Looking back, looking onwards: selflessness, ethics, and French documentary

This article considers questions of documentary ethics in relation to the most recent films of Chris Marker, Agnes Varda and Raymond Depardon. I revisit my own arguments in Selfless Cinema? Ethics and French Documentary (Cooper 2006), in order to show how these directors continue to flesh out an approach to alterity that was already discernible in their earlier work, and that is still compatible with Emmanuel Levinas's ethics, albeit with a slight expansion of focus. In their late work - most notably, Marker's Chats perches/The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004), Varda's Les Plages d'Agnes/The Beaches of Agnes (2008), and Depardon's Profils paysans/Country Profiles (1998-2008) - these film-makers seem concerned ever more poignantly with matters of mortality, their own and that of other people, along with the survival of the planet and its other inhabitants. While their future-directed anxieties connect with memories of the past to suggest that an exploration of time is key to an understanding of their filmic ethics, the most striking facet of these films is to be found in the intimate, spatial geographies that they construct. Crafted essentially on the basis of interaction with or observation of others, as well as the film-makers' own reflections on matters of life, death and the future, these films create vivid emotional landscapes of mortality and loss that unite interior and exterior worlds in a deeply subjective and personal vision that is also ethical.