ABSTRACT
Colette's identity seems, in biographical terms, to have been far more bound up with the transient qualities of physical beauty and sexual appeal than Beauvoir's, given her career as a semi-nude dancer as well as her long and adventurous love-life. There are further analogies between Varda's images of ageing and those of Colette. Each more or less abandons fiction and plot in their late works, adopting instead more heterogeneous, supple forms of text that mix autobiography with the immediate experience of the everyday. Both women stage their own physical presence in their late work. Varda appears on screen as narrator, interviewer, and object of her own cinematic exploration; Colette repeatedly makes her first-person narrator visible in the text. Feminism cannot save people from the loss of what is dear, nor from the ultimate loss of their lives. The aesthetic that connects the artists is one that values the random, the contingent, the fortuitous, and presence of everyday within artistic activity.
