Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of One Sings, the Other Doesn't
1977 · Agnès Varda · One Sings, the Other Doesn't on Sightlines
A truck pulls into a field, a woman climbs onto the flatbed, and she sings. The lyrics are Agnès Varda's own — she wrote them herself — and what they say, brightly and without apology, is that this body is mine. No speech sets it up. No argument follows. The song is the argument.
Keep that image, because it is the strangest decision in the film and everything else follows from it. Varda had lived this history. She signed the Manifesto of the 343, the public declaration by women admitting to an illegal abortion, and here she restages the 1972 Bobigny trial that helped force the law to change. She had every reason to make a tract. She made a musical.
Deleuze, near the end of Cinema 2, borrows a word from Bergson for what that song is doing: fabulation. Legending. He found it in documentary — in Perrault and Rouch, filming people who, once the camera is on them, begin telling a story about themselves that is neither a lie nor a report. It is a version of themselves they are in the middle of becoming. Pomme on the flatbed is doing that. The song does not describe a woman who is free; it is the act by which she becomes one, out loud, in front of witnesses. Which is why the film's buoyancy is not a softening of its politics. Fabulation has to be joyful to work. Complaint stays inside the situation that produced it. A song makes a different one.
Deleuze's hardest claim about political cinema is that the modern political film cannot address a people, because the people are not there yet: they are missing, and cinema's job is to help invent them. France in the 1970s is a good test of that. 'Women' as a political body was being assembled in real time, in courtrooms and petitions and marches. Varda is not filming a constituency that already exists. She is filming the assembly. And she does it by refusing any single model of what a liberated woman looks like. Pomme sings from trucks. Suzanne becomes a community worker and does the slow, unglamorous institutional labour. One sings, the other doesn't. The title is the thesis. A people you could summarise in one figure would not be a people.
So whose voice is it? Varda wrote the lyrics. When Pomme opens her mouth, the hand that signed the Manifesto is the hand that wrote the line. Pasolini called this the free indirect subjective, and Deleuze takes it up: the author's vision and the character's stop alternating and fuse into one utterance that belongs fully to neither. Usually this is an aesthetic subtlety. Here it is the film's politics at the level of grammar. A woman who did this thing writes the song for a woman doing it, and the film declines to put any distance between them.
Deleuze also has a real theory of the musical, and it is more generous than you would expect. The dance begins as one person's private movement; then the world takes the movement over, and the dancer stops being its source and becomes the place where a world-movement passes through. Astaire begins to move and the set moves with him. Varda keeps that machinery and changes the world. When Pomme sings, what moves around her is not a dream-city but a decade: the crowd, the law, the argument. Her stages are a flatbed and a country field. The most escapist device the musical owns gets aimed at exactly the material musicals exist to float above.
That posture on the truck is what Deleuze, after Brecht, calls a gest: an attitude held so that a social relation becomes legible in it. A woman standing above a crowd to announce that she owns herself is a legal history arranged into a body. You can read the law off her stance.
Fifteen years, two friends, mostly apart, and the film is held together by postcards read aloud. Deleuze's name for a voice like that is the speech act: not dialogue and not quite narration, but a voice that testifies and legends, running alongside the images rather than explaining them. The debt is to Hiroshima mon amour, where intimate voiceover is laid across documentary-political imagery. Varda's variation is to let private correspondence carry public history, so the abortion struggle reaches us in the register of a note to a friend.
The other structural debt is older, and it is to her own first film. La Pointe Courte braided documentary observation of a real community with a scripted couple's story; here, footage of real protest is cut against the fiction of Pomme and Suzanne. Deleuze would call that join an interstice, the 'AND' between two images that continuity cannot close. The documentary does not authenticate the fiction and the fiction does not illustrate the documentary. They stay two things, and the gap between them is where you do the thinking.
Even the colour is inherited. Le Bonheur used pastel prettiness against a story about women's interchangeability, so the sunlight worked as an accusation. The same palette returns here with the irony removed. Deleuze's affective colour is colour that absorbs a scene into a feeling instead of describing a place, and Varda's is doing frank political work: this is what it would look like if it went well.
Tracing the line out of this film is harder than tracing the lines in, and the reason is flattering. Six debts sit visible in the room: Demy's decade-spanning reunions and his habit of setting unglamorous facts to purpose-written melody, Resnais's essay-voice, Cléo's song that halts the story to render fear from inside, her own two-strand method. What Varda invented is more diffuse. She made the political film that puts its maker's own life inside the fiction and sings rather than argues, that treats first-person warmth as evidence instead of bias. That founded no school. It became a permission, which is harder to attribute and far more widely used.
The claim worth making for it is this. Political cinema in 1977 largely assumed that seriousness meant severity, and that a film about oppression should feel like one. Varda showed that a movement could be filmed in the mode of its own desire, and that you can make the case for a life by showing the life being enjoyed. Watch for the moments where the song stops the story. Nothing advances. That is not a break from the film's thinking. That is the thinking.
Concepts in play
- fabulation (story-telling / legending) — Pomme's songs, with lyrics Varda wrote herself, delivered from flatbed trucks and country stages as 'buoyant, funny declarations of bodily self-possession' — the song performs the self-possession rather than reporting it.
- the people are missing — The film is made inside the constitution of the French women's movement (Manifesto of the 343, the 1972 Bobigny trial) and refuses one model of the liberated woman: Pomme the unconventional singer, Suzanne the serious community worker, 'affirming their different female identities.'
- free indirect discourse (political) — Varda, a signatory of the Manifesto of the 343, wrote the lyrics Pomme sings — the author's political voice and the character's stage voice are literally the same utterance.
- movement of world — The film is an unashamed musical whose numbers are staged not in a soundstage dream-space but on flatbed trucks and country stages, so that what moves around the singer is the decade's political change — 'a whole political era passes through' the songs.
- the gest — Pomme's performing posture — a woman raised above a crowd declaring bodily self-possession from a truck bed — holds an attitude that makes the legal and social relation to women's bodies readable.
- acte de parole (the legending/testimonial voice) — The fifteen-year friendship is sustained mostly by postcards, whose narration braids private correspondence into the public abortion struggle — a testifying voice rather than dialogue, descended from Resnais's essayistic voiceover in Hiroshima mon amour.
- interstice / the 'AND' — The La Pointe Courte two-strand method reprised: the scripted story of Pomme and Suzanne threaded through footage of real 1970s abortion-rights protest, neither strand absorbing or authenticating the other.
- affective colour — Le Bonheur's deliberately pretty pastel palette and sunlit design, ironic there against women's interchangeability, carried into Pomme's iconography as an affirmative image of liberation as sunlight.