Cinematic caesuras: Experimental documentary and the politics of form in Left Bank films by Resnais, Marker, Varda (Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Agnes Varda)

Documentary filmmaking over the last fifty years has largely rejected traditional conventions that strive to denote authenticity, objectivity, and fact. Sparked by a crisis in epistemology after World War II, some filmmakers began to craft alternative means to representation by turning to experimental techniques of fragmentation, disjunctive editing, and left wing polemics. In doing so, they crafted a mode of filmmaking that blends one of cinema's most socially motivated wings, documentary, with one of its most formally experimental wings, the avant-garde—and thereby bring to the fore qualities of the aesthetic and the cultural as demonstrated in both practices. The goals of this new form of documentary, then, are to effect both cultural critique and formal analysis, to mobilize cinematic aesthetic form and cultural content toward progressive ends.; This dissertation locates the origins of this “experimental documentary” style not in the French New Wave (Nouvelle vague), as much of the existing literature claims, but in the Left Bank Group (Groupe rive gauche) of 1950s Paris. In close readings of three films—Alain Resnais's Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955), Chris Marker's Sans soleil (Sunless, 1982), and Agnès Varda's Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000)—I consider how these three key members of the Left Bank Group redefined and have continued to experiment with documentary representation spanning these fifty years. Striving to subvert and explode the rules of documentary representation, these films diffract documentary evidence by juxtaposing reflexive narration with nontraditional, even banal subject matter, left-wing polemics with postmodern destabilizing techniques.; At heart, such disjunctive formal structures stage a necessarily poetic interrogation of documentary ethical concerns; they exceed pretenses to mimetic representation by engaging metaphor. This style of representation, I argue, is much akin to the poetic caesura. Like the meter of poetry, these experimental documentaries evoke ambiguities via their disjunctive editing: pivotal pauses and silences between shots yield extraordinarily eloquent connections. Such moments of poetic pause and meaningful reflection—which I term “cinematic caesuras”—generate a state of interconnectedness and spark a proliferation of meanings for the filmmaker, filmic process, filmed subject, and spectator.