The name Agnès Varda, though just spoken, didn't get too many people to remember. But when it comes to "The Gleaner", everyone should be familiar with it, and today we will take a look at it together!
She died of illness on March 29, 2019, with flowers in front of her room.
Will she want us to shed tears over her passing? Will she grieve over her own aging? I don't think so. For the "girl" who was still creating and discovering until she was ninety years old, death may be just another adventure for her.
And her moving films may be the immortal things she can share with us.
Previously, Ear published an article in "Curtain Taste", which provides a moving longitudinal review of Varda's life in a time axis. His flashback writing style must be a tribute to Varda's wonderful flashback autobiographical film "The Beach of Agnès".
In this article, the author will take a horizontal writing approach to talk about Varda's film works as a whole, compared with other masters, what is unique. This may be what Varda's last work, Listen to Varda, was recently screened at the French Film Festival on Broadway.
In Varda's final work, Listen to Varda, she summarizes three of the most important keywords in filmmaking: inspiration, creativity, and sharing. In Varda's work, these three words often complement each other.
"Listen to Varda"
For me, the most different thing about Varda from other directors is the way she approaches inspiration. She is able to capture unexpected themes in her daily life. But what makes her work even more fascinating is that she is never limited to predetermined subjects.
Because of this, watching her films always changes the way we see the world, and always makes us personally recognize the "wonders of everyday life". The specific techniques in her films can be said to serve this perception.
First of all, almost all of her most elaborate works have a certain meaning of "intellectual archaeology". The term, from Foucault's work, denies transcendent themes and instead uses spatial cross-sections as a benchmark, tracing the derivation of a phenomenon and exploring its relationship to other things.
It is fitting to use this concept to discuss works like Agnès Varda's Ulysses (1982). The film cuts from a photograph taken by Varda in 1954 of a man, a goat and a little boy.
Although films like this, derived from a photograph, already have such wonderful precedents as Godard's Letter to Jane (1972), Varda's relatively gentle stance also allowed her to create more free-thinking, layered archaeological images.
This tendency in Varda's work is actually very suitable for the short film format. So in films like The Statue of a Woman (1984) and Approaching the Côte d'Azur (1958), we follow her in a whole new way of looking at statues, the Côte d'Azur, at the things we've become accustomed to.
The Statue of a Woman
Of course, the most proficient of these works is probably the famous documentary "The Gleaner" (2000). Starting from Miller's famous painting "The Scavenger", the film captures the image of a contemporary French scavenger with the proposition of "Scavenger".
The Gleaner
The second most important feature of Varda's films is the combination of documentary and feature films. Previously, Director Dapeng won the Golden Horse Best Short Film and will be screened at the Beijing Film Festival, which is a work that blurs the boundary between documentaries and feature films. Needless to say, Varda was a master at making such films.
In fact, the documentary "The Gleaner" mentioned above contains a lot of her exquisite ideas and designs. Recording the real image and then divergeing it out to give more meaning to the image is exactly what Varda is best at.
The title of Record Liar (1981) actually reflects Varda's understanding of documentary, and her documentary does not necessarily mean "real", but also may lie. This work combines documentary and fiction to find clues to advance the "plot" from chance. Varda's extremely keen perception is vividly reflected.
"Record Liar"
The most fascinating of these films is probably Varda's biopic A Thousand Faces of Treasure Gold (1988) for the famous actor Jane Birkin. In that film, Jane Birkin's ever-changing image, under Varda's ingenious collage, is given a dreamlike texture.
Varda's documentaries are made like feature films, and so are drama films. She also mentioned in Agnès on Varda that she often adds elements with documentary qualities when shooting fictional films.
If "The Gleaner" is her most famous "drama documentary", then "The Fallen Woman" (1985) is the representative of her "documentary drama". This film about the wanderer uses a large number of documentary-style moving long shots, giving the film a bit of real texture.
Interestingly, Varda points out that most of the push-track shots she uses in this film are moved from right to left; in general films, people are accustomed to pushing track shots that move from left to right. Through this rebellious approach, she stylized the "reality", and we see both the reality she recorded and the way she read it.
The above two characteristics – the "archaeological knowledge" structure and the "documentary + plot" audiovisual style – together create a very unique look and feel of Varda's films. Watching her film is like embarking on a journey with her, we know where we started, but we don't know where we ended up – because accidents keep happening.
At the end of Faces, Villages (2017), she fails to knock on Godard's door, which may be an accident. But interestingly, this accident makes the film even more moving. I think that this extremely smart and cute director will be able to find her solution in the world after death, no matter what kind of accident she encounters. After all, in her incredibly fascinating films, that's what she does.