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Most directors go to their locations or sets like people heading to an office; that’s where they make their films. A rare few make the world their work. For them, shooting a film is just another part of their day; their movies are excerpts from the great flow of their experience. Agnès Varda is one such filmmaker. Not only were her art and her life inseparable; she was also an artist of life itself, bringing transformative energy and imagination to whatever was at hand. Thus the world that she filmed bore the trace of her own presence. This summer, the Musée Carnavalet, a Paris museum dedicated to the history of the city, has an exhibit, “Agnès Varda’s Paris, From Here to There,” that illuminates with intensity, clarity, and delight the singular nature of her achievements—in movies and outside of them.
The through line of the exhibit is photography—mostly by Varda herself. Varda, who was born in 1928 and died in 2019, started her professional life, in the late nineteen-forties, as a photographer. Several shows of her photographs in the past decade, including one in New York in 2017 and one in Arles two years ago, have called attention to the formative influence of this work on her subsequent output as a filmmaker. The Arles exhibit paired her still images of the seaside town of Sète with her first feature, “La Pointe Courte,” which was filmed there. The New York gallery show was centered on images from an exhibit of her photographs which Varda organized in Paris in 1954, the same year that she shot most of “La Pointe Courte.” But “From Here to There” takes an excitingly wide-ranging view of Varda’s photography and amplifies that display with connections to her movies, especially her earlier ones, and even to ones that weren’t made or—yes—that have seemingly been lost.
The impulsive, wandering, protean essence of Varda’s work is reflected in the show’s title. In French, it’s “Le Paris d’Agnès Varda, de-ci, de-là,” and I’d translate the last phrase more simply than the museum does, as “here and there,” a plain dichotomy bound together by “and.” (That “and,” at once multiplying and unifying, is a perfect analogue for her vision.) The photos themselves are thrilling, and the most thrilling ones, which are also among the earliest, are of Varda herself. In 1949, the year she turned twenty-one, she took a series of self-portraits in which she’s hardly recognizable. She has tousled and sideswept hair, a men’s-style shirt, sometimes a sailor’s cap, and even an expression of distracted innocence. In an album page, these images appear in a montage with ones of the sculptor and ceramicist Valentine Schlegel, her partner at the time. She used one as her identity photo on her professional-photographer’s card, issued in 1950. (She’d got her start in 1948, having been recruited by the theatre director and impresario Jean Vilar, the husband of a friend, to do the publicity photos for his productions.)
It’s a shock to see, in effect, Varda before Varda. If those photographs, an implicit quest for a self-image, form a kind of question mark, what comes next in the show has the impact of an exclamation mark: a self-portrait from 1950, in which Varda sports the bowl cut that would be a trademark for the rest of her life. Varda prepared carefully for the photo, using dark makeup to add shadow below her eyes and to emphasize her jawline, and the result emphasizes her new and, it turns out, definitive identity with a theatrical formality. This is the face, and the determined, forthright, assertive, discerning expression, that she’d bear forever.
Varda’s new look reflected her approach to her work and to her life alike, and it also heralded a decisive and definitive change in that approach. In late 1950, Varda found a pair of adjacent former storefronts in the Rue Daguerre, which were unheated and had only an outdoor toilet. Her parents bought the property for her, and she turned it into two workspaces. For Schlegel: a sculpture studio on the ground floor. For herself: a darkroom, also on the ground floor, and a photography studio on the top, under a skylight. (It was to be Varda’s home and workplace for the rest of her life.) As a photographer of theatre people, Varda had taught herself to direct her subjects, to create moments that didn’t merely document but also reinterpreted plays for the camera. She brought a similar sensibility to portraiture and even to street photography, along with an element of artifice; she affixed a pair of human-size angel wings to the wall of her studio and posed people in front of them as if they were in costume. Her photos of the nineteen-fifties invoke drama, displaying a dynamic connection to space and action outside the frame. Witness a remarkably vibrant series of portraits of friends and neighbors (including the sculptor Alexander Calder) shot in her courtyard, or a 1956 photo of the actress Suzanne Flon, muffled beneath the collar of her coat, alongside two unidentified passersby, all of them attentively gazing into the street at a bus stop at the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
Photograph by Pierre Antoine / Courtesy Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris
When Varda shot portraits on location, her practice was both observational and interventionist. She took subjects around town in her car in search of suitably photogenic sites and then framed and posed them with a meticulous eye and firm guidance. One of the highlights of the Carnavalet exhibition is a video screen showing an excerpt from a 1954 TV report by Hubert Knapp on Varda’s session for an outdoor portrait of the photographer Brassaï. Varda, who used a large-format view camera, is seen carrying a big case, a tripod, and a four-legged stool through the street in the rain. Reaching the chosen location, in her neighborhood, on the Rue Cels, she poses Brassaï in front of an abraded and mottled wall that has character, a sort of Abstract Expressionist surface. In an extended take, Varda assembles the bulky camera with practiced certainty; she cranks the tripod to raise the camera, climbs onto the stool, ducks beneath a black cloth that covers the camera’s glass back, and then emerges to wave Brassaï into place. The resulting picture, like most of her street photos, is a work of inner and outer depth in which the human and the material subjects, the foreground and the background, expressively coalesce.
Knapp’s short film is silent, like photographs themselves, but Varda’s movies are, of course, talking pictures (indeed, voluble ones), and a crucial emphasis of “Agnès Varda’s Paris” is the connection in her work between language and images. Pointedly, the first item on display in the show is a spiral notebook in which Varda had jotted down notes for a film, “Christmas Carole,” of which she shot only a few scenes, in 1966. In the two pages on view are the names of dozens of Paris Métro stations (including Pyramide, Convention, and Denfert-Rochereau), with circles and rectangles drawn around words that are embedded within these names—such as ami (“friend”), vent (“wind”), enfer (“Hell”), and roche (“rock”).
In the course of her filmmaking career, Varda invented the term “cinécriture” (cine-writing) to refer to the totality of directorial decisions of which a movie is composed, akin to a writer’s fine-grained and hands-on approach to language. She also had more direct involvement with the combination of image and text: in the fifties, she published photo essays in magazines, one featuring a girl wearing angel wings in the streets of Paris, another on art schools, and a third (using actors) about a new generation of literary-influenced youths. In 1957, she photographed passersby on the Rue Mouffetard and assembled them in a mockup for an intended photobook, taping them into a large-format blank book and adding her own handwritten commentaries. That handmade volume has an exquisite artistic aura, a feeling of craftsmanship even in its sketchlike form, yet it wasn’t published. Instead, Varda returned to the same street the following year with a movie camera and a crew—while pregnant with her daughter, Rosalie—and the result was the short film “L’Opéra-Mouffe,” one of her early masterworks. The film departed from the strictly observational book project, with Varda adding images of a nude pregnant woman, an explicit erotic sequence between a man and a woman, a playful interlude in masks, and Surrealist-inspired visual motifs linking fruits and vegetables to human fertility. What was implicitly personal in her still-photo observations became intimately so in her cinematic—and quasi-literary—transformation of the concept.
Because the bulk of Varda’s photographs were made before, or early in, her film career, the Carnavalet exhibit is richer in work from that period. Nonetheless, the show still explores the full span of her working life, using related materials that she produced and photographs of her by others. Her handmade foldout book of sketches for her second feature, “Cléo from 5 to 7,” is filled with images and text (in tiny handwriting, in red ink) that feels like both a dialectical launching pad for the movie and an integral, active part of the film itself. Similarly, a mimeographed call, from 1976, for women to play demonstrators in a reënactment of a 1972 protest—in support of a teen-ager put on trial for having an abortion—thrums with artistic energy that’s continuous with the movie that resulted, “One Sings, the Other Doesn’t.” The exhibit also features six photographs by Michèle Laurent from the location shoot, in Paris streets, of a 1967 short by Varda, intended for the compilation film “Far from Vietnam,” which its producer, Chris Marker, saw fit to exclude from the finished compilation and which is believed lost. The six images show a young woman in a chic dress and white boots who, as she passes through the streets of Paris, is confronted with Vietnam in various forms—newspaper headlines about the war, a political newsletter pasted to a wall, even a Vietnamese restaurant—and who, in the last photo, is arrested by two police officers. The photographs are practically a movie in themselves.
Whatever Varda touched turned into art, and vice versa: the show concludes with clips of filmed interviews with her, made between 1961 and 2019. They fulfill a desire that Varda expresses in one of the clips: to have her interviews edited together in chronological sequence, in order to show herself passing from youth to old age and also, as she puts it, blooming like a flower. Discussing her 1975 documentary “Daguerréotypes,” about shopkeepers on her street, she calls them members of the “silent majority” and proclaims the philosophical reach of this ultra-local project: “Wherever one is, one can bear witness to what existence is.”
While I was in Paris, I visited the office of Ciné-Tamaris, the production company that Varda founded, which also distributes many of her films and those of her husband, Jacques Demy. There, I was astonished to discover the wealth of materials that it preserves. I was also shown the company’s separate archives, in which images, business documents, correspondence, and objects of many sorts (from cameras to tchotchkes) are stored—a colossal trove of personal activity and artistic history. The room felt like a storehouse of relics, as if the movies of their legators were palpable in the air. Varda, whose materials are far more copious than her husband’s, was a saver, from the very beginning of her photographic career, and this practice of accumulation was a living act of artistic philosophy, a commitment to the future—her own and the world’s. For much of her career, Varda was an underappreciated filmmaker, both in France and here. Appropriately, the work with which she remade her art and her public image was the 2000 video-film “The Gleaners and I,” in which her hands-on camerawork and immediate experience converged with her personality, her own onscreen presence.
That movie and those which came next—“The Beaches of Agnès” and “Faces Places”—made explicit the unity of Varda’s life and her art, the fusion of her daily activities with her self-imagined persona. With these works, Varda made herself into a figure of history in the present tense, an embodiment of the modern cinema—and of women’s cinema, which she had hypothesized, in a 1978 clip included in the exhibit’s concluding assemblage, as “marginal and subversive.” By moving even further to the margins, she put herself at the center of the times; by subverting the ordinary practices of cinema, she refashioned them. Her influence and her authority, the benign dominance of her personality, skipped a generation, as in the relationship of grandparents and grandchildren. The future for which she’d started saving in her twenties arrived while she was still forming and expanding it. With the wealth of treasures that she stored up, “Agnès Varda’s Paris” emerges like a new work of her own—only one of many exhibitions waiting to be midwifed into the world. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
