Var­da by Agnès – first look review

There’s a break­down of com­mon pur­pose in how Agnès Var­da is per­ceived in the cur­rent film land­scape. On one hand, since the recent suc­cess of her rel­a­tive­ly twee, jaun­ty road trip doc­u­men­tary Faces Places, and its pro­mo­tion involv­ing card­board cutouts of Var­da pop­ping up in cin­e­mas across the world, there’s a temp­ta­tion to turn her into a meme, to like and share snaps of Tha Absolute Queen with­out much famil­iar­i­ty with her career.

On the oth­er, there are devot­ed stu­dents of this ethno­g­ra­ph­er and self-por­traitist, inven­tor and recy­cler, philoso­pher-poet and prankster, this artist who has direct­ed over 50 films includ­ing shorts and fea­tures going back to the incep­tion of the French New Wave in the 1950s. Not to men­tion a sig­nif­i­cant body of work in TV series, art instal­la­tion, pho­tog­ra­phy and books. For the curi­ous, observ­ing the bifur­cat­ed camps of fan­dom, from the super­fi­cial to the intim­i­dat­ing, it might be dif­fi­cult to know the best entry point into the filmography.

Var­da by Agnès, a sum­ma­tion of her work, is a piece that might play equal­ly well to neo­phytes, devo­tees and cinephiles who fall some­where in the mid­dle. It’s not the first time Var­da has addressed her audi­ence direct­ly and reflect­ed on her life and career – see also such works as the 1994 book that shares this film’s title, as well as 2008’s auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal The Beach­es of Agnès and the 2011 mini-series Agnès Var­da: From Here to There. But this new one takes the form of a mas­ter­class and a taster palette, ges­tur­ing broad­ly at the work and its inten­tions, giv­ing an overview that can be tak­en as either intro­duc­tion or recap.

“I just turned 90 and I don’t care; when I turned 80, I pan­icked, I thought I had to fin­ish some­thing,” says Var­da refer­ring to the time between Var­da by Agnès and The Beach­es of Agnès. While the pre­vi­ous film saw Var­da take to the road and stage pop-up exper­i­men­ta­tion in the land­scapes of her mem­o­ries and projects, the new work is a calmer, more offi­cial lec­ture. The film is large­ly col­lect­ed from Q&A ses­sions Var­da has done in the past cou­ple of years – includ­ing one at London’s BFI Southbank.

“I can’t fol­low the chronol­o­gy,” she says, gig­gling­ly, after almost call­ing it ​‘the crim­i­nol­o­gy’, and cor­rect­ing her­self. Instead she jumps back and forth, describ­ing a career full of jour­ney­ing into the lives of bystanders across the world. Hav­ing cap­tured a French fish­ing vil­lage for her first fea­ture, La Pointe Courte, after hav­ing only seen about 10 films in her life, play­ing with real time ver­sus emo­tion­al time in her most famous fea­ture, Cleo from 5 to 7, and film­ing the denizens of her own Paris street in Daguer­réo­types, she also had an Amer­i­can peri­od, cap­tur­ing LA hip­pies in Lions Love, African-Amer­i­can activists in Black Pan­thers and the graf­fi­ti scene in Mur­al Murals.

She por­trayed a woman who shunned soci­ety by liv­ing on the road in Vagabond, and women who changed it by advanc­ing abor­tion rights in One Sings, the Oth­er Doesn’t. She paid trib­ute to her actor friend Jane Birkin in works like Jane B for Agnès V, to the child­hood of her direc­tor hus­band Jacques Demy in Jacquot de Nantes and to the cen­te­nary of cin­e­ma itself in One Hun­dred and One Nights. In 2000, she picked up a dig­i­tal cam­era and made a joy­ful study of those who live on dis­card­ed food in The Glean­ers & I. Indeed, her own propen­si­ty for ​‘glean­ing’ extends as far as tak­ing her old film reels and mak­ing lit­tle green­hous­es, or ​‘cin­e­ma shacks’, from the material.

What makes Var­da by Agnès less swirling than her pre­vi­ous aut­o­cri­tiques, and more of a jour­ney than a sim­ple straight video essay, is that she’s basi­cal­ly just talk­ing over film clips – yet she does let this fire­side chat ram­ble and move freely between reflec­tive modes. Some­times she doesn’t name the film, but instead focus­es on jour­ney­ing to a cer­tain loca­tion, or her fas­ci­na­tion with a cer­tain person.

She describes her the­o­ry of ​“cinécri­t­ure”, which is to say she believes a film is ​“writ­ten” through com­po­si­tion and move­ment, den­si­ty and sparse­ness, sound mix­ing and oth­er tech­niques that are unique­ly cin­e­mat­ic. She breaks down char­ac­ters (“Mona’s anger is what keeps her alive, but say­ing no is what kills her”), notes prac­ti­cal­i­ties (“sea­sons don’t wait on cinema’s unpre­dictable sched­ules”) and makes jokes (“the cam­era took no space; nei­ther did I, back then.”)

Ulti­mate­ly, Var­da by Agnès is a final tes­ti­mo­ny of an artist’s approach to the world. ​“I’d like to tell you what led to me make these films,” she says, out­lin­ing three key prin­ci­ples: ​“Inspi­ra­tion, cre­ation, shar­ing.” If that sounds like a bro­mide, the pow­er of Varda’s images and breadth of her geo­graph­i­cal and emo­tion­al jour­neys are the evi­dence that it isn’t. As Varda’s phys­i­cal strength dimin­ish­es, and she gives us an end­ing that very much feels like a good­bye, she goes out by hand­ing us an index to her case stud­ies in how to spread cre­ativ­i­ty into the world.