Agnès Varda (2019)

Agnès Varda died in late March this year, aged ninety, a few weeks after this film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival.  Her passing underlines, but doesn’t radically alter, the significance of Varda by Agnès:  this autobiographical documentary is a very conscious farewell.  Varda had been suffering from cancer; whether or not she was aware that her death was imminent, she clearly knew she’d made her last film.

The eye disease from which she suffered was clearly becoming an increasing challenge, as illustrated in Faces Places, Varda’s 2017 collaboration with the photograffeur JR.  Under the opening titles of Varda by Agnès, the patterns of colour on the screen move in and out of focus, suggesting blurred vision.  At the close of the film, she recalls a memorable episode in Faces Places.  On a seashore rock formation, at low tide, JR posts a hugely enlarged image of Guy Bourdin, Varda’s friend and photographic model of more than half a century previously.   By the following morning, the sea has entirely effaced the photograph.  Varda says that she and JR considered ending Faces Places by vanishing into a near-sandstorm blown up by the coastal wind.  In the event, they didn’t but she decides to sign off in Varda by Agnès ‘disappearing in a blur’.  Her exit line is ‘Je vous quitte’ and the haze that fills the screen appears to spirit her away.  Although the fact of Varda’s death strengthens the metaphysical flavour of this finale, her leave-taking is also, more practically, an expression of a visual artist’s failing eyesight.

The basic form of her swansong is simple enough although, characteristically for Varda, not as simple as it initially looks to be.  She sits on a stage, facing a large audience, and starts to talk to them and to camera about her life and work.  She asks for the first film clip to be shown on the large screen beside her.  We seem to be in for a straightforward illustrated lecture but none of the many subsequent clips is introduced in this explicit way.  The audience in the venue (an opera house converted to a cinema for the occasion, according to Varda) isn’t always the same one.  Early on, it seems largely to comprise aspiring film-makers, whom Varda addresses more directly than she does an older, more dressed-up assembly later in the film.  In other words, Varda by Agnès appears to splice different public performances that she’s given.

Her narrative is remarkably fluent, even when it moves out of the theatre setting entirely.  Varda returns, for example, to the rural location of Vagabond (1985) to explain the disorienting intention of the right-to-left tracking shots she used repeatedly in that film and to talk with its star, Sandrine Bonnaire, who recalls – with good humour but without pulling punches – the gruelling things that Varda made her do.  Footage of interviews conducted with Varda at or closer to the time she made a particular film is inserted at several points.  Back in the theatre, there are a couple of onstage conversations – with the cinematographer Nurith Aviv, who shot some mid-period Varda films; and Hervé Chandès, director of the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, which has exhibited and acquired several of her installations and other artefacts.

She looks and sometimes sounds tired but Varda is unfailingly lucid and cogent, whether she’s dealing with political history, film techniques or feelings about existence, mortality and people.  In sequences in the theatre, she occasionally looks down at notes but these are a prompt rather than a transcript.  She’s well prepared yet gives the impression of speaking off the cuff.  Even though she doesn’t work through her oeuvre in strict date sequence, she observes chronological order enough to convey the trajectory of her career.  The narrative finds time to cover her photography and, as implied by Hervé Chandès’ involvement, her work as an exhibition and installation artist.  I was pleased her documentaries got as much screen time as they do here.  While I’m not a fan of the few non-documentary Varda films I’ve seen, she’s so clear-minded and articulate that it’s well worth hearing what she was aiming to do in these too.  This applies even to a picture like One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977) although it’s a relief that the excerpts illustrating the result are short.

At the very start, Varda defines what have been her three priorities in cinema:  inspiration (why she makes a film), creation (how she makes it) and sharing (the necessary result of making it).  The shape and focus of what follows reflect these priorities, though never too emphatically.  Her most celebrated dramas, Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) and Vagabond, incorporate documentary elements.  As she makes clear in Varda by Agnès, the same applies, vice versa, in her approach to documentary film-making.  (When I tried to key in ‘vice versa‘ in the notes I put on my phone after seeing the film, the predictive text insisted this should be ‘vice Varda’, which seems right enough.)  Addressing the audience of film students, Varda distinguishes two types of documentary – the ‘pure and brutal’ and the ‘filmic’.  The former type, she says, simply records reality.  The latter type, to which she’s firmly committed, presupposes a point of view that the film-making reflects – a kind of shaped, even staged reality.

I’m usually left cold by the visual jokes of which Varda seems always to have been fond but these too are easy to tolerate in the context of this particular film – leavened as they sometimes are by a more substantial and self-deprecating humour.   She describes how she intended to film her childhood home in Belgium.  The house she grew up in now belonged to a couple of model railway fanatics – or ‘trainopaths’, as the husband calls himself and his wife.  They laugh about their obsession without in the least apologising for it.  In each of The Gleaners and I (2000), The Beaches of Agnès (2008) and Faces Places (the three documentaries by her that I’ve so far seen), Varda consistently features people whom she finds extraordinary and appealing.  It’s typical of her that her fascination with the trainopaths resulted, as she acknowledges, in their completely upstaging her return-to-childhood reflections.

At 115 minutes, Varda by Agnès isn’t short (and doesn’t feel it) but fair enough:  it’s the story of an extraordinary and extraordinarily long career.  It’s full of things that hadn’t occurred to me, like how the advent of digital cameras has allowed those interviewed by documentary film-makers to feel a greater sense of privacy (though Varda doesn’t go on to admit that, once the result is ‘shared’, this turns out to be an illusion of privacy).  And there are good jokes, when they’re not too preconceived.  Varda stops herself a syllable into a parapraxis:  meaning to say ‘the chronology of my films’, she starts to say ‘the criminology’.  Quickly realising this is a Freudian slip not to be wasted, she decides to make clear what she nearly said by mistake.  Uttering all five syllables, she gets the full audience reaction benefit.  A more confounding joke – and it’s hard to think this wasn’t in Varda’s mind – is that by making this bracing autobiography and dying before it opened in cinemas, she has effectively thwarted any other film director with ideas about devising a posthumous tribute to her.  This is called what’s having the last word.

15 August 2019