{"id":32734,"date":"2015-11-23T21:34:02","date_gmt":"2015-11-24T03:34:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=32734"},"modified":"2015-11-25T08:25:44","modified_gmt":"2015-11-25T14:25:44","slug":"still-agnes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2015\/11\/23\/still-agnes\/","title":{"rendered":"Still Agn\u00e8s"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Varda<\/a><\/p>\n

Self-portrait by Agn\u00e8s Varda.<\/em><\/p>\n

DB here:<\/p>\n

Sixty years ago, a twentysomething photographer released a film shot in an out-of-the-way French fishing village. Coming right after Rossellini\u2019s Voyage to Italy<\/em> and Fellini\u2019s La Strada<\/em> (both 1954), the result announced something new in cinema. Like those other works, it looked forward to the French Nouvelle Vague and the cinematic modernism of Antonioni, Bergman, and a host of other filmmakers.<\/p>\n

But the status of Agn\u00e8s Varda\u2019s La Pointe Courte<\/em>\u00a0(1955) became apparent only with the most distant hindsight. It didn\u2019t win big\u00a0attention on the festival circuit, in the international market, or in the pages of highbrow film magazines. Denied a commercial release, La Pointe Courte<\/em> circulated mostly in French cin\u00e9-clubs. In\u00a0the early 1980s, when I saw it at the Brussels Cinematek, it was still a rarity.<\/p>\n

Thirty years after La Pointe Courte<\/em>, Varda\u2019s career reached a new level. Vagabond <\/em>(Sans toi ni loi<\/em>, 1985), widely recognized as her masterpiece, remains one of the great achievements of that modern cinema she helped create. And she hasn\u2019t exactly been idle since. There have been many films both long and short, including a biopic of her husband Jacques Demy in Jacquot de Nantes<\/em>\u00a0(1991) and the picaresque\u00a0The Gleaners and I<\/em> (2000); the fascinating autobiography Varda par Agn\u00e8s (<\/em>1994); and over the last decade a series of installations in museums around the world. She started as a photographer, became a cin\u00e9aste, and is now a plasticienne<\/em>, a maker of painting and sculpture.<\/p>\n

She is eighty-seven years old.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Agn\u00e8s V., not B.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Our colleague Kelley Conway<\/a> has just published an\u00a0authoritative consideration<\/a> of the work of this shrewd, unpredictable survivor. Reading Kelley\u2019s book reminded me of that\u00a0encounter with La Pointe Courte<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I had known Varda’s more famous works: Cl\u00e9o from 5 to 7<\/em> (1961), screened at my college film society as the project of a New-Wave fellow-traveler; Le Bonheur<\/em> (1965), which might be called Jules et Jim revis\u00e9 et corrig\u00e9<\/em>; One Sings the Other Doesn\u2019t<\/em> (1977), which got circulation among other feminist films of the period. These didn\u2019t prepare me for La Pointe Courte<\/em>\u2019s daring mix of realism and minimalism. Varda wanted, she said, to make a film that was the equivalent of a difficult book, and for me she succeeded.<\/p>\n

The film alternates sunny\u00a0images of local life\u2014fishing, net-mending, washing-up, a festival\u2014with episodes in which a Parisian couple drift through the village, oddly detached from the life around them. The everyday scenes are shot in documentary style, but with a casual rigor suggesting Cartier-Bresson. Meanwhile, the couple talk\u00a0in stylized compositions that could only remind me of L\u2019Avventura<\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Washerwomen<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"Boats<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Foreground<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"Dock<\/a><\/p>\n

No wonder Picasso was Varda’s favorite painter: she splits up the couple’s faces with cubistic zeal.<\/p>\n

\"Bedheads<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"Profiles<\/a><\/p>\n

The disjunction between the actuality of a location and the abstraction of the couple\u2019s anomie-riddled duet, often heard only as voice-over commentary, looks forward to Hiroshima mon amour<\/em>. (No wonder: Resnais edited the film.) I barely understood the French, but the film gripped me. It was of great historical interest, and\u00a0it had its own stubborn vivacity. When Kristin and I planned\u00a0the first edition of Film History: An Introduction<\/em> (1994) I made sure it got in. In that year, forty years after it was made, La Pointe Courte<\/em> was released on VHS.<\/p>\n

Things change. Varda is now regarded as a living treasure of world cinema, preserved in excellent Criterion DVD editions<\/a>, available for streaming on Hulu<\/a>, and \u00a0wrapped up in a vast cube, Tout(e) Varda<\/a><\/em> (20 features, 16 shorts). Whatever she does in the future, we can at least take a long-distance measure of her accomplishments.<\/p>\n

The dream of many writers on a single director is to cover it all: appreciative study of the films, background on how the films came to be, assessment of their immediate impact and long-range influence. But this breadth of understanding is very hard to achieve. Where are the documents? How do you get the filmmaker to talk?<\/p>\n

Kelley has done it. Her book combines film analysis, historical research, and information drawn from Varda\u2019s archives. Kelley can tell us how the films came to be, what Varda wanted to accomplish, and how they were received. To top it off, there\u2019s a new interview with Agn\u00e8s herself.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Crossing\u00a0landscapes<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Agnes<\/a><\/p>\n

Les Demoiselles ont eu 25 ans <\/em><\/strong>(1993): Varda and Deneuve.<\/em><\/p>\n

With a brisk practicality echoing that of her subject, Kelley has focused her lens tightly. You can\u2019t quarrel with her choices: La Pointe Courte<\/em>, the early short documentaries, Cl\u00e9o<\/em>, Vagabond<\/em>, The Gleaners<\/em>, two installations, and The Beaches of Agn\u00e8s<\/em> (2008). Her plan of attack is straightforward: scrutinize the film, then work backward to the conditions of production and forward to the film\u2019s reception.The analyses are models of attention to story and style, images and sounds. Kelley pins down what intrigued me about the acting in La Pointe Courte<\/em>, showing its debt to Brechtian distancing (a big influence on Varda). She goes on to connect the performances to the experiments in\u00a0\u201cflat\u201d performance we find in Tati and Bresson at the same period. Kelley shows how many of Varda\u2019s artistic strategies, such as whimsical puns and a love of digression, go back to her early documentaries.<\/p>\n

\"Varda<\/a>In a sense, Varda has never ceased to be a documentarist, since all her films depend on a process of research, exploration, and a personal viewpoint characteristic of the roving photographer. The book includes fresh information on two of Varda\u2019s major multimedia installations, obviously born of her interest in found materials, gags, and unexpected juxtapositions. For one, Varda covered the gallery floor with 1500 pounds of potatoes and played the role of \u201cLady Potato.” Another exhibition included a reference to the grave of her beloved cat Zgougou. As described by Kelley, these installations are\u00a0less narcissistic than they might seem, because Varda\u2019s work has always been personal, derived from her perceptions of\u00a0her subject. Even The Gleaners<\/em>, which is at one level a denunciation of a society built on waste and inequality, is refracted through the filmmaker\u2019s sense of aging. And though Mona in Vagabond<\/em> is ferociously solitary, we meet her through Varda\u2019s welcoming voice-over: \u201cIt seems to me she came from the sea.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another legacy of documentary: Kelley points up how even the fiction films spring\u00a0from an attention to the specifics of a locale. \u201cPart of Varda\u2019s journey is regularly exploring a chosen region at length, waiting for ideas, emotions, and images to emerge.\u201d That region might be a single Parisian street (L\u2019Op\u00e9ra-Mouffe<\/em>, 1958; Daguerr\u00e9otypes<\/em>, 1975) or the fourteenth arrondissement (Cleo from 5 to 7<\/em>). Like La Pointe Courte<\/em>, Cleo<\/em> is the story of a walk, this time purportedly played out in actual duration as a beautiful pop singer awaits the results of a test for cancer. Mona, in Vagabond<\/em>, is another wanderer, and the wintry bleakness of southern France is\u00a0as central to the action as whatever psychology we can find in her or the people she meets. The Gleaners and I<\/em>\u00a0searches out\u00a0people who stalk the landscape and live off what they can scavenge. With modern cinema from Bicycle Thieves<\/em> onward, Dwight Macdonald once noted, \u201cThe talkies have become the walkies,\u201d but Varda has always embedded her footloose\u00a0protagonists in the particulars of place.<\/p>\n

Varda\u2019s personal archive has given Kelley the opportunity to document the director’s\u00a0creative process. The\u00a0scripts are sometimes scrapbooks, with texts and images jostling one another. (Kelley offers an example in\u00a0a 2011 blog entry<\/a>.) The arrival of digital tools reinforced and expanded Varda’s\u00a0method\u00a0of free assembly. Out of a database of images, Varda erected the scaffolding of The Beaches of Agn\u00e8s<\/em>\u00a0before starting her screenplay. She wrote, shot, and edited the whole thing in a nonlinear fashion. During the final stages, two editors worked busily in\u00a0separate rooms. \u201cI went from one to the other. On one side was S\u00e8te and Los Angeles, in the other room was Belgium and Paris.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for exhibition, crucial to Varda\u2019s early films was a distinctive French institution. Varda had created her company to make shorts, but when La Pointe Courte<\/em> grew to 80 minutes, it could not be distributed under those auspices without new investment. As a result, it found its main audience in the network of cin\u00e9-clubs that had grown up after World War II. That network became activated to the maximum during the release of Cleo from 5 to 7<\/em>. One of the side benefits of Kelley\u2019s book is its explanation of the power that the cin\u00e9-club scene had achieved by the early 1960s.<\/p>\n

\"Cleo<\/a><\/p>\n

Brandishing the slogan \u201cDevelop Film Taste, Introduce Masterpieces, Educate the Public,\u201d an astonishing five hundred clubs with over two hundred thousand members showed thousands of films in the year that Cleo<\/em> was released. Varda took advantage of this situation to promote her film, but Kelley goes beyond the simple marketing issue to point out that the clubs bolstered\u00a0spectators’ appreciation of New Wave films. She draws on audience comments to show that the organizers guided\u00a0audiences to talk about form, style, theme, and historical context. The clubs helped create the \u201cdemanding viewer\u201d described by Alain Resnais: a viewer eager for challenging films that could bear comparison to advanced works in traditional arts.<\/p>\n

Varda\u2019s later films were absorbed into the mainstream\u00a0commercial\u00a0distribution\/exhibition infrastructure, and Kelley is painstaking in plotting critical response to them. Near the book\u2019s close, she traces how another institution shaped Varda\u2019s work: the museum. Kelley shows how the emerging importance of installation art encouraged filmmakers like Varda and Chris Marker to create multimedia exhibits that were natural continuations of their poetic-essayistic documentaries. The installations seem to have encouraged Varda to take up the autobiographical compilation mode that yielded The Beaches of Agn\u00e8s<\/em>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There is much more in Agn\u00e8s Varda<\/em>\u00a0than I can summarize, but I hope I\u2019ve piqued your interest. For any lover of Varda, Kelley’s\u00a0book is a must, and even casual viewers will learn things that will drive them to the films. Reading it led me to think about how Varda\u2019s lack of cinephile culture (she emphasizes that she knew nothing of film when she started) allowed her to respond to stories more directly than did the Bad Boys of the Cahiers<\/em>, who saw\u00a0everything through a mesh of hundreds of other movies. I was also prodded to think of her as quite an innovator in narrative. She has given us the parallel\u00a0structure of La Pointe Courte<\/em>, the fantastic science-fiction plot of Les Cr\u00e9atures<\/em>, the isoceles\u00a0love triangle of Le Bonheur<\/em>, the dual-protagonist structure of One Sings<\/em>, and the network narrative of Vagabond<\/em>, with Mona as a circulating object a bit like Bresson\u2019s Balthazar.<\/p>\n

From the\u00a0delightful interview with Lady Potato herself, I allow myself just one spoiler:<\/p>\n

KC: You seem to start your projects with considerable preparation but you also have a flair for improvisation. Do you see it that way also?<\/strong><\/p>\n

AV: Yes and no. Or no and yes, depending.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

An earlier entry<\/a>\u00a0discusses a Kelley talk on\u00a0La Point Courte<\/em>. I discuss some ambiguous narrative cues in Vagabond<\/em> in my updated “Art Cinema” essay in Poetics of Cinema<\/em>, 166-169.<\/p>\n

This has been a good publishing year for our colleagues at Wisconsin–Madison. Lea Jacobs’ book on filmic rhythm came out last winter; go here<\/a> for our observations.<\/p>\n

\"Varda<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Self-portrait by Agn\u00e8s Varda. DB here: Sixty years ago, a twentysomething photographer released a film shot in an out-of-the-way French fishing village. Coming right after Rossellini\u2019s Voyage to Italy and Fellini\u2019s La Strada (both 1954), the result announced something new in cinema. Like those other works, it looked forward to the French Nouvelle Vague and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,219,33,34,44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-directors-varda","category-national-cinemas-france","category-people-we-like","category-uw-film-studies-department"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32734"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32734\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32769,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32734\/revisions\/32769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}