A Grand Dame in the right place
Agnes Varda has been making films about faces and places since 1955 – and she has no plans to stop now, writes Kylie Klein-Nixon.
At 89, Belgian-born filmmaker Agnes Varda’s abiding dream is for a peaceful death. Fortunately, she’s far too busy loving life to worry about it just at the moment.
‘‘Oh, dying in peace. At my age, it’s a dream. Not in accident, not with illness. Dying in peace is a good dream,’’ she says, from her spot on a wide, white sofa in an over-the-top, velvet-draped hotel room in Paris.
‘‘But I work. I am very alive. I imagine my grandchildren – I have five – I enjoy many things. I am tired, I am normally tired, but that’s part of the game.’’
The game is film, art and the image. And it’s been Varda’s since the 1950s, when she emerged the only woman director of France’s New Wave of experimental cinema.
Since then, she’s written, directed and edited more than 20 feature films – the most recent of which, Faces Places, has been nominated for an Academy Award. It’s not her first brush with Oscar, however. She was awarded an honorary one in 2017 for her historic role in cinema.
It all accounts for the heightened air of reverence in the room today – packed as it is with journalists, eyeing one another warily, jockeying like courtiers for a spot closest to the throne.
It is a bit like court, this meeting. Varda is the final subject in a week of interviews for Rendezvous A Paris, showcasing the best movies France has to offer in 2018. The excitement in the room is tangible – finally, after hours of meetings with the barons, dukes and princesses of French film, we’re allowed an audience with its queen.
Varda will have none of that sycophantic nonsense, however. When one of the reporters congratulates her on her nomination, she shoos him away.
‘‘Oh, I don’t care!’’ she says. ‘‘My movies never made any money but they give me awards all the time.’’
What interests Varda – what she calls in Faces Places, her greatest desire – is meeting people. Even here, she greets us as friends more than strangers, apologising that she can’t see anyone’s faces but can hear us all perfectly well.
‘‘So wonderful to believe that cinema and film can travel and that we can be understood,’’ Varda says. ‘‘I have been in Japan, so different to Germany, South Korea and China, and we go through the film, the work,’’ she says.
‘‘Some people don’t get it. I know that I never had huge success, monster success, mainstream success but in my category, which is the margin ... I know I have friends all over the world. It is very good to know.’’
For Varda, the ‘‘margin’’ has always been the point where art and film meet. Her movies, often employing her other great passion, photography, blend fiction and documentary in a beguiling way. She was one of the first directors to use non-actors – ordinary people – in supporting roles to give her fictions reality and depth.
Her collaboration with French graffiti artist JR on Faces Places has created a poetic, transgenerational love letter to France – where she has spent her working life – and her favourite topic: ordinary, working-class people.
‘‘We have the same empathy for people,’’ she explains when asked how she and JR worked together. ‘‘I thought I would slow down [after ‘‘self-portrait documentary’’ Agnes Varda: From Here To There was made] but then I met JR and off I went.
‘‘He has made a film called Women Are Heroes, he loves people. And he does it – that’s what’s so interesting – with his magical truck and he goes to places that you’ve seen, and then the photo comes out like poster and he puts it together on the wall. It’s like creating a community for people who don’t know [or see] themselves so much.’’
This meeting of minds was arranged by Varda’s daughter, Rosa. The pair met and three days later began working together.
‘‘I fell in love with his truck [a mobile printing unit] really, because I wanted so much to travel like that,’’ she says.
‘‘We want the audience to love the people in the film and I hope with Virginie [the first person they meet and photograph], in the north of France, the way she behaved ... we put it at the beginning of the film so you have the emotion right away.’’
The emotion is personal too, and part of Varda’s charm as a film-maker is that she’s not afraid to dig into her own hurts to create something new.
In one sequence, JR and Varda visit a beach where she once photographed her friend, surrealist photographer Guy Bourdin. The images, from the 60s show a fresh-faced, young man leaning against a wall.
Bourdin died in 1991 and the buildings have since crumbled off the cliff into the sea. But Varda takes JR there to turn her original photograph into a large-scale poster. For Varda, it was a pivotal moment in the film, perfectly encapsulating what they were trying to do.
‘‘That is the power of your imagination,’’ she says. ‘‘It became something quite interesting, it [the art] became a grave for my friend [Bourdin]. Suddenly, it has the importance of a grave to my friend ... we knew it wouldn’t last, because the tide would take it, and the tide took it. I love that sequence.’’
Someone in the room suggests that, combining so many of her favourite themes, Faces Places is ‘‘a very elegant way to say goodbye to cinema’’. Varda is immediately shocked.
‘‘You said I am finished!?’’ No way. She has already finished another film about her work, and is starting a third.
‘‘I wait, I wait until something pushes me ... the shock pushes me ... Some film-makers are courageous, they have a project and they wait three years to find the actor, to find the money, to find the producer, then they do the film. I am not that courageous. I want to do it fast, I want to be in the excitement of the subject, of the desire to make a film.’’
Varda’s eyesight is failing, and her definition of courageous might need some adjustment but there’s no end to her passion yet.
"I want to do it fast, I want to be in the excitement of the subject, of the desire to make a film."
Agnes Varda
❚ Faces Places is screening as part of this year’s Alliance Francaise French Film Festival. For more information and session times, see frenchfilmfestival.co.nz