Agnès Varda's Radically Personal Films - The New Yorker PDF

3/29/2019 Agnès Varda’s Radically Personal Films | The New Yorker
Postscript
Agnès Varda’s Radically Personal

Films
By Richard Brody 3:00 P.M.
Drawing from her own experience and the lives she observed, Agnès Varda, who died this week, lmed
women’s stories, women’s lives, women’s struggles, women’s faces, and women’s bodies.
Photograph by Micheline Pelletier / Gamma-Rapho / Getty
he challenge of modern cinema is to render a technical medium personal

T within a corporate industry. The forms that exemplify this aspiration are the
self-portrait in art, the memoir or rst-person novel in writing—and the home
movie. Agnès Varda, who died this week, at the age of ninety, is one of the
lmmakers who brought about the revolution in personal cinema. She led it from a
very early age, virtually off the radar of critics and producers. She was so far in ahead
of the world that she had to wait for it to catch up to her.
Varda made her rst feature, “La Pointe-Courte,” at the age of twenty-six, in the
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coastal town of Sète, in the Subscribe now
South of France, where
and get a freeshe grew
tote. >> up. She had been living
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in Paris, studying art and working as a photographer, and went to Sète to shoot stills
when she got the idea for a movie. It would combine two sides of her life: her
observations of the daily economic and political struggles faced by residents of the
shing village, and the romantic turmoil of a couple visiting from Paris. (The man is
originally from Sète, and brings his wife to his home town.)
There, at the start, Varda combined the elements that would inspire her entire career:
personal experience, political insight and activism, an ardent vision for landscape, an
intense curiosity about the lives of others, and frank confrontations with intimacy,
romance, and love. In a 1993 interview, Varda explained that she made the lm
without having any background whatsoever in lmmaking. She’d seen very few
movies in her life, and was completely unfamiliar with the works of famous directors.
She added, “I was twenty-six and I didn’t even know that there existed a
Cinémathèque in Paris! . . . My in uences were painting, books, and life.”
Varda made her rst feature, “La Pointe-Courte,” at the age of twenty-six, in the coastal town where she
grew up.
Ciné-Tamaris
Needless to say, Varda got to know movies, and nourished her own with responses to
what she saw in those of others. But, never having been imbued with their
conventions and their norms, she worked from the start with an uninhibited
inventiveness and an audacious freedom that few lmmakers in her generation of
bold innovators—and, for that matter, few who followed in her footsteps—could
match. Her originality in style and form was inseparable from her subjects and
themes.
Drawing from her own experience and the lives she observed, Varda lmed women
—women’s stories, women’s lives, women’s struggles, women’s faces, and women’s
bodies. Her second lm, “L’Opéra-Mouffe,” a short, from 1958, which she made
while she was pregnant with her daughter, Rosalie, begins with images of a pregnant
woman’s nude body. It blends a joyful erotic sketch with documentary sequences,
largely of elderly people in dire straits, which Varda lmed in the Rue Mouffetard,
which was then a poor neighborhood. In its sixteen-minute span, Varda rushes,
lyrically and tenderly, passionately and ruefully, through the cycle of life, and from
carnal pleasure to social and physical decay.
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The fusion of direct observation and aesthetic contemplation, of documentary

proximity and sociological re ection, led Varda to make lms of passionate political
engagement that drew, too, on her own experience. She was vigorously involved, in
the early nineteen-seventies, in the battle to legalize abortion in France, and that
battle—set in the much wider context of the lives of women (whether artists or
working people) who took part in that struggle—gave rise to Varda’s great, all-too-
One
rare drama “One Sings,
One Sings, the
Sings, the Other
the Other Doesn’t
Doesn’t,” from 1977, which, in dramatizing the
Other Doesn’t
lives of two women, embraces the passion and ferment of an entire era. It’s a political
lm that’s also a tale of the birth of an artist, a social analysis that’s also nearly a
musical. (The teen-age Rosalie Varda appears in the lm, too.)
Varda is a lmmaker of place. Her penultimate feature, called “Faces

Faces Places
Places” in
English, has a similar French title (“Visages Villages,” or “Faces Villages”). Before
that, she made “The Beaches of Agnès,” a cinematic self-portrait in which she
discusses the primacy of landscapes in her life and, as she does in “Faces Places,”
lms her encounters with the new people she meets, and the others whom she
already knows. This style was her lifelong procedure, her lifelong inspiration. In the
early fties, she moved to a house on the Rue Daguerre in the Fourteenth
Arrondissement of Paris, and stayed there until the end of her life, opening the
offices of her own production company there, too. In 1975, she made a lm about
her street, her house, her neighborhood, called “Daguerréotypes,” the premise of
which was to shoot a lm no further from her home than she could run an electrical
cable.
She and the director Jacques Demy (best known for “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”)
met at a lm festival in 1958 where both were showing short lms. They married in
1962. When she made the science- ction fantasy “The Creatures,” in 1965, she
lmed it in the coastal town of Noirmoutier, where they had a home. The subject
was a married artistic couple; the footage involved surveillance video that functioned
as mini-documentaries of the lives of the local residents. After Demy’s death, from
, in 1990, Varda dramatized the source of his artistic inspiration in “Jacquot de
Nantes,” about Demy’s boyhood.
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Varda made lms with and about her friends and family. She put her friends Jean-
Luc Godard and Anna Karina in the lm within a lm for her second feature, “Cleo
from 5 to 7,” from 1961 —the story of a young singer who’s awaiting word from a
doctor as to whether she has cancer—and got Godard to take off his eternal
sunglasses on camera because, she told me in 2001, “I thought he had very beautiful
eyes.” She also told me that she shot it as a silent lm, because Godard “talked
constantly.” The ninety-minute lm is existential in the frankest sense—the
confrontation, in real time, with one’s impending death—and is set in Paris, entirely
within the two-hour span of the title. (The title of that lm is a sort of dour pun—
the French expression “from 5 to 7” means a furtive sexual encounter; in the lm, it’s
a matter of life or death.)
A still from “Cleo from 5 to 7.” Ciné Tamaris
When she was in California in 1967, Varda lmed her relative, an elder painter
named Jean Varda, in the short “Uncle Yanco,” from 1967. She lmed her friend and
editor Sabine Mamou, as an actress (her only acting role), in “Documenteur,” from
1981, about a Frenchwoman in Los Angeles who’s there with her young son while
separated from her husband. In 1985, Varda lmed a documentary portrait of Jane
Birkin, “Jane B. pour Agnès V.,” which is simultaneously a vision of a friendship, a
family, an artist’s range of talents and styles, a view of Varda herself collaborating
with the actress from inside the frame, and a painterly portrait of Birkin’s face and
body. (Two years later, she lmed Birkin along with her own teen-age son, Mathieu
Demy, in “Kung- Fu Master,” a graceful yet grimly clear-eyed drama about an adult
woman who begins a romantic relationship with a fourteen-year-old boy.)
Inspired by the art of painting from the start, Varda pushed even further into its
handmade intimacy thanks to new technologies—especially small-format digital
video. Some lmmakers took advantage of the mini-DV to replace, on a low budget,
full-scale movie cameras. Varda, in her 2000 lm “The Gleaners and I,” instead used
it like a paintbrush, holding it in her hand and getting close to people and things for
detailed and urgent proximity, for a sense of immediate physicality, for the visual
feeling of personal contact. It also served as a mode of intimacy with herself. Varda
made the lm in her early seventies, and, as traces of age were visible in her face and
body, she didn’t shrink from depicting herself and those traces. She made her state of
mind and body inseparable from her work and, in later years, became one of the
great cinematic self-portraitists.
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The zenith of Varda’s acclaim came in these later years—in part simply because it
took the world half a century to catch up with her artistry; in part, because lms by
female directors and the concerns of women have always been overlooked, but also
because there was nothing Hollywoodish about her art. Throughout her career, she
stood apart from the conventions of popular lmmaking. Other lmmakers of the
French New Wave, in their homages and critiques of Hollywood styles and
conventions, also invoked those conventions and brought them to the fore. Varda, by
contrast, proceeded with aYou
freehave 3 free articles
detachment left them—though,
from this month. in her 1965 lm
“Le Bonheur” (Happiness), a bitterly ironic romantic drama of an exquisite post-
Impressionist painterliness ( elds of owers are nearly its co-stars), she did wink and
nod critically at the styles of other lms and lmmakers, namely those of other (and
male) directors of the French New Wave.
In our 2001 interview, Varda spoke of a visit that she and Demy paid to Godard and
Karina at a house that they were renting near Nice: “Jacques and I, we’re the kind of
people who like to get the most out of life, to do whatever there is to do.” This spirit
infuses Varda’s art as well; her passionately original sense of style and form does
more than convey her life experiences; it embodies them. The fullness of her life is
on view in her work—of which there’s still a piece remaining to be revealed, a feature
called “Varda by Agnès,” which screened on French television this month and still
awaits its American release.
Richard Brody began writing for The New Yorker in 1999. He writes about movies in hishis
his
blog “Everything
blog for newyorker.com. He is the author of “Everything
blog Is
“Everything Is Cinema:
Is Cinema: The
Cinema: The Working
The Working Life
Working Life of
Life of
of
Jean-Luc
Jean-Luc Godard
Godard.” Read more »
Jean-Luc Godard
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3/29/2019 Agnès Varda’s Radically Personal Films | The New Yorker

Agnès Varda’s Radically Personal

he challenge of modern cinema is to render a technical medium personal

The fusion of direct observation and aesthetic contemplation, of documentary

Varda is a lmmaker of place. Her penultimate feature, called “Faces

VIDEO FROM THE N YORKER

Robert Redford on His Last Role as an Actor

You have 3 free articles left this month.

A still from “Cleo from 5 to 7.” Ciné Tamaris

You have 3 free articles left this month.

The Blessings of Aging

You have 3 free articles left this month.

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