Up With Peo­ple: In Remem­brance of Agnès Varda

Who else could make a film about the folks liv­ing and work­ing on their own street? And not just a piece of quaint voyeurism, or cold ethno­graph­ic obser­va­tion, but a film of non-judg­men­tal empa­thy, of what it means to live, love and work in a local com­mu­ni­ty. Agnés Varda’s 1976 film Daguer­réo­types is per­haps less known than it should be – it sees the always inquis­i­tive film­mak­er hop­ping from out­let to out­let on Rue Daguer­ré in Paris, glad-hand­ing with the pro­pri­etors, nat­ter­ing with passers by and sim­ply allow­ing them to speak their truth.

She enters into these mean­der­ing con­ver­sa­tions with no the­sis to estab­lish or no axe to grind. This project appears to be about allow­ing a film to grow nat­u­ral­ly, and for the char­ac­ters to blos­som in imper­fect, but no less beau­ti­ful forms. The mate­r­i­al is there for the view­er to make of what they will, to engi­neer a sto­ry, to imag­ine a past and chart a future. By any means nec­es­sary, try to seek out Daguer­réo­types as soon as you can – if you’ve seen it, maybe give it anoth­er pass on the occa­sion of Varda’s pass­ing at the age of 90.

For some­one to have lived such a full, rich, active life and to have passed at what many would see as a ripe old age, the shock val­ue can often be dilut­ed some­what by a tri­umphant sense of achieve­ment. And yet, to all who saw her speak, pick up an award, post self­ies on Insta­gram or even hold court in one of her films, Var­da was 90 years young.

She was in the midst of a late-career revival, blithe­ly kick­ing off a bril­liant new chap­ter in one of the most var­ied and con­sis­tent­ly aston­ish­ing cin­e­mat­ic oeu­vres you’d care to name. Var­da by Agnès received its world pre­mière in Feb­ru­ary 2019, and was intend­ed as a swan­song. Few gen­uine­ly believed this tena­cious and mis­chie­vous direc­tor would lay down her cam­era so easily.

My first con­tact with Var­da came in 1994 after read­ing an essay by Chris Darke in Sight & Sound mag­a­zine about her 2004 work Ciné­var­dapho­to. I was instant­ly intrigued by the film, but also how she was writ­ten about like one of the canon­i­cal greats – one, at that point, whose back cat­a­logue had yet to find its way onto home video. I lat­er man­aged to catch 2000’s The Glean­ers and I on DVD, and was instant­ly smit­ten by this lit­tle old lady mak­ing con­nec­tions with her imme­di­ate land­scape through what­ev­er means necessary.

The film is about the quaint phe­nom­e­non of glean­ing, which is essen­tial­ly tak­ing the all the detri­tus left to roll towards the gut­ter and imbu­ing it with a new lease of life. Var­da is armed with a con­sumer grade DV cam­era cus­tomised with some children’s plas­tic stick­ers, and she takes to the road to meet as many kin­dred spir­its as she can, one of whom is a com­i­cal­ly mis­shapen potato.

At this point I had Var­da pegged as a mak­er of nat­ty, per­son­al doc­u­men­taries, and I des­per­ate­ly want­ed to see more. But the more I thought about it, the more this film didn’t feel like a doc­u­men­tary, as its mak­er play­ful­ly nudged aside any sense of objec­tive fact-find­ing in place of offer­ing her own poet­ic, sub­jec­tive take on the world. She embraces an aspect of doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ing which many attempt to con­ceal, that notion of what John Berg­er described as our ​“ways of seeing”.

With this and many of her great films, it’s less that she’s try­ing to make an artis­tic state­ment than she is try­ing to trans­fer an expe­ri­ence. She made films in which the audi­ence aren’t plant­ed inside the cam­era, but they are plant­ed inside her eye, in her brain and, most mov­ing­ly, in her heart.

The moment is still raw, so I don’t want to list all her films right here, even though there are none that I don’t love. But I do want to men­tion 1985’s Vagabond, which I think may be the great­est film of the 1980s along­side Mau­rice Pialat’s A Nos Amours – both of which star San­drine Bon­naire and work as an intrigu­ing dou­ble fea­ture (with Vagabond played sec­ond). It’s a script­ed dra­ma com­bin­ing the free, col­lage-like nature of her doc­u­men­tary work with a star­tling rigour and pre­cise sense of pur­pose. It charts the final pere­gri­na­tions of a young, seem­ing­ly care­free drifter named Mona (Bon­naire) who has cho­sen to reject her place with­in soci­ety and cap­i­tal­ism. The film opens on a shot of Mona’s frozen corpse in a drainage ditch before flash­ing back, spec­u­lat­ing on how she arrived at this trag­ic end.

Var­da is glean­ing her life, tak­ing some­thing that has been dis­card­ed and imbu­ing it with force, per­son­al­i­ty, empa­thy, human­i­ty, desire and tor­ment. If Var­da had only made this one film, it would have been enough to cement her lega­cy as one all-time greats, but it now exists as mere­ly the pin­na­cle of life­long project which stands alone in its heart­felt and light­ly eccen­tric grandeur. She loved peo­ple and she reject­ed class, or at least saw class as irrel­e­vant when it comes to the ques­tions of what makes peo­ple fas­ci­nat­ing. She loved her hus­band, Jacques Demy, and built many mon­u­ments to him – includ­ing the won­der­ful biopic, Jacquot de Nantes, from 1991.

So adieu, Agnès. We will remem­ber you vivid­ly through the films and the art you gen­er­ous­ly left for us. Thank you for shar­ing with us your inti­mate thoughts and the peo­ple who shaped your affir­ma­tive view of the world. Thank you for being an avid cat lover and includ­ing a cat on your own pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny ident, Ciné Tamaris. Thank you for so often zero­ing in on the ray of light which shines through the dark­ness. Thank you for giv­ing your­self over to your art with such joy­ful aban­don. Thanks for every­thing. We will miss you greatly.