Women Reply

In 1975, International Women’s Year, as declared by the United Nations, Agnès Varda was invited by French television to contribute to the show F comme femme. The result is a Second Wave Feminist pamphlet where young and old, dressed and nude, proletarian and upper-class women answer the question: What does it mean to be a woman?

The style of Women Reply is very typical of the politically engaged cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. This short film could feel terribly dated today, were it not for Varda’s success in transforming a series of dull slogans into a stimulating experience that is at once inventive and poetic.

In what Varda herself calls a “ciné-tract,” various women talk about themselves in front of her camera: what they look like, their views on sex and desire, advertising, and the controversial maternal instinct. These women may be beautiful, unattractive, or downright ugly, but they all want to be treated as individuals and not as consumers and sex toys, only to end up as old, easily discarded ghosts. The group of women protests against the conditioning imposed on them by society and the suffocating gender roles that go with it.

The most striking thing about this pamphlet is the scene in which a pregnant woman dances naked in front of the camera, without a shred of shame. Even a puritan could  appreciate such a (then) rare scene, unlike some viewers of French television who complained to Antenne 2 at the time about this “scandal.”