If I had to list my favourite filmmakers every month the list would be different every month, but I love this crop of ten filmmakers from all around the globe more than most. I love them so much I’ve spent the evening making mosaics of pretty images from their films for you to enjoy. Back in film school the course I hated the most (and which consequently stayed with me and affected me more deeply than the ones that I enjoyed) was film theory. I remember making a presentation on an essay by Roland Barthes in which he posited that stills from films are actually more cinematic than moving images. I should really dig it up and reread it, but off the top of my head his premise still stinks of bullshit to me. Anyway, the cinematic quality of the stills I’ve collected here is certainly undeniable.
Lifelong residents of southern France take great pains to explain the vast, existential difference between themselves and Parisians. Southerners consider themselves warm, jovial and open; a stark contrast with urbanites from the north, whom they consider to be cold, rude and arrogant. There is a kernel of truth in these characterizations, as Agnès Varda illuminates in her first feature film, 1954′s La Pointe Courte.
The story is set in the coastal Mediterranean town of Sète, where a man born in the impoverished fishing neighbourhood known as la pointe courte returns with his Parisian wife on vacation after a 12 year absence. The couple are preoccupied by a marital crisis. Only a few minutes after stepping off the train the wife announces her desire for a separation. They spend the whole vacation taking meandering walks along the beach as they discuss their relationship dynamics.
Meanwhile, all around them, the life of the locals rolls along at its usual pace. A young man seeks to date a pretty girl, contending with her strict father. A woman with eight children loses one to fever. The fishermen are besieged by local health authorities, who continually fine and arrest them for harvesting bacteria-tainted shellfish. They take little notice of the aloof urban couple in their midst, except when one woman remarks that “they talk too much to be happy.”
Varda emphasizes the gulf between these two worlds by employing opposing shooting styles and performance techniques. The husband and wife, both professional actors, deliver their lines with the blank alienation of a Brechtian play. Their walks carry them through highly composed, restrictive camera angles. All spontaneity is eliminated, creating a vacuum of formalism. In these sections of the film we witness Varda breaking ground for the foundation of the Nouvelle Vague and European Cinema in general:
The locals, however, are all non-professional actors recreating personal anecdotes from their own lives (Varda shares her screenwriting credit with them) shot in an unvarnished documentary style. Here Varda demonstrates the first blush of her career-long obsession with–and aptitude for–capturing authentic portraits of salt-of-the-earth French citizens. With La pointe courte (1054), Daguerréotypes (1976), Sans toit ni loi (1985), and Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000), Varda has assembled an encyclopedia of the French national character in its many guises.
In a Criterion DVD interview the filmmaker suggests that she intended her two disparate directing styles to highlight the separation between the public life and the private life. But watching the film, as it took me back to fond memories of a year I spent in nearby Montpellier, I couldn’t help but read it as an essay on the cultural distinctions of social geography in France.
The film finds an interesting companion piece in Abdellatif Kechiche’s La Graine et le Mulet (winner of the César for best French film in 2008). The Secret of the Grain, as it is known in English, was also filmed in Sète. It’s about French citizens who also face off against health authorities and municipal bureaucracy over access to the city’s waterways. The difference, half a century later, is that the struggling working class is now Arab, perhaps calling into question just how warm and open the South really is.
It happens all the time with amateur videos: the operator forgets to stop shooting, lets the camera fall to her side as she turns away, and she ends up capturing endless minutes of shaky, unusable footage. Usually these moments are fodder for the oblivion of the editing room floor, but in Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse (2000) Agnès Varda cuts such accidental footage into a jazz montage, commenting on the way her lens cap appears to dance. In another scene she records her own face as she fiddles with the cheesy digital effects on the consumer-grade camcorder used to shoot the documentary. Is there any other high-caliber auteur who gets away with these kinds of lo-fi antics?
Of course, Varda keeps these moments in because their presence cuts to the heart of her elusive thesis: the abandoned-yet-redeemable potential of everything that we discard, throw away, cast aside. Image media. Food. People.
Her investigation begins with historical paintings of Gleaners, groups of French peasant women who scoured for scraps in the fields after harvest time in centuries past. With the charming free-association of gallic rhetoric, Varda links this forgotten métier with her own role as a documentary filmmaker, a gleaner of images.
From there she sets out on a meandering journey across France, cataloguing a host of scavengers from all walks of life. She chases her unstructured cinematic conceit with gusto, relishing whimsical tangents and happy accidents; in a used furniture warehouse she discovers an amateur painting that suits the theme of the film, so she buys it, loads it into the car and heads back out onto the highway, moving along to the next random discovery. In another sequence she stalks a Parisian man whom she notices scavenging in market stalls for scraps after-hours. Following this thread, she discovers that the man volunteers in the basements of ghetto housing projects outside of Paris, teaching French to Senegalese immigrants.
As she bounces around, connecting unlikely dots and drawing loose associations between passing moments, a patchwork of political, economic, artistic and social issues emerge that speak to the vital ongoing role of supposedly extinct “gleaners” in French society. Varda’s stroke of genius is that the haphazard quality of her filming technique mirrors and reinforces her subject matter in a way that becomes unexpectedly moving, even profound. In the very last shot of the documentary (I won’t spoil it with a description here) she presents a fleeting moment that brings her quest full circle, unifying her scattershot mosaic of ideas and images into a singular poetic resonance that touches on the sublime. From a pile of scraps and useless footage Varda creates a small masterpiece.
I’m back at blogging with a celebration of one of my favourite filmmakers: Agnes Varda, mother-goddess of la nouvelle vague and, more recently, reigning grandma of the indie documentary scene. Varda recently launched her entire oeuvre to the forefront of the budding DIY distribution world, pairing with online cinematheque The Auteurs/MUBI to present her entire catalogue of films for on-demand streaming at micro-payment prices ($3 for features, $1 for shorts).
Among the many gems worth discovering here, I’m happy to see my personal Varda favourite Daguerréotypes finally resurfacing in North American distribution channels.
(Daguerréotypes, 80mins, 1976. Image courtesy of MUBI.)
Also worth checking out on Mubi or on the plush Criterion DVD releases, are Varda’s triumphs in narrative fiction: the “real-time” Paris of Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962), the pastel-pastoral tragedy of Le Bonheur (1965), and the barren brooding of Venice Golden Lion winner Sans Toi Ni Loi (1985).
