Heterotopic Spaces and Nomadic Gazes in Varda: From Cléo de 5 à 7 to Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse

the exterior versus the interior. Critical work on Varda's films has itself often relied on this and other binaries; and yet, in many of Varda's films the gaze is nomadic, not least because several of them are road movies, the nomadic gaze undermining the binary instead of confirming it. As Rosi Braidotti explains, nomadic thought helps to deconstruct binary representations, especially those of women. The nomad, she suggests, "expresses the desire for an identity made of transitions, successive shifts, and coordinated changes, without and against an essential unity." Consequently, the nomad is a "form of political resistance to hegemonic and exclusionary views of subjectivity." 2 Varda's cinema is a nomadic cinema; it is by a traveler, about travelers, and often uses iconic traveling shots, which are key to understanding how Varda's use of space functions. Her cinema is one that crosses the boundaries between the object and the subject to create the space of the imaginary. Objects, like le hasard objectif of the surrealists, reveal traces of hidden sub- jectivities. In that respect, the real world, if taken at face value, at topograph- ical value, lies, hence Varda's pun combining the word documentary and lies, "documenteur," the title of one her films (1981). The real can be apprehended only through subjectivity. But equally, the subject can be apprehended only through objects. As the artist Macha Makeieff in Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse: deux ans apres (2002) says, to Varda's surprise, "les objets nous contiennent." And Jean Laplanche says in the same film, reflecting on what he said in Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000), that he wishes that in the first film he had pointed out something that seems retrospectively self-evident to him: that he as a psychoanalyst gleans objects from the unconscious mind so as to con- struct a narrative of identity. Space, and the objects and the people within that space, are as fluid and as fragmented as the structure of Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, as mobile as the tracking shots of lorries pursued by Varda's camera; what matters is not where you are nor where you are going, but movement, transformation, becoming, of the object and of the subject.