Discovering Agnès
Varda
My introduction to Agnès Varda is at the 2001 Sydney Film Festival.
I go along expecting The Gleaners and I (Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse,
2000) to be a drama feature and instead it is a documentary. I have no prior
knowledge of this filmmaker. Somehow, 'the grandmother of the French New
Wave' has escaped my attention. She is never mentioned
in documentary classes. Her film doesn't even warrant a picture in the festival
program. Seems to be the story with her.
The Gleaners and I is a deliberately self-conscious documentary,
taking the form of a cinematic poetic essay, (1)
where the filmmaker herself is very present in an unusual way. The literal
translation of the title is “The Gleaners and the Gleaner” (feminine).
Varda has intentionally and obviously placed herself intrinsically within
the story. She narrates the film in her soothing French accent and we learn
that she is old, mindful of ageing, has recently discovered the mini DV
camera, wonders about time and has a penchant for hypothesising connections
where there might (or might not) be one. “I'll walk my small camera
among the coloured cabbages”, she says.
The film is ostensibly about people who 'glean' or collect, from the ground,
the remnants of a harvest. “To bend down is not to beg” (2)
she says. And so the film sets about exploring past and present practices
in gleaning, salvaging and picking. She interviews an eclectic range of
people - ferals at the supermarket, gypsies in the field, middle-class anarchists,
a winemaker who practices psychology and lawyers who, dressed in their archaic
garb, articulate the legal parameters for gleaning under French law.
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The
Gleaners and I
|
Varda herself collects a bunch of heart-shaped potatoes and leaves them
on a shelf to rot. She compares herself to the decaying vegetables and introduces
the themes of death, decay and her own demise. She gathers images on her
DV camera of her own hand, skin and greying hair and talks about the march
of time. “I'm getting old, the end is near” she says. There is
a clock with no hands, gleaned by Varda after it was overlooked by one of
her subjects. We see her in a full-length mirror, holding her camera but
she doesn't look old. The film avoids becoming self-indulgent, managing
to retain objectivity, probably in part due to her collaboration with other
cinematographers and editors, though her own wisdom and decades of filmmaking
should not be discounted.
Her love of paintings, both in their own right and as story telling devices,
is explicit in this film, which is structured around well known paintings
of gleaners by Van Gogh, Breton and Millet. In this film, she says, “I
wanted to express my love for painting.” (3)
The culmination of this idea is a copy of a Van Gogh which she has taken
out of storage and shoots buffeted by wind, supported by two women. Her
first visual inspiration though directly references film history: beautiful
black and white footage of gleaners from the Russian film Earth (Dovzhenko,
1930).
Most delightful of all is the way this film incorporates Varda's sense of
fun and play. When the camera is accidentally left running, the lense cap
bobbing in and out of frame, Varda opportunistically describes it as “the
dance of the lense cap”. Varda gleans this footage that would otherwise
be wasted. Equally revealing of her child-like playfulness are shots of
her own hand inside a moving vehicle appearing to grasp trucks through the
windscreen. Varda portrays herself as a collector of images and 'right brain'
ideas: “There are many ways of being poor, having common sense, anger
or humour.” (4)
I decide to investigate Agnès Varda further, starting in the library
of the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. I find out Varda is
74 years old and has been making films since the '50s. Varda keeps good
company alongside other respected septuagenarian filmmakers. Kubrick died
the day after finishing Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Sascha Vierny shot
his last feature for Greenaway at the age of 75. Perhaps, like good
wine, cinematographers improve with age. Varda has preserved a youthfulness
which is evidenced by her films and even her publicity pictures which show
her as vibrant, dark haired, and young at heart.
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Kung-Fu
Master
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The library has Kung-Fu Master (1987) and several shorts. This
time I am surprised to find that the Kung-Fu movie is not a documentary
at all, but a feature length drama about an older woman (played by Varda's
friend and actress Jane Birkin) whose character falls in love with a young
boy Julien, played by Mathieu Demy. One critic described it as “a
subject tailor-made, one imagines, to frighten British distributors,”
(5) The film contains many of the themes seen
in The Gleaners and I, asking: what does it mean to be old? Who
can we love? What stories is cinema allowed to tell?
Although not visible in this film, Varda is very present in the story.
The voice-over sounds like her and Birkin strongly resembles Varda. In
fact, I discover, the boy is played by Varda's own son, and his sisters
by Birkin's daughters, Charlotte Gainsborough and Lou Doillon. This suggests
a whole new layer of meaning and pleasure in viewing the film. Ruth Hottell
suggests “Varda's cinema is one of subjective inclusion: she includes
herself, her friends, and her family directly and indirectly in her films.”
(6) The playful prelude has the teenage Julien
acting out a game character, in jerky movements with appropriate electronic
sounds. The scene is played out in front of a shop window and under cranked
to add to its comic style.
L'Opéra-Mouffe (A pregnant woman's notebook) (1958)
was made while Varda was pregnant with her first child Rosalie. It is
a wonderfully feminine film about pregnancy and life on rue Mouffetard
in Paris. A woman's swollen belly is juxtaposed with a huge pumpkin, which
is quartered to reveal it bulging with seeds. A montage in a fruit and
vegetable market, intercut with faces of old people shopping, is reminiscent
of The Gleaners and I. L'Opéra-Mouffe is segmented
by chapters with hand-written titles which is also 'very Varda'. In many
ways she has come the full circle with her most recent film.
Uncle Yanco (1967) appears comparatively conventional
for Varda. It is a documentary that researches her family history. She
visits her bohemian Uncle Yanco, who lives amongst artists on a pier in
San Francisco, and of course takes her camera with her. Varda makes no
effort to hide the fact that she is making a film and once again includes
herself in the story. The artists sit down to eat a huge meal, Varda and
Yanco presiding at the head of the table. Part way through she whistles
to the camera and gestures, presumably to one of the visitors, to turn
it off. This is indicative of her code of honesty, whereby she is explicitly
implicated in the filmmaking process and story telling. Ironically this
provides the viewer with a reading of greater objectivity. Another scene
has Yanco yelling down to Varda, “Agnès, I love you dearly,
but let me take a nap!” The film culminates with a surreal sequence
of clapper-boards and artists wearing “Viva Varda” badges, while
Varda voices her thanks to the crew for their contribution (a device used
two years later by Altman in M.A.S.H.). She readily admits, “I
am always very precisely implicated in my films, not through narcissism
but through honesty in my approach.” (7)
Varda's honesty is her strength and originality, and this benefits the
audience with an unexpected perspective. Varda avoids judging her characters,
rather trying to find connections between them, their environment and
her own life. And hence her place within the film.
T'as de beaux escaliers, tu sais (1986) appears to be a documentary
for a museum of cinema and refers to the great history of films by Welles,
Kurosawa, Truffaut, Godard and Vidor, to name a few (despite weeks of
research, I cannot find any information to verify this). In it, the director
re-enacts playfully Potemkin's Odessa steps sequence and Truffaut's anarchists
on the steps of the Paris museum. The film is a loving homage to film
culture and includes common elements of Varda's films. All of her films
reference the film frame through the use of curtains, shooting through
shop windows and archways and usually including other films within her
film. The Gleaners and I includes short clips of moving image pioneer
Etienne-Jules Marey; L'Opéra-Mouffe closes with a roller
door eclipsing the frame. Uncle Yanco includes a scene where neice
and uncle act out their reunion; the scene becomes surreal when it is
repeated (cheekily) in several takes, incorporating the clapper-board
and editor's china graph sync marks.
On leaving the library, I find a box of old Cinema Papers magazines
being given away. I blindly reach in and glean a couple
of issues; one has an interview with Varda from her 1983 visit to Australia.
In it, she laments “the word documentary has been spoilt. You say
documentary and people say what a bore. We should have middle words.”
(8) At this point I am unaware of how difficult
it will prove to be to find anything written about Varda in English. On
the internet I find only the same interviews reconstituted into different
websites, with very little biographical information.
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La
Pointe Courte
|
Agnès Varda was born in Ixelles, Belgium on May
30, 1928, and grew up on a port in the Sète district of Provence.
(9) She studied art history at the Ecole du Louvre
then worked as official photographer for the Théâtre National
Populaire. Her colleagues of the Left Bank, Chris Marker and Alan Resnais,
encouraged her to direct her first feature, La Pointe Courte (1954),
ahead of the French New Wave. This was despite her having no previous film
making experience. She had only ever seen 20 films prior to this. In 1962
she married celebrated French filmmaker Jacques Demy, most famous for his
film Lola (1960), and they had a son Mathieu (b. 1972) who has acted
in many of Varda's films since. Jacques died in 1990, the same year that
Varda made her tribute to his early life: Jacquot de Nantes. Jacques
apparently loved the film and played himself as an adult reminiscing. Varda
also has a daughter, Rosalie, but I can glean no more about her and she
does not appear in any filmographies of Varda. In 1977 the director founded
her own production company, Cine-Tamaris, which she says allows her the
freedom to shoot and edit in tandem (10). She has
shot films in Iran, France, the US and Cuba. Varda has lived and worked
on the rue Daguerre for more than 40 years. From this habitat sprang her
film Daguerrèotypes (1975), based on the inhabitants of the
street.
Unlike her contemporaries who wrote for the Cahiers du
Cinéma, Varda resists intellectualising about film. She has however
developed her own notion of cinécriture, which she describes
as the process of ciné-writing, but in the most broadest of senses:
editing style, voice-over commentary, choosing the place, the season, the
crew and the light (11). In 1994 she wrote a book
about her life and work, Varda par Agnès, which was published
by Cine-Tamaris and Cahiers du Cinéma Although often connected to
the French New Wave directors, her path remains different in that she directs
documentary as well as drama, shorts and feature length films.
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Une
chante, l'autre pas (One Sings,
the Other Doesn't)
|
Most articles about Varda centre around arguments for or against her work
as a feminist. She exists as part of a long history of French-language female
filmmakers including Germaine Dulac, Marguerite Duras, Chantal Akerman and
Alice Guy (who is distinguished as the first woman film director). (12)
Varda is dismissed by critic Claire Johnston as “reactionary and certainly
not feminist”, (13) yet is considered by most
to be an exemplar of feminist filmmaking for her consistent use
of female protagonists and crafting of a female cinematic voice. (14)
When asked if she saw herself as a feminist, she replied “I wasn't
always very clear about discrimination and it's not exactly my image.”
(15) In 1967 Chris Marker collaborated with some
of France's best known directors (Godard, Resnais, Lelouch etc.) on an anti-war
documentary titled Loin du Viet-Nam. Agnès Varda also contributed
but reviewers rarely gave her a mention. According to Sight and Sound
writer Jill Forbes, “the silence is so systematic that Varda's exclusion
must be related to the fact that she is a woman.” (16)
She is never included amongst discussions about La Nouvelle Vague.
Whether or not her films can be regarded as feminist, they are certainly
about women, contain socio-political, philosophical and current themes without
ever losing a sense of fun or the art of entertaining an audience.
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Jane
Birkin and Agnès Varda
|
In 1987 Varda made her Diptych dedicated to Jane Birkin I and II,
which comprised her two films Jane B. Par Agnès V. (97 mins)
and Kung-Fu Master (Le Petit Amour, 78 mins). I am not the
only one to confuse the second film for a documentary and so it has now
been released (on video only) with its French title. The first film is a
character sketch of Birkin, an actuality, while the second film is fictional
and also includes stars Birkin. The fiction film emerged during the shooting
of the documentary when Birkin gave Varda a 10-page character sketch which
Varda then wrote into a feature length drama. (17)
Kung-Fu Master also stars both Birkin's and Varda's children, adding
to the complex riddle of truth and fiction. These two films reflect upon
each other and ask questions about representation of women on the screen,
fiction and reality. Each is a film in its own right, but together they
say much more. Unfortunately the documentary has not been picked up by a
distributor and the fictional film has only been released on video so audiences
are unlikely to have the full impact of this unusual duo.
Jacquot de Nantes is a loving souvenir of her husband, the filmmaker
Jacques Demy. It is sometimes described as documentary but the film mostly
comprises recreations of Jacques' childhood memoirs. It was filmed in Nantes
which adds veracity to its look. The film features clips of his first film
adventures, including lovely 9.5mm hand drawn images. Demy himself has a
presence, speaking directly to camera (Varda) about his life. The camera
pans tenderly along his skin, showing every pore, hair and blemish. Poignantly
recalling similar shots in the Gleaners and I, the two films form
another duo, together representing a chapter in Varda's own life. Jacquot
du Nantes begins with Varda's now very familiar voice reminiscing about
her lover. It provides an unusual intimacy which connects the viewer to
them. He lies on a long sandy beach near the ocean of collective unconscious,
sifting yellow grains through his fingers. She honours Jacques Demy by placing
him within the infinite sands of humanity.
Most articles cite Sans Toit Ni Loi (Vagabond, 1985) as Varda's
most successful and best known feature film but I am unable to source it
and instead settle for her second (fictional) feature Cléo de
5 à 7 (1961), a beautifully crafted story about a pop singer
who has two hours to wait for results from a cancer test. The film is actually
90 minutes long but feels true to the allotted narrative time frame. It
opens with a scene in colour of an old woman reading Cléo's tarot
cards: her life is clearly laid out. The film then reverts to black and
white for its duration. Cléo de 5 à 7 has many (documented)
resonances with L'Opéra-Mouffe and includes scenes of Cléo
wandering the Paris streets backgrounded by people going about their everyday
lives. Varda typically displays a “tendency to inflect narrative with
reality”. (18) Varda wrote her own haunting
lyrics for Cléo's songs and casts her friends Godard and Legrand
in minor roles. The film is marked by chapters which indicate who the scene
is about and emphasise the progression of time.
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Cléo
(Corinne Marchand)
|
The film is rich in Jungian symbols: Cléo shops for a hat which she
later gives to her friend and then removes her pop-singer's wig to reveal
her naturally beautiful, ordinary self, indicating she is now ready to play
a different role. Stairs (interior and exterior) feature in all of Varda's
films and here suggest that Varda is interested in the collective psyche,
the society, which is represented by her characters but should be taken
out onto the streets and referenced to contemporary culture. Cléo
has a clock with a monkey on it, a sign that time is the
monkey on this woman's back. The streets are papered with movie posters
and there is the typical film-within-a-film which serves as a catalyst to
pick Cléo up out of her self-obsession and move her forward. The
film echoes Varda's general discussions around ageing: “People are
obsessed with cancer and heart trouble. My disease is work, phone calls
and appointments.” According to Varda, “at that time, the collective
fear was of cancer, just as the nuclear bomb or war is now.”(19)
Agnès Varda has always been ahead of her time - in filmmaking technique
and style and also in political commentary. Just as The Gleaners and
I is a contemporary look at capitalism and urban life and utilises the
latest in digital cinematography, Kung-Fu Master sits comfortably
alongside other dramas of the '80s including those of Loach, Bergman and
Greenaway. Uncle Yanco reflects the bohemian, drug-taking, moral
ambivalence of the late '60s and Cléo de 5 à 7 displays
a French obsession with cars, fashion and identity. Agnès Varda is
grandmother to the world community of filmmakers. At 74 she has a good perspective
on a life which has given her breadth of filmmaking experience, it is hardly
surprising she keeps going. “I think communication is difficult but
essential and not just in love, but in work, in the relationship with one's
children, in one's general attitude” (20)
There is some accepted wisdom which says, people only ever write the same
book or film script over, but Varda has produced at least one unique gem
for each of her five decades as writer, director and cinematographer. Her
body of work cannot be described by genre, let alone fiction or reality.
One imagines The Gleaners and I may well be her last film offering
but as she has shown herself to be still so full of curiosity and zest for
life, she may well have more to say.
© Helen Carter, September 2002
Endnotes:
- Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy, “Magic and Wisdom in
two portraits by Agnès Varda”, Screen, 1993, p.302
- Varda, Agnès, “Director's Notes', The
Gleaners and I release notes, Zeitgeist Films, 2001
- Ibid
- Forbes, Jill, “Agnès Varda, Gaze of the
Medusa”, Sight and Sound, Spring 1989, pp.22-24
- Hottell, Ruth, “Including Ourselves: the role
of female spectators in Agnès Varda's Le Bonheur and L'Une
chante, l'autre pas”, Cinema Journal, 38, No. 2, 1999,
pp.52-72
- Hottell, op. cit.
- Sabine, Jennifer, ”Agnès Varda” (interview)
Cinema Papers, Issue 42 (March 1983), pp34-35 and 83
- St James Women Filmmakers Encyclopaedia, Visible
Ink Press, USA, 1999
- Agnès Varda, quoted at http://www.zeitgeistfilm.com
- Smith, Alison, Agnès Varda, Manchester
University Press, 1998
- Meyer, Andrea, “'Gleaning' the Passion of Agnès
Varda” at http://www.indiewire.com/film/interviews/int_Varda_Agnes_010308.html
- Austin, Guy, Contemporary French Cinema: An introduction,
Manchester University Press, Manchester and NY, 1996
- Hayward, Susan, “Beyond the gaze and into femme-filmcriture:
Agnès Varda's Sans toit ni loi (1985)”, French
Film: texts and contexts, Routledge, New York, 1990
- Flitterman-Lewis, op cit.
- Sabine, op cit.
- Forbes, op cit.
- Flitterman-Lewis, op cit.
- Kardish, Laurence, Agnès Varda, The
Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1997
- Sabine, op. cit.
- Varda, Agnès, “Agnès Varda”,
Film (BFFS) Journal, Spring 1963, p.7
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Agnès
Varda
|
Filmography
Pointe
Courte (1954) 89 mins
O Saisons, O Châteaux (1957) 22 mins
L'Opéra-Mouffe (1958) 17 mins
Côté de la côte (1958) 24 mins
Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cléo from 5 to 7)
(1961) 90 mins
Salut les Cubains (1963) 30 mins
Le Bonheur (Happiness) (1964) 82 mins
Enfants du Musée (1964) 7 mins
La Rose (1966) 20 mins
Créatures (1966) 105 mins
Uncle Yanco (1967) 22 mins
Loin du Vietnam (in collaboration with other directors, 1967)
Panthers (1968) 28 mins
Love (...and Lies) (1969) 110 mins
Nuasicaa (1970) 90 mins [Vanished]
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Réponse
de femmes
|
Daguerréotypes
(documentary, 1975) 80 mins
Réponse
de femmes (1975) 8 mins
Plaisir d'amour en Iran (1976) 6 mins
Une chante, l'autre pas (One Sings, the Other Doesn't)
(1976) 120 mins
Femmes Bulles (video, 1977) 58 mins, video
Murs (Mural Murals) (documentary, 1980) 81 mins
Documenteur (An Emotion Picture) (1981) 63
mins
Ulysse (1982) 22 mins
Minute pour une image (1982) 170 two-minute spots for television
Dites Caryatides (1984) 13 mins
Cuis., s. de b... (1984) 27 mins
Toit ni loi (Vagabond) (1985) 105 mins
Winner of Grand Priz at Venice Film Festival
De beaux escaliers, tu sais... (1986) 3 mins
B. par Agnès V. (1987) 97 mins
Kung-fu Master (Le Petit Amour) (1987) 78 mins
Jacquot de Nantes (Jacquot) (1990) 118 mins
Demoiselles ont eu 25 ans (The Young Girls Turned 25)
(documentary, 1992) 63 mins
Cent et une nuits (One Hundred and One Nights) (1994)
100 mins, made for the centennial of cinema
L'Univers de Jacques Demy (The World of Jacques Demy)
(documentary, 1995) 90 mins
Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I)
(documentary, 2000) 82 mins
Winner of Best Documentary of 2001:
-National Society of Film Critics
-New York Film Critics Circle
-Chicago International Film Festival
-Los Angeles Film Critics Association
-New York Film Critics Online
Le Lion volatil (2003) 12 mins
Cinevardaphoto (2004)
Select
Bibliography
Austin, Guy, Contemporary
French Cinema: An introduction, Manchester University Press, Manchester
and NY, 1996
Bunney, Andrew, “The Gleaners and I”, DB Magazine, Issue
286 (August 28, 2002), p.32
Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy, “Magic and Wisdom in two portraits by Agnès
Varda: Kung-Fu Master and Jane B. by Agnes V.”, Screen
34(4), 1993, pp.302-320
Forbes, Jill, “Agnès Varda: The Gaze of the Medusa”,
Sight and Sound, Spring 1989, pp.22-24
Hayward, Susan, “Beyond the gaze and into femme-filmcriture:
Agnès Varda's Sans toit ni loi (1985)”, French Film:
texts and contexts, Routledge, New York, 1990
Hayward, Susan, French National Cinema, Routledge, New York, 1993
Hottell, Ruth, “Including Ourselves: the role of female spectators
in Agnès Varda's Le Bonheur and L'Une chante, l'autre
pas”, Cinema Journal, 38 (2), 1999, pp.52-72
Monaco, James, The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer
and Rivette, Oxford University Press, New York, 1976
St James Women Filmmakers Encyclopaedia, Visible Ink Press USA,
1999
Smith, Alison, Agnès Varda, Manchester University Press,
1998
Sabine, Jennifer, ”Agnès Varda” (interview), Cinema
Papers, Issue 42 (March 1983)
Varda, Agnès, “Agnès Varda”, Film (BFFS) Journal,
Spring 1963, p.7
___________, Varda par Agnès, Tamaris/Cahiers du Cinéma,
1994
Zeitgeist Films release notes, The Gleaners and I, 2001
Articles
in Senses of Cinema
Trash
and Treasure: The Gleaners and I by
Jake Wilson
Drought
de Seigneur: Le Bonheur by
Carloss James Chamberlin
Jacquot
de Nantes by
Peter Kemp
Vagabond
by Holly
Willis
Web
Resources Compiled
by the author and Albert Fung
Celebrity,
Filmmaker, Grandmother: Agnès Varda
Interview about One Hundred and One Nights.
“Gleaning”
the Passion of Agnès Varda
Interview about The Gleaners and I.
Women in Film: The Search of True Liberation for Women
Discusses Cléo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond.
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Agnès
Varda and Jacques Demy (right)
|
Agnès
Varda Film posters
Check out these vintage film posters.
Backlist:
Agnès Varda: Le Bonheur
German page on the film.
the-artists.org
Portrait, brief bio and links.
Sundance
Channel
Has a short piece on her and a booklist.
Arts
Film Feature
Lengthy interview about Gleaners.
Vagabond
Two reviews of the film.
WAC
Several Quicktime pics of Varda's films.
Images
Review of Cleo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond
Agnès
Varda
A comprehensive Taiwanese page that reviews Varda and her films.
Les sites filmographiques
French site about Agnès Varda, Jacques Demy and Mathieu Demy.
Agnès
Varda
Brief bio and several stills.
Varda,
Mother of the French New Wave
Brief article.
Zeitgeist films | Agnès Varda
Independent American distributors that carry The Gleaners and I
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