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One sings, the other doesn’t (Agnès Varda, 1977).
in his memories By Varda AgnesThe French director describes herself as “une feministe de terrain plus qu’une discuteuse,” roughly translated as “a feminist on the ground, not in theory.” Later in the book she describes “feminists” discussing her work, implying that she was outside of that group. How feminist she now reads in any way is unclear. For example, many believe that its focus on the body and childbirth is essential. His 1975 short, Women’s Answer: Our bodies, our sex (Women answer: our body, our sex), opens with the question: “What does it mean to be a woman?” The text is painted on the glass and two women are holding hands: “Qu’est ce qu’être femme?” Showing a naked female baby rolling on her back, her voice replies, “To be born a woman is to be born with female genitalia.” The next shot is of a blonde adult woman, naked and standing, saying, “To be a woman is to inhabit a woman’s body.” While this is happening, Varda can be heard in the background singing some wordless combination of “la la la” and “da da da” as if the topic is not the topic. Or maybe his song is a way to just undermine the idea of the lecture. The remaining eight minutes contain many naked women, many children (some clothed), and several tables with a man standing in a group looking at the women, collectively. They look unhappy, but they are not the center of attention.
Tenderness may have been Agnes Varda’s main theme, or a derivative of what is now her guiding principle: Be gentle. Within this, Varda recapitulates a consistent trilogy of conditions: raising children is a joyous job rooted in the body; The business of life is infinitely easier if a woman mates with another woman; And alone, woman is grace in a world created for and by men. What he brings to these vectors is the most tender eye, the grace he brings to all his subjects. Opera-muff (1958) contains a wealth of information in its chaotic seventeen minutes that spans the next 60 years of work. This is only Varda’s third and second short film, but By Varda AgnesHe writes that it was “the first film where I felt like I was really practicing the fine craft of filmmaking.” The film opens with shots of a naked woman, almost certainly Varda herself, then a pregnant Rosalie Varda (although there is no official confirmation in the credits). Undressing women on screen, as casual or casual as cut flowers on a table, is a mission that Varda has pursued throughout her career. Finally, Georges Delerux’s score kicks in, an antidote to professionalism that seems lifted from another, more fully funded film.
Women’s Answer: Our bodies, our sex (Agnès Varda, 1975).
Varda’s 16mm black-and-white verse bears no relation to the black-tie sound of Delerue’s orchestra, which actually works in its own inverted way. Varda’s innate facility with the cinematic language brings everything together. In Opera-muff We don’t have any of Vardha’s friendship scripts yet, but the love in her look makes her movies they feel Radically different from anything coming from the adjacent New Wave cohort. (However, vivacity is common to all original classes.) Varda’s vision of love is deeper than a decorative, substantive, rather than sentimental strategy. Of all the homeless people he takes in at La Mouffe – aka Rue Mouffetard, open-air, market street – he writes that “all of them – the old, the one-eyed and the homeless – were once babies, often loved newborns, whose bellies were kissed and their bottoms powdered”. The selfless body is perhaps a demand for his politics, an assertion in physical space in the name of tenderness.
Seeing people lying on the street looking at Varda and her camera, sitting on a canvas chair on the sidewalk with a big belly, you can feel how she thinks about the children. Those who are clearly suffering are edited out with happier, more cheerful people shopping. It all has to do with the surrealism of kindergarten: a slice of lemon standing in the sun, a bird trapped in a glass, a twig in a vase. He called his scenes “dreamlike images of so-called marginal cinema (a precocious chick slipped into a wine glass and a cabbage as nervous as a living organism). He declared this short film to be a search for cinematic form between “Cartier-Bresson’s truth” and the abstractions of these crudely drawn dreams. Slices cut from the pregnant belly to the pumpkin are applied to Buñuel’s wounded eyeball. Among all these images of “drunkenness” and “anxiety” (its title) are two young lovers: naked, happy, healthy. The idyll of domesticity is one step away from drunken slumbers on cobblestones with no mothers in sight. “I was shooting,” Varda wrote, “I was only thinking about these two subjects: former babies and branches.”
Dorothe Blank entered Opera-muff (Agnès Varda, 1958), left sister Cleo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962), right.
Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962), Varda’s breakout hit and still her best-known film, shows a pop singer (Corinne Marchand) traveling in Paris awaiting a medical check-up. his friend Dorothe Blank, aka Woman Funny and Naked Opera muff. Here, she’s a nude model who tells Cleo that her body makes her “happy, not proud.” This distinction is central to Varda and perhaps explains her transition in and out of politically salient positions. Just as she wants nudity to be no big deal, she creates a vision of life in which autonomy should not become a prerequisite for complaint. This is my body! Calm down! Like a true friend, Dorothe takes Cleo to the movies.
From his 1965 film, happinessVarda wrote that the “colorful, impressionistic, family-centered happiness” revolved around an idea that is “painful and simple” that “each of us is unique but replaceable.” Varda explained less philosophically in a short filmed introduction happiness Produced for ARTE in 1998, “I wrote a film with two or three picnics to spend a month outside.” Varda calls the film “A Peach with a Worm,” for which she chose a TV actor, Jean-Claude Druault, who she discovered on the cover. Marie-Claire. He starred alongside his real-life wife, Claire, and their two children. “In a world full of preconceived images of happiness, it’s interesting to break away from clichés,” he told ARTE, clichés you’ll see, for example, Marie-Claire.
The saturated colors look like women’s magazine ads, and the film’s effect is a succession of flat, medium-distance shots. Our archetypes: the husband is a carpenter, the wife works at home. The husband quickly replaces his wife with a postal worker who goes from adulterous lover to wife when the first wife drowns in a lake. It is replaceable, as Varda says. The even tone feels like a horror movie, an early indication that Varda wasn’t paying attention to what was benefiting her career as much as her star was rising because of it. ClandO. It is also important that this time the pregnant belly is now a small group of children who see themselves spinning, very opposite to the child actors. A wife without a boyfriend is mired in a sawdust of clichés and structural violence, but the kids are fine.
happiness (Agnès Varda, 1965).
In 1972, Varda was eight months pregnant with Mathieu, her son with Jacques Demy, when she went to the town of Bobigny with her friend, actor Delphine Seirig. There they marched and chanted in support of Marie-Claire Chevalier, who was acquitted of an illegal abortion after her (also illegal) rape. Lawyer Giselle Halim defended Chevalier at the trial and called Seyrig to testify because she was a famous actress who had an abortion without being arrested. (With Chevalier acquitted and abortion legalized in 1975, Bobin was widely cited as a turning point.) As Varda told interviewer Mireille Amiel in 1975, “How can women who still want to have children be sure they can have them when they want, with whom they want, and how are we going to help them? The only solution she She saw, in her words, a “superwoman” who manages not to abandon her multiple lives, a woman who can “not give up children, not give up cinema, not give up men if someone likes a man.”
In 1976, Varda began working on an answer to all of this, a film that synthesized twenty years of thought: One sings, the other doesn’t (1977). Varda’s catalog doesn’t have any major films, but this can be considered a cliffhanger. Incomplete songs are heard Mouffe’s Opera Full-fledged musical numbers were born, and the children in Varda’s cinema grew and multiplied, earning spoken lines and broken bones (one man’s leg). After more than twenty years of friendship, Suzanne (Therese Lyotard) and Apple (Pom, originally Pauline) (Valerie Myres) remain more constant with each other than with their children. Susan loses her low-income photographer husband who specializes in portraiture to suicide, leaving her with two children and another on the way. Apple, a singer, helps raise money for Susan’s abortion. Susan doesn’t do exactly as she promised, doing the abortion her own way, insisting that independence is key for Rose, even in friendship.
The men in the film are neither demons nor saviors. Apple’s husband, Darius, is an attentive companion in France, but when they move to her native Iran, Darius falls into traditional masculine inaction and becomes frustrated with Apple in France. They end up raising two children separately, in two different countries, though not without resentment. Apple’s group, the Orchids, eventually come to the family planning center where Susan works. They perform an ode to pregnant women called “Balloon Woman”: “Oh, it’s good to be a balloon… a factory of cells.” An audience member responds by saying that even a right-wing anti-abortion gang can sing the song. Dialectic does its job. And Varda renews Bobbin’s protest with Halimi herself, using it as a rallying point for Apple and Susan. As for the end of the film, after various hippie men have come and gone, the two friends remain the central couple.
Jane B. For Agnès V. (Agnès Varda, 1988).
In later films, the formula remains the same. In a tramp (1985), Mona Bergeron (Sandrine Bonner) wanders alone and ends up frozen in a ditch. in a documentary film Jane B. For Agnès V. (1988), Jane Birkin and Agnes Varda talk like themselves, and the engine of the film is none other than friendship. A very long interview with Birkin, affectionate and slow, is interrupted by a fantastic sequence of almost vague goals. Laurel and Hardy in a flour-covered bakery? Of course. Birkin as a flamenco dancer, her personal nightmare? Check it out. Jane actually sings, Agnes doesn’t, and the two clearly love each other and their children – Varda even lends her own child. Master of Kung Fu! (1988), a film they conceived in the middle of filming Jane B for Agnes V. Varda spends a lot of time talking to Birkin, asking her how she feels about being photographed, what it’s like to be Jane Birkin, without it feeling like celebrity journalism. Feminism on the ground. The film itself is a space where Varda can protect her friends. Tenderness does not scale – it is always small, close to the skin.
