Women Reply: Our Bodies, Our Sex with One Sings, The Other Doesn't

Women Reply: Our Bodies, Our Sex with One Sings, The Other Doesn't

Women Reply: Our Bodies, Our Sex ( Réponse de femmes: Notre corps, notre sexe)
Commissioned by the French television channel Antenne 2, Women Reply is Varda’s contribution to what was a series of seven films that aimed to answer the prompt, “What is a woman?” Decidedly second wave in its reductive consideration of gender, this short is a time capsule of white feminism and empowerment in Western society.

One Sings, The Other Doesn’t
Agnès Varda’s nuanced approach to motherhood, pregnancy, and how one should live in the churning 1970s unfolds via the continent-spanning friendship of Pomme and Suzanne, played respectively by Valérie Mairesse and Thérèse Liotard, two actors who understood that Varda was presenting them with a chance to tell a story from the mind of an explicitly feminist artist, through the language of an emerging feminist cinema. This sprawling musical, which was not distributed widely in the US until 2018, is essential viewing for a time in which access to reproductive healthcare in the US is as tenuous as it was five decades ago.

Women Reply: Our Bodies, Our Sex ( Réponse de femmes: Notre corps, notre sexe)
DIRECTED BY: Agnès Varda. 1975. 9 min. France. Color. French. DCP.
One Sings, The Other Doesn’t
DIRECTED/WRITTEN BY: Agnès Varda. WITH: Thérèse Liotard, Valérie Mairesse, Ali Rafie, Robert Dadiès. 1977. 116 min. France. Color. French. DCP.
Academy Museum film programming generously funded by the Richard Roth Foundation. 
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