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.
Here’s a brain-tickle to boost you out of the Monday blahs. Working through the theme and variation of the cyclical narrative structure, I’m reminded a great deal of David Lynch. Particularly the stuff about the shape-shifting key object, which strikes me as a direct ancestor of the blue key in Mulholland Drive. Deren and Lynch also share the distinction of achieving recognized, radical film art practices right in the shadow of the studio system. The most challenging flourish of Meshes is probably its first title card, which locates the filming in Hollywood, provoking us to reconsider our preconceived notions of the “Hollywood Movie”.
