Cats, strange vegetables, street art, foraged food, feminism and playful ironic self-reflection: these things are at the heart of Instagram culture, but Agnès Varda, the veteran French-Belgian documentary-maker, was filming them years ago. Although the grande dame of the French New Wave, it’s now at the age of 90, and with the superb Faces Places, that her legacy is being fully rediscovered. A touring cinema programme and a Curzon Home release of some of her early work is bringing her to wider attention.
Varda’s later-life documentaries are personal and playful, an older woman looking back at a life of curiosity amid major social change. The Gleaners and I (2000), in which she riffs on the traditional French idea of those who scavenge after harvests, gets all the attention. For me, it’s The Beaches of Agnès (2008) that’s the magical one.
In it, Varda reflects on her love of seaside locations, and uses the beaches of her youth as a backdrop for restaging memories of love and loss while playing games and pondering creativity. Mixing archive clips, observational material, constructed fantastical sequences and to-camera reminiscences, she roams the country, musing on interesting random encounters.
One moment she’s sailing down the Seine; the next, she’s walking around dressed as a potato in her own art exhibition. It could be twee, this national treasure having fun with her memories. But Varda is sharp and no pushover. She has strong opinions on being an artist, on feminism, on the need for culture-makers to depict the working class with dignity, and on the importance of film-makers and artists being part of social change.
There are moments of profound mournfulness, such as her reflections on the death in 1990 of her husband, Jacques Demy. Himself a great film-maker, here Demy plays second fiddle to Varda, whose body of work, I would argue, far surpasses his in ambition, crossing fiction and documentary lines with abandon, getting the mix of joy, pain and weirdness just right.
Varda’s love for discovering more about the lives of ignored people is the basis of Faces Places, her Oscar-nominated documentary made with JR, the French muralist and photographer who is 65 years her junior. These years don’t prevent a visible bond of creativity and cheekiness: Varda’s the fun youthful one; he’s the grumpy one hiding behind sunglasses. She and JR travel through rural France, taking photos of and filming the people they meet, and creating giant prints of their faces, which are pasted on their houses or on other public buildings. The prints echo her 1981 mural documentary, Mur Murs.
Faces Places is typical of Varda’s interests – public art, hidden stories, digressions, jaunty animals – but the presence of Instagram star JR places them in a social media context and underlines how ahead of her time she was. She understood memes years ago – the fascination with heart-shaped potatoes in The Gleaners and I is very now – and Faces Places is a riposte to celebrity culture, promoting “ordinary” people as photographic subjects.
The Gleaners and I becomes a deeply political film, widening the term “gleaner” to include those who subsist on the detritus of wasteful capitalist production, including squatters. Varda exposes vintage vineyards where grapes are left to rotto maintain a specific production quota of wines even though local people are desperate to use them. Her politics come from finding out about people through simply talking to them and being interested in what they say, which sounds radical in the modern context of social media filter bubbles.
It’s an approach she showcased decades earlier in Daguerréotypes, in which she trails a power cable from her house to allow her to film the shopkeepers, artisans and residents of her street, Rue Daguerre in Paris. Varda has stayed up to date on technology and Faces Places has mobile tech running through it. This isn’t what makes her such a relevant documentary-maker, however. The technology is a tool for her lifelong interest in what gets her closest to her people. In a talk last month at the BFI she said: “Sometimes, I feel the success I have is when I meet people in the streets and instead of ‘bravo’, they say ‘thank you’.” That is Agnès Varda all over.
