Cinemasparagus: Réponse de femmes

9 Minutes for Sex

Here's a mouthful of a title: Réponse de femmes à une question produite par Antenne 2 pour le magazine 'F. comme Femme' [Women's Response to a Question Put Forth by Antenne 2 for the Magazine-Show 'F. comme Femme', 1975]. Agnès Varda dealt out minor arcana when it came to the names of her movies, especially when they were only a few minutes long and consisted of her short video introductions. Réponse de femmes, had it been made in the 2000s, or around the 2007 introduction Varda filmed, would have fit nicely within the miniDV category of her work. As it stands, this 1975 essay-short is all the more beautiful for being shot on film. Varda asks specific questions — like "What does it mean to be a woman?" — and the women provide concise answers. No celluloid wasted in this film in the French enquête or survey tradition, one which spurs me to draw a comparison with the subjects at hand in 2021: Debate on certain matters has since transformed into givens ("Do all women want to be mothers?" Not by a long shot); society's expectations have lessened in their focus on the traditional female gender role, shifting to a broader assessment of gender as a spectrum. The nurturing, mother/cook/caretaker role has fallen away, as has an examination of the female body as a Frankensteinian assemblage of discrete parts (breasts, genitals, behind). "What is a real woman?"

Plus ça change. Every time a woman is exploited in an ad, it's every woman being exploited — sold and bought. "Strange contradiction!" exclaims one of the women onscreen. "First we're told, 'Hide your private parts.' Then we're told, 'Expose yourself. Your body sells!'"

More explicitly expressed in 1975, one might gather, was the desire of a woman to be desired. A man's voice off-camera in voice-over challenges, Go ahead, keep complaining and we'll no longer desire you, — to which one woman in particular counters on-screen that she still feels desirable nonetheless, she just doesn't wish to be made into an advertisement; in a way, the latter subsumes the former when desirability becomes a condition of the mercenary.

Women, are you still servicable? Is your sex marketable? In 1975, "We women are taking charge of our evolution." •