"I don't want to be a serious and annoying sociologist. I try to think of sociology as part of everyday life."
In 2018, director Agnès Varda was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for her documentary Face, Village, and became the first female director to win an Oscar lifetime achievement award. She and Oscar are almost the same age. A week before the awards ceremony, Varda was invited to speak at Harvard University. She sat on a high stool behind the podium, her legs dangling high in the air—"I think I'm too young." She said. Over the past few decades, she has often teased herself about her short stature, but it makes her look like a naïve child.
Varda's hairstyle resembles a piece of watermelon peel: the doll's head has been left for almost a century, and the newborn white hair on the top of the head is a white circle, gradually expanding downwards, which contrasts with her shirts, pants, and scarves that are full of dots. As you can see, she's a wave pointer. "Ah, yes, the shape of the polka dots is pleasant. How alive it is! ”
In her, the beautiful qualities of youth, innocence, and enthusiasm never seem to fade. In a feature review of Varda, Sight & Hearing magazine wrote: "If she hadn't appeared in reality, she might have been replaced by a mosaic or a comic, such as a triangular pipe-shaped nose portrait by her friend Christopher Varro." She was so naughty: at the age of 75, she suddenly fell in love with installation art, transported 700 pounds of potatoes to the exhibition hall, put on a huge potato suit for herself, and smiled and squinted to greet the audience of the Venice Biennale. At last year's Oscar nominee's luncheon, she sent her own humanoid cardboard as a delegate, attracting Hollywood stars such as Meryl Streep and Greta Gerwig.
At the age of 88, Varda decided to drive a van with 35-year-old artist JR around french townships in a van carrying cameras and large printers. They traveled a week a month and spent 18 months photographing the residents of Miners Street, the dockers and their wives, the postman delivering apples to the old woman... Pasted their large portraits on the sides of buildings, barns, boulders and shipping containers. The experience was edited by Varda into Faces, Villages.
By this time, Varda's eyesight was extremely weak and it was difficult to walk, but the journey was still full of joy: at the museum, JR would sit in a wheelchair and "race" with Varda; JR secretly pasted pictures of Varda's toes and eyes on the top of the train car, ladders and boats, so that Varda could see far away. Varda was very happy. "I'm just a slightly degenerate woman... But I'm not sad at all, I'm still energetic! Energy has nothing to do with the body. ”
The way Varda celebrates her 80th birthday is by building a plastic whale house by the sea and a miniature coastline on a busy street — "If everyone had their own scenery, she would have a beach." On her 90th birthday last year, she had a big banquet and went swimming in the sea. If nothing else, she should have spent her birthday in a similar way. Sadly, at the end of this March, after a brief battle with the disease, she died at her home in Paris on Friday morning.
<h3>"Leave it all to chance"</h3>
Arlette Varda was born in Belgium. Her father is Greek and her mother is French. After the age of 12, the family settled in the Mediterranean town of Seth in the south of France. At the age of 18, she renamed herself Agnès, went to the Sorbonne to study literature and psychology, then briefly studied art history and photography, and began her career as a photographer, but she was not satisfied with the art of photography: "Too silent. 'What's before and after the snapshot' piqued my interest. ”
She had read the American novel Wild Palm, and the structure of the story was two lines intertwined, the first chapter was about social issues, the second was about a couple, and the third chapter was back to the first story. "When I read this book, I chose the way of jumping, reading chapters 1357 and 2468 in tandem. I read two different stories at the same time. After completing the jump reading, I read the story again in the original order, and then I found a wonderful thing- the two stories were not directly related, but they were combined to create a common emotion, a common feeling, which is sometimes independent but can be echoed. I wanted to make a movie like this. ”
Almost entirely by natural artistic intuition, the 27-year-old Varda created chapter by chapter, and his debut novel", "The Affair of the Short Horn" (1955), was born: half the reality of the fishing village, and half the emotional entanglement of the husband and wife. At that time, she could not even direct the actors to perform, but she was already familiar with breaking the classical narrative and establishing the distancing effect. Truffaut, who was a film critic at the time, commented in the Film Handbook that "The Short Angle" was "a film essay that needs to be read."
It was from his debut that Varda coined a word: cinécriture. In later works, she tried to shoot and edit in the same way that writers treat words, syntax, and chapters with caution, "not just shooting an image for a novel or a script, but combining all the elements that can be used to create a movie, the process is the same for me as writing." Film historian Harden Gest once commented, "She was a poet. One aspect of her that is rarely mentioned is her ability as a writer. ”
For Varda, it was easy to break the clichés of the language of the film because she didn't know the rules from the start. "I barely saw a movie when I was younger, and I was stupid and naïve. Still, if I've seen a lot of movies, maybe I wouldn't have made movies. She said in a 2009 interview.
Believing in the inspiration in his head, Varda never adapted a literary or dramatic work, "I can only stay in the pleasure of creation." "When she saw someone scavenging on the road, she wanted to make a "Gleaner"; seeing the men and women wandering on the road, she had the inspiration to make "The Fallen Woman of the End of the World".
"My films are not about spectacle. Lo and behold, I don't want to be a serious and annoying sociologist. I try to think of sociology as part of everyday life. There's a meaningful shot in Agnès's Beach: she takes out a mirror, looks at herself, and then turns it upside down to point it at the person she wants to see, "I want to point the mirror at someone else... Aim at the people who made me who I am today. ”
Varda has always been free to wander between reality and fiction. The short film "Drad Street Style" (1975) was shot on her doorstep, and her neighbors— the grocery store owner, the coffee shop owner, the hairdresser— became the characters in the feature film, "When people watch my film, they will say, this character is so good, I tell them, this is not a character, but a person, they are real people." 」 ”
Documenteur (1981), she synthesized a new word from documenter and element. The mother in the film is very sad and lonely, and this emotion cannot be shared with her daughter. So Valda photographed some passers-by on the street to help the fictional character express his emotions. "Sometimes I even find that the lonely scenes we encounter on the street may be more representative of our hearts and more able to make others understand what we are thinking."
In The Fallen Woman (1985), she brought in a car mechanic, a café owner and a vine repairer in southern France to star, allowing mona, the heroine who refused to assimilate and eventually died, to live in a real situation.
From more than six decades into film, Varda has switched freely between narrative feature films, documentaries and short films. "When the work is finished, I don't think, 'I could have done better' or 'I might have done worse,' I try to understand the creative process. It's not just technical, I try to make myself more spontaneous. It is to find the right image, the right vocabulary, and finally to follow the instinct. I really follow the instinct of the movie. ”
As she says in Faces, Villages: "We just picked some small towns in advance, and the rest was left to chance." ”
Varda and artist JR
<h3>"I have the final say!"</h3>
Varda started so early, and it will be four or five years before Truffaut and Godard will make a grand debut and set off a new wave. So she became the "grandmother of the new wave."
She is the only woman in the Left Bank of the New Wave (Aaron Renai et al.) and right Bank (Truffaut, Godard, etc.) filmmakers, but she has not approached this loose group of filmmakers, and has always maintained her own marginalization, turning a blind eye to capital, stars, and reputation. "I try my best to keep the quality of my films. I don't make commercial films, I don't do stardom, I just do my own 'gadgets'. In an interview later in life, Varda said, "I don't consider myself a woman who makes movies... I also don't see myself as the part worth discussing. It's all labels. Even the term 'New Wave' is meant to wrap us up. ”
In 1959, Varda and director Jacques Demi fell in love. They are all determined to reinvent the language of cinema. Demi created revolutionary films like Cherbourg's Umbrella, allowing the sound of music to dive into everyday life, and at the heart of Varda's distinction from New Wave directors was that all of her work focused on women's identity. In filmmaking, she challenged the masculine hierarchy of subordination of women as males, undermining the masculine language of Hollywood and French New Wave cinema.
Cleo at Five to Seven (1962) focuses on a beautiful female singer Cleo who is suspected of having cancer and awaits a medical report. She wandered the streets of Paris, controlled by the fatalism that lingered in her mind. Director Andrew Hagrid considers it to be a "film with complex ideas, but at the same time light as air". Prior to this film, young women in Paris were mostly reproduced in the film in two ways: outright negative images (women seducing men, prostitutes, fallen women, liars, liars, murderers), or the unfortunate people who are plagued by the survival/moral crisis of the city. Cleo, on the other hand, is a modern female wanderer who, after 45 minutes of the film, sees the city from her own perspective like all the male characters in the film, transforms from a "woman being watched" to an active viewing subject, and overcomes the fear of dying when dusk comes.
Three years later, in Happiness (1965), Varda satirized a man who wandered between his wife and lover without guilt. A man's wishful thinking was shattered by the sudden death of his wife.
In 1972, when Varda and Demi's son Matthew was born, she suspended her directing career, "and while I was happy, I couldn't help but be dissatisfied with the brakes on my work and travel." She said in a 1975 interview. Two years later, in One Sing, One Don't Sing (1977), she asked a rebellious teenage girl to help her friend go to Switzerland for an abortion. "No father, no pope, no king, no judge, no doctor, no legislator, I have the final say!" This is her own declaration.
Sympathy for the station and street wanderers led her to create the role of Mona. "The Fallen Woman" begins with Mona's death, and through the words of others, constructs Mona's refusal to be assimilated and lonely in the face of an indifferent world.
But Varda denied the film's indoctrination. "People don't watch movies to be told they don't see enough or don't know enough... I try to make honest films, but I don't pretend to think I can change the world. ”
If Varda must have some identity and label, it would be feminism. She said she had been a feminist at the age of 19, and her actions proved it: in 1971, she signed the 343 Slut Declaration with Beauvoir and others, recognizing abortion and demanding that the French government legalize abortion, which was successful in 1975; in Cannes in 2018, she walked the red carpet with 81 female filmmakers, including Kate Blanchett, to protest sexism in the film industry.
When she won a series of blockbuster lifetime achievement awards, The Hollywood Reporter interviewed her: "Do you think it's because the film industry has finally been able to recognize your achievements?" ”
She smiled and replied, "I think it might be because I'm too old, so they can't wait to give me something." So I now have two full cabinets! If someone gives me a gift, I'll say thank you, but it seems a bit unfair in this matter. Other female directors deserve these accolades... But because I was the oldest, I became a vase that served as a façade, and they offered me to the top of the pedestal. ”
<h3>"All death leads me back to Jacques"</h3>
At the age of 90, Varda was asked by the media, is there still a dream?
She replied, "I want to die in peace." At my age, death is indeed my dream, not because of an accident, not because of illness, but unconsciously leaving in peace. ”
The shadow of death first approached her in 1990, when Jacques Demi died of complications from AIDS. Varda made three films about Demi, Jacques Demi of Nantes (1991), The Los Angeles Boy Was Twenty-Five (1993), and The World of Jacques Demi (1995), trying to capture memories of her husband. Jacques Demi of Nantes was filmed before Demi's death and completed a week after his death, and the camera caresses Demi's wrinkled skin, dry fingers, diseased marks and gray hair as if it were attached to him. Finally, Varda says to the camera: After Demi dies, I will learn to grow up.
After Demi's death, she was depressed for nearly a decade. It wasn't until the winter of 1998 that she sat in a café near her home in Montparnasse when she saw scavengers outside the house picking up food left over from the market. So she took the small digital camera that her peers despised, and happily and curiously followed the people who picked up food. In The Gleaner (2000), we can see that wanderers look for necessities in the garbage heap, well-wishers want to make the environment cleaner, and artists come here to find the raw materials for art. Varda was the gleaner behind them.
During Demi's lifetime, the couple spent a long time on the island of Nuwamtiya, where many fishermen died at sea, leaving behind their wives and children. In 2006, she interviewed the widows in depth ("I'm a widow myself, so the widows on the island trust me a lot.) "), the interview footage is placed on 14 small screens, all of which surround a large shot of the women walking by the sea (the set is influenced by the composition of the saints around the Virgin in traditional religious paintings). Spectators can sit back, put on their headphones, listen to any lady like Varda, and feel the mourning of the passage of time. "I don't want people to say it's great, I want people to say, 'This is for me.'" ”
Installation art allowed Varda to start a "third life" after photography and directing. She also joked that she was too old to make movies, physically weak and inconvenient, but she could be a "young visual artist".
Agnès' Beach (2008), originally Varda's last film, is a 110-minute distillation of her childhood, her life with Demi, family photos, her work, and her fantasies. She wanted to leave these broken selves to future generations. But nine years later, her daughter Rosalie introduced her to JR, and after meeting three times, the two decided to work together. At this year's Berlin Film Festival, she launched the documentary "Agnès on Varda". The Golden Camera Award-winning film is a complete look back at Varda's creative career like a pause, and she explicitly tells the media: "I'm really going to be ready to say goodbye." ”
But other than that, she didn't care about age at all. "I like wrinkles and palms. I'm interested in what changes can occur in one hand, and that might be a lovely picture. So I enjoy my own aging and see things being destroyed naturally and gradually. ”
In The Gleaner, she records both rotten potatoes and her own aging skin and age-stained hands. "Aged potatoes are actually very beautiful. So you have to be careful. Don't feel the pain. It's like potatoes. She stretched out her palm to make a forward grasping motion, and rejected the sad interpretation-"Am I trying to grasp the past that has flown by?" No, I'm just for fun. ”
Living to the age of 90, Varda's old acquaintances have passed away one after another. She often sat in the bar with her friend and longtime Partner of Demi, Michelle Legrand, holding hands and saying nothing but accompanying each other. Last year, Legrand was gone. Her cat Tsiggugu was also one step ahead of her. She buried Tsiggu in the garden and made a stop-motion animation of it, sprinkling its tomb with shells and flowers.
In The Beach of Agnès she says, "All death leads me back to Jacques... Every tear, every bouquet of flowers, every rose, every begonia, is a flower dedicated to Jacques. ”
Finally, she was reunited with Demi.
(This article was first published in the 10th issue of Southern People Weekly in 2019)
Zhang Yuxin Southern People Weekly