ABSTRACT

Agnès Varda’s science fiction tale, Les Créatures, is her only film with an extravagant plot, and it is also the film considered (by others and by herself) to be her great failure. This article argues that these two aspects of the film are related. Les Créatures can be read as a condemnation of a certain kind of unrestrained storytelling, in which an artist’s desire for invention displaces any effort to engage with the world. The novelist-hero of Les Créatures cooks up fantasies that share the freewheeling improvisation of some of Varda’s other films but lack an ethnographic or observational dimension that would tether them to reality. As a result, his story, and indeed Varda’s film, amount to a self-absorbed game-playing that Varda repudiates in spite of its eerie fascination. In this way the film can be seen as a road not taken for Varda, drawing attention to the ways in which her other films hold their fantasies accountable to a shared world, and imagining what they would be like if they didn’t.

摘要

阿涅斯·瓦尔达的科幻小说《生物》是她唯一一部情节夸张的电影，也是她（其他人和她自己）认为是她巨大失败的电影。本文认为电影的这两方面是相关的。《生物》可以被解读为对某种无拘无束的讲故事的谴责，在这种讲故事中，艺术家对发明的渴望取代了与世界接触的任何努力。Les Creatures的小说家英雄编造的幻想与瓦尔达其他电影中的一些随心所欲的即兴创作一样，但缺乏将它们与现实联系起来的民族志或观察维度。结果，他的故事，甚至瓦尔达的电影，都成了一种自我陶醉的游戏，尽管它令人毛骨悚然，但瓦尔达却予以否认。通过这种方式，这部电影可以被视为瓦尔达没有走的一条路，让人们注意到她的其他电影如何让他们的幻想对共同的世界负责，并想象如果他们不这样做的话会是什么样子。