nor is it explicitly relevant to the story?

Sometimes when I am watching a film, I ask myself, would I recognise this scene from my dreams? We don’t ask about the dreams of pregnant women, much, I suppose because we assume that their dreams are not their own—they are giving over their lives, bodies, imaginations entirely to their future child. To grant pregnant women the license to feel something, to be themselves: is it too threatening, too empowering, just too much to imagine? The subject matter is still deemed too tricky, too potentially conservative.

Many beloved women have explored, in their films, how to be free of pregnancy. A divergent realm of thought remains wide open: how to be free as a pregnant woman.

The research for this piece was made possible by a Nicholas and Angela Curtis Cité Internationale des Arts Residency Fellowship, awarded by the Power Institute, Foundation for Art and Visual Culture at the University of Sydney.