On April 15, the 72nd Cannes International Film Festival, which will be held in the southern French city of Cannes on May 14 this year, officially released a warm-up poster to the recently deceased "Godmother of the New Wave" French film artist Agnès Varda. The poster features Agnès Varda, who was 26 years old at the time, working on a film in the south of France, in August 1954 by cinematographer Jean Villar. The Festival de Cannes has always borrowed posters to pay tribute to excellent films, directors and stars, and also shows the lofty status of Varda in the film industry.
Main poster of the 72nd Cannes International Film Festival
Agnès Varda created some of the greatest cinematic masterpieces: Le Bonheur (Happiness), Sans toit ni Loi, Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cleo at Five to Seven). However, our unique and wise documentary left a deep and indelible impression on us. For me, they also impressed my soul. Although the word was not enough for the always rigorous Varda, she has passed away at the age of 90, as if there is no more meaning of entanglement and calculation.
Agnès Varda
<h1>Where should we begin with Agnès Varda? </h1>
Agnès Varda may have been dubbed the daunting title of "grandmother of the French New Wave" and hailed as a pioneer of the left, but her work was surprisingly "grounded." She is a curious filmmaker who has created a series of interesting and politically charged works due to her interest in marginalized and female subjects, coupled with her professional background in photography.
She coined her own term "cinécriture" for the films she produced to demonstrate her unique storytelling skills. Unlike many of his peers, Varda wasn't a movie fan at first. Instead, she draws inspiration from literature, music, art, single images, real life, and even pet cats and heart-shaped potatoes to use her imagination. Speaking about her subjects, she says, "I love photographing real people; I also like to deal with people we don't know very well. ”
Exploration, provocation, and exploration of society and human nature are all characteristic of her films, but Varda does not want to be stuck in a certain genre or style. In her career of more than 60 years, she has freely switched between feature-length, documentary and short films. Her work can be self-reflective and reflect the depths of human nature, but it can also have rich historical details embedded in her empathetic and somewhat interesting films.
"Opportunity has always been my best assistant," said Varda, who cleverly uses her presence, community, family and friends to find inspiration. Whether she's setting her sights on Los Angeles, Normandy, or the street where she lives, the Rue Daguerre in Paris (where her home has been used as a set and appeared several times in many of her films), she can seize every opportunity and material. At times, she seems a little disorganized, but it all adds more charm to her infectiously eccentric works.
<h1>The best start – Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cleo at 5 to 7).</h1>
On the face of it, Varda's second work, Cleo at Five to Seven (1962), seems simple. It's a live character documentary by singer Cleo Cléo (played by Corinne Marchand) in which she tries everything to distract herself from the fear and panic of the outcome of an unknown biopsy (biopsy). She goes to visit old friends, watch a short film or take a walk in the park. This is a vivid account of Paris in the early 60s. But this multi-layered French New Wave classic also profoundly reflects the inner world of a woman who is afraid of death. Cleo is just one example of the many female figures in Varda's drama films.
Cleo at Five to Seven
<h1>What's next? </h1>
Sans toit ni loi is probably the most famous of Varda's mid-career films. It is a film with strong emotions, combining fact and fiction to provoke reflection by forcing the audience to question their own social responsibility. The film has won several awards and critical acclaim for its conflicting approach to expression.
The protagonist of the story, Mona Mona, is a beautiful and angry girl. At the beginning of the film, she is found dead in a trench in a village. The work traces the last days of a homeless woman's life. The foul-mouthed, unapologetic protagonist girl, played by Sandrine Bonnaire, is wonderful. Varda spends a lot of time meeting the wanderers in search of the tramps (some of whom appear in the film). During this time, in a conversation between an old gentleman and a homeless lady (Varda met a young homeless woman on the road), they found that they had more in common than expected, which was simply touching.
"The Wandering Girl of the End" - Mona Mona
Another important point in Varda's film career was probably the feminist musical L'une chante, l'autre pas (one singing, one not singing) (1977). The theme of the work is that women struggle to have autonomy over their bodies. This brings up a topic that is very sensitive and of interest to modern audiences. The film revolves around the friendship between women, who share their interests and secrets with each other, and are later forced to separate, but they meet again many years later at a rally for abortion rights. They return to their former intimate relationships. They all experienced Simone De Beauvoir's famous saying: "Women are not born women, they become women later." Varda constructs a feminist history through the lives of two women from the 1960s to the 1970s.
"One Sings, One Doesn't Sing"
One of the most important of Varda's documentaries, from Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000), she embraced a new technology in her seventies – picking up a digital video camera, "hanging out" in french cities and villages, and taking her own images of today's scavengers. Inspired by the famous painting "The Gleaner" by the 19th-century French painter Miller, the film depicts the scavengers of France's current era: from farmers picking potatoes in rural farmland, to city dwellers rummaging through the garbage heaps of food supermarkets that are still edible, to artists looking for waste to make works of art, scavengers tell their views on scavenging in front of Varda's camera. Varda divides all kinds of scavengers into three categories: "Some people scavenging because life forces them, some scavenging because they are artists, and some scavenging because they like to scavenge." "Homeless people and people living in poverty pick up all kinds of necessities of life to make ends meet, artists look for raw materials for creating works of art from scrap copper and rotten iron, and the motivation of people who like to collect waste is more out of the virtue of "practicing thrift and opposing waste". Varda said: "It's a film about waste. "Everyone in Scavengers and Me is scavenging, and Varda, who wanders in front of and behind the camera, is picking up and reminiscing about forgotten people and things.
The Scavenger and Me – Heart-shaped potato
After seeing the above works, you may already know more about Varda, and then you should be more interested in les Plages d'Agnès ( Beach of Agnès ) , a self-portrait-like documentary. She added to the film's editing that she grew up in Sète, Port Sète, and that her first film, La Pointe Courte, was also filmed in Port Sete with personal details, in order to "review" her career's closeness to the coast. She also has many excellent works worth seeing: the film Jacquot de Nantes (Jacquot de Nantes) to restore the childhood of her beloved husband Jacques Demy; the documentary photography "Daguerréotypes" based on the streets where she has lived for many years; and her son Matthew Demi Mathieu Demy as the protagonist, telling a story that takes place in Los Angeles. Documenteur and so on.
The Beach of Agnès
The Slovaks are gone, but the classics live on. The Cannes Film Festival in France has always liked to use posters to pay tribute to the stars who shine in the film industry, and this year's film festival is to send the last blessing to the eternally naïve "Godmother of the New Wave". The poster borrows behind the scenes from Varda's film The Affair of the Short Horn. In the picture, Varda's eyes are slightly squinted behind the camera, and behind her is a warm golden yellow and magnificent purple - that is her favorite sea. Varda had to resort to a wooden box and the back of the staff because she was too tall to reach the camera, and her earnest work gesture seemed a bit funny and made people laugh. In fact, this is not Varda's last message: life can be bad, people come, people go. Be naïve, not overly calculating, crying loudly and laughing loudly because, C'est la vie (that's life).
(Text: XINJUN Zhuoyuan)
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