After 57 years of making films about herself and the world around her, you wouldn’t think that Agnès Varda would have any surprises left up her sleeve. And yet that’s exactly what we get when we enquire about her storied past: ‘I still can’t figure out what made me want to make films,’ the 83-year-old says from her studio in Paris, ‘or at least that first film, since I was not a cinephile.’
The remark seems extraordinary given that Varda is now enshrined as a major figure in French filmmaking alongside such New Wave luminaries as Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Alain Resnais and her late husband, Jacques Demy. But when you see ‘that first film’, 1955’s La Pointe Courte, it makes perfect sense. Varda had originally gone to the titular fishing village to take photos for her friend, who was too ill to visit. Enchanted, she rented a camera and started a shoestring-budget film about a troubled couple’s attempt to reconcile their relationship. The film showed a natural talent unburdened by cinematic conventions, and yet the aesthetic fabric it cut would be worn by Varda for the rest of her career, despite her developing abilities. Like her later films, it is loose, self-reflective, boldly feminist, shot in a documentary style and highly verbal.
Words are important in both Varda’s fictional and non-fictional films, whether in the form of chattering dialogue (Cléo from 5 to 7; Vagabond) or emotion-charged narration (The Gleaners and I; The Beaches of Agnès); it’s a topic on which Varda certainly has a lot to say. ‘To be a documentarian in the way I chose to be, I have to be extroverted – not just to approach people and ask questions, but also to be able to set up a dialogue. Even when a film is about a person or a group, it’s about me, the go-between; the people I film; and the viewers. I’m part of the film because I make the film.’
Indeed, Varda’s most celebrated documentary is The Gleaners and I, in which – as the title suggests – Varda is as much a subject as the potato foragers being filmed. These notions of self-involvement and intertwining herself into the work are also key features of her art installations, some of which will come to the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) this month, as a part of the 2012 Croisements Festival running in Beijing, Wuhan, and Shanghai (film screenings only). Many of the projects, which include her photographic works and visual installations, are actually reminiscent of her films – ‘Patatutopia’ features images of old rotten potatoes, recalling The Gleaners and I, while both ‘Seashore’ and ‘The Widows of Noirmoutier’ contain seaside shots that bring to mind The Beaches of Agnès, a semi-autobiographical film.
But while the themes are familiar, the medium is an exciting new one for Varda, who only began her career as a gallery artist in 2003, at the age of 75, with ‘Patatutopia’ at the Venice Art Biennale. ‘[Visual installations] allow me to propose another way to communicate and to share images, surprises and impressions, using space as an element,’ she explains. ‘I’m glad that the beautiful rooms offered to me allow viewers to see the pieces from a distance.’
Not that Varda was ever a stranger to white walls. After her family moved to the south of France during World War II, she spent her teenage years in Sète and Paris before majoring in art history and photography, working as a photographer from 1949 to 1954, when she began production on La Pointe Courte.
Throughout her developing film career, she never lost interest in photography. In 1957, she was sent to China to document the country’s development. These photographs – previously unpublished – have now been incorporated into another installation, ‘The Chinese Gate’, which takes the form of a wooden shack, built like a construction toy painted in red. ‘It will be in the hall as my welcome to the visitors, in a facetious way,’ she says. ‘It is, in fact, a childish imitation of the beautiful Chinese pagodas.’
Indeed, while Varda is playful and childlike despite her age, her affection for her experiences in China is obvious. ‘I got as many images as I could of the people and the places, from Manchuria [the three provinces of northeast China] to Yunnan, and also from Chongqing to Shanghai on the Yangtze river.
‘People in the streets were easy to meet. Smiles were the language,’ she continues. ‘They were maybe surprised to see a very young foreign woman carrying a lot of cameras and lenses. The translator would sometimes tell them what I was there for, and when he was not with me, or was with another traveller, I would go alone into some villages. People would offer me hot water, and kids would laugh at me, pointing at my nose.
Such a subtle sense of warmth and humanity runs through her works. In Varda’s 1991 drama Jacquot de Nantes, she fictionalises the early life of her dying husband, Jacques Demy, by creating a child character named Jacquot. The year before the film was released, Demy passed away, and a major part of Varda’s work in recent years has been restoring his films from the original negatives on to DVD. ‘Jacques always valued his own childhood as the roots of his personality. He wrote about it, told me a lot about it, and suggested that I should make a film out of his stories,’ Varda muses. ‘I certainly discovered a child named Jacquot, and I started to love him as a real child.’
In 2008, Varda announced that The Beaches of Agnès would be her last theatrical film. But, as evidenced by her CAFA show, she’s far from finished with art. ‘I’ve been working on television, DVD and installations,’ she says, ‘they’re just another way of working. I have exhibitions coming up in France and Spain, and I’m also working on a DVD box set containing all my films.’ And with more than 40 to her name, the grande dame remains as free-spirited and confident now as she was in her days as a vibrant Left Bank feminist and cohort of Jim Morrison. ‘All I need to do,’ as she tells us, ‘is to let my creativity live its own life.
Time: March 10-April 18
Adimission: 10-15RMB
Address: CAFA Art Museum, No.8 Hua Jia Di Nanjie, Chaoyang district
朝阳区花家地南街8号
