Faulkner’s Novel and Adaptated Film: Agnes Varda’s “Cinècriture”(cine-writing) in La Pointe Courte

This research is to explore a new perspecctive of novel adaptation for films with a case of Agnès Varda’s La Pointe Courte(1954) inspired by William Faulkner’s novel, The Wild Palms. The two innovative ‘writers’ both took the lead in narrative experiments of novels and films, respectively, complementing each medium. As her own coined term, ‘cine-writing’ speaks itself, her debut cinema rewrites Faulkner’s novel visually and reassures the perspective in adaptation that a novel-based film is beyond transposion of novel’s storyline on screen with film techniques. Varda never learned film making either at school or in the field, and had no networking with film industry at all. This made possible her fresh eyes on the medium taking full advantage of her long expertise in another visual art, photography. Consequently, she heralded a new wave cinema in France. With her original cine-writing, Varda achieves narrative poetics of the two mediums. Her film reflects the novel’s unique contrapuntal structure intertwined by two short stories with contrast images and conveys the same universal themes—people’s life struggles including love relationship.