Ulrike Hanstein

Agnès Varda’s film »Documenteur« (USA/FR 1981) was filmed on location in several neighborhoods of Venice, California, in the winter of 1980. Given the unpretentious cinematography with little extra lighting, as well as the color, texture, and resolution of this 16 mm film, the images bear the physical traces of a smallscale production. Thus the images support a strong sense of connectedness to the material reality »out there« – that is, the everyday life and the brief encounters with strangers in the streets, shops, and neglected residential settings of Venice.

My paper examines Varda’s site-specific mode of filmmaking, which explores material architectural structures in their role of supporting specific spatial, perceptual, and affective relations. The composition of the shots relies on the material resources of the built environment and recomposes the expressive qualities of the actual architecture. Varda’s filmic practice intensifies the pictorial aspects of particular locations and the physicality of bodies in motion framed by the organized and confined urban space. Moving through a range of documentary, fictional, diaristic, and essayistic forms, »Documenteur« displays the characters' interpersonal relations as taking place – as being located – in a particular, material milieu. The mise en scène seemingly results from a scrutiny of the immutable and dynamic aspects of real places and the improvised invention of possible routes and relations across space. In »Documenteur« the fictional characters for the most part intermingle with the factual social life and the »afilmic« space of the built environment. Thus, the actors paradoxically appear as »extras« throughout the film – that is, as a fictional and carefully staged supplement to the already existing locales and gatherings of strangers in the street.

Ulrike Hanstein graduated in theatre studies at the Justus-Liebig-Universität, Giessen, and gained her PhD in film studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. She was a lecturer in media studies at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, and a fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles (2013–2014). Since 2015 she is a lecturer at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Leipzig. Her research interests include film philosophy, experimental film and video practices, media history, and the aesthetics of moving images. She is the author of a book on Lars von Trier’s and Aki Kaurismäki’s melodramatic film aesthetics (»Unknown Woman, geprügelter Held: Die melodramatische Filmästhetik bei Lars von Trier und Aki Kaurismäki«, Berlin 2011) and co-editor of an anthology on media history entitled »Re-Animationen« (with Anika Höppner and Jana Mangold, Vienna 2012).