Film Review: VARDA BY AGNÈS
Credit: Ciné Tamaris
This film is something akin to a master class on the life and work of revered filmmaker, installation artist, and photographer. The first scene opens with her sitting alone on a stage facing a rapt audience as she talks to them and us directly, explaining and exploring what motivates, inspires and drives her to the do the various kinds of work which she has produced prolifically for most of her 90 years. Ironically, and somehow appropriately, she died shortly after finishing this film.
Credit: Ciné Tamaris
The film’s structure is built on a series of talks given in front of audiences as well as direct to the camera interviews. The three principles which guide her are Inspiration, which seems to include everything she can see. Creation, which she describes is how the work gets done. Again, in her case there is certainly more variety and originality than a fixed game plan. The last principle is Sharing, which she takes to mean getting the work seen by the people for whom she has made it. Interspersed with the talks are clips of her at work on various projects. One memorable and particularly charming one, Jane B par Agnès V, with Jane Birkin was sort of a playful cubist collaboration of a film. Also included are clips from one of her most popular films, Cléo de 5 à 7, which places her squarely in the vanguard of the Nouvelle Vague, a position she rapturously shares with fellow filmmaker Jacques Demy, who was to become her husband until his death.
Credit: Ciné Tamaris
Her endless curiosity led her into the most unusual directions. After filming The Gleaners, she became obsessed with potatoes, an object that featured prominently in the film. This led to an art installation based on the life cycle of potatoes and how they never seem to die, they just become something else, strange and wonderful. There were many other art installation pieces which were selected and shown in Venice Biennale’s and bought or financed by The Cartier Foundation and seen in major galleries and museums around the world. This was unknown territory for me and totally brilliant. She made a series of Art Sheds out of exposed movie film strips that are marvelous examples of repurposing (akin to the potatoes).
Credit: Ciné Tamaris
Until the end she retained the wide-eyed vision of a curious and wildly creative child who found delight in everything she saw. Her last project Faces/Places, a collaboration with photographer JR, an odd road trip of discovery, expressed so much humanity and compassion for all kinds people, the marginalized, the eccentric, the ugly and the beautiful. It was a fitting final project. But this posthumous autobiographical document is the real gift. She is open and generous and it feels like the next best thing to having known her.
