When watching Agnès Varda’s DOCUMENTEUR from 1981 I am struck by this recurring visual motif of the typewriting woman’s gaze out to the ocean. The beach, the sea, the horizon – they form lines or blocks, lying on top of each other. They resemble the lines of a poem, and also the different part of a typewriter: keyboard, carriage, paper. It makes me think about Varda’s concept of what she called „cinécriture“, in which all the elements of a film are meant to interact. And it makes me understand how much „cinécriture“ is to be taken literally, as an act of writing, which means: forming lines that can lie on each other, touch each other, while each of them maintaining their uniqueness.

Made in April 2023, as part of the module „Filmanalyse“ at HSLU.