Mona's postcard collection
Sixty-four minutes into Sans toit ni loi (Agnès Varda 1985), the protagonist Mona lays out in front of her seven postcards:
The shot lasts no more than five seconds, and nothing more is made in the film of Mona's postcard collection. Nonetheless some curious connections can be traced between these seven images and other parts of the film. One of these connections is directly topographical:
Barbentane is a recurrent location in the film. Mona and Madame Landier eat chichis and have a beer there, and Mona is on a bridge over the railway lines by the station:
Her postcard shows the same stretch of track and station buildings, from a reverse angle, fifty or more years earlier.
Diagonally opposite the postcard of the railway station, in Mona's arrangement of them, is a postcard that has a more oblique connection to the topography of the film:
This is one of two water towers at Jonquières-Saint-Vincent. Three moments of the film are shot at Jonquières-Saint-Vincent; none of them features a water tower but, curiously, all three show sources drawn on by Mona for water - a hand-pump, an irrigation hose and a village fountain:
There is another water tower shown in the film, but that is some distance away from the one in the postcard, at Le Grau-du-Roi:
Three of Mona's postcards are of landscapes with trees:
|
The one on the right is easy to localise. Van Gogh painted this 'Route avec un cyprès et une étoile' in 1890 at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, not far from the cluster of locations used for Varda's film.
The other two look more like photographs and I haven't been able to match them, either to real places or to extant postcards. I assume that they are landscapes related to the region in which Sans toit ni loi was filmed. One of them it is possible to localise in a different way, in that it appears again in the film, as indeed does the postcard of the Van Gogh painting. The home of Madame Landier, the tree specialist, is full of images of trees, at least forty of them: paintings, prints, posters and postcards. A close-up of a painting in her living room shows two of Mona's postcards tucked into its frame, alongside a tree by Magritte: |
|
This is after Madame Landier has said goodbye to Mona, so narratively it is only coincidence that both women have these images.
|
The other two postcards in Mona's collection relate not to the region's topography but to its folklore.
The little girl standing by the vestiges of a tree is wearing traditional Provençal costume, often called Arlésienne, through association with Arles. The monstrous figure is a Tarasque, an effigy of a mythic beast associated with the town of Tarascon, near Arles. (My thanks to Greg "Fantomas" F for this identification.). |
|
|
|
None of the seven postcards in Mona's collection makes much of a connection to her personal story, whether narratively or thematically: it would be hard to identify her with the little local girl; the local monsters who assault her at the end of the film are not at all Tarasque-like; and she isn't very interested in trees. The water tower connects to her recurrent efforts to obtain drinking water, but only tangentially, and the train station is not related to her journeying - she gets a lift from a car when she is further along the bridge, at a point where it no longer crosses tracks and where we no longer associate it with trains.
Mona's collection is, it seems to me, simply a sample of Varda's collection, that is, in that moment of repose she is contemplating some of the images related to the region that Varda herself collected in preparing the film. This is a metatextual moment, as if the character were its creator's collaborator in determining what visual pretexts might inform the decisions to be made in the making of the film.
There is another postcard moment in the film, very near the beginning, when some men are discussing an image of a naked woman on sale in a café and comparing it with a memory of seeing Mona emerge from the sea, naked, after having washed:
These postcards are not, I would say, part of the collection assembled by Varda as a visual aid to the design of the film. They are objects there, found on site and folded into the film's figuration of bodies. I'm guessing that they were already there, then, for sale in the café that was used as a location, at Montcalm. These days such postcards are, I think, only for sale on specialist internet sites:
|
The one other collection of postcards in the film is on the wall of Yolande's room.
Two of these at least are not local. Top right is the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, centre right is a souvenir of Spain.
If you recognise any of the others do let me know, here. |
|
For the locations of the film Sans toit ni loi see this brilliant map produced for produced for Languedoc-Roussillon Cinéma:
