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SFC 10 (1) pp. 5768 Intellect Limited 2010

Studies in French CinemaVolume 10 Number 1 2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sfc.10.1.57/1

KEYWORDSdocumentary ethicsmortality loss

temporality emotional geography

SARAH COOPERKings College London

Looking back, lookingonwards: selflessness,ethics, and Frenchdocumentary

ABSTRACTThis article considers questions of documentary ethics in relation to the most recent films of Chris Marker, Agns Varda and Raymond Depardon. I revisit my ownarguments in Selfless Cinema? Ethics and French Documentary (Cooper 2006),in order to show how these directors continue to flesh out an approach to alter-

ity that was already discernible in their earlier work, and that is still compatiblewith Emmanuel Levinass ethics, albeit with a slight expansion of focus. In their late work most notably, MarkersChats perchs/The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004), Vardas Les Plages dAgns/The Beaches of Agns(2008), andDepardons Profils paysans/Country Profiles(19982008) these film-makersseem concerned ever more poignantly with matters of mortality, their own and that of other people, along with the survival of the planet and its other inhabitants.While their future-directed anxieties connect with memories of the past to suggest that an exploration of time is key to an understanding of their filmic ethics, themost striking facet of these films is to be found in the intimate, spatial geographiesthat they construct. Crafted essentially on the basis of interaction with or observa-tion of others, as well as the film-makers own reflections on matters of life, deathand the future, these films create vivid emotional landscapes of mortality and loss


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1. Since Selfless Cinema? ,I have explored therelation between Levinasand cinema in twofurther publications.See Cooper (2007)for an edited collectionof articles on thissubject, and for my ownreading of Jean-Pierreand Luc Dardennesdebt to Levinas in theirfilm-making. See alsoCooper (2008) for aLevinasian approach totime in the work of ChrisMarker.

that unite interior and exterior worlds in a deeply subjective and personal visionthat is also ethical.

In the concluding plenary talk of the 2007 Visible Evidence conference, doc-umentary theorist Michael Renov posited ethics as one of the most impor-tant concerns for documentary film-making and scholarship today. Renovsencouragement to put ethics first was the latest in a series of calls to registerits importance in the field of documentary enquiry. Indeed, my own book,Selfless Cinema? Ethics and French Documentary(Cooper 2006), was focused onprecisely this issue, and the philosopher whose work I, like Renov, drew upon was Emmanuel Levinas. In this article, four years on, I look back first to thephilosophical underpinning of my argument in my earlier text in order then torevisit my theorization of documentary ethics in a more recent filmic context.Focusing here on two films by Chris Marker and Agns Varda, and on a tril-ogy by Raymond Depardon, I show how each contends with mortality in theirlate work their own mortality and that of other people in a manner thatchimes with, but also extends, the sense of what, in my previous publication,I characterized as selfless cinema.

In Selfless Cinema? , I sought to read Levinass work against, and in spiteof, his own suspicion of the visual image, while remaining sensitive to hisnegative early views on the artwork, and the absence of cinema from his phi-losophy.1 Fleshing out an understanding of an ethical cinematic encounter interms of the Levinasianvisage , as defined inTotalit et infini/Totality and Infinity(Levinas 1961), I explored asymmetrical relations between self and Other thatdid not reduce the latter to an entity that could be known fully, and thereforecontained or constrained by the sentient, perceiving subject. This Levinasianapproach was voiced in contrast to psychoanalytic theories of identification in which the self is still separate from others, but is involved more fully in rela-tions of similarity than Levinass thinking permits. I set out to demonstratehow, in keeping with Levinasian philosophy, certain films within a particulartendency in French documentary were questioning this logic of resemblanceand articulating a non-reductive relation to alterity. An ability to let the Otherbe suggested the registering of distance from others, yet such distance didnot correlate with indifference; on the contrary, in Levinasian philosophy, asin my selected films from the corpus of the late Jean Rouch, Chris Marker,Raymond Depardon and Agns Varda, such distance emerged from withinrelations of extreme proximity, a proximity without which ethics would beimpossible. The development in Levinass philosophy in his text, Autrement qutre ou au-del de lessence/Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence(Levinas

1974) led me to emphasize the discomfort and suffering that lies at the heartof responsibility for the Other, who becomes my neighbour, my prochain , inthe later work. Yet the questioning of the subject that occurs inTotalit et infini reveals that this discomfort has been at the centre of the ethical relation fromthe outset. In fact, it is the fundamental starting point for the rupture of total-izing thinking that takes us beyond ourselves, by opening to the infinite and,therefore, to others.

What interested me then, as now, is what happens to subjectivity withindocumentary films that negotiate the relationship between the film-maker/camera operator and his/her filmed subjects in a manner that refuses totalizing gestures in favour of this Levinasian opening to infinity. As Renov acknowl-

edges in his Levinasian-inspiredThe Subject of Documentary(Renov 2004) which turns attention to the self, rather than the Other, as the privileged


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ethical subject of filming the subject was involved in several major battles inthe twentieth century. Most notably, it was derided in favour of the collective(Marxism); seen as an effect of broader systems, such as language or ideology (Structuralism; Lacanian psychoanalysis); or decentred and dissolved (post-structuralism) (Renov 2004: xiii). In contrast, Levinas preserved his belief ina subject who is brought into being through an originary ethical demand to which it cannot fail to respond. The sense of infinity to which Totalit et infinirefers, builds on insights already apparent in embryonic form in the earlierLe Temps et lautre/Time and the Other, a lecture series first delivered in 1947(Levinas 1947). In Le Temps et lautre , death is given as a supreme exampleof an encounter that brings the subject into contact with the unknown. Thisopening out to the mystery that is future time and absolute alterity is thefoundation of his ethics. Following this strand of his thinking that links LeTemps et lautre to Totalit et infini and his later work, Dieu, la mort et le temps/ God, Death, and Time (Levinas 1993), we confront death finally as an opening to the infinite and the Other, and the subject is rendered human and mortalthrough this relation. In this, Levinass understanding of infinity contrastsnotably with the idea of an infinite universe or infinite mental life exploredby Temenuga Trifonova when considering the revival of metaphysics in the work of a range of twentieth-century French philosophers and viewing this with reference to recent film (Trifonova 2007: 261304). Whereas the phil-osophical movement that Trifonova sums up using Deleuzes fantasy of getting rid of ourselves (Trifonova 2007: 9) bears a significant relation toLevinasian thinking in its aversion of the philosophical gaze away from adiscourse of vision and the image, and in its opening up and questioning of the subject, this happens the better to rework and preserve that very subject.Levinass philosophy could be said, then, to reinstate ourselves but in a way that makes the subject unthinkable without an Other.

In keeping with this philosophical vision, each of the films I considerin this article interrogates subjectivity in ways that can be identified as dis-tinctly Levinasian, through their unsettling displacement of totalizing, self-centred vision, even when the film-makers lifetime forms the main subjectmatter of the film. In this regard, there are strong continuities betweenthe recent work of Marker, Varda and Depardon and the non-reductiveapproach to filming others that was apparent to me in their earlier work.But there is also a notable difference. At the heart of an admission of thefilm-making subjects importance in these films, is a concern with vulner-ability and contingency in short, the very things that the assertion of filmas an impersonal consciousness or infinite mental space would not admit.

These qualities are particularly associated with documentary. Yet if subjec-tivity is not abandoned, neither is a connection to something that stretchesinfinitely beyond the human subject, and this does not only pertain to time,or, indeed, to other human beings. While the Levinasian bond between subjectivity and infinity still emerges through an encounter with alterity here,these documentaries also place emphasis on spatial location as vital to thepossibility of the film-makers being able to access his/her own narrative,however disjunctive, as well as that of other people. Crafted essentially onthe basis of interaction with, or observation, of others, as well as the film-makers own reflections on matters of life, death and the future, these filmsconstruct vivid emotional landscapes of mortality and loss that unite interior

and exterior worlds in a vision that is not only deeply subjective and per-sonal, but that is also ethical.


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FROM MARKER TO VARDA, CITY TO BEACHIn spite of his age, there is no sign as yet that Marker is ready to retire from any of his pursuits, film-making included. His most recent one-minute short in whicha rat chases a cat, is titledLeila Attacks!(2006), and is now included in the DVDrelease of the English-language version of his latest feature,Chats perchs/TheCase of the Grinning Cat (2004). InChats perchs , Marker tracks the appearance of yellow cat graffiti across Paris from November 2001, just after the attack on thetwin towers in New York, through to 2003. These cats and their furry, fleshed-out equivalents are seen as signs of hope amidst the more disquieting political

situation in France and on the world stage at the turn of the millennium. It issuggested that without the cats, the human race has no future, and an inter-titletowards the end of the film confirms that we need them with us wherever we aregoing. There are constant reminders of the potential for an apocalyptic ending of the planet; for example, deaths caused by AIDS are highlighted in one sequence which segues into the memory of Hiroshima, as recalled through the music andform of Alain Resnaiss masterpiece of 1959. The film also isolates the loss of individuals as the deaths of cancer specialist Lon Schwartzenberg and actressMarie Trintignant are also commemorated. Such collective and individual trag-edy is registered on a meandering temporal and spatial journey through Paris,as the film searches for the cats. It moves from Left to Right Bank, between pastand present, and scales the city from the underground tunnels of the metro tothe heights of its rooftops and through its waterways. Hope is thus painted into

Figure 1: The yellow cat graffiti inChats perchs(Courtesy of Films du jeudi).


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the very texture, the bricks and mortar of the city, and the intricacy of this filmsinterrogation of relations between subjectivity and alterity, along with a relationto the future, is encapsulated in the figure of the elusive cat.

The graffiti cats are both separate from the film-makers signature andclosely linked to it. The cat Guillaume en gypte features within the film and isone of Markers well-known mouthpieces. Indeed, the feline character speaksas and for Marker in Vardas most recent film,Les Plages dAgns/The Beachesof Agns(2008), confirming the directors shared love of cats. The graffiti catsthereby challenge any identification of the all-seeing eye of this film with animpersonal consciousness, even though Markers characteristic absence fromhis films makes the possibility of delineating his subjectivity somewhat like agame of hide-and-seek. But the whole film works subtly to unsettle, rather thandissolve, the centrality of the human subject, the film-makers own positionincluded. Marker is connected with the desire to preserve the lives of humansand animals, through the presence of the cats across the geography of Paris. Yet he is also discernible in formal terms (his montage techniques) and in somefamiliar passions and characteristics (his love of beautiful women; his militancy;his intelligence and humour). MarkersSans soleil/Sunless(1982) presented us with a film-making subject Sandor Krasna, another stand-in for Marker whobecame the very skin of the film, fashioned in celluloid through his many and varied encounters with those he filmed.Chats perchs , in contrast, uses mixedmedia to produce a portrait of Paris from 20012003, its politics and people,in which a subjective vision is revealed through the political and ethical importof the cats. The Levinasian opening to infinity extends here well beyond thehuman subject, not only in temporal terms after its death and to the future livesof others, but also in the present, by referring to creatures other than humansalone, and by incorporating the geography of Paris. Subject to time and part of an intimate cartography of Paris, Markers cats continue to confirm a belief ina human subject, turned hopefully, but not without anxiety, towards the future.In contrast to Markers apparently open-ended commitment to making films, Varda has declared that her latest film will be her last.Les Plages dAgns is a deeply moving memorial film that looks back over her life and work. It isher most autobiographical yet, but it also takes up a strand of her film-mak-ing that was already visible in her earlier auto-portraits of others, in Jane B. par Agns V./Jane B. by Agnes V.(1988) and inLes Glaneurs et la glaneuse/TheGleaners and I (2000), which I wrote about in 2006 (Cooper 2006: 7790). I under-stood these films to turn an inwardly directed gaze outwards, to question theself-reflective status of the autobiographical mode and to film others using themirror of the self, while preserving a Levinasian asymmetrical relation between

the two. Although different in ways that will become apparent,Les Plages dAgns is also aligned with this Levinasian perspective. It begins with shots of beachesin Belgium, and with Varda walking and filming from within the midst of mem-bers of her crew arranging mirrors along the small stretch of coastline. As herscarf is caught by gusts of wind and covers her face, she welcomes this self-effacing moment, which is also replicated in the installation of mirrors on thebeach. The mirrors present us with multiple images, in which she and her crew are fragmented and dispersed. Within this fluid and shifting realm of the image, Varda reveals the beach to be her favourite landscape. She explains that wereshe to be cut open, her interior would reveal a series of beaches: If you openedme up, you would find beaches. From Belgium to Ste, through California to

Noirmoutier, Vardas inner landscape is defined through the principal geograph-ical spaces of the film. In addition to this spatialization of her current feelings and


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memories, she turns the mirror outwards to include others within the frame; herinterior is thus exteriorized as we move from beach to beach, and she looks backthrough her encounters, experiences and films, many of which feature in theform of extracts. Spread across the globe, her life and memories are there on thebeaches, and such an external, relational construction of her portrait broadensany solipsistic focus. As Franck Kausch puts it:

Les Plages dAgnsindeed proffers an autobiography, but stripped of allinteriority [] The portrait here is hollow, always concealing what itreveals by drawing attention not to an identity but to her relations and,therefore, transformations: such that within herself eternity changes her .

(Kausch 2008: 15; original emphasis)

The ever-shifting terrain of the beach is utterly in keeping with such a visionof eternal change. Like the changing tides that wash up their sandy shores, thefilmic portrait that Varda offers us with characteristically ludic poignancy is also withdrawn, as what is being retracted here is the very act of film-making. Unlikeher earlier portraits of herself and others, this is a film about the withdrawalfrom film-making, one of the very activities that have made Varda who she is.

Varda is unravelled in two senses, cinematically and emotionally, and, of course, the two necessarily merge in this film: at one moment her image dis-solves into an earlier film, and at another moment she dissolves into tears. Inone scene as she walks backwards through the courtyard of her workshop onthe rue Daguerre, the travelling shot is superimposed with images fromClode 5 7/Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) before the disjointed narrative of Vardas liferesumes. Here her life and work, mediated through images that overlay oneanother, share the same frame, but as she takes her leave in the present, back-ing down her courtyard that will then be filled by Corinne Marchand, leaping a temporal gap of over forty years, it is as if she is saying goodbye, ceding placeto the films that will outlive her. Yet her voice-over from the present time of filming suggests implicitly that this is not yet the end.Les Plages dAgnscom-memorates a life still being lived, while also pre-empting its future as a filmthat will outlive its subject. The awareness of her own mortality runs throughthe film to culminate in a celebration of her eightieth birthday, included inconclusion. However, it is a scene staged earlier that catches her unawaresand reveals the heightened emotion of confronting the mortality of others.

Sitting in an exhibition space in Avignon where she staged a scene thatinvolved distributing pink roses and begonias among black and white photo-graphs she had taken of great theatre actors, she breaks down and explains

that all she sees when she looks at these photographs is that their subjects aredead. These deaths return her to her greatest loss of all, the dearly departed Jacques Demy, and it is this loss, among others, that remain with her always. As she comments in interview: InLes Demoiselles ont eu 25 ans , I said: Toremember happiness, is still a bit of happiness! But I think that to rememberthe dead is still to be with them. Even if, at times [] it jars a little (Domenachand Rouyer 2008: 19). The flowers she holds in this scene are bound to acommemoration of death and loss, but still come from the land of the liv-ing. She is never unravelled or dissolved completely. As Vardas final wordsof the film remind us, she continues to remember, as long as she lives, and whether these memories are bitter or sweet, they form the film of her life, that

is located between, and that stretches infinitely beyond, her birth and death,like the timeless shores that turn her inside out.


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DEPARDONS RURAL PAST INTERIOREmploying different strategies from those undertaken by Varda, Depardonsmost recent film was nonetheless a means for him to reconnect with his past,and to gain a sense of peace and closure. Released in 2008,La Vie moderne/ Modern Lifecompletes the trilogy Profils paysans/Country Profiles(made overa period of ten years, and researched over a period of fifteen), and as LtitiaMikles argues, in spite of the film-makers promises that he will return,the third section of his triptych sounds like a farewell (Mikles 2008: 20).

Depardons emotional landscape is landlocked, but is just as highly chargedas that of Vardas beaches, while contrasting with Markers predominantcity focus. Historically the city has had far more attention in cinema and filmscholarship than have rural areas, partly due to the kinship between cinema,the city and modernity. Without defining Profils paysansspecifically againstsuch work, Depardon turns here nevertheless to those who have been side-lined or forgotten, in cinema as in life: rural dwellers and their farms. In aninterview withCahiers du cinma in 2008, Depardon and Claudine Nougaret(his sound operator and wife) explain that the first two films were originally meant to be trials towards a third that would be about Depardons childhood(Frodon 2008: 10). But this was what the entire triptych was to become, even

though the third part still differs in its relative self-sufficiency, and in its statusas a film de cinma rather than a film audiovisuel (Frodon 2008: 10). Their

Figure 2: Mirrors in Les Plages dAgns(Courtesy of Cin-Tamaris and Cinema Guild).


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original plan was to make three 16mm films, but given changing attitudesto rural life in France in the lengthy period of the trilogys making, they feltthat the third film would find a public in the cinema, whereas the first two,although on exactly the same subject, fell somewhere between the televisionand cinema (Frodon 2008: 11).

The first film,LApproche/The Approach(2001), shares its title with a key term of Levinass Autrement qutre. Correspondingly, Depardon attempts togain ethical proximity to those he films, which transcends geographical orspatial closeness. The pain attached to the substitutive logic at the heart of Autrement qutre , which involves an exorbitant assumption of responsibility for others, is evident in Depardons approach, and is entwined with the lossof human life as well as the impact it has on the communities scattered widely across the plateaux and valleys of rural France. An elegiac mood is establishedfrom the very outset through the choice of Gabriel Faurs lgie Opus 24.The music suggests an emotive connection to something deeper than that which can be expressed linguistically, and that the images may not reveal, butby which they are haunted. Its minor key is in tune not only with a loss thatlies in Depardons past too, and which still traverses him, but also with thepervasive sense of decline and future loss that already marks these rural com-munities. For, over the course of ten years, and despite an influx of new life,a generation to which the film-maker is clearly attached is pictured as dying slowly before his eyes.

Depardon introduces each of the people he films, as if we as specta-tors have become guests in their homes, permitted to cross the thresholdon the basis of the trust won by Depardon and Nougaret over the years.In voice-over, Depardon gives us the necessary details to follow each scene,sometimes the date, the season, and the time. The first exchange we wit-ness inLApprocheis filmed in Depardons recognizable style, which also pre-dominates across the trilogy: he uses fixed-frame cinematography patiently to record scenes in their full duration, never getting too close to those hefilms, and holding his position even if they leave the frame. This style of filming helps him to maintain a respectful distance that the rural dwellersreinforce in other ways. The first scene presents two key figures of the oldergeneration Marcelle Brs and Raymond Privat who actually reveal very little to Depardon and to most viewers beyond their outer appearance in thisencounter, since they speak Occitan, enabling them to retain their intimacy in front of the camera. This preservation of a space that is their own recursin other ways with other people through the films. When we first meet LouisBrs, and later Paul Argaud, Depardon says it took him a long time to gain

their confidence, and with Paul in particular, it was only after a ten-yearperiod of acquaintance that he was allowed into his home. The first time thatDepardon films Paul, inLApproche , we see a fixed-frame, long take of himin his kitchen, eating his breakfast at 8am, and this is succeeded by a fur-ther shot of him from a more oblique angle as he finishes eating and leavesthe frame to wash up. The final shot of him in this first encounter takes usoutside his house. Depardon thus takes us from the interior to the exterior,across a very small space and in a matter of minutes, on the inverse trajec-tory of the journey that took him years to make across an ethical distance of respect. Both Louis and Marcelle Brs die within the course of the trilogy,and, at the end of the third film, Depardon dedicates his work to them. While

never raised to the status of the loss of a person, the death of an animal isalso treated with sensitivity, as is apparent inLa Vie moderne , when Raymond


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Privat is sad about the terminal illness of one of his cows. Although differ-ent from Markers combination of playfulness and seriousness when tracking cats across Paris, Depardon also bears witness to an expansive ethical visionhere, which opens to animals as well as humans. Indeed, Depardons filmslay bare the strong bond between livestock, farmers and land, whilst showing the threat it is under in the modern world.

The question of how these rural areas will survive comes up frequently.Sometimes succession is assured by forceful persuasion. Daniel Jean Roy is the only one of six children who has stayed to run the family farm now that his parents are too old. Smiling all the while as he is interviewed by Depardon, he says that he is not happy, that he does not like agriculture,and that his parents have forced him to take on the farm. Although frankabout their feelings when pressed by Depardons questions Daniel JeanRoy and others openness about their worries for the future conceals thetacit story that this film also tells. For Depardon was one of two sons bornto farmers in Villefranche-sur-Sane, and he chose a career that involvedtravelling the globe rather than participating in ensuring the survival of thefamily farm. Although he never articulates it explicitly within the trilogy,the guilt that accompanied him on his travels is what he is attempting tolay to rest through filming the lives of others. The exorbitant and painfulresponsibility that is palpable here ties Depardon as closely to the land-scape and loved ones of his childhood as it does to those he films in thepresent. The ethical proximity to those he films in Profils paysansemergesthrough this temporal connection, but also through the unearthing of anemotional geography that relates to, without supplanting, the actual land-scapes of the trilogy.

Yannick Lemari writes aptly of Depardons unacknowledged return tohis past in these films:

Depardon gives the spectator the impression of returning home aftera long absence, a long detour through far off lands [] In this sense, Profils paysans is first of all a landscape, a geography at once physicaland human, an anterior space in Trassards beautiful expression.

(Lemari 2001: 122)

The anterior space that Lemari demarcates is also an intimate, interior space,blocked off initially in the same way that Depardons filmed subjects pro-tect their privacy in full view of the camera, but which, as the films progress,becomes the other story that the film-maker is also seeking to tell. As Nougaret

suggests in interview on the DVD for the second film,Le Quotidien/Daily Life (2004), it is as though he is filming his own mother and father inProfils pay-sans , and that everyone is actually engaged in telling the story of Raymondslife without recounting it directly.

Depardons earlier autobiography,Les Annes dclic/The Declic Years(1983),is released on DVD with the first film of Profils paysans , suggesting a relation-ship between the autobiographical and the lives of these farmers. He explainsin the earlier autobiography that his father died while he was away on one of his long trips. This trip was spent as a photojournalist in Chad where, among other political events, he covered the hostage taking of Franoise Claustre. A further, and initially less obvious, connection between the autobiographical

and the French rural lives of others emerges through another trip to Africa,and confirms Nougarets observation in interview on the DVD of Le Quotidien


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of a similar anxiety when filming the two apparently disparate subjects. Yetthere is a recasting of this continent as one that brings him closer to his child-hood, and to his father, in Afriques: comment a va avec la douleur?/Africa, How Are You with Pain? (1996). From South Africa through to Egypt and then, inthe final sequences, from Marseille to his parents farm, Afriques comprises360-degree panoramic shots that position the film-making subject at the cen-tre, audible yet invisible. The final sequence is a 360-degree shot of the farmin Villefranche-sur-Sane. His voice-over commentary notes that althoughthe differences between Africa and France are flagrant, the proximity betweenthem is to be found in their respective agriculturalists worries and wisdom.The return to his parents home is not included visually in Profils paysans , butimbues all three parts.

In an interview after the release of La Vie moderne , Depardon declaresthat since 1998 he had changed, and that he had freed himself from the weight of regret of never having filmed his father, and of shame for hav-ing followed a profession that prevented him from taking on his parentsfarm (quoted in Frodon 2008: 1112). In the film, he explains how, withtime, he has gained the confidence of the people he has encountered, andhow he is pleased to find them again some years on. The Privat brothersare the most striking instance of decline in this film, as Marcel, at a latepoint, declares that this is the end. There is a hint of optimism, however,that ties Depardons personal journey to that of the future of the region. Atthe end of the film, Depardon withdraws one autumn evening in goldenlight at 6pm with a travelling shot that reverses those he used at the start of

Figure 3:Profils paysans: LApproche(Courtesy of Gmaci).


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the films, and throughout, to show his approach to each farm; his camerafilms where they have come from, rather than where they are going, along the winding country lanes. In voice-over, and in words very similar to thosethat appear at the end of his book,La Terre des paysans (Depardon 2008), which includes photographs of his parents and their farm, along with the various people in the trilogy, he declares: I am no longer afraid to speakof my attachment to the land of the rural dwellers. Appeased, I will conse-quently return to the cold, high plateaux and the deep valleys of the Massif Central. It is the gradual progression of these three films that has helpedhim to achieve peaceful closure and to leave open the possibility of his tran-quil future return.

CONCLUDING REMARKSEach localized setting in the films discussed in this article is crucial to thetale the directors wish to tell, yet each registers their historical and geo-graphical positioning clearly while also thinking relationally: whether this

is Marker forging connections between events in Paris and New York in2001, or across the globe and through time until 2003; Varda mapping thebeaches of her life across Europe and America; or Depardon suggesting linksbetween rural France and Africa, from his childhood to the present. Acrosstheir diverse projects, each looks back: Marker views traumas and losses of the past, as well as the present, while Vardas and Depardons contempla-tive films grant emotional closure, to a unique career on the one hand, and,on the other, to past guilt at missing a final opportunity to say goodbye toa lost loved one. Yet they also look onwards: while they all give us theirown vision of how the end may be nigh through a concern with their ownmortality and grief for loved ones; the demise of the human race and theplanet; or the loss of communities they also manifest a fervent desire togo on living. Marker, Varda and Depardon become one with their settings,losing themselves necessarily through their presentation of, and reactionsto, the lives, and deaths, of others, but also imbuing their landscapes of loss,both actual and projected, with an indelible human presence that informsand interrogates, rather than dissolves, their subjectivity or subjective pointof view. As a result, a more expansive view of an ethical approach to docu-mentary filming becomes possible that continues to safeguard the humanalterity without which subjectivity would be inconceivable for Levinas, butthat opens out to the other creatures with which we share the planet, inaddition to the geography of the globe itself its cities, its rural areas and itscoastlines. Still selfless in focus, these expanded contours of a Levinasian-inspired vision of subjectivity and alterity within documentary film remindus of the complexity of our place in the world, our relation with and infi-nite responsibility to its landscapes and other inhabitants, without which we would not be who or where we are today.

REFERENCESCooper, S. (2006),Selfless Cinema?: Ethics and French Documentary , Oxford:

Legenda.Cooper, S. (2007), The Occluded Relation: Levinas and Cinema, Film-

Philosophy , special issue, 11:2, http://www.film-philosophy.com/2007v11n2/.

Cooper, S. (2008),Chris Marker , Manchester: Manchester University Press.Depardon, R. (2008),La Terre des paysans, Paris: Seuil.


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Domenach, E. and Rouyer, P. (2008), Entretien avec Agns Varda: passersous le pont des Arts la voile, Positif , 574, pp. 1721.

Frodon, J.-M. (2008), Entretien avec Raymond Depardon et ClaudineNougaret,Cahiers du cinma , 638, pp. 1017.

Kausch, F. (2008), Les Plages dAgns: la mer, ternellement recommence, Positif , 574, pp. 1516.

Lemari, Y. (2001), Profils paysans: LApproche: lespace antrieur deDepardon, Positif , 485/486, pp. 1223.

Levinas, E. (1947),Le Temps et lautre , Montpellier: Fata Morgana.Levinas, E. (1961),Totalit et infini: essai sur lextriorit , The Hague: Martinus

Nijhoff.Levinas, E. (1974), Autrement qutre ou au-del de lessence , The Hague:

Martinus Nijhoff.Levinas, E. (1993),Dieu, la mort et le temps , Paris: Grasset.Mikles, L. (2008), La Vie moderne: lcart, Positif , 572, pp. 1920.Renov, M. (2004),The Subject of Documentary , Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press.Trifonova, T. (2007),The Image in French Philosophy , Amsterdam: Rodopi.

SUGGESTED CITATIONCooper, S. (2010), Looking back, looking onwards: selflessness, ethics, and

French documentary,Studies in French Cinema10: 1, pp. 5768, doi: 10.1386/sfc.10.1.57/1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILSSarah Cooper is Reader in Film Theory and Aesthetics at Kings CollegeLondon. Her most recent books includeSelfless Cinema? Ethics and FrenchDocumentary (Oxford: Legenda, 2006) andChris Marker (Manchester:Manchester University Press, 2008). She is currently writing a book on filmand the soul.

Contact: Film Studies Department, School of Arts and Humanities, KingsCollege London, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS, UK.E-mail: [email protected]

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