(A word about this post: My daughter’s birth has given me the opportunity to rediscover my love of writing. Staying home with her also has allowed me to re-engage with film, another of my passions. This post is a reflection of where those passions intersect.)
I’ve written before about how my daughter doesn’t like to take naps, or at least she doesn’t like them until she’s fallen asleep (she seems to like them a lot at that point). While she sleeps through the night in her crib, she hasn’t taken a nap in that thing since she was about four months old. And believe me, I’ve tried. Three times. Three hour-long screaming meltdowns. So, no more trying for crib naps, at least for a while.
In the morning, my daughter naps in my arms after I bounce her on a yoga ball for a few minutes. In the afternoon, she sleeps in her carseat after we return home from visiting Mommy at work. This system works fairly well, most of the time.
I cherish those morning naps. I love that she sleeps in my arms. In fact, it’s one of the best parts of my day.
You see, while she naps, I watch movies. God bless Hulu Plus and the Criterion Collection.
Since I gave up on morning naps in the crib, I have watched more than 20 movies in the Criterion Collection. From the auteurs of the French New Wave to Akira Kurosawa’s film noir series, I get to watch these movies in 30 to 45-minute increments. It works out well, because I get to watch great films, and I don’t have to turn the volume up too loud because they’re all subtitled: French, Japanese, Italian -- loud enough to hear the sound, quiet enough to let my daughter sleep peacefully.
I love it.
(Note #2: Being a stay-at-home dad has a lot of advantages. I feel so blessed and privileged to be able to be the primary caretaker for my daughter during the day, but I recognize that so many parents don’t have the means to make that choice, nor should they feel compelled to do anything related to their children’s care due to societal pressure. This was the choice that my family made, and we feel like it’s the right choice for us.)
I’ve always been a film buff, and I have dabbled in making films over the years. Having the opportunity to watch great films while my daughter sleeps in my arms is one of the current joys of my life. I’ve watched all of Eric Rohmer’s Moral Tales, and I have discovered the work of Agnès Varda, the only female director among the French New Wave filmmakers.
Agnès Varda is awesome. I have watched four of her films so far -- Cleo from 5 to 7, Le Bonheur, La Pointe-Courte, Vagabond -- and they are all worth watching. She is by far my most favorite New Wave filmmaker. I think most of the rest of the guys in that sausage fest are way too full of themselves and their genius to make consistently compelling films.
Exceptions: Band of Outsiders, Masculin Feminin, Last Year at Marienbad, Hiroshima Mon Amour. In other words, Godard and Resnais get passes for making two masterpieces each.
There are no easy answers and no easy perspectives in Varda’s films. Too often, I think that filmmakers make films with an ambiguous tone because they assume that critics will fill in the gaps where they’re too afraid to have opinions. If these directors’ movies are inscrutable, critics will assume that they have something profound to say (I’m looking at you, David Lynch!).
But this isn’t the case with Varda. My feelings about her characters are always complicated, and I think that she uses her camera to complicate my feelings toward the characters I’m supposed to revile or identify with. That’s because Varda’s feelings about her subjects are complicated.
All of Varda’s films are real reflections of society, but they also feature people who don’t quite fit perfectly into that real society. What’s interesting about her approach is that it doesn’t diminish how real those characters are. Vagabond is the most clear depiction of this unsettling dichotomy. The movie is about a fictitious itinerant girl who’s found dead in a ditch. Her life is reconstructed by the filmmaker and the people with whom the girl interacted. The “vagabond” has made a choice to reject societal norms, but her choice isn’t viewed sentimentally. Sometimes, her life seems romantic; at other points, it seems dirty and awful and pathetic. In some ways, the movie is more about the society that takes her in or rejects her or takes advantage of her or treats her with envy or indifference.
There are several tracking shots that follow our vagabond that end without her in the frame. You could argue that this is a visual representation of her existence outside the norms of society or her lack of engagement with the people who offer her connection...
So, how is this about the Parenthood Journey?
Well, I’m talking about naps and feminism, baby!
I get to watch these movies while my daughter naps in my arms, and these movies get me thinking about who my daughter will be and the women she will look to for inspiration. Varda wasn’t just a trailblazer (a cliche too often used for creative women artists); she started the French New Wave. La Pointe-Courte, her first film, which was clearly experimental in the fashion of the New Wave, premiered in 1955. For those keeping score, that’s four years before The 400 Blows (Truffaut) and Hiroshima Mon Amour (Resnais), and five years before Godard’s Breathless. Interesting fact: Resnais edited the movie!
Feminism is manifest in all of Varda’s films. Each of the films I have watched are keenly interested in the roles women inhabit in French society, and Varda presents those roles with frank, yet complex honesty.
Varda’s confidence, creative vision and her willingness to present an honest, complicated perspective inspire me. I hope that she inspires my daughter, too.
As for me, the dad of a daughter, I am struck by the compromises I have made as a parent. I never thought I would use the “cry it out” method of sleep training at night. I never thought that my daughter would take her naps in my arms or in her carseat. In fact, those two sentences don’t seem like they should even come from the same parent.
Right and wrong answers aren’t as simple as you would think when it comes to being a parent. There are so many decisions you have to make, and as much as you would like to judge parents who do it differently, you’ve got to realize that you are at the mercy of the same chaos as they are.
Varda’s films have helped me realize that it’s ok to have complicated thoughts about other humans. Everyone’s perspective is three-dimensional about other three-dimensional human beings, but it is a limited perspective. We all watch each other and we make judgments about the behavior of other humans all the time, especially as parents.
But that doesn’t mean that we understand what’s happening outside the frame. Varda helps me keep that in perspective.
And for what it’s worth, Varda has been added to my mental playlist of women artists that I plan to share with my daughter. Here’s hoping, that while she’s sleeping, my daughter has already started to absorb the playlist.
Fantastic Steve!
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