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Agnès Varda has been an important figure in French and European cinema for over fifty years. Her work is often discussed in the context of new wave cinema and feminist approaches to film. Her expatriate films, however, have received little critical attention. An appraisal of Mur, murs (1980) and Documenteur (1981), both shot in California in the late 1970s, provides unique insight into Varda's cinema. An analysis of the locational modus operandi of the Californian diptych demonstrates the aesthetic coherence of the director's project, helping to situate these films within Varda's cinematographic production. A detailed examination of the diptych's aural qualities also illustrates Varda's revisionist and political poetics and provides an interesting example of the way Varda explores the notion of space. Looking at these films carefully helps us understand the importance of adopting a comprehensive and self-reflexive perspective when studying women's cinema and its many different facets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study proposes a method to detect ocean fronts from in situ temperature and density glider measurements. This method is applied to data collected along the CalCOFI Line 90, south of the California Current System (CCS), over the 2006–2013 period. It is based on image-processing techniques commonly applied to sea surface temperature (SST) satellite data. Front detection results using glider data are consistent with those obtained in other studies carried out in the CCS. SST images of the Multi-scale Ultra-high Resolution (MUR) dataset were also used to compare the probability of occurrence or front frequency (FF) obtained with the two datasets. Glider and MUR temperatures are highly correlated. Along Line 90, frontal frequency exhibited the same maxima near the transition zone (~130 km offshore) as derived from MUR and glider datasets. However, marked differences were found in the bimonthly FF probability with high (low) front frequency in spring-summer for glider (MUR) data. Methodological differences explaining these contrasting results are investigated. Thermohaline-compensated fronts are more abundant towards the oceanic zone, although most fronts are detected using both temperature and density criteria, indicating a significant contribution of temperature to density in this region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]