Varda by Agnès is a delight. Like the most joyous, freewheeling TED talk imaginable, the late French filmmaker guides us through her career based on her artistic bedrocks: inspiration (why make the film?), creativity (how do you make the film?) and sharing (“a filmmaker’s nightmare is an empty cinema”). Funny, moving and insightful, all filmmakers should lay out their art and art like this. But not all filmmakers can be Agnès Varda.
Varda By Agnès’ M.O. is to intertwine the director holding court with archival footage, clips from her career and specially filmed vignettes. It’s a fun, fluid approach that has little truck with chronology but shines a light on the nuts and bolts of her filmmaking — Cléo From 5 To 7’s use of subjective time; Le Bonheur revealing her love of colour, fading to vibrant reds and blues rather than black — but doesn’t skimp on the personal aspects of her life. A particularly poignant passage covers Jacquot De Nantes, her film about husband Jacques Demy, that juxtaposes fictionalised scenes of his childhood with close-ups of Demy’s face, immortalising every feature, as he faces up to death. There are also fascinating digressions into oddities like her homage to cinema, One Hundred And One Nights, which sees her work for the first time with big stars (“I was intimidated”) like Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, Catherine Deneuve and Robert De Niro, who flew in for a day and learned his French dialogue phonetically.
Rooted in Varda’s mischievous spirit.
But Varda By Agnès also does vital work chronicling her talent as a documentarian, be it through film, photography or installations. She puts part of her knack for getting up close and personal down to her diminutive stature (“I took up no space back then,” she says about mingling with the Black Panthers), but it’s also clearly her generous worldview that prevails. “Nothing is trite if you film it with empathy and love,” she says, and it’s a philosophy that courses through her work profiling marginalised groups who are rarely listened to, be it ‘gleaners’ who pick food up off the street, squatters or a moving piece about widows in a fishing village that juxtaposes the women’s stories with her own tears. Varda’s installations, from a shed made of strips of film from Le Bonheur to a never-ending video funeral for the Varda family cat, are all innovative but accessible, finding fresh ways of letting audiences engage with images. Like Varda By Agnès itself, they are also deeply curious.
The specially created sequences are rooted in Varda’s mischievous spirit. An interview with Vagabonde star Sandrine Bonnaire is conducted on a trolley in the pouring rain, a discussion about tracking shots that is a tracking shot. Linking to her love of beaches, Varda relocates her entire office to a street filled with sand. A nonagenarian, Varda never forgets to inject the playful amongst the serious. And Varda By Agnès celebrates this unique sensibility to the fullest