Abstract
L’Une chante, l’autre pas (1976) is one Varda’s least known films, articulating feminist politics of the period with the relationship of two women, one of whom becomes a singer, the other a social worker, but both of whom fight for women’s rights. The film has been viewed as subversive of both a ‘masculinist’ view of the world (Hottell 1999) and of genre (DeRoo 2009). DeRoo shows how the film’s musical numbers, much criticized at the time, function as a specifically Brechtian device undermining the genre of the film musical that the film. The concern of this paper is to take a closer look at the musical numbers in the context of work on the film musical, and in particular to show how in conjunction with the rest of the score and camerawork they construct a utopian community. This is not so much because of the proselytizing lyrics of the songs, but because of the way in which the music functions to create a community in movement, undermining binaries such as stasis and movement, domesticity and nomadism, ‘masculine’ views of the world and ‘feminine’ views of the world. Music undermines these binaries, neatly encapsulated in a metaphorical sense by the title of the film, L’Une chante, l’autre pas, to create a mobile domestic community that shares characteristics with several of Varda’s other films.