Towards a Cinema of Precarity? Agnès Varda’s Vagabond (1985)

Abstract

This article makes the case for considering Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond, 1985) as a rare precursor of the contemporary French cinema of precarity and shows how it anticipates that cinema’s key features. With close attention to formal and narrative choices, it argues that, while of a specific period, the film demands to be situated in a much longer timeframe. Drawing on Michael Hardt’s account of the 1970s, it argues that the film carried that decade’s political aspirations into the 1980s but deprived of a horizon of hope. But it also looks to Marx, Foucault, Federici and others to show how the film resonates within a longer historical tradition that saw the vagabond as part of a stigmatised lumpenproletariat, a figure of resistance or an embodied and gendered object of new disciplinary regimes. Finally, drawing on Kathi Weeks’ rehabilitation of the lumpen as agents of change in neoliberal times, it argues that Varda’s film speaks powerfully to a precarious present and how we might make sense of it.