Diary of a Pregnant Woman

In just 17 minutes, L'Opera Mouffe, Agnes Varda's 1958 documentary and personal essay about how a pregnant woman looks at her working class neighborhood, provides an exciting primer of French New Wave style. Previously a photographer, Varda had made and self-financed her first feature, La Pointe Courte, in 1954, then turned to making quirky documentaries for the French tourism office to make money. Pregnant with her first child, Varda took a movie camera and a chair onto the Rue Mouffetard, where there was (and still is) an outdoor food market. She recalled in later interviews that she stood on the chair, observing, until the people in the street grew used to her, then began filming. Varda has been called the "Grandmother (or sometimes, "Godmother") of the French New Wave," because La Pointe Courte used a combination of documentary and narrative techniques and other revolutionary methods of storytelling that later came to define the New Wave style. It was released several years before Godard's Breathless (1958) and Truffaut's The 400 Blows 1960), generally recognized as the seminal films of the nouvelle vague. But the title seems patronizing, as if that much-vaunted movement didn't really exist until men such as Godard and Truffaut invented it, and Varda just hovered nearby, providing inspiration or support. As L'Opera Mouffe and her subsequent films prove, Varda has always been a wholly original filmmaker, equally innovative in both narrative features and documentaries. L'Opera Mouffe is even reminiscent of the surrealists of the 1920s, with a Man Ray-like opening shot of a seated naked woman seen from behind, and some absurdist images such as a chick hatching from a broken lightbulb, and a woman eating flowers. There are several shots of a woman's pregnant belly, before the camera ventures out to observe people on Rue Mouffetard, affectionately called "la Mouffe," in the Latin Quarter of Paris. They gossip, shop, look surprised, bored, drunk, sad, fearful. There is no synch sound, and no narration, just an occasional evocative, evanescent intertitle ("on pregnancy," "the dearly departed," "happy celebrations," etc.) and Georges Delerue's lilting music. Early in her career, Varda called L'Opera Mouffe her favorite film. "It's the freest," she said in a 1965 interview. 40 years later, she called it "More instinctive, almost primitive. Those faces passing in the street speak so eloquently. And I was that pregnant woman who was looking at them. A look that I call the subjective documentary....A look that says, 'They were all newborns before becoming old people, bums, blind men. How did people look at them when they were babies?'" Director: Agnes Varda Screenplay: Agnes Varda Cinematography: Agnes Varda, Sacha Vierny Editor: Janine Verneau Music: Georges Delerue Principal Cast: Dorothee Blank, Antoine Boursellier, Andre Rousselet, Jean Tasso, Jose Varela, Monika Weber 17 minutes by Margarita Landazuri