2023-10-28 08:43:16
At the very end of the exhibition dedicated to her at the Cinémathèque française, a showcase brings together the most prestigious awards gleaned by Agnès Varda during her seventy-year career: a Silver Bear in Berlin for her film Happiness in 1965, a Golden Lion in Venice for No shelter, no law twenty years later. Then an Honorary César in 2001, followed by a Palme d’Honneur in 2015, and an Honorary Oscar in 2017, symbols of belated recognition of the profession for a woman who has marked its original imprint on the history of cinema. Long invisible due to her gender and her position on the fringes of the industry, she who very early on created her own production company Ciné-Tamaris so as not to depend on anyone.
Four years after her death, “Viva Varda!” » is the first retrospective exhibition dedicated to the photographer, director and visual artist. “ It is also the first that the institution devotes to a female filmmaker », concedes its president Costa-Gavras, in the catalog. “Agnès Varda does not belong to any school or movement. The path she charted was to go where her passion and the stories she loved guided her,” he continues. The tribute paid to him, supervised by his daughter Rosalie, is in this image: joyful, abundant and free.
The lair of rue Daguerre
Rather than taking the route of chronological reconstruction, he paints an impressionistic portrait through five themes and as many unpublished archives. “My mother kept everything, we found a lot of documents after her death,” comments Rosalie Varda. Like these contact sheets evoking the workshop-laboratory on rue Daguerre where she set up as a photographer in 1951, never to leave it again, making it her personal and professional anchor. Or these little advertising films made on the castles of the Loire and the Côte d’Azur, surprising with their offbeat and ironic tone, and, more intimate, this scrapbookan album created during Jacques Demy’s illness to give him courage.
Agnès Varda practiced her profession in a way that was both artisanal and inventive. When it turns The Short Point in 1954, the film was largely self-financed. Official photographer of Jean Vilar’s TNP, she has never made films. She combines the story of a couple in crisis (Philippe Noiret and Silvia Monfort) with images of daily life in this fishing district of Sète where she lived as a teenager.
Her freedom of form announces the New Wave and a constant search to experiment with new modes of narration, what she called “cinewriting”. But if she is part of this emerging movement alongside Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, the director of Cleo from 5 to 7 is not the type to let himself be locked up in chapels.
Unconventional in his life as in his art
Curious and committed, she witnessed the transformations of the world, spending two months in Mao’s China then in Cuba where she took photos and a short film (Hello Cubans), before accompanying Jacques Demy to the United States. There she documented the hippie revolution, met Andy Warhol, and made an improbable film on the sexual revolution (Lions Love) and interviews the main leaders of the Black Panthers.
Returning to France, she supported the feminist movement (One sings, the other doesn’t). Attracted by the margins, she will never stop documenting them from the tramps of rue Mouffetard (The Opera-Mouffe) to his dear gleaners (The Gleaners and the Gleaner), Passing by No shelter, no law.“She felt tenderness and empathy for anonymous people. All her life she went on the street talking to people,” testifies his daughter.
Unconventional in her life as in her art, she will never stop reinventing herself, traveling the roads of France with JR or designing film cabins to be exhibited. With ups and often downs. “Behind all this, there is a lot of work, films that did not work or were not produced,” says Rosalie Varda. However, she will never abdicate. Like this splendid snub she addresses to spectators at the entrance to the exhibition.
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Varda at all costs
The exhibition ” Long live Varda! », organized until January 28, is the occasion for a retrospective of his films, visible at The French Cinematheque, until November 25, but also in the regions. Several of them are currently available on Netflix and free on arte.tv.
A box The Cinema of Agnès Varda,bringing together 11 feature films, 16 shorts and numerous bonuses, was published by Arte Éditions (€60).
A collective work bringing together unpublished documents and texts numerous cinema personalities complete the exhibition (Long live Varda!La Martinière, 224 p., €34.90) while Laure Adler signs a richly illustrated biographical essay (Agnes VardaGallimard, 296p., 29,90 €).
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