On February 13, 2019, local time, Berlin, Germany, the 69th Berlin International Film Festival, the non-competition screening unit film "Varda By Agnes" premiered. Varda wears a large-flowered silk top, the top of her hair is specially dyed gray, and the bangs are dyed purple, which is full of creativity. (Visual China/Photo)
Agnès Varda, with a red mushroom head and a penchant for polka dots, never seems to age. The French film "Grandmother of the New Wave" is still making movies at the age of 89 and swimming in the sea on her 90th birthday.
In early 2018, Varda's new film "Face, Village" was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 90th Academy Awards, and she became the oldest nominee in Oscar history. Unable to attend the nomination banquet, she sent herself printed on cardboard, life-size, full-body polka dots. On November 11, 2017, she was already awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Oscars.
Varda and artist Jean Genet (JR) collaborated on this quasi-documentary, in which they roamed the French countryside, interviewing and filming people they met and asking each other to tell stories. Varda wants to meet fresh faces so as not to "fall into his own memory holes."
On March 29, 2019, Varda died of breast cancer at the age of 90. At home in Paris, loved ones and friends spent her last moments with her.
On March 30, JR posted photos on its website and Instagram showing the huge landscape he had just completed at the Louvre with tens of thousands of volunteers. "I'm sure you can see it. I made something that I could see in the sky. Seriously, I didn't know that was done for you. He wrote humorously.
<h3>"When the New Wave came, she had already begun to go elsewhere</h3>."
Born in 1928, Varda changed his name from Alet to Agnès at the age of 18. She studied literature and psychology at the Sorbonne, history at the Louvre Academy, and photography at night classes. Together, these disciplines profoundly influenced her career, and she is also remembered by the public for her close connection to the New Wave of French cinema.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the movement was sparked by New Directors such as Godard and Truffaut who had gathered in the Magazine Handbook of Motion Picture. Their films are all about rebelling against popular "quality films", challenging the solidified performances, plots and rhythms.
Four years before Truffaut made his masterpiece "Four Hundred Blows", the 26-year-old Varda made "Short Horn Love Affair". Set in the small town of Seth in the south of France where she lived as a teenager, the film alternately depicts couples in emotional crisis and fishermen struggling to survive. Two very different worlds are juxtaposed in a way that comes from Faulkner's novel Wild Palms.
Although it did not do well at the box office after its release in 1955, non-linear narratives, emphasis on emotions rather than plots, peculiar editing methods, and neorealism and other iconic features of later New Wave films all appeared in Short Horns. It is regarded by many critics as a precursor to the New Wave, influencing famous works such as "Love in Hiroshima".
"There's a mystery I've been unable to explain about The Short Corner Affair: What exactly drove me to make a movie?" Ten years after the film was made, Varda said in an interview.
Varda had never trained in film and had seen only a handful of films. Before filming Shorts, she had only seen about 20 movies, including the Disney cartoon Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. She was working as a photographer at the National People's Theatre, using weekends to finish the script, thinking she would never shoot it. But at the instigation of an assistant director, she borrowed money, pulled people, formed a seven-person shooting team, and shot "Short Corner Love Affair" at a budget of less than 1/20 of the general film cost.
Jeanine Basinger, an expert in film history, argues that Varda breaks the so-called proper, classic narrative style, but she doesn't really like being lumped into the New Wave. "When the New Wave came, she had already started to go elsewhere."
Varda visited China as a young man. In 1957, as a member of the French delegation, she spent May Day in Beijing. Then we took a boat along the Yangtze River from Chongqing to Shanghai and also to Yunnan, six years before the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and France. In the hotel, a waiter delivered hot water, and soon someone delivered water, just to see for yourself what foreigners look like. In Wuhan, she witnessed the completion of the Hankou Yangtze River Bridge project; in Sichuan, she couldn't eat anything because it was too spicy.
Varda took thousands of precious photographs to witness the vitality and happiness in the early days of socialist construction. She once said in an interview that since that trip to China, she has drunk a large cup of hot water every morning like Chinese, and the hotter the better.
<h3>"I don't think of myself as a film director</h3>."
"I was pretty sure it was just a one-off thing — I didn't think of myself as a film director." After filming "The Short Corner Affair", Varda still worked as a cinematographer, because the film did not make money at all. Seven years later, she made her second feature film, Cleo at Five to Seven.
In the film, a female singer waits anxiously for the results of a cancer test. The fear of death forces her to think about herself, and thus finds herself a doll manipulated by men, a little girl who knows herself through the eyes of others.
Cleo at Five to Seven is a very "New Wave" film and is considered an important feminist film. Varda then made "Happiness," revealing the popular clichés about women in society.
Varda read Beauvoir's works, fighting for women's free rights to contraception, sex, and new ways of marrying and raising children. In 1971, she signed the 343 Manifesto, launched by Beauvoir, in which 343 female celebrities said they had had abortions in the hope of legalizing abortion in France.
But Varda didn't want the film to become a propaganda tool. In 1974, when the feminist movement was in full swing, she realized that feminism had become strong on the one hand, but it had also become fashionable. "It's the worst because talking about women becomes 'trendy.'" "You don't have to say, 'Because I'm a woman, I should definitely make feminist films because the feminist view isn't yet widespread.'" She is often alarmed by this.
In 1971, Varda's friend, Gate's lead singer Jim Morrison, died unexpectedly in Paris. At the funeral at The Père Lachaise Cemetery, she was one of only five mourners. In 1990, her lifelong love, French actor and director Jacques Demi, died, and she made three films in his honor.
In 1998 and 1999, the elder Varda traveled around France for months, using digital video cameras to document the living conditions of contemporary scavengers. She calls them "gleaners," and the handheld device seems to give her the freedom to shoot short films as a young man. During the filming, she felt that she was also a gleaner in another sense. As an artist, she picks up other people's ideas, images, and emotions everywhere and puts them into movies. She blends her subjective feelings about aging with more objective documentaries.
When introducing Varda's work to American audiences, Richard Peña, emeritus president of the New York Film Festival, described Gleaner and Agnès' Beach as "touchstones for a new generation of nonfiction filmmakers."
Varda never stopped. At the age of 80, she began to create installation art, which has participated in the Biennales of Venice and Lyon. She built her own used film into a small house and named it "My Failed Cottage." Half a year ago, she told The Guardian: "I'm still alive and curious. I am not a decaying body. ”