In
Memoriam
I don't have the right words
to pay tribute to Agnès Varda; that endlessly inspirational filmmaker who
predicted the new wave of French cinema with her extraordinary debut feature, La
Pointe Courte (1955). In that film, Varda took two professional actors - Philippe
Noiret and Silvia Monfort - and placed their scripted melodrama against the
backdrop of an actual fishing village; allowing the two strands of a story -
one fiction, the other documentary - to contrast and collide. It was a film
that advanced on the early concerns of the Italian neo-realists, allowing the
actuality of the location and its inhabitants to become not just a
counter-point to the conventional drama, but a genuine focus.
La Pointe Courte remains a
quiet masterpiece; the debut of a film director who was coming to the cinema
not out of devotion to the medium itself, but out of a deep and inquisitive
interest in the world, and those that inhabit it.
The
making of La Pointe Courte [circa 1954-55, photographer not known]:
Unlike her contemporaries
of the nouvelle vague, Varda wasn't looking at life through the cinema screen,
the theatrical frame or the written word, but through the lens of her own
camera. If Rohmer was wrapped up in books and Rivette lost to the stage, and if
Godard and Truffaut thought life could only be understood when reflected on-screen,
then Varda, more than any other filmmaker associated with that revolutionary
period of French cinema, was preoccupied with people.
From La Pointe Courte she
would go on to produce a similarly groundbreaking and enduring work in each
subsequent decade of her career. Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), One Sings, the Other
Doesn't (1977), Vagabond (1985), Jacquot de Nantes (1991), The Gleaners and I
(2000) and more recently Faces Places (2017), each show the evolution of Varda's
aesthetic, from black and white 35mm, to 16mm colour, to handheld consumer-quality
video and finally digital. If the equipment was always changing, becoming less
cumbersome, less distancing, more free and inclusive, then the technique, the
focus and the sensitivity remained the same.
Throughout her career
Varda would maintain a photographer's closeness and intimacy with her subject
matter, telling personal stories, both from her own life and experiences, as
well as the lives and experiences of those existing within the same vicinity. There
were other interesting features made along the way, such as Le Bonheur (1965), Daguerreotypes (1976), Jane
B. by Agnes V. (1988) and The Beaches of Agnès (2008), as well as short films,
installations and photographic exhibitions. Varda's creative energy was
inspiring, and her work remains thought-provoking, visually distinctive and essential.
