Identity Self-Portraits of a Filmic Gaze. From Absence to (multi)presence: Duras, Akerman, Varda

The present article aims to analyze the nature of the filmic self-portraits of three of the greatest directors in francophone cinema: Marguerite Duras, Chantal Akerman and Agnès Varda. They all generate an identity self-portrait that shows the essences of their respective filmic gazes. Tree self-portraits that describe a route from absence to (multi)presence, from identity to alterity and intersubjectivity, from fiction to autobiography, from artistic to intimate space, from literary presence to that of visual arts, and which share the same primordial desire: the vindication of their female filmmakers’ status through cinematic reflexion. Marguerite Duras only showed her image in one single work, The Lorry (1977), to then embody, through her voice-over, different female characters who remain absent from the filmic image. A duality-identification is then generated between the filmmaker and the fictional characters, and the latter compose a self-portrait in absence of the director in Le navire night (1979), Aurélia Steiner (1979), Agatha and the Unlimited Readings (1981) and The Atlantique Man (1981). Chantal Akerman, while dividing herself into filmmaker and actress at the beginning of her career, created three works that represent her existential self-portrait: News from Home (1977), Down There (2006) and No Home Movie (2015). Films of a diaristic nature where the self-portrait is constructed through the conflict with maternal alterity and self-identity, and which is embodied by the dialectic presence-absence of Akerman in the film. Finally, Agnès Varda creates a self-portrait of the multipresence born from her interest in alterity, from the portraits of others created in Jane B. for Agnès V. (1988) and Jacquot de Nantes (1991), and which she continues in The Gleaners and I (2000). In Te Beaches of Agnès (2008) the meeting between autobiography and art installation enables her to generate multiple self-images, present and past, real and fictional, in order to achieve a collage-puzzle of herself