This can be read as an Ebert blog entry with photographs
here:
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Dear
Agnes Varda. She is a great director and a beautiful, lovable and wise woman,
through and through. It is not enough that she made some of the first films of
the French New Wave. That she was the Muse for Jacques Demy. That she is a
famed photographer and installation artist. That she directed the first
appearances on film of Gerald Depardieu, Phillipe Noiret–and Harrison Ford! Or
that after gaining distinction as a director of fiction, she showed herself
equally gifted as a director of documentaries. And that she still lives, as she
has since the 1950s, in the rooms opening off each side of a once-ruined Paris
courtyard, each room a separate domain.
That
is not enough, because her greatest triumph is her life itself. She comes
walking toward us on the sand in the first shot of “The Beaches of
Agnes,” describing herself as “a little old lady, pleasantly
plump.” Well, she isn’t tall. But somehow she isn’t old. She made this
film in her 80th year, and she looks remarkably similar to 1967, when she
brought a film to the Chicago Film Festival. Or the night I had dinner with
her, Jacques and Pauline Kael at Cannes 1976. Or when she was at Montreal 1988.
Or the sun-blessed afternoon when we three had lunch in their courtyard in
1990. Or when she was on the jury at Cannes 2005.
Her
face is still framed by a cap of shining hair. Her eyes are still merry and
curious. She is still brimming with energy, and in “The Beaches of
Agnes” you will see her setting up shots involving mirrors on the beach,
or operating her own camera, or sailing a boat single-handedly down the Seine
under the Pont Neuf, her favorite bridge. And she has given us the most poetic
shot about the cinema I have ever seen, where two old fishermen, who were young
when she first filmed them, watch themselves on a screen. Yes, and the screen
and the 16mm projector itself are both mounted on an old market cart that they
push through the nighttime streets of their village.
If
you are lucky you have seen her features like “Cleo from 5 to 7,” or
“Vagabond,” or “Les Creatures,” or “One Sings, the
Other Doesn’t” or “Kung Fu Master.” Her documentaries like the
one filmed all on her street, “Daguerreotypes,” or her sympathetic
look at scavengers in “The Gleaners and I.” Or the lovely film of
Demy’s life that he wrote and she filmed, completing it 10 days before his
death, “Jacquot.”
But
if you have not seen a single film by Agnes Varda, perhaps it is best if you
start with “The Beaches of Agnes.” You don’t need to know anything
about her work. She has a way of never explaining very much, and yet somehow
making it all clear. She does this by not treating her life as a lesson in
biography, but as the treasured memories of friends.
This
is not an autobiography, although it is about her lifetime. She closes it by
saying, “I am alive, and I remember.” The film is her memories,
evoked by footage from her films, and visits to the places and people she
filmed. But that makes it sound too straightforward. The film is a poem, a
song, a celebration. Although she is in robust good health, she accepts, as she
must, that she is approaching the end, and je ne regrette rien. She expresses
no thoughts about an afterlife, and only one great regret about this one: That
Jacques and she could not complete the journey together, as they had planned.
This is a great, loving, uplifting film. It provides an ideal of a life
well-lived.
If
she had only been a photographer, Varda would have been a great one, with her
work in China, Cuba, Europe, America. As an installation artist, regard the
“house of cinema” she constructed by hanging hundreds of long film
strips from a framework so the sun shining through them would define the space
inside. She stands within this space, the light playing on her, and says,
“I have lived my life in the cinema.” Or if that is too theoretical
for you, consider her installation about potatoes, with Agnes herself as an
advertisement, walking the sidewalk inside a big potato.
She
doubts she had seen 10 films by the time she was 25, when she made her first
film, “La Pointe-Courte” (1954). That’s the one with the fishermen
she went to visit again. “I thought if I added sound to photographs, that
would be cinema,” she says, adding that she had a lot to learn. She had no
theory, and never desired any theory. She filmed as she felt, even in this
first work that boldly brings together two story lines. Its visual compositions
are compared to Bergman’s in an enormously useful IMDb user comment. It starred
the great actor Phillip Noiret in his first role. Coming before the first films
of Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Demy, Rivette and Resnais (who was her editor) ,
it could have a claim to be the founding film of the New Wave, unless
Jean-Pierre Melville should be considered. Perhaps that’s why Varda is
sometimes called the grandmother, not the mother, of the New Wave.
She
made five short films between 1954 and 1961, before starting “Cleo from 5
to 7,” the first feature that gained wide attention. Her friend Jean-Luc
Godard had experienced enormous success with “Breathless,” sometimes
described as the first New Wave film. His producer asked him to recommend
someone else “like him,” who could make a low-budget black and white
film that would tap the same market. He recommended Varda.
The
film’s title refers to the afternoon hours when French married people meet
their lovers, but Cleo (Corinne Marchand) is not simply a lover. She is a
singer who fears she’s dying of cancer, and we follow her as she passes time
waiting for the result of a biopsy. The film achieved much notice for the way
it photographed Cleo on real streets and in real shops with real people; what
is remarkable is that Varda achieved this not with a hand-held documentary look
but with elegantly composed and edited shots that revealed her compositional
background as a photographer.
I
first became aware of her at my first Chicago Film Festival, in 1967, where she
showed the documentary “Uncle Janco.” It involved an uncle who was a
painter and lived on a houseboat in San Francisco, and one reason I remember it
so clearly is that she made Janco and his life so vividly human. He isn’t seen
as a character or an anecdote, but as a man who has built the life he wanted
to, and lives within it.
I
will not go through the Varda films I’ve seen one by one; but there are a few I
must mention. “Daguerreotypes” (1976) is one she filmed literally
outside her front door. She lives on rue Daguerre in Montparnasse. Let me
describe her home, office, work space and headquarters. A big double gate opens
from the street. Inside is a former alleyway, still wide enough for a small
car, with two-story rooms on either side. I’m not sure what it was once used
for–flats above, perhaps, and small shops below. There’s a scene showing the
space as Varda first saw it, no water, no heat, no toilets, the courtyard
jammed with junk. Each two-story unit was separate, and Varda and Demy mostly
kept them that way. You have to go outside to get from one to another.
One
unit was Varda’s, one Demy’s, one theirs together, one for their daughter
Rosalie, one for their son Mathieu, offices for Demy and Varda, art studios,
darkrooms, editing rooms, and so on. Confined yet spacious. Spartan luxury. You
can open a window and call out to another room. The spaces are filled with art
and fabrics of bright colors, the courtyard lined with trees and flowers. There
is a family-sized table for outdoor meals in good weather. You will see the
home in the film, but she doesn’t give you a tour and you may not be able to
tell how original and comfortable it us. In this home every notable figure in
the world of French film, and countless from elsewhere, and many not notable
figures, and countless new friends, have come calling for more than 60 years.
Not too far away is La Coupole, the famous restaurant where French painters
paid for their supper in the late 1920s by painting the interior columns. If
Varda and Demy had established a similar policy, the rue Daguerre film
collection would not rival the Cinematheque Francais, but it would make the
Museum of Modern Art green with envy.
To
make her charming and compassionate documentary, Varda simply filmed her
neighbors. In the 1970s, they were small shopkeepers and trades people. Today,
I fear, it is tres chic,and the film preserves an earlier time in Paris. There
was the baker and his wife. A butcher, expertly slicing steaks “not too
thick” for one customer, “not too thin” for another. An
accordion player, a laundress and, most memorable of all, a very old couple who
ran a shop selling perfumes and buttons. Buttons and perfume? Yes, the old man
says. He mixes the perfumes himself. And, should a customer also happen to
require a button–voila!
In
“The Beaches of Agnes,” Varda explains that she promised the
neighbors to use her own electricity to power her camera and lights. This she
did by stringing a 90m cable through her mail slot. That was her umbilical.
Everyone she filmed was less than 90 metres away. She still has the cable.
There is a shot of it being pulled back through the mail slot at night. Doesn’t
your knowledge of that cable (never mentioned in “Daguerreotypes”)
make it almost necessary for you to see the film?
For
Varda, film has been a family business. Demy of course is most famous for
“The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” the all-singing musical which won the
Palme d’Or at Cannes. Varda’s “Vagabond” won the Golden Lion at
Venice. They supported each other when needed, but kept a
“respectful” distance from each other’s work. Their great
collaboration came at the end, when Demy started to write down memories of his
youth in Nantes, and Agnes said, “Jacques, do you want me to make a film
of these?” Jacques said he did, and Agnes began immediately, that very
day.
Calling
on friends and collaborators, she started to film with Demy at her side and
everyone aware that he was dying. It was a period piece, with actors playing
young Demy and the others. “Jacques” was finished with a few days to
spare. She must have had a personal agenda for beginning work so quickly; right
to the end of his life, Demy was needed. There is no use in waiting passively
to die. There could be no better demonstration of Werner Herzog’s vow that if
he knew the world was ending tomorrow, he would begin another film.
Varda
has worked frequently with her children. Rosalie has been an actress and
costume designer for her mother. Mathieu is an actor who has appeared in 46
films, but his first significant role was in “Kung Fu Master!”
(1988), Varda’s daring balancing act about a tentative romance between a 14 year
old boy and the mother (Jane Birkin) of two of his friends. This story, written
by Birkin and Varda, sounds undoable. It is surprisingly gentle, sweet–and
funny. Kind of a miracle.
In
“The Beaches of Agnes,” there is a sequence in which all of her
children and grandchildren, dressed in white, perform a slow ballet on the
beach, and Varda dances behind them, dressed all in black. And that’s all I
need to say about that. Many times when we see her in the film, she is walking
backwards, as the film itself walks backwards through her life, and as she
perhaps sees herself receding from our view. But her films will not recede, and
neither will Varda. There is absolutely no hint to suggest this is her last
film.
022809bert7.jpgAt
Illinois I had a class that made a great impression on me, taught by the famous
critic Sherman Paul, about the organic tradition in literature. As models he
held up such as Emerson, Thoreau, Louis Sullivan, Edmund Wilson, William Carlos
Williams. These men, he said, created as a part of their lives, not as a
separate cerebral activity. My professor would have approved of Varda. She
never studied film. She never moved in circles with Sartre, Beauvoir and other
cafe philosophers who measured out their lives with coffee spoons. She simply
went to work, doing what felt right to her, filming, photographing and
designing what came to hand. For her there is no distinction between fiction
and documentary, for they are both ways of observing and feeling.
The
film most central to her life in many ways is “The Gleaners and I,”
where she ennobles a trade she traces back to the middle ages: The trade of
moving through the places of Man and rescuing those things that can usefully be
used again. When I see men moving down our alley with grocery carts, searching
garbage bins for items of value, I do not think of the words homeless,
mendicants, vagrants. Having been taught by Varda, I think gleaners. They have
a life to live and a living to make, and are of greater actual use to society
than some who make millions a year.
In
that way all of Varda’s films have been gleanings. Although she is happy when
one of them is successful (“Vagabond” was a big hit,” she
recalls cheerfully), I don’t believe a single one was made because of its
commercial prospects. They were made out of love of the art form, and
constructed by what fell to hand and seemed good to her. And now at 80 she can
walk backwards with more serenity than most of us, because she will not
stumble.
