Intervju        AGNES VARDA

Varda directing La Pointe Courte in 1954.

Dupont:
You didn’t just make beautiful images, you did more. After all, who thought of making a movie out of Faulkner?

Varda:
Wild Palms impressed me, and I liked the idea of making a movie as disturbing as Faulkner’s work. I thought it [La Pointe Courte] was like a poem to put in a drawer. Alain [Resnais] said, “Keep the film as it is, and show it to André Bazin,” who chose it for Cannes. And my mother paid Le Vox, a movie house in Cannes, to show it.

I was twenty-six years old. Thirty people showed up—and the Cinémathèque took the movie. They saw something new and radical.

Dupont:
What was your life in L.A. like?

Varda:
After the fabulous reception of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Jacques was invited by Columbia to make a film [Model Shop]. I loved him, so I was with him. And I fell in love with Los Angeles. It was the time of the hippies, peace and love, love-ins at parks, flower children, baskets of cherries, cakes, guitars. I adored that, got right into it, and met the idols: Andy Warhol and Viva. I made Lions Love, about a threesome who played in the nude.7 What got me was the feeling of those times: sex and politics.

Dupont:
You were quick to catch on!

Varda:
Yes, I knew I had to go fast; I knew that five years later they would all be square. I seized the moment.

And that’s how I got to the Black Panthers. My friend Tom Luddy worked at the cinematheque in Oakland and had lots of friends and knew all about the Black Panthers.8 “Huey Newton was jailed! We must free Huey Newton!” Now!

I took the plane [on a] Sunday. I filmed by myself with a 16mm camera they lent me. I got into the prison by saying I was from French TV. Nobody stopped me.

Before, it had been whites writing on blacks. This time, it was the blacks. Eldridge Cleaver! I filmed them all—and they were all nice to me.

Dupont:
You had guts.

Varda:
I knew it couldn’t last. They didn’t have the infrastructure, so the movement fell apart. I filmed at just the right moment, the moment of consciousness and action. They went off to Cuba, they went off in different directions, it broke up quickly.

Dupont:
And you, too, went to Cuba and made Salut les Cubains [1963], a short, and took that photo of Castro that I saw?

Varda:
In 1962, Chris Marker made ¡Cuba Sí! and he said I had to go to Cuba. So I went. And I understood I couldn’t film, the camera was too obtrusive, but I could take photos and film the photos. That way, we could recompose [and] refilm photos with music to be able to match film. I was alone, I went everywhere, spoke Spanish.

Dupont:
When did you learn English?

Varda:
When we were in L.A. … I watched a lot of TV. I learned English, and began to speak well. In any case, I understood them and they understood me.

Dupont:
You and Demy were both busy.

Varda:
Jacques was busy writing and filming; Rosalie was nine, in a Beverly Hills public school, which was great. We only had Rosalie. Mathieu was born in 1972 when we came back. [There were fifteen years between the two children.]

Later, when I made Mur Murs (1980), the L.A. County Museum had nothing [about the city’s murals]. We had to do a search to find the muralists. I was fascinated by the desperate side, the underside, of L.A. [as] revealed by their stories. I loved making that film.

Dupont:
Each generation in the United States has a dream about going west.

Varda:
A kind of gold rush, and then, the letdown. And it pleased me because in L.A. it’s as if the sun is out all the time and I wanted to film the shadowy side, its “sans soleil,” like the title of the film by [Chris] Marker. Each time, I look for a different kind of cinematic choice.…

And what brought you to France? Did you come because of Monsieur Dupont?

Dupont:
Yes, but not only! Now, about Le bonheur: the film is beautiful, yes, but it has an undertow. It’s not just about what society permits, but about a relationship in which only the man is free to double his pleasure. What if it had been the woman who found a lover just as tall, dark, and handsome? Would the husband have been so passive?

Varda:
In this film, there are seventy-five different possibilities. Lion’s Love was one [version]: a love triangle. But I couldn’t propose this film any other way: this is a happy couple with children, not poor, not rich, they love nature, love their kids, he works in carpentry, not a violent milieu. I took a basic situation, minimal, to tell a simple story. He falls for somebody else who looks like his wife.

Desire is human, it exists, so what do we do with it? In civilized society, we hide it. This man is amoral; he doesn’t see how he hurts anybody; he continues to be nice to his wife and children, thinking he can simply add to his pleasure.

Dupont:
But she feels betrayed. After all, she is betrayed!

Varda:
There’s a moment that is ambivalent: we don’t know if she slipped, or meant to drown; we will never know.

Dupont:
But surely you know?

Varda:
No! I think when we write a script, we mustn’t know. The characters have to have autonomy. There are options, and the dreadful moral is: we are each unique, but replaceable. Society functions if each one is in his/her place. It was credible in the film because the kids are young, they can accept another mother. I did everything to make this story credible. I put all the conditions on my side. It’s a utopist fable.

Dupont:
We’re trapped! The wife and mother is doing her job so well that she can be replaced by another blond wife/mother without much fuss. Her husband and kids adopt the new one without a fuss!

Varda:
Because it’s a film trap! We had big reactions—in the United States, too. Also, it was my first film in color and we did research to bring out beauty, to evoke a Utopia. It’s not realistic.

You’ve made me jump between Le bonheur and feminism … [but] my most important movie was Sans toit ni loi [Vagabond, 1985].