Suzanne Daveau (2019) reconstructs the career of the French geographer in space and time, dimensions shared between geography and cinema. Out of the counter-mapping structure of Luísa Homem’s film emerges the political history of the 20th century, as well as the history of the geographer herself in her complex relationships with the structures of dominance and the workings of power, particularly within colonial contexts.

The life partner of Orlando Ribeiro, Daveau has lived in Portugal since 1965. Halfway through this film, in a voice-off, she affirms regarding her relationship with the Portuguese geographer: “Our life and our work were the same thing”. The fabric of this film knits together these two fields, love and science. Yet, while Daveau’s relationship with Ribeiro is given particular significance in the first part of the narrative, the masculine figure becomes gradually diluted by the feminine, if not feminist, story the film has to tell. But the relation between love and science takes on other forms of expression. It is present in the film’s sensitive construction, in its emotional logic, connected to the processes of intergenerational transmission, in line with Daveau’s own singular idea of the geographic discipline. For the geographer, “there is no science, no progress in knowledge, without love, without passion”, a citation that appears in the final intertitle, pointing towards the weight of affectivity and subjectivity in the different stages of the scientific method, and objectivity as a historically and ideologically modulated category [1]. The narrative and aesthetic logic of the film responds to this idea. Daveau’s photographs, taken in the field, alone show the modulation of the category of objectivity. From the pictures of the Jura region to the more recent images (Daveau stopped taking photographs in 2000), we can observe a greater attention to detail and a growing interest in the human figure and the relation between the field of observation and the field of the observer, something which the editing demonstrates.

Suzanne Daveau is a self-reflexive film on many levels. In the opening sequence, the hand, captured in a close-up shot, that caresses and offers to our gaze the fragments of rock — the geographer’s own hand against a sandy backdrop — clarifies the spatial-temporal context. The gesture, repeated in other sequences, explicates a space and time, historical and discursive, a “here” and a “now”. The hand that shows us defines, self-reflexively and dynamically, the situation and its discursive conditions. The remaining ways of showing retain similar functions: the editing of photographic and film archives inscribes itself in a logic of presenting more than representing.

The film uses a counter-mapping structure, deconstructing the hegemony of cartographic and cinematic representations and positions of sight-power that delimit the subject-object relationship. Its outline takes on two fundamental and non-exclusive dimensions. The images of the present (2016–2018) are filmed in Super 8, inserting them symbolically in the same timeline as the images taken from photographic and film archives (1951–1986). This non-hierarchical re-ordering — both trans-geographical (from Jura to Teotihuacán, from Serra da Estrela to Cabo Verde) and trans-temporal (the shots from the past and from the ostensible present) — of Daveau’s photographic archives points towards her temporal, material, discursive, ideological and cultural itineraries, that is, her material history, giving rise itself to a counter-mapping. At the same time, the elliptical continuity between past and present leads to a non-chronological, non-linear and non-progressive view of history, which counters the teleological, causal ideas of Europe’s hegemonic project of modernity — served, previously, by cartography, and inscribed in it. The idea of counter-mapping also emerges from the emotional relationship between Daveau and Luísa Homem. The activation of the observer’s point of view by that of the observed takes Suzanne Daveau out of a strictly biographical frame. This activation overcomes the separation between subject and object that structures dominant cartographical and cinematic representations, making this feature film a reflection (and its formalisation) on mechanisms of relating — or of “identifying”, as indicated by the final intertitle — in our systems of representation.

A series of sequences filmed in Super 8 aims to reconstitute what would have been Daveau’s point of view on the filmed object, and this sensitive reconstitution creates space for different perceptive and cognitive relations to space and time. In other words, it not only reaffirms the spatial-temporal — and cultural — position of the observer, but also reactivates and dynamically updates the perceptive conditions and cognitive-historical perspectives of Daveau, making them available to the viewer. In parallel, the representation of the landscape, as well as of difference both social (rurality) and cultural (the human geography of the old colonial territories), are embedded in a process of de-perspectivisation, in which the observer takes on this status — of being the observer — as their gaze becomes invested, affected and activated by the gaze of another. The gaze of another is, therefore, the condition of the act of observation itself.

Suzanne Daveau is structured by transitions between the world-spaces of the geographer to the intimacy of home. These movements acquire formal expression in Daveau’s modes of figuration. In the transition from the opening sequences — fundamentally, archive montage sequences with voice-off and close-ups of Daveau — to the geographer’s full embodiment, she ceases to be an acousmatic character, who is heard but not seen, and becomes fully present. The sequence filmed in Daveau’s garden, at the end of the film, makes the geographer present in sensorial, synaesthetic, multi-perspectival and prismatic terms, based on the principle of “infringement”, in the Merleau-Pontian sense [2], between the visible and tangible. In this sequence, Daveau sees, touches and is seen by the filmmaker and camera, as well as by various plants, animals and minerals. If the chain from visible to tangible presupposes the retreat of the visual as primary sense — or the emergence of a tactile or haptic vision —, then the construction of the sequence also makes perceptible a continuity (and reciprocity) between the observed, the observer and the other perspectives in circulation: human, non-human and machine, which mutually affect each other. The emotional aesthetic of Suzanne Daveau invites us to relearn and apprehend the world at the margin of hegemonic representations of the landscape [3] and nature.

The first version of this text was published with the title “Notes about the film ‘Suzanne Daveau’” in the Jornal do Doc’s Kingdom, nº 3, Série I, July 2021, pp. 14–19.

[1] Daston, Lorraine and Galison, Peter. Objectivity. Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2007.

[2] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Le Visible et l’invisible suivi de Notes de travail. Paris: Gallimard, 2001.

[3] Mitchell considers that the landscape genre, which has flourished under imperial regimes, is not simply an aesthetic manifesto but a space for political affirmation.

Mitchell, W. J. T.. Landscape and Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.