How to describe Agnès Varda?
The first feature film [Short Horn Affair] is indeed a New Wave brushwork, but it is four years earlier than the official history of the New Wave; it is a "little red in the evergreen bush" among the many male directors of the New Wave, and it is a multi-habitat artist...
▲ She has many theories of her own
It is a "Varda installation" collaged with broken lenses, each of which reflects a different side of itself: painter, photographer, installation artist, director, actor (top left);
The wrinkled heart-shaped potato that sprouted tender buds was also like her—the folded skin of the eighty-year-old glowed with the joy of exploration (top right);
Or that beach called Agnès. She came from the sea, not building a house facing the sea, but following the direction of the wind, enjoying the wanderings and mysteries of the journey - that is the fixed posture of the ocean-type personality (bottom left);
Or the "projection hut" of the transparent glass house wrapped in discarded film— much of her life is accompanied by light and shadow (bottom right).
I have only picked one of Varda's many genius lenses and presented it as the first film director of the New Wave, Varda.
New Wave grandmother
Varda said: "One morning I woke up and heard a bird in the tree calling. An hour later, I went to see it again, and there were already 25 birds. ”
Later people knew that Varda was the first bird [of the French New Wave].
In 1958, a large number of new directors flocked out, and the New Wave stirred Up France and the world like a huge movement, not limited to the aesthetic changes in cinema.
Alan Renai, Agnès Varda, Jacques Demi in the New Wave (front row)
Because the producers needed someone to make a film that was "fun and made money at a small cost," Varda was given the opportunity to shoot [Chio at Five to Seven], and she was known as the only woman in the New Wave's Eight.
In fact, as early as four years before the rise of the New Wave, her filming of [Short Angle Affair] already had many New Wave film styles:
Cross-narratives, literary lines, small-cost ways of personal investment, and the fearless adventure and enthusiasm of the ignorant.
▲ [Short Horn Affair] stills
To this day, people still like to catch the gossip between her and the members of the New Wave:
Alan Renai edited her first film for her, and Godard made a cameo appearance in her [Chio at Five to Seven].
▲ [Chio at five to seven], take Godard's sunglasses to open
The old lady laughed and said:
If French cinema is a long line, people let me go to the front like a flag bearer, probably because I'm the smallest.
On the way
[Chio at 5-7] is one of Varda's most acclaimed films.
The film uses a near-real-time reporting method to track a woman who wanders the streets of Paris worried about her cancer.
In the process, she faded her aura as a star, from the pure and closed interior to the streets of Paris, and also discovered the meaning of life with the help of others.
▲ That's the typical character in Varda's movie, the woman on the road (stills of [Chio at 5-7])
Similarly, there is [Wandering Girl], a girl who has no destination and enjoys the freedom and danger of wandering
That's also the experience of the director himself:
As a teenager, she ran away from home and spent months in a fishing village, where she was responsible for rowing when fishermen went out to sea to fish, and this fluttering sea life gave her a hard texture to her character.
She then went to Paris to study photography – an experience that was also projected into the film "Wandering Girl": "A puzzling girl, led by the people who pass her way".
Paris gave her an artistic beginning, after which Varda sailed on a galleon bound for China, Vietnam, and Cuba, and she floated like a large golden boat that took her to the film.
Image fragments
Varda's films favor fragmented objects, and her films are filled with a kind of imagination that is free to insert self-talk shots, photographs, and short films.
"I saw the broken mirror, like the broken self. Not the physical self, but the broken memories in the memory, the fragments that cannot be put together..."
She picks up the fragments of life at any time, which is both a nostalgia for the deceased and an insight into the details of life.
▲[Ulysses] is based on a photograph taken by the director 30 years ago, consisting of photographs, narration, and motion photography
[You know, your staircase is beautiful] is a short film that pays homage to the 50th anniversary of the French Film Archive.
The film features footage of stairs from many films, such as the "Odessa Ladder" from battleship Potemkin, as well as the staircase clips from films such as Citizen Kane, Contempt, and Chaos.
And [the gleaner] originated from the seventy-year-old Varda wandering around the city and the countryside, using a handheld DV to record a clip of passers-by picking up discarded potatoes.
She became curious about the people who picked up trash on the street, and developed this documentary that won 30 awards around the world in 30 months.
"Picking a ear of wheat is itself an easily forgotten thing, and even the word sounds like an outdated word, especially in the age of mechanical popularization."
Gender attitudes
As a rare female standard-bearer of the New Wave movement, Varda focuses on female characters with the lens, and she uses the lens to record women's departure from home, singing, loneliness, wandering...
What's even more rare is that the women in Varda's films are not glorified by narcissism, and they are not extreme in atmospheres such as "May Storm".
Varda is more inclined to show the most authentic of them, and to express the relationship between the sexes more gently and soberly.
In life, Varda and her husband Jacques Demi are deeply in love, and the two are both New Wave leaders, guiding each other and having their own world.
Jacques Demi, like Varda, was an important member of the New Wave and won the Palme d'Or with [Cherbourg's umbrella].
Like the plot of Jacques, the woman and the male poet are looking for their dream partner and can't help it, and the two finally meet on a truck to Paris.
It's also like a true portrayal of their feelings; searching for a soul mate and meeting each other on the way to the same temple of art.
In the small courtyard on the left bank of the Seine, they had a lot of happy times.
Until Jacques fell ill with AIDS, as director Varda "had the only option to shoot him, to photograph his skin, his eyes, the childhood in which she could not participate".
So she brought Jacques's childhood memories to [Jacques of Nantes], but before the film could be finished, Jacques left.
At the end of the film, the camera focuses on the silent sea and the seaweed floating with the water, and then turns to the smiling Jacques:
"Between heaven and earth, the wind blows and the tide. Far away, the sea is rolling with waves, you are seaweed, your body swaying with the wind... I was caught up in two tears and two waves. ”