Agnes Varda

Kelley Conway

• Editorial: University of Illinois Press
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780252097829
• Categoría: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoría: Performing Arts

Both a precursor to and a critical member of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda weaves documentary and fiction into tapestries that portray distinctive places and complex human beings. Critics and aficionados have celebrated Varda's independence and originality since the New Wave touchstone Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) brought her a level of international acclaim she has yet to relinquish. Film historian Kelley Conway traces Varda's works from her 1954 debut La Pointe Courte through a varied career that includes nonfiction and fiction shorts and features, installation art, and the triumphant 2008 documentary The Beaches of Agnès. Drawing on Varda's archives and conversations with the filmmaker, Conway focuses on the concrete details of how Varda makes films: a project's emergence, its development and the shifting forms of its screenplay, the search for financing, and the execution from casting through editing and exhibition. In the process, she departs from film history's traditional view of the French New Wave and reveals one artist's nontraditional trajectory through independent filmmaking. The result is an intimate consideration that reveals the artistic consistencies and bold changes in the career of one of the world's most exuberant and intriguing directors.

New Wave Cinéaste to Digital Gleaner

Change and Continuity in the Work of Agnès Varda

It is hardly news that Agnès Varda is fond of (one might venture besotted by) Paris’s 14th arrondissement, where she has made her home since first arriving on the rue Daguerre in 1951. She devoted an entire film to the daily lives and preoccupations of the denizens of her beloved rue Daguerre, Daguerréotypes (1974). Her second feature film, Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7, 1962) is largely set in that southern arrondissement, cradled between the green swaths of the Luxembourg Gardens to the north and the Parc Montsouris to the south. To the west beckons Montparnasse and its nightlife, while the vast walled prison and hospital complexes bordering the neighboring 13th discourage further exploration eastward. Cleo’s trajectory in the film constitutes a classic Left Bank idyll that places Paris’s 14th at the epicenter of the known world. She begins her journey in the home of a fortune teller on rue du Rivoli in the 1st arrondissement and moves south, across the Seine, to her apartment in Montparnasse. She skirts the Latin Quarter and the Sorbonne, where student restlessness is already evident on the margins of the bland postwar prosperity as the Algerian conflict played out. She then strolls through the 14th arrondissement for much of the remainder of the film, moving from a café in Montparnasse to the nearby train station and eventually to that very Parc Montsouris on the southern edge of the city, where she meets a soldier on leave from Algeria. Her trajectory ends portentously in the 13th, at the Salpêtrière Hospital, once a repository for prostitutes, the poor, and the criminally insane, where a diagnosis of cancer is confirmed.

In some sense, Cleo perfectly demonstrates Varda’s prescience: her film anticipates student unrest, reflects on upheaval and conflict in the Maghreb, and more broadly, if literally for Cleo, foretells the societal ills to come. Varda sees these written in the city itself, its landmarks, iconic quarters, and stone façades. And she shows Cleo seeing these things, seeing with a woman’s gaze, a decade before Laura Mulvey would attempt to formulate looking outside of male subjectivity. Clearly this is one reason feminist theorists and critics have taken up Varda’s work so readily.

Varda’s own trajectory, through her career and in the world, will guide my work here. Born in Ixelles, Belgium, in 1928 to a Greek father and a French mother, Varda spent her adolescence in Sète, a fishing village in the south of France. At seventeen, she moved to Paris to finish her high school education and to attend classes at the Sorbonne and the Ecole du Louvre. With the exception of two lengthy sojourns to Los Angeles, she has lived at the same address on the rue Daguerre in Paris since the early 1950s.

Like Cleo, it’s hard not to picture Varda in the 14th arrondissement, where she is both at home and at work. Varda is all too aware of the distinction between local and tourist, between villager and visitor, and it is a contrast that gives texture to much of her work. Window shoppers on the rue Daguerre should not be surprised to find Varda herself peddling DVD collections of Jacques Demy’s and her own work in her shopfront studio Ciné-Tamaris, or unloading groceries or suitcases from the trunk of her car at the sprawling residence across the street. Deep in research in Ciné-Tamaris’s archives, I myself have been pleasantly interrupted by Varda coming and going, insisting I break from my work to join her for lunch. Her door seems always to be open, and the world knows where to find her; imagine my shock answering the doorbell while Varda is rummaging through binders of old reviews or interviews on my behalf, only to discover Jean-Pierre Léaud or Anouk Aimée, in the neighborhood and hoping to find Varda at home. But if she is unpacking suitcases, it is because she has returned from an extended stay at her beloved Ile de Noirmoutier, spitting distance from Nantes, where her filmmaker husband Jacques Demy grew up. And despite the heavy gravitational pull of the 14th arrondissement, Varda’s career has taken her from Languedoc to the gritty streets of Oakland, from Hollywood to Havana. Each of the sections in this study traces stages of Varda’s journey, each place shaping her art and her vision of the world, shifting her identification between visitor and local.

Agnès Varda’s rise to the top tier of international, independent filmmakers can be framed in a paradox. In 1954, a twenty-five-year-old woman with neither training in film production nor connections in the film industry began work on a film called La Pointe Courte (1955), which both evoked Italian Neorealism and anticipated by a full five years the French New Wave. The film, made completely outside the hierarchical system of French film production of the 1950s, provides a realist chronicle of daily life in a fishing village and a stylized treatment of the troubled marriage of a bourgeois Parisian couple. Varda financed the film by forming a cooperative made up of the film’s cast and crew (a young Alain Resnais, a year away from releasing Nuit et brouillard [Night and Fog, 1955], generously agreed to join the cooperative and edit her film). Not until the late 1950s would French directors conduct similarly unconventional experiments in narrative structure, style, and mode of production. La Pointe Courte was denied a traditional theatrical release but was nevertheless reviewed favorably by André Bazin, who called the film “miraculous” and praised its combination of documentary simplicity and modernist stylization. How did La Pointe Courte happen and where did Varda go from there? Moving from this work to those that follow, how can we best explain and appreciate Varda’s melding of documentary authenticity, stylistic experimentation, and social commentary? How have her working methods changed through time? These questions are central to this study.

Varda’s trajectory through film history conforms neither to the traditional story film historians tend to tell about the French New Wave, as Richard Neupert adeptly makes clear in his 2007 history of the movement, nor to our sense of the conventional trajectory of independent filmmakers more generally. Varda was a professional photographer whose initial aesthetic commitments were framed by Modernist literature and Renaissance painting as much as anything else. Although historically placed in the category of the “Left Bank” with the likes of Resnais and Chris Marker, Varda’s directorial persona and her films differ significantly from those of the Left Bank directors and should be understood on their own terms. Moreover, Varda’s career, spanning more than half a century and still going strong, has been unusually varied. Rather than making only fiction features, Varda has alternated between creating documentaries and fiction films, short and feature-length films, photography, and installation art. This unusual heterogeneity and exuberance in Varda’s work deserves further exploration, as do both the consistency and the changes in Varda’s aesthetic preoccupations and working methods over the years.

Despite Agnès Varda’s centrality to the New Wave, to European art cinema, to experimental documentary, and to feminist film history, her work has received far less critical attention than it deserves. Varda’s written autobiography, Varda par Agnès, remains a precious resource on her life and work to 1994, but this volume unfortunately has never been translated into English and is now out of print. Until recently, the only monograph on Varda in English was Alison Smith’s valuable Agnès Varda, but that study concludes with the late 1990s. Since then, Varda has embarked on a new phase in her career: in 2000, she made Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I), her first digital film, and in 2003 she exhibited her first multimedia installation at the Venice Biennale, Patatutopia. In 2006, she exhibited a suite of installations, L’île et elle (The Island and She), at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, and in 2008 Varda followed up with a feature-length documentary, Les Plages d’Agnès (The Beaches of Agnès), which retooled the aesthetics evident in her installations toward a cinematic memoir. These works initiated a new chapter in Varda’s long and productive career, one that remains ongoing and thereby calls for continued investigation.

If, as I’ve suggested, Varda was unfairly neglected by film critics and historians in the past, happily the same cannot be said today. In addition to the scores of articles and book chapters devoted to her films and installations, several book-length studies of Varda’s work are now available and more are under way. Varda’s greatest commercial success, Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond, 1985) drew a generation of feminist critics to re-examine thirty years of filmmaking. Thus did Sandy Flitterman-Lewis provide what I believe is a definitive and still current feminist account of Varda’s work, To Desire Differently, despite its publication nearly twenty years ago. Flitterman-Lewis focuses on the representation of femininity in La Pointe Courte, Cleo, and Vagabond, deftly combining a sophisticated analysis of Varda’s feminist aesthetics (through an emphasis on the key issues of feminist film theory, including vision, subjectivity, and desire) with an analysis of the broader context of French feminist filmmaking that takes into account the work of Germaine Dulac and Marie Epstein. Smith’s 1998 monograph explores, among other topics, the “specifically feminine” aspects of five films (L’Opéra-Mouffe / Diary of a Pregnant Woman, 1958; Cleo; Réponse de femmes: Notre corps, notre sexe / Women Reply, 1975; L’Une chante, l’autre pas / One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, 1977; and Vagabond), framing her analysis with the question, “How to represent the feminine?” (93). Rebecca DeRoo’s two published essays fruitfully position Le Bonheur (Happiness, 1965) and One Sings in fresh contexts: the representation of femininity in 1960s women’s magazines and Brechtian performance, respectively. With this rich terrain so fruitfully mined already, I will not be focusing on Varda’s role as a feminist filmmaker so much as her work as a woman making films in France.

Beyond the framework of feminism, Neupert’s A History of the French New Wave positions Varda in the context of that movement. Delphine Bénézet focuses on Varda’s lesser-known films (including Opéra-Mouffe, Daguerréotypes, and Mur Murs / Mural Murals, 1981), interpreting Varda’s concerns through the lens of phenomenology and ethics. A collection of Varda’s interviews was recently edited and translated by T. Jefferson Kline and will no doubt enhance Varda’s reputation as one of the most insightful analysts of her own work. Again, with so much substantial scholarship on the historical (and political) context of the New Wave and Varda’s project through the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, I will not try to expand on that line of inquiry here. I will, however, engage with underutilized sources in French about Varda’s work, including her autobiography, Varda par Agnès, and the collected papers from the first conference ever devoted to Varda’s work in France, Agnès Varda Le cinéma et au-delà, edited by Antony Fiant, Roxane Hamery, and Eric Thouvenel (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007). I was also fortunate enough to have access to Bernard Bastide’s invaluable, unpublished dissertation detailing the conception, production, and reception of Cleo.

For a critical reading of Cleo, both Valerie Orpen and Steven Ungar have contributed valuable book-length analyses. The film has in fact already elicited so many rich analyses of space, time, and characterization, in these studies and those of Flitterman-Lewis and Susan Hayward, that I have not included here an extended reading of my own, focusing instead on reconstructing the postwar cinephilic culture of France and Cleo’s place within it. My take on the ciné-club’s role in revitalizing postwar French culture and detailed analysis of survey responses to Cleo solicited by Varda herself (and currently held in the Ciné-Tamaris archive) offers a new perspective about the film’s circulation through France of the early 1960s, one far less familiar to historians of French cinema.

Indeed, my approach to Cleo and to all the films and installations I explore in this book begins with the assumption that authorship in the production of moving images is still eminently worthy of study. In the wake of the poststructuralist turn, one can well understand how it became unfashionable to place the living, breathing film director at the center of one’s research. And yet most film historians never really lost interest in discovering the aesthetic and narrative preoccupations of individual filmmakers. My particular contribution to the scholarly literature on Varda is borne in large part of my lucky access to her archive over a period of many years and to my sense that attempting to chart the changes and the continuity in her working methods would yield interesting information about her work and one artist’s approach to the creative process. Writing film history from the point of view of authorship means charting the thematic and stylistic consistencies of a filmmaker’s work over time, but it also, for me, increasingly means writing the most detailed history of film production possible. Discovering the concrete details of the emergence of a given project, the development and shifting forms of its screenplay, the search for financing, the casting, the shoot, the editing, the exhibition, and reception are essential to the questions that interest me most about Varda. (How and why does she make her films and installations? How can we chart their impact in the culture, both commercially and critically?) Therefore these questions, so central to Varda’s journey through the cinematic and art scene landscape, will benefit from the greatest share of my attention. My vision of film authorship holds that while directors are certainly acted upon by forces outside of themselves, they also seek challenges and solve problems, maintain certain aesthetic commitments (but abandon others over time), and impose creative constraints on themselves (while resisting others).

I recall having breakfast with Varda in Montreal in October of 2005. She had come to town to speak at the retrospective on her work at the Cinémathèque québécoise and to hang an accompanying exhibition of her photographs. We were seated by the window of a hotel dining room, several floors above street level. As we chatted, Varda looked out the window and spotted some homeless people across the street. Some stood, others sat; some moved about a bit, many were encumbered with bags. Varda could not take her eyes off of them and wondered aloud, “What do you think they’re carrying in those bags? Where do you think they sleep at night?” She observed their movements carefully for many minutes. Much later, in June 2012, I saw an exhibition of Varda installations in Nantes. One of them, La Chambre occupée (The Occupied Room), consisted of a decrepit room hidden away above the elegant covered shopping arcade, the Passage Pommeraye, made famous in Jacques Demy’s Lola (1961). Made to look like a squat, the room housed an assemblage comprising a mattress propped upr...