In 2018, when Varda's warm and touching documentary "Face, Village" was released, she said that it was "the last theatrical film". Just after the words fell in 2019, "Agnès on Varda", a self-summarizing documentary, is also a complete master lesson for future generations of filmmakers. Today's news came that Agnès Varda, 90-year-old "grandmother of the French New Wave", died at her home in the 14th arrondissement of Paris. It was a pink house where she had lived for seventy years, and had his director husband, Jacques Demi, with him. Demy died in 1990, and now she's gone.
This is an article written around the time of the release of "Faces, Villages" last year, and even viewers who have never heard of Varda will like her, because she may be the most cute old lady in the world.
Agnès Varda (1928.5~2019.3)
How the journey begins
The old lady, 89 years old, walked on the top of a contrasting mushroom head, small, but people knew it was her from a distance; the young man, 34 years old, standard with a gentleman's hat and sunglasses, was tall, and walked on the streets of Paris at a rate of seventy-five percent.
The first time an old man and a young man met, the old lady wanted to take a picture of the young man, but the latter refused to take off his sunglasses. It reminds her of her old friend Godard, yes, the one that immediately comes to mind in your mind, Jean-Luc Godard. The founder of the New Wave of French cinema, who wore sunglasses throughout the '60s, was the only time, on a relaxed and cheerful occasion for a gathering of friends, that he took off his sunglasses and asked her to take several portraits, including Anna Karine, Godard's then-lover.
The old lady was Agnès Varda, known as the "Grandmother of the French New Wave". Her first narrative novel, La Pointe-courte, was made in 1954, an adaptation of Faulkner's Wild Palms that directly influenced the narrative style of left-bank filmmakers. Five years later, Truffaut and Godard had les quatre cents coups and a bout de souffle. So the name Agnès Varda is in any case closely associated with the New Wave, and to this day it is – today's Varda has three artistic lifelines, in addition to film, but also photography and installation art, but the three big words "New Wave" are elements that people will repeatedly emphasize when listing her various identities.
Varda and Jr are in a photography pickup truck
Jr, the young man, is a semi-anonymous street artist. Born in 1983, he began graffiti on the streets as a teenager, believing that "the street is the largest art gallery", and is now known for posting huge portraits of people on the façade of the building, called "the Bresson of the 21st Century" by fabrice bousteau, the editor-in-chief of the French "Fine Arts", and after winning the 2010 award at the age of 27, he took the work "The Wrinkles of the City" to Shanghai.
The two, who are more than 50 years apart in age, are the co-creators of the documentary "Visages, Villages," which has received much attention.
If a work is completed by two artists, how do they adapt to each other? This may be a philosophical proposition similar to "how the two parties in love attract each other", depending on the "qi occasion is not compatible". These two happen to be the pair that fit. How about a co-production method? When they met, they obviously felt, "Why haven't we met on many occasions?" In the '80s, Varda had a strong interest in "walls," and the 1981 documentary "Mur murs" was her show of Graffiti artists in Los Angeles, before Jr was born.
Their response to concerns about age difference was "Why age is a problem" or "I didn't even realize age."
Agnès Varda and Jr, one old and one young, are quite contrasting and cute, and they always attract attention everywhere they go
So the documentary begins with the two "where have they ever met?". They didn't meet in the city, some in the city, such as bakeries, dance halls, and some in the countryside, such as field paths. One is old and one is young, one is walking slowly, one is striding forward; one can climb halfway up to claim to have "completed this week's sports quota", and one who is far ahead of the end and has to turn back halfway down will be the old lady. These scenes give this documentary a homely breath of life. Varda says she's going to photograph "something that brings peace to people in a chaotic world, and there is this concern in the quiet but surging life of people in the village."
The two finally really met in life under the arrangement of Varda's daughter. Jr visits Varda's home on 14th arrondissement daguerre, a pink house where the hostess lived for almost 70 years, formerly with her husband Jacques Demi, the director of les parapluies de cherbourg and les demoiselles de rochefort, which became a studio after Jacques's death. In 2017, the oscar-winning best director Damien Chazelle was inspired by Jacques Demi to shoot "The City of Philharmonic", which made him enjoy great glory, and when he was promoted to Paris, Chazelle went to visit Alda, jr was also present, and he and the old lady had known each other for more than a year.
The documentary actually took 18 months, three or five days a month, with Jr picking up Varda and driving the pickup truck he had transformed into a photomatone (automatic camera). Photomaton is very French, many fans at a glance this is the most important source of inspiration and props for "Angel Amelie", to this day, some French people are still accustomed to going into the photomaton of the subway station to take ID photos. In jr's pickup truck, after drilling in and taking a photo, you can print a huge photo in five minutes. Jr and Varda will travel to the Fields and Villages of France in search of characters and buildings, and then use Jr to fit them together. In the words of the old lady, "As long as it is to go to the village, to the simple scenery, to find the face, I am always ready to go.".
Stills from Varda's 1981 graffiti documentary "The Whispers of the Wall" in Los Angeles
"Ordinary people without power"
On the surface, Jr occupies a more important place in this documentary. For example, the photographic pickup truck is his usual weapon; outside of filming, scaffolding, climbing, pasting on walls is done by Jr and his team, and even the content is similar to several of the artist's important works in the past: choose a suitable wall and think about what to paste on it. But the texture of the documentary is still Agnès Varda's.
From her debut, the subject of Agnès Varda's work is far from the city, and she cares for "ordinary people without power". Jr's usual "visual gigantic" naturally has an impact, and Varda wants to give ordinary people heroic courtesy, so they always set off from Paris, driving through the countryside and into some forgotten corners.
They chatted with people and heard about a miner's daughter who was old but still reluctant to leave the almost deserted miners' neighborhood. So they took a picture of him, enlarged her face several times and pasted it on the facades of her house, and when everything was ready, she opened the door and walked across the street, choking up at the first sight of her face.
There was a seasonal waitress in the town café, and Varda borrowed a dress and a 1973 white lace parasol from the townspeople and took pictures of her. On the wall she became the star of the town.
A farmer who has a lot of modern planting equipment, "this is quite anti-social, because I used to have to hire three or four people during the busy season, and now I can do all the work alone." They took a full-body photo of him on the wooden house where he was guarding the farm, and at the end of the scene Varda chanted, "A picture of a man and thousands of acres of land, how lonely." ”
Ordinary people do always feel warm in their lives. The postman in the village, who has worked for decades, rode a bicycle as a teenager and drives a bright yellow van today. He not only delivered letters, but also meat, vegetables and liquefied gas to the elderly residents, "Once upon a time, I would put a small radio on my bicycle, and the villagers would know that the postman was coming." After delivering the letter, my cowhide messenger bag was filled with melons and tomatoes that the farmers had given me." Finally, the four- or five-meter-tall portrait of Mr. Postman was pasted on a house on the side of the road, with a heroic look on his face.
The postman who appears in "Face, Village" walks by the wall with his own portrait printed on it
Most of the protagonists in the documentary are random people they meet, and Varda tells Jr in the film, "Chance is my best assistant.". She has always believed in this idea, and she later told the young people present in a "master class" about this, "Chance is always positive in the life of the creator, it is my contact with time." Documentaries, in particular, often rely on contingencies and are always prepared to deal with them, because what people say can be unexpected, which sometimes helps the work a lot. Chance depends on time, on the wind, and on many things, and to make a movie you have to be able to take on these accidents, they are not always rational, but they are magical."
Varda then gave an example. She once asked some women whose husbands had died in the film how they slept after they fell single. Most people would say that they still slept on their side, but one of them told her, "He slept at the window, and there was a small tree by the window, which I could not see before, and now the tree belongs to me."
Although she is well known for long-form narrative films such as "The Short Corner Affair" and "Cleo at Five to Seven", in the field of cinema, Varda prefers the documentary format because "it is related to real people" and "filmmaking is also related to actors, but most of the time they are dominated by fictional characters, and real-life people are unique and unexpected, and their perception of life makes me feel that they are all somewhat artist.".
In "Faces, Villages," they also arrive at the docks. The camera is focused on the dockers' wives. The full bodies of the three wives were finally printed on the container stacked tens of meters high, hollowed out in the middle, and they both sat in separate places, sitting in their respective hearts. One said, "I don't like heights, I don't like loneliness, and now I'm feeling both at the same time, and I'm upset," while the other "feels like I'm in charge." These few pictures are all narrating a kind of power that surges under the peace, which is particularly touching.
Godard as a symbol
Sometimes, they also use Varda's old friends as creative subjects, and the director himself is willing to "enter" the documentary in this way. Self-experience and the outside world form an intertextual approach that she uses in many of her documentaries. Les plages d'agnès (2008) is a classic example, in which the director reconstructs the trajectory of his life, autobiography, reminiscing about the past, and exploring boundaries.
The Beach of Agnès, 2008
In Faces, Villages, there are still Varda's self-exploring recollection paths. For example, they went to a particularly small cemetery, with less than 10 tombstones, two of which were the great photographer Bresson and his wife. Another object of remembrance is the famous fashion photographer Guy Bourdin, who is the same age as Varda, but died early in the 90s. The two often played together when they were young, and he also modeled for Varda many times, in one of which shows him sitting on the floor with his back to the beach hut. This beach is located outside a small town called sainte-marguerite-sur-mer in the Normandy region of northern France, and on this beach stands a huge square bunker that fell from a cliff here, in a corner of the ground. They placed this young Guy Berdyn here, and from a distance it looked like he was sitting in a cradle. The next day, it was washed away by the sea. The piece existed only for one day.
Of course, the more important old friend is Godard, who is still alive but alive in the world, as if he were a chivalrous warrior who saw no end in sight. He appears at the beginning and end of the documentary in a special way, both as an invisible clue and as a ubiquitous symbol.
It's probably hard for young people to imagine what it's like to have a friend you've known for more than 50 years. When they were young, the Jacques Demi and Godards saw each other almost every day, and the two couples would meet for a vacation. Decades later, Jacques Demi and Anna died one after another, and the two who were still alive rarely saw each other again, "seeing each other once every four or five years." Sometimes, if Godard returned to Paris from Switzerland, where he now lives, Varda said she might go to see him for five minutes.
When Varda became friends with Jr, she thought it would be nice if they could meet each other too. Godard's assistant said Godard had promised them a visit. At first it was 11:30 a.m., but then it was 9:30 a.m., so they arrived in Switzerland a day early and found a hotel to stay in. They waited for the appointed time to arrive at a café near Godard's house.
At 9:25, they finally stood in front of Godard's house, but found that the door was locked, and the knock on the door shouting "Jean-Luc" was not answered. When they found two lines on the window panes, "à la ville de douarnenez, du coté de la coté", Varda finally faced the reality that Godard was not going to see them anymore. In other words, he made a promise, and visitors from afar ate a closed door. She burst into tears and was excited. "Douarnenez was a small restaurant we used to go to on the Avenue Montparnasse in Paris, and when Jacques died, Godard wrote me these two words, and if it was written to make me uncomfortable, then he succeeded."
Jr took the old lady to sit down on a bench by the lake, and the idea calmed her down. The reasons used sounded pretentious and moving, but on second thought, Godard was indeed clever. He doesn't show his face, but he adds a brilliant touch to the face-themed documentary, "much more meaningful than a real-life meeting." From an artistic point of view, Varda as a director calmed down, but from an emotional point of view, as an ordinary person, Varda really could not quickly forgive this old friend.
After the film was completed, Varda mailed Godard a DVD without any response.
When you make a movie, you have the world
But Varda's own work is full of warmth, at least the style of many of her documentaries is always bright and smooth. The reason why "Face, Village" is loved by so many people is because this old lady's nostalgia for the past is always full of life, just like her hairstyle.
In 1996, at the age of 68, Varda took her haircut inspiration from a portrait of a 16th-century man, half white and half red-brown, a contrasting color pairing that has been popular in trendy ladies' backpacks for several years. Varda has been applying it to her own hair color for 20 years.
In 1951, Varda began his career as a photographer in his early twenties by taking photographs of stage productions at the Avignon Theatre Festival. As for starting to make movies, she is not a fanatical fan type at all, on the contrary, before she made her debut, she had only seen seven or eight movies, "so when I started making movies, there was no reference at all, and no master influenced me, I was very free, and I kept this freedom."
Unlike the commercial success of her late husband, Jacques Demi, most of Varda's films are the "French art films" that people think of as "french art films" that "didn't make much money, but won a lot of awards".
More than half a century later, I didn't expect that she was still creating and still winning awards. In addition to premiering in the non-competition section of the Cannes Film Festival, "Faces, Villages" also won four awards in North America, which was the first time for Varda. Moreover, she is also included in the list of 4 lifetime achievement award winners confirmed by the Oscars in 2017, and the French media is very excited, because this is the first French person to win the award, and in fact, it is the first time that the award has appeared as a female winner.
Agnès on Varda, 2019, a self-summarizing documentary
Last year, Varda, who is about to turn 90, said that this may be her last theatrical film, because going to theater means a roadshow, "Every time I promote a film, it takes me at least half a year, and at my age, a little time and energy have to be spent on creation." She used to dislike things other than creation, such as the "money-raising process" before making a movie. She even proposed a "monthly salary" to the CNC (French National Film Center), in exchange for a medium-production film every two years. The other party did not agree.
"In this movie I play the role of a little old woman." She opened like this in "The Beach of Agnès". That was 10 years ago, when people were already asking the same question: "People don't do anything at your age, and how can you still have a job?" Her response was: "I feel like what I have is not a job, I make movies, I have the world." ”
(This article was originally published in Sanlian Life Weekly, No. 3, 2018, originally titled "Agnès Varda, Face, Village")
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