Wandering around the ’70s

Informed by three interlocking texts—Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropisms, Agnès Varda’s 1985 Vagabond, and Lesley Stern’s Dead and Alive: The Body as Cinematic Thing—this essay attends to a series of scenes from US films of the 1970s. Visually oriented and guided by movement, these analytic descriptions develop together a context of feminist associations that in turn runs counter to the mastery of textual analysis that is so often implicitly aligned with the “masterful” auteurs and works of the era. By moving between a series of cinematic images that home in on women’s experiences, the essay at once recognizes their shared resonances and imagines a counter narrative to dominant histories of the era and an alternative or extension to dominant theoretical fields that emerged from the era. This form of speculative criticism allows for readers to engage in acts of speculation themselves.