Approaches & Analysis - Agnes Varda (Week 1)

Agnes Varda:

• La Pointe Courte (1954) - First Film
• Made film in every decade for 60 years
• Hands on filmmaking - she's not delegating her work to others, she has a vision, active in her filmmaking.
• Jacque Demy - Contempory of Varda and her husband, father of her children. 
• He made very musical/colorful film. Had quite a fairytale element 
• Closely aligned to Varda's filmmaking.
• After he died she made films related to this - what it's like to be an older widow.
• Huge collection of films; some fiction some documentary.
• Interested in women, women's place in society, the way in which women's stories are seen.
• The Gleaners and I (empathizes on I) she sees herself as one of them - her filmmaking is quite renovating, she takes bits and pieces, uses them in new ones.

 Visages Villages / Faces Places (2017) :

• First time Varda has collaborated with someone
• Co-Directed by Agnes Varda and photographer JR
• JR - Wrinkles of The City (Links to Faces Places) Urban City of Havana.
• It's described to be performative and a poetic documentary, which is built upon the two travelling and creating portraits of ordinary people in far-flung villages of rural France.
• The specificity of Visages Villages resides in its weaving together of key motifs of vision and the vagaries of friendship, resulting in a series of staged and spontaneous encounters that raise question about the function of art and the nature of collaboration,

Kelly Conway Essay:

Q: How does Visage Villages fit into Varda's corpus of documentaries and what is new here

A: Visages Villages extends Varda's longstanding preoccupation with the power of place, but also stages encounters that raise questions about the function of art and the nature of collaboration

''Both Varda and JR find the extraordinary in the apparently ordinary, draw energy from incessant travel and creation, and strive to make political interventions that are both subtle and accessible.''

• Gleaming - taking something ordinary
• How do we account for the power of the extraordinary in the ordinary?
• What's political? - Varda's gleaming ; environment, climate change, capitalisms, consumerism.
• The feminist manifesto from her early movement.

''Additionally, both artists maintain a small-scale mode of production; they surround themselves with a loyal, familial team of five or six assistants (largely women, in the case of Varda's Cine-Tamaris and largely men, in the case of JR's Social Animals).'' 

• Her children are both involved in this film.

''(Allison) Smith observes that 'one strand of Varda's filming consists of presenting the subjectivity of a principal character through her perceptions of her surroundings'

• Cleo & Vagabond are both about subjectivity of the female character and the way in which they perceive the world around them
• Similarly in Varda's later career, understanding the world she lives in.

''Extending Smith's idea, I argue that Varda's autobiographical documentaries, like her fiction films, expose her preoccupations, whether aesthetic or political, through the prism of place. To this end, she has framed many of her films explicitly through the invocation of specific streets, neighborhoods, cities or regions.''

• In Faces Places - we are in known places, engaging in specific history.
• Playfulness going on, she makes joke about the name of the first place she visits.

Themes:

Places: villages (not the urban, more pastoral places) domestic facades, workplaces, industrial structures.

Faces: individual, groups, families, strangers

Time: preoccupation for both directors, memories, the past, aging, mortality, absence

Vision: seeing, subjectivity, rupture, deterioration

Art: process, collaboration, storytelling, creativity

• Immersive art: woman of the miner villager, she becomes the place.
• Tributes: some of the ordinary people (postman and waitress)
• Not just the faces of images/bodies - we focus in on the body - make it something we can't avoid seeing. Eye behind the camera for over 60 years.

Documentary/fiction; past/present

• Scenes like Varda conversating with JR feel like performative and poetic documentary
• To what extent are we watching filmmakers make themselves as characters?

Varda - Goats - Ulysse (her short film from 1983) its based on a photograph she took in 1954, its a film that features three elements: a naked man, a boy and a dead goat. The film is an investigation into what they remember about the image, the story takes us through their memory. Conway states this is apart of Varda's own autobiography.