Screenings in Bay Area pay tribute to Varda’s mastery
Thirty years after she filmed a tribute to her husband and soulmate, Jacques Demy, as he was dying, Agnès Varda made one for herself.
“Varda by Agnès” is her autobiography, the summation of an extraordinary artistic life, and she was able to bask in the glow of a world premiere at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival in February and a release in her cinematic home country of France just weeks before her death at age 90 on March 29.
The Belgianborn Varda made the first French New Wave movie way back in 1955 (“La Pointe Courte”), and followed that with one of the most famous (“Cléo From 5 to 7,” 1962). Yet she struggled to get her films made, and her place in the movement that changed cinema forever was neglected for far too long. She was an ardent feminist activist in the 1960s and ’70s, pouring her anger, frustrations and love of sisterhood into the remarkable “One Sings, the Other Doesn’t” (1977).
Varda ended her career with a terrific run of documentaries and visual art installations, and at long last she received her due from the film world. Last year, she became the oldest person to be nominated for a competitive Oscar — for her lovely, engaging documentary “Faces Places,” codirected by French photographer JR — and became the first female director to receive an
honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement.
You knew it was coming, and here it is: a comprehensive tribute to Varda’s life and career, “Agnès Varda: An Irresistible Force” unspools at both the Berkeley Art Museum’s Pacific Film Archive (Friday, Dec. 20, through Feb. 28) and SFMOMA’s Phyllis Wattis Theater (Jan. 9 through March 21). In addition, “Varda by Agnès,” which will be screened in the retrospective at both venues, opens on a regular theatrical run on Jan. 10 at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco and the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.
So get to know her (if you’re a newbie) or strengthen your connection (if you’re a fan) with one of cinema’s most beloved figures and a career that was blissfully eclectic. As she says at the beginning of “Varda by Agnès,” which kicks off the BAMPFA retrospective (7 p.m. Friday, Dec. 20; 1:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 21), she was guided in her creative life by three words: “inspiration, creation and sharing.” That last word is a key to her reputation as one of the most humanistic of filmmakers.
“You don’t make films to watch them alone. You make films to show them,” Varda says. “We need to know why we do this work.”
Early on, Varda’s work often focused on the fragility of the human condition. In her first film, “La Pointe Courte” (Jan. 9, Feb. 1, at BAMPFA; Feb. 15, Feb. 22, at SFMOMA), the 26yearold Varda, who began as a still photographer, instinctively knows where to put the camera in this tale of a rocky marriage set in a Mediterranean coastal fishing village. She uses nonactors and actors alike, and her detailed exposition of a fisherman’s life, almost documentarylike, recalls Italian neorealism.
But in its storytelling and editing and the sophistication of the relationship between the married couple (Philippe Noiret, Silvia Monfort) is an announcement of the New Wave to come — five years before JeanLuc Godard’s “Breathless” made it a thing.
While Godard and editor Alain Resnais were fascinated with finding new ways to tell stories by subverting technical norms, Varda — like François Truffaut and Demy — excelled in telling personal stories that subvert narrative conventions. “Cléo From 5 to 7” (Jan. 9, Feb. 29, at SFMOMA; Jan. 11, Feb. 7, at BAMPFA), released the same year as Truffaut’s “Jules and Jim” and the same year she married Demy, tells the story of an artist, in this case a pop singer (Corinne Marchand), who spends the two hours she is awaiting a possible cancer diagnosis reassessing her life.
As Varda explains in “Varda by Agnès,” there is subjective time, which is elastic by nature because it is in one’s mind, and objective time. As objective time ticks away, the subjective time kept in Cléo’s mind expands and allows her to become her own person, and not as others would have her.
It’s the announcement of an artist who is her own person, and cancer is Varda’s way of saying her future is fragile and uncertain, but she will negotiate it on her own terms.
That freedom can also be selfdestructive, as Varda seems to be saying in her last great narrative masterpiece, “Vagabond” (Dec. 29, Jan. 30, at BAMPFA; Feb. 1, Feb. 27, at SFMOMA). By following an alienated teenage drifter (Sandrine Bonnaire), Varda appears to be working out anger and frustration at perhaps the failings of the feminist movement and possibly the challenges of her filmmaking career as it stood in 1985.
Varda and Bonnaire discuss that anger and hint at the ideas behind it in “Varda by Agnès,” in which the two return to one of the places where they filmed. And Varda explains the importance of tracking shots in the movie to help the audience go on the journey with Bonnaire, who was 17 at the time.
I don’t want to neglect her documentary work, which is extensive and often as groundbreaking as her narrative films. She had a strong connection to the Bay Area, heading over to Oakland to document the Black Panther movement (“Black Panthers,” 1968), and she even found a longlost relative living on a houseboat in Sausalito (“Uncle Yanco,” 1967). Both play in a shorts program (Jan. 22, Feb. 8, at BAMPFA; March 7 at SFMOMA) in the retrospective.
Her documentary features show great range. “Mur Murs” (1980) depicts Los Angeles murals; “Jane B. Par Agnès V.” is a cinematic fantasy biography of actress Jane Birkin; the narrative/documentary hybrid “Jacquot” (1991) works through her grief at Demy’s death. There’s also the doc “The Young Girls Turn 25” (1993, shown in the retrospective with Demy’s “The Young Girls of Rochefort”) and relatively recent work such as “The Gleaners and I” (2000) and the autobiographical “The Beaches of Agnès” (2008).
But I’d like to put in a plug for what for me was a recent discovery, the aforementioned “One Sings, the Other Doesn’t” (Feb. 8 at SFMOMA; Feb. 23 at BAMPFA). The heartbreaking and empowering feminist masterpiece begins in the 1960s, when Pauline (Valérie Mairesse) helps her best friend, Suzanne (Thérèse Liotard), get an illegal abortion. But the film takes off when, after 10 years apart, they reconnect and become passionately involved in the worldwide women’s liberation movement.
But this 1977 gem isn’t an inyourface, crusading political film. It is full of quiet and tender moments — and even musical numbers — as Pauline pursues a singing career while Suzanne, still unmarried, raises her two children. Both have been frozen out by their oldschool, disapproving parents, so they turn to each other for sisterly support as they pursue their own independent, unconventional lives.
“One Sings, the Other Doesn’t” was Varda’s first feature in nearly a decade, and it is among the most underseen and underrated films of a true master director.
She once characterized a film of hers as “a beautiful summer peach with a worm inside.” Message: A passionate and wonderful life often comes at a cost.
For Varda, it was a price worth paying.