Whether largely fiction
(Cleo from 5 to 7) or largely documentary
(Jacquot de Nantes and The Gleaners
and I) or balanced between the two
(Vagabond), Agnès Varda’s greatest
films have been portraits of people and
places—faces and landscapes inseparable
from one another. “If we open people up,
we would find a landscape. If we open me
up, we would find beaches,” she says at the
beginning of The Beaches of Agnès, her
lovely autobiographical documentary, one
of the most popular and critically lauded
movies of her career.
Varda began as a still photographer
and she has continued to take and exhibit
still images throughout her life. Her
first film, La Pointe Courte, (1954) was a
feature-length love story, set in Sete, the
French seaside city where she spent her
adolescence. At the time, she said she had
seen fewer than a dozen movies. With its
mix of professional and non-professional
actors, its elegant black- and-white
cinematography, its near-ethnographic
depiction of the daily life of people who
make their living from the sea, La Pointe
Courte is a ground-breaking film and
arguably the first film of the French New
Wave. By the time she made her second
feature, the even more radical Cleo from 5
to 7 (1962), that astonishing movement had
already fostered more than a half dozen of
the greatest and most prolific filmmakers
in the world among them, her friends and
colleagues, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker
and Jean Luc Godard, and her husband
from 1962 until his death in 1990, Jacques
Demy. Often dubbed “the mother” or even
“the grandmother,” of the New Wave, Varda,
more accurately, was “the sister,” the only
woman in that illustrious company, and a
feminist to boot. In her films she takes the
side of women, presenting them, not as
beautiful, dangerous, unknowable objects of desire, but as complex, intelligent,
vulnerable, and desirous human beings.
Over the past two decades, Varda has
focused almost entirely on documentaries,
including two portraits of her late husband
(The Universe of Jacques Demy and the
aforementioned Jacquot de Nantes) and
another of her friend and frequent star,
Jane Birkin (Jane B by Agnes V.) She has
also been involved in the restoration and
DVD packaging of her own and Demy’s
films. And she has begun to make museum
and gallery installations. As she quips in
The Beaches of Agnès, she has gone “from
being an old filmmaker to a young artist.” To attract visitors to her installation at the Venice Biennial, she dressed as a talking
potato.
Varda’s way of working took a
remarkable turn with the The Gleaners
and I (2000.) Shot with lightweight
digital cameras, it is an intimate look at
people who, out of economic necessity
and/or ecological/philosophical beliefs,
collect and derive their sustenance from
the detritus of an affluent society. While
making The Gleaners, Varda began to
regard her own collecting and culling of
images—the processes of shooting and
editing—as a form of gleaning. The subject
of the film is thus both the gleaners and
the filmmaker. At one point she turns the
camera she’s holding in one hand on her
other hand, examining it in close-up as
if it were an alien thing—the experience
that many of us have when we catch a
glimpse of our own mortality written on
skin that has become lined and marked
with age spots. Nearly ten years later
and approaching her 80th birthday, she
decided that it was time to write her own
autobiography as cinema.
She begins, where else, on one of the
beaches of her childhood, instructing a crew made up of men and women, most of them two or three generations younger
than she is, where to set up props and
mirrors and picture frames. From the
first, she shows us that this will be a film
of reflections within reflections, a linking
of memory to the excavation of existing
images and the creation of new ones. The
shifts—between photos and clips from the
films she made over the course of nearly 60
years on the one hand, and, on the other, recreations in which others play Varda or
Varda plays herself as a young or middleaged
woman—are so fluid that they seem
made up on the spot. She traces her story
in fairly linear fashion but the movie also
has a crazy quilt quality. Memories, she
says, are like flies swarming through
the air. As she speaks we see a tableau
vivant recreation of Manet’s Olympia, the
painting that prophesized the coming of
modernism and feminism through the gaze
of an odalisque who coolly stares down the
spectator as if she knows she has the upper
hand. Varda’s Olympia attracts flies. Is she covered in honey? Is she a Venus flytrap? A
dozen interpretations are possible.
“It’s a little like putting together a
puzzle,” Agnes V. explains to Jane B.,
who counters, that “even when you dump
out all the pieces, you only reveal a little
bit.” But however little, make no mistake,
it must have taken enormous courage
to make this film. At first Varda gives
herself the protection of playing a role, “a little old lady, pleasingly plump and
talkative, telling her story.” Soon, however,
the comic persona falls away, and there is
Varda, fighting back tears as she explains
that most of the subjects in an exhibit of
her photos are dead. Sadder still is her
evocation of her life with Demy, and how
in his final months, she directed the film
about his childhood that he no longer
had the strength to bring to the screen.
But if there is much sadness, there is also
much joy and excitement. The film is a
veritable emotional roller coaster, its cast
of characters, many of them evoked in
a single photograph, remarkable. Look,
there’s Godard without his dark glasses,
the expression in his eyes unguarded and
startlingly tender. Look, there’s Fidel, still
buoyed by his victory in the Sierra Maestra.
Look, there’s Harrison Ford grinning like
he had nothing to lose because almost no
one believed he had a future in the movies.
Look, there are Black Panthers marching in
Los Angeles and French women marching
for abortion rights. Varda was among the
343 “bitches” that signed the petition
demanding a woman’s right to control her
own body.
Toward the end of The Beaches of Agnès,
Varda’s friends throw her a surprise 80th
birthday party. Afterwards, she turns the
camera on herself. Is she completely alone
or is someone else operating the camera,
and in that sense keeping her company?
No way to know for sure. “It all happened
yesterday,” she tell us, in those four words
evoking the party and also the 80 years of
her life. “It’s already in the past, a sensation
imbued instantly in the image, which will
remain. While I live, I remember.” And we
too will remember her in her images and
ourselves through them as well.
-----
Amy Taubin is a contributing editor for Film Comment and Sight and Sound magazines
and a frequent contributor to Art Forum. She is the author of Taxi Driver in the BFI’s Film
Classics series. Her critical essays are included in many collections. From 1987 and to 2001
she was a film critic for the Village Voice where she also wrote a pioneering column about
independent film titled Art and Industry. She teaches at the School of Visual Arts in NYC.