Firstly, if you’re here because you were lured in by my promise of something special this week in the previous newsletter, or if you’ve suddenly come to in a house with walls of celluloid and a floor layered with ugly potatoes and this has been accessed on your 4G LTE-capable Tracfone, let me kindly direct you to the About page.
As I mentioned, this week is a little different, and I’ve decided to tweak the format a bit because this is, after all, experimental media. I’m pleased to announce that since beginning this newsletter in October 2020 I’ve plunged headlong through the looking glass that is the oeuvre of late French filmmaker and multimedia artist Agnès Varda, with whom I am now reasonably besotted. Chronicled here is a list of musings on the Varda films I’ve seen—shorts, too—that is not alphabetical, nor is it exhaustive, but instead follows the order in which I watched them to better track my progressive wading and eventual swan dive into veneration. A significant majority of the films were viewed in May of this year, which is when, as devoted readers may remember, I returned to Central NY for a week after being (re)delivered via the birth canal of academia. That month, which also happens to be the month of Varda’s birthday—a gemini!—finally saw my long-overdue familiarization with the spirited and probing artistry of a filmmaker I had only seen in online odes and recognized as the octogenarian with the dichromatic, vaguely monastic hairstyling (a literal crowning achievement of the flamboyant style that has a personality so big it makes her short stature seem like a profound mistake).
I never thought I’d comfortably call someone my favorite filmmaker, but then a handful of films turned into an arm’s load that soon became more than I could carry and had to be set down somewhere, a pile I can now dig through, bending at the hip to glean joyful or clever bits I might have missed in my initial or even subsequent passes. This admiration was not ardent love-at-first-sight, nor was it simply an infatuation burned through by crowding my week with films; it was instead an appreciation that sprouted slowly, its shoots poking through as beady eyes that then began yearning to see beyond themselves, reaching for more and more. This is, in fact, a fair way to describe much of Varda’s work, too, films in which the subjects are not the art themselves but the docents of worlds we are fortunate enough to witness through Varda’s eyes, which are not content to occupy a single vantage. “I’m a discreet person, but I can do crazy things,” Varda has said, which is a reminder that we are never monolithic, that art does not always have to imitate life—at least not our life—and that we are always free to keep asking questions, as long as we keep our ears open to whatever answers back, even if it’s fecund, capacious silence.
Cléo from 5 to 7
dir. Agnès Varda, 1962
As I’ve written in this newsletter before: I think this was the first film I ever watched through hit on-demand streaming platform Kanopy, so for that I will be self-congratulating into a vegetative state.
I had no idea who Agnès Varda was when I watched this in 2016, I only knew that I’d heard of the film wherever it is people who decide to study the arts after rejecting delusions of pre-med grandeur hear about films. To be honest—and ultimately that is what I have always been here—I was a bit bored by it. Granted, I believe I sat down to watch it around 5pm after being in class all day, so the integrity of my attention span was already at risk—please lower your pitchforks and/or torches, they are no more menacing than my own shame. I have since come to appreciate the diligent, meditative crafts(wo)manship of this film, and although I haven’t seen it again since that fateful day, the appreciation continues to metastasize (is this tactless?).
Les 3 Boutons
dir. Agnès Varda, 2015
Created as part of the Miu Miu Women’s Tales short film series, this is the second thing I watched of Varda’s shortly after she died in 2019. I’d witnessed an outpouring of grief by those around me and those I’ve never met, and wondered if I had missed out on an opportunity—is there something more invigorating about admiring someone, loving their work, while they’re still alive and making it?
I thought this short was just a little bit twee, and did not seek out much more of Varda’s work immediately after this. In hindsight—a lens that is scuffed, cloudy, and caked in grime from how frequently it’s been used in this newsletter—the playful fantasy that carries this little short is a very Vardian approach to the chromatic sensory web that is living through youth and wearing it like a second skin.
Uncle Yanco
dir. Agnès Varda, 1967
A friend recommended I watch this, and it revolutionized my understanding of Agnès as a filmmaker, as a storyteller, and as a purveyor and pugilist of truth. Here was someone not bound to the austere disinterest I had for so long identified in the French New Wave, but instead a woman intent on captivating with color, cutout hearts, and (re)staged interactions all tossed into the blender of personal narrative and self-portraiture. Was this documentary, or was this something else entirely?
Vagabond
dir. Agnès Varda, 1985
This one, I wrote after I watched it, lingers like a cold touch, a sentiment that immediately launched me onto the Poet Laureate shortlist in 2020. My initial reaction was made tepid by the fact that I had hoped for more of the on-the-sleeve constructedness of Uncle Yanco where the making of the film is the film itself. It wasn’t until this film simmered a bit longer in my psyche that I began to recognize that the self-assembly ethos that was now drawing me to Agnès’s work was present through Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire), a character consistently in-process and consistently rejecting that process. This is about a life—specifically that of a young woman—on the outskirts, shirking the established roles that would threaten to swallow her and setting them ablaze.
L’Opéra-Mouffe
dir. Agnès Varda, 1958
It’s no secret that by the summer of 2020, I had succumbed to a quarantine-induced myopia that shuffled the immediate transpiring of the day onto the only focal plane with any relevancy, and I subscribed to the Criterion Channel. Newly added was a collection of the complete works of Agnès Varda, which I added to my watchlist upon its landing on the site, where it began its slow-burning of a hole in my to-do list.
I was at one point in late Summer/early Fall looking for something short to watch, and thought it was as good a time as ever to begin picking through Varda’s short-filmography. This one was aptly a piece of music.
Black Panthers
dir. Agnès Varda, 1968
Not yet knowing how deftly and astutely Agnès navigated the subject-object relationship inherent in filmmaking, I watched this short cautiously, expecting a wide-eyed what-in-the-world outsider’s gaze. I was instead greeted with a measured display, both reverent and celebratory, of a movement in which the filmmaker clearly witnessed a great deal of merit and wanted to amplify the voices in their own words (or at least, I’m willing to concede, in their own words as edited together into the limits of time-based art).
There I was, already growing more and more enamored with a boisterous style, a commitment to form and structure, a fascination with the body and the self and the world through which it moves, and now, here was evidence of someone so intent on observing and chronicling that observation. Varda doesn’t subscribe to the supremacy of objectivity, instead forwarding her direction so that the discerning eye of the film is always uniquely her own, and the subjects of its gaze are not her playthings but her shepherds through the spaces they occupy. In an interview, Agnès was asked, “As a filmmaker, how do you avoid voyeurism and exoticism?” and she responded, “I speak to them.”
Le Bonheur
dir. Agnès Varda, 1965
I watched this in the final few weeks of 2020, and, as intended, I was troubled by the potential misconstruing of passion as capital-L Love. I was, in equal measure, titillated by the idea that Agnès was out there slapping a floral-printed INCHOATE sticker over the mouth of anyone daring to qualify their happiness. Aesthetically, this film is a dazzling stained-glass window; substantively, it is beautiful iconoclasm.
La Pointe-Courte
dir. Agnès Varda, 1955
This one launched my Varda binge flotilla as I lay in my bed and enumerated each of the films I hoped to watch before the month was out—what better way to begin than with her first feature, one that everyone likes to say (laughably) she made with no experience? Here, Agnès led me to think about love as a ship and that ship as the Ship of Theseus—is it rebuilt to be the same?—for which I will always be equally grateful and aggrieved.
Daguerréotypes
dir. Agnès Varda, 1975
At first, I was watching this pretty absently while waiting until it was time to go to a grad party celebrating both my graduation (from an MFA program) and my sister’s (from medical school—contentiously meritorious, I know). By the end of the doc, though, I had become entrapped by the lusterless allure of the charming people on Rue Daguerre and how their embraced mundanity (would it be too gauchely French to say “quotidian”?) was its own kind of magic show.
Lions Love (…and Lies)
dir. Agnès Varda, 1969
Viewing this romp through the sun, sex, and sin of Hollywood/America made me worry that if I’m not careful, I’ll soon get to a point where I’ll only be able to stomach films I can watch being made as I watch them. Shirley Clarke’s showing up was fun, but I’m still a little mad at her about Portrait of Jason, which is, now that I’m thinking about it, antithetical to the way Agnès would have attempted a portrait: less coercion, less forcing someone into the filmmaker’s preconceived mold.
Mur Murs
dir. Agnès Varda, 1981
There is a certain pleasure in watching a film where, for roughly ninety minutes, you get to adopt a different set of eyes and see the world anew—I’m sure there are essays about this. Very seldom before have I been enchanted by this specific element of film-viewing—not one of thrill, narrative tugs, or even honed technical acumen (although this film certainly has that), but the sheer delight of being guided and directed to look (and then, of course, to think). This adds a certain degree of bitter irony, a flavor of high tragedy, to the fact that in her later years, Agnès, whose curious and compassionate gaze compelled discovery, always new understanding, dealt with a degenerative eye disease that increasingly blurred her vision.
As one should, I watched this, and then went right on to watch:
Documenteur
dir. Agnès Varda, 1981
I was too distracted to be watching this when I did, and then, thankfully, a dear friend called me out/called me back to take another glance. What a thing to have overlooked/not looked at enough—the wandering, the yearning, the fumbled attempts at building a life out of something you’re not supposed to miss. Of all these films, this is one I will certainly (re)return to.
One Sings, the Other Doesn’t
dir. Agnès Varda, 1977
I only fell asleep a little bit during this, the only film of Varda’s I watched that I did not love. This of course made me worry I had committed a Misogyny with my drifting off during Agnès’s most overtly political film, so naturally I conducted a goog and found that this film was, among many other things, a conscious attempt at capturing the joy of feminism. This was, ultimately, not a stance to which Varda held fast: “I tried to be a joyful feminist,” she would admit years later, “but I was very angry.” This is of course not to condemn finding pleasure in the painful, nor is it espousing the laughably reductive notion that feminism can only take a single righteous form (the genius is in fact often no more powerful than the ingenue), but instead to note that even the most competent and commanding filmmakers shouldn’t be held to standards of perfection (and let’s all remember who dictates the bounds of the perfect!).
Jane B. par Agnès V.
dir. Agnès Varda, 1988
This film rightly suggests that the camera is a mirror and everything we make, from behind or in front of it, is a reflection that both is and is not at all who we are. To be honest, I knew of Jane Birkin only by name recognition, and if shown a picture of her I would have said, “That is Charlotte Gainsbourg.”* Is a film a portrait, and if so, of whom? The first panel of a second Varda diptych, the second of which is:
*Can’t believe I’m doing this, but that is her daughter.
Kung-Fu Master!
dir. Agnès Varda, 1988
My feelings about this were scattered and pinballing—it’s so tender but also unavoidably provocative; it addresses the AIDS epidemic but as a backdrop and maybe a point of reference for dangerous love affairs? The pedophilia that structures this film seems somehow walled off, protected by intentionality, provided you have an understanding of the collaboration between Birkin and the Vardas (I can’t imagine watching this with a blank slate). The AIDS commentary also feels ensconced in the fact that Varda’s partner, Jacques Demy, would die of AIDS only a couple years later. How much of my own admiration of Agnès is qualifying each of these weighty subjects as nuanced and personal? Regardless, we can’t ignore how this film is buoyed by rager-teenager Charlotte Gainsbourg, alchemically coming into her own.
Jacquot de Nantes
dir. Agnès Varda, 1991
I really didn’t think I would see so much of myself in this but alas, I was moved by the sparks of budding creativity. Made in the twilight of Jacques Demy’s life as AIDS began to drain his vitality, the film’s most affecting moments come when we are awoken from the dreamlike past and made to inhabit the present, where Agnès films closeups of her dying parter’s hair, his hands, his shoulder—I have never seen someone so fondly caressed by a camera before. If you’re like me, you will frequently return to this photo of the two of them jogging on the beach.
Confession: I tried to watch Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg the other week and didn’t even make it ten minutes in.
The Fiancés of Mac Donald Bridge
dir. Agnès Varda, 1961
Admittedly, I was troubled by the black/white dichotomy, but otherwise thought this was up there with the best of the silent-filmmakers. One day, I will not be able to remember if this was actually of the silent film era or not, or even enough details to properly describe it to someone.
Du côté de la côte
dir. Agnès Varda, 1958
I’ve never been to the South of France—nor have I been to North, East, or West of France, for that matter—but I suspect that if I were to go, it would be less endearing than it is through Agnès’s lens, which extols it as a landscape that whispers its secrets to you if only you care to listen.
Salut les Cubains
dir. Agnès Varda, 1963
I like to think that Agnès would want this film to lead to discussion about what’s going on in Cuba right now. Something else to consider.
Women Reply
dir. Agnès Varda, 1975
A frank, unabashed, celebratory response to the question, “What is a woman?” This has all the affirmative rejection of another Agnes, Agnes Martin, who once told an interviewer, “I’m not a woman, I’m a doorknob.” Agnès Varda could tell me a woman is a twenty-seven-story high-rise with twenty-six floors of labyrinthine corridors dedicated to a different letter of the alphabet and one floor I needn’t worry about and I would believe nothing else.
Ulysse
dir. Agnès Varda, 1982
If you’re not making a film about a photo you took thirty years earlier, what are you making a film about? If Uncle Yanco didn’t have the dazzle of an introduction about it, this would easily be my favorite of Varda’s shorts—it’s a whole disquisition on time, a condemnation of memory that implicates photography as false assurance, recognizing that the past can only ever be the present.
The Gleaners and I
dir. Agnès Varda, 2000
I once found a puzzle piece on the ground while helping my dad help my uncle move out of his apartment and it was a profound experience for me, especially as a high schooler with an Instagram (I posted a picture of the puzzle piece with the best quote I could find online about life being a puzzle with pieces scattered all over the world). Agnès Varda was better at this than I am, by which I mean thinking about the things we pick up and the the things we leave as traces.
This might be my favorite of Varda’s work, in part because of her embracing (and acknowledging that embrace) of handheld cameras, a video aesthetic that I have never been able to get over. Once again, the film is certain to position itself as a world distilled through the body (the eye, the hand) of the filmmaker, but never only her perspective. There’s a sustainability message here, too, which is not overtly an agenda, but instead a suggestion, or better yet, a lament in the form of a declaration. Even as her next few films are the ones that traverse her life and career, this is the one that feels most elegiac. I cried watching Agnès’s hand close again and again around semi-trucks only to have them race along without her.
The Beaches of Agnès
dir. Agnès Varda, 2008
Watching this, I thought about someone else attempting a biography of Agnès Varda and I laughed. Almost indisputably, it will be done, but it won’t come anywhere near to the innovative methods Varda employed to tell it her way, in this film that was meant to be her last. Someone who had spent her whole life looking, listening, investigating the niches and pockets from where her existence emerges to waltz with the sea of life happening all around will always do a better job at chronicling this experience than someone who can only see that mingling as the whole picture.
Faces Places
dirs. Agnès Varda, JR, 2017
A monument, piece by piece. I was skeptical of his team-up, as it felt somehow like an exploitation of Varda’s iconic reputation, but the genuine rapport, trust, and intimacy that developed between Agnès and photographer/street artist JR instantly melted those hesitations away. I remember seeing this film circulating during the 2018 Oscars and wondering, “Who is that spunky little French woman with the confusing bowl-cut?” And spunky was right: watch this for a slighted Agnès Varda calling Jean Luc Godard a dirty rat. Also watch this to feel.
Varda by Agnès
dir. Agnès Varda, 2019
Fuck your MasterClass! This is like when the magician reveals the false back of the wardrobe or that the blade is retractable, and that makes the craft all the more magical because it’s reality, within reach. Agnès has taught me so much in the short amount of time I’ve moored my life to her memory, and the work she left behind (“Sixty years of creation. Not even four pounds,” she has said, holding a boxed set of her films) will continue to impart its lessons.
In the final interview she gave, Agnès said: “This is such a terrible world, but I keep the idea that every day should be interesting. What happens in my days—working, meeting people, listening—convinces me that it’s worth being alive.” I hope, if I see ninety, I can say the same.
PLEASE share your own experiences with any of this week’s films in a comment—I’ll include my favorite in next week’s email for my millions of beautiful fans* to enjoy.
*Data pending
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