Intervju        AGNES VARDA

Dupont:
It also has a lot to say about women. You created a single woman, played by Sandrine Bonnaire, who is alone on the road. This is the film of yours that bewitched me with the mystery of Mona, Bonnaire’s character, with a ghost of a smile on her face.

Varda:
I had a friend who had a house in the south, and I was interested in homeless people. So I went down there with my car and I’d pick up homeless people. They were mostly men, but there were a few women. And I noticed the importance we give to cleanliness. We can deal with the poor, but they’d better be clean, and smell okay! This emphasis on cleanliness bothered me.

I made the movie and, as in Cléo, it was the structure that counted: this time, the structure is made of thirteen tracking shots, always from right to left. A girl walks, a girl on the road, she walks, she walks in the country, through woods, through villages.

Then, there is the idea of rape, that’s what happens on the road. I rubbed it out, just as she did …

Dupont:
Yes, there’s violence in the film.

Varda:
I had seen À nos amours (Maurice Pialat, 1983), Sandrine Bonnaire’s first film. Sandrine was so spontaneous, and in my movie, she was amazing.

Dupont:
Yes, she was—and Pialat was furious about losing her, as it were, to you. I had lunch with him and Gérard Depardieu on the set of Sous le soleil du Satan [Under the Sun of Satan, Maurice Pialat, 1987; also with Bonnaire], and all he could do was grumble!

Varda:
I know, and she loved Pialat!

Dupont:
In Vagabond, I wondered what she was running from. Perhaps from that abusive household in which her character was trapped in À nos amours! I imagine her marching, with stubborn determination, to the beat of “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” her destination. 9 And the characters she meets on the road! You gave the marvelous Yolande Moreau her first role on-screen.

Varda:
I needed help on an exhibit in Avignon and had met Yolande doing her one-woman show, a violent and funny street performance. I invited her to join the film. Vagabond is a complete film on a social subject. I couldn’t get anybody to produce it, so we [Ciné-Tamaris] produced it. And it turned out to be our only success, with over 1 million entries.

Other films I made were loved but made no money; I never earned money for producers. I was always looking to be where the action was!

(Just then, guests arrive, so we meet again a week later, when, after a quick tea in the kitchen, we move across the street to Agnès’s studio. This is a suite of rooms stacked high with the history of Agnès, photographer—a world in black and white inhabited by friends from the past. The argentite [silver gelatin] photos are not merely beautiful. Her portraits haunt, not only because so many of her subjects are great artists who have since died, but because she somehow caught or cast them in a mood, an otherworldliness, because of her unique mise-en-scène. She gives me a tour.)

Varda:
Here’s a portrait of Louis Aragon and Elsa [Triolet], in love, here’s Salvador Dali in the 1950s in Ibiza, Brassai in the 1960s; photos from China in the 1950s. And my potato series: when I did Les glaneurs, the heart-shaped potato inspired me. Me, too, I glean like the women who plant potatoes in the field. I kept the old potatoes and they sprouted …

Look, here’s Resnais sitting alongside Alain Robbe-Grillet, the two Alains; one in white socks, the other in black socks.

Dupont:
And no shoes! He was handsome, Resnais.

Varda:
But physically a bit stiff, very official. And here is beautiful Rosa, pregnant to the gills, and a small bird dead on the beach. I made the film Ulysses (1982) out of this photo. Look at the photo I took of Le Corbusier’s terrace in the Cité Radieuse in Marseille in the 1950s. It all just fell into place so well that I made a three-minute movie later. … Sometimes things done spontaneously bring surprises, sometimes nature casts just the right shadow, like the people who gathered on that terrace.

I mix periods, and I’m free to mix and to think. And to think of nothing as well. I meditate visually.

Dupont:
Tell me about your method.

Varda:
I started as a photographer in the 1950s, and when I did Cléo in 1961, I stopped [photography] for twenty years. Then, I went back in 2005 and mixed the old argentique [silver gelatin] with the digital. I like to do that. I first worked with the big cameras, then, smaller cameras; now, with cell phones, et cetera, it’s become democratic, which is fine, but it changed everything—because a photograph has to be original.

(We leave the studio and move back across the street to the house.)

Varda:
This hall separates my house from Ciné-Tamaris, which is completely independent. I made a hole in the wall, see?

(We tour the production quarters, where I discover a suite of small rooms filled with intense computer activity.)

Varda:
We have apprentices working in this room, and here [she opens the door to the next room] this is the summit [and] here’s Rosalie, Rosalie does a lot.

(When we return to her living room, she chooses a small couch and I settle across from her.)

Dupont:
You’ve had three lives: photographer, filmmaker, visual artist.

Varda:
It’s more complicated; they have overlapped. I remained a photographer when I became a filmmaker. Like the photo that I took on Le Corbusier’s terrace. I always wondered who those people were, did they know each other? I saw them for ten seconds back then, and twenty years later, made a small film [from the photograph].

In each snapshot is the mystery of a film that doesn’t exist. I kept the relationship between photography and film, two ways of capturing life. And twenty-eight years after the photo of Ulysse in 1954, I made a half-hour film [Ulysses, 1982] inspired by that dead goat on the beach and the child.

So, there’s an inner dialogue between photo, film, and a kind of memory of present time. What happened? Maybe that child was abandoned? This is how I express my deepest reflections. I travel across times zones and different ways of thinking, which is interesting for me. At the end of Les plages d’Agnès [The Beaches of Agnès, 2008], I say: “I am remembering as I live.” I live intensely.

My creative thought has multiple expressions: photo, cinema, installations—above all, imagination—and several ways of perceiving. I have a photographer’s perception. I write. I write my films. I mix period [history] with fantasy. And I’m free to think like that. Or about nothing at all. I am remembering as I am living.

And there’s also visual mediation. I have great powers of concentration. I can be in the midst of life, here with my cats. … Here’s one. This is Paille [“straw”]. Come up here. … She likes me best lying down; when I’m on my feet, she doesn’t recognize me. She’s my heating pad.

Today, we are in a situation with the migrants; we have a roof over our heads and we think about them, but we do nothing—just as when we made Loin du Vietnam[Far from Vietnam, 1967] and wanted to do something but couldn’t.10 So, we are unhappy witnesses.

When I made Visages villages, I decided not to ask the people we interviewed whom they voted for, or any of that. We limited the experience—and it became rich. They confided in us because it became a conversation, not a Q and A.

It put them in a situation to reflect, express; we wanted to know what they think, who they were. So we had a dialogue, a space to provoke imagination to find words to express ideas. The man who ran a garage who talked about putting Ping-Pong balls on the sheep’s horns had such funny ideas and found solutions. We were there at the right time.

Dupont:
Isn’t that who you are: somebody at the right place at the right time?

Varda:
We are sensitive, good listeners, which makes it possible to discover the right moment.

Dupont:
You’re always conscious of that?

Varda:
When I made Daguerréotypes on rue Daguerre, years ago, I spoke to my neighbors, the shop people. Commerce has its own vocabulary, words that don’t mean much. For example, the butcher always said, “It’s because of the weather,” no matter what. One day, a woman came into the shop and said, “My husband had a heart attack,” and he said: “It’s the weather!” It’s that kind of dialogue—words that mean nothing, and nobody listens.

This interested me. There’s an American university in upstate New York where the departments of Documentary, Sociology, and Language invited me; all three departments paid my trip. It was as if there were several doors, entranceways. And my cinema, too, has several entranceways. There is utopia [and] fiction, as in Le bonheur and One Sings, both social proposals that offer a moment of reflection.

Dupont:
Vagabond is no utopia!

Varda:

Perhaps, but there is a kind of long demonstration of how things take place in life. Without dialogue, there’s no life. She [Bonnaire, as the vagrant girl] refuses to exchange with the people along her path. She refuses the hippy; she is anti-hippy. And she dies from solitude—and the cold—from her refusal of dialogue, of human exchange.

Dupont:
It is my favorite of all your films! I can see it again and again, and I love the characters she meets on the road.

Varda:
It’s strong, because her negative energy makes it hard to help her. But when she goes off, I can’t judge her, I can just follow her on the road. I put myself somewhat in the place of the woman played by Macha Méril, the tree doctor who takes care of trees that die. She meets up with her and takes her for a ride. What else can she do? She’s like the rest of us: we’re limited, we can just offer understanding and kindness. Then she goes home and lives her life.

Each film has its [own] treatment, tone, color. … In L’une chante we talk about freeing women, how women didn’t dare speak up.

Now, this recent business about that producer …

Dupont:
Harvey Weinstein?

Varda:
Harvey freed our tongues, but it’s a slow process. In the work world, women are harassed constantly. It’s a horror—on trains, metros, all the time. How about the kind of thing that women hear every day, like “You have a great ass?”

It’s not hard to free actresses. Feminists have always fought. Now we see the problem of parity. For example, how come there are not as many women as men on the Cannes selection committee? I’m happy that I was the first [in France] to make a movie, L’une chante, with as many women as men.

Here in France, we now have many women directors and technicians, and many men [who are] filmmakers take women as DPs [cinematographers]. So, I’m optimistic.

When I won my Spirit Award in Hollywood, I felt: it’s changing, it’s moving. After seventy years in cinema, I see change.

Epilogue

We talked of many things, but not of many other things. Whatever happened to her heroines, for instance? To Thérèse, the one who does not sing in One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, or to Mona, with her dance of death in Vagabond? Where is she marching and why? And what about Claire, the wife in Le bonheur, who believed that she was perfectly happy until she found out that she had been replaced?

Is each of us women truly unique, the only potato shaped like a heart in the field of potatoes? Or are we irreplaceable, or even multiple? As special as that heart-shaped potato may be, it is merely a potato after all. The themes of women who do badly, of women who falter, of triangulations and betrayals are ever-present but unremarked.

In Agnès Varda’s film world, characters lead parallel lives that may connect (as the two friends do in L’une chante) or clash (as in the rape in Sans toit ni loi). Her films have mysterious symmetries and asymmetries, which their titles reflect (Mur murs; Sans toit ni loi; Visages villages). This bent for formal structures may have its roots in her attraction to Le Nouveau Roman (“the new novel”) of the 1950s, the literary breakthrough created by Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet.

I am left with the vision of that photo I spied in her studio of the two Alains: Robbe-Grillet alongside Resnais, both key figures in her career—respectively, her first editor and her compère in the Rive Gauche group—both caught in a melancholy moment that rests unexplained. It is the way she sees things: here were these men who were really important, her patron saints, and she has frozen them. It is her fancy. They look so haunted there, in her studio, her kingdom. Agnès, who still mulls over a lifetime of contrasts and connections, invents new ways to reinvent them all, and serves up fresh fare, cinematic and culinary, in her house on the rue Daguerre.

Notes

1.All sorts of characters pop up in this film, including director Shirley Clarke and actor Eddy Constantine, playing versions of themselves.
2.Varda did finally make Les créatures. Starring Catherine Deneuve and Michel Piccoli, it was released in 1966 to mixed reviews. Writing in the New Yorker recently, Richard Brody called it her “lost sci-fi romance.”
3.The protagonist, François, is played by Jean-Claude Drouot, who was the star of Thierry la Fronde, a popular French television serial for kids. The wife, Thérèse, is played by his actual wife, Claire Drouot, and the on-screen couple’s small children are the actors’ own children.
4.In fact, it is not clear whether she slips or drowns herself.
5.In 1971, Varda was one of the women who signed the famous “Manifesto of the 343 Sluts” drafted by Simone de Beauvoir, which led to the ground-breaking law under Health Minister Simone Veil, legalizing abortion in 1975.
6.The documentary’s title is derived from Freud’s famous question, “What Do Women Want?”
7.Lions Love stars Viva along with Gerome Ragni and James Rado, creators of Hair.[Editor’s note: a selection of Varda’s early films, all restored, is available in the United States as a box set from Criterion Classics.]
8.Tom Luddy, director of the Telluride Film Festival, was then showing films in Berkeley. He went on to become the head of the Pacific Film Archive and then to work in production at Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Productions. He is credited as a camera assistant on Black Panthers.
9.“I Have a Rendezvous with Death” is the title of a famous poem by Alan Seeger, a young American poet who was killed in World War I, the “Great War,” while fighting with the French Foreign Legion. He was the uncle of Pete Seeger. I interpret Bonnaire’s character as heroic, too.
10.Loin du Vietnam was a collective work of short films, made under the direction of Chris Marker; Varda was supposed to contribute. With contributions by JLG, Joris Ivens, Alain Resnais, Claude Lelouch, and William Klein, finally, there was no room for Varda’s sequence (though she appears credited as a codirector).

© 2018 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.

 

Joan DUPONT
first published in: Film Quaterly, December 7, 2018