A like Agnès and associative
Before Agnès Varda makes a film, she likes to catch up in the dictionary. In alphabetical terms does she approach her subjects, associatively? and whoever wants to talk about her and her life's work best starts with the letter A. A like Arlette. This is what her parents called the girl, born in Brussels in 1928 but begotten in Arles. However, because Arlette always had her own mind, she, barely of age, went to the town hall in the southern French port town of Sete, where the family had emigrated during the Second World War and where she lived for years on a sailboat. She requested a name change and called herself Agnès. Agnès Varda.
Agnès Varda puts her ideas into action.
From then on, her lifeline was to be at the interface between land and water. As a refugee child on the beach of Sète, as an art history student and filmmaker on the left bank of the Seine, as a traveler on the beach in Los Angeles, as a mother, wife and widow on the beach of Noirmoutier. "If you opened people, you would find landscapes, in me you will find beaches," says Agnès Varda. Stranded and flotsam, shells, stones and people.
In her new autobiographical film "The Beaches of Agnès" she puts her camera on the beach and spreads large mirrors in the sand. This reflects children and companions, old film snippets and current interviews, reflections and comments in a surrealistic way. They multiply in the water and in the sky and dissolve into everything and nothing. Then the filmmaker spreads her arms and walks backwards, curious as a girl, towards her past.
Already in 1954, at a time when her profession was still male, Agnès Varda was called "the most important female film director in the world". In her spectacular first film "La Pointe Courte" she talks about the fishing life in the fishing village of the same name and a loving couple who wants to split up but can not.
Agnès Varda - filmmaker of heart's content
Thus she founded the auteur film of the "Nouvelle Vague", a style to which film greats such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard appealed. 53 years later, Agnès Varda revisits the people from "La Pointe Courte" for her film autobiography. She comes as a filmmaker and friend. What a goodbye: In front of the camera you fall into countless times in the arms. Because you like it. For those who were children at the time and now sail as fishermen with weather-beaten, chapped faces, Agnès Varda spontaneously helps with nets in a scene. That's what she had learned when, after finishing high school, she had bribed with a camera in her backpack and worked with sailors in Corsica.
After her return, in the late 1940s, she studied art history and made a name for herself as a photographer. Before her pictures started to move and the French critics cheered: "For the first time a woman speaks to us - what an event!" And Agnès Varda? "I'm fond of being famous," she said, "but I want to be able to say something that people enjoy and think about." She herself can be happy about the smallest things: In her film "The Collector and the Collector" (2000), the small spherical woman with rubber boots trudges across a field somewhere in the middle of France? and discovers a potato in heart shape. "May I have them?" She asks the potato collectors, who pick up what's left after the harvest. She holds the potato heart with one hand and films with the other. It's not written in a script, but everyone can see it now: how beautiful a potato is!
Agnès Varda picks up what she's getting her hands on, marvels and films with all her heart's content. Even her hairstyle, this 70s colored pageboy tail, sitting around her head like a woolen hat, is less of a hallmark than a field of experimentation: sometimes she lets the color grow out until the gray-white vertex becomes visible. Because it interests you what aging looks like.
Like a laurel wreath, just not green, but red. Her seriously ill husband, the film director Jacques Demy, she stroked with the camera over his wrinkled arms and hands shortly before his death, while he pondered the sand thoughtfully through his fingers. "Happiness is a mirror game and only shared perfectly," is a beautiful sentence from her. She is a happy person because she loves what she observes, shares and communicates.
Documentation and fiction: Agnès Varda does both
The banal and the surreal, the petty-bourgeois, the dirt and the exotic, documentary and fiction, being a mother and making movies: Agnès always wanted everything at the same time, and she succeeded.When she did not want to travel because of her little son, but wanted to work as much as possible from her Parisian home, in 1975 she simply made a film about the shops and craft shops of her street: the "Daguerréotypes" called her the poetic images and interviews of the baker and his wife, the plumber and the man at the newsstand.
All she needed was a camera and a cable drum with a long cable that she plugged into the socket in the morning, rolled up, and rolled up again in the evening. To this day she lives with her cats in the Rue Daguerre in the 14th arrondissement and works in her production company Ciné-Tamaris, founded in 1954. Here she can do what she wants according to her own ideas and let her do everything from exposé to copying.
Happiness is only completely shared.
Agnès Varda even invented his own narrative style: the "Cinécriture", the "film writing". He starts with the film idea, which gives it a structure but no script. It orbits its topic, comes from the hundredth to the thousandth to the actual and mixes a multi-layered puzzle from inside, side and outside perspectives to see in the end surprised what has become of it? a cheerful social-political film that does not accuse, or a feminist-artistic. Agnès Varda was always engaged: in 1972, she walked on the street with a big belly to demonstrate that she was abortifacient. Her road movie "Bird Free", in which the French actress Sandrine Bonnaire pulls through the cold Midi as a homeless woman in winter, not only received the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, but also sparked a debate on homelessness.
The rhythm of her films follows the rocking of the sailboat on the waves of Varda's childhood. Airy and free, even if now and then someone falls into the water. Intuitively, can it drift, playfully, from one discovery to another? and tells of people on the verge of our throwaway society. With her digital camera she follows the homeless man who bends down and follows, following the pecking birds and the tar-contaminated people who are being picked up on the coast because they can no longer fly. With lead in her feet, because the world is as terrible as she once said. And at the same time with wings, like a careless seagull circling the mast of a sail.
