If you intend to spend a few hours at the Harvard Film Archive's Agnès Varda retrospective (it starts Sunday and is well worth 80 minutes, an evening, or an entire weekend of your life), you'll leave aware of how little of Varda's filmmaking takes place beneath the cover of darkness. She practices her craft in broad daylight. During the 1950s and 1960's French New Wave, of which she was a little-known part, that was a matter of necessity. It was easier to shoot in the day. But into the 1970s, '80s, and beyond, the presence of light in Varda's moviemaking has come to mean an absence of secrecy. This is a director we can trust.
A humanist filmmaker with a collector's eye
The archive's series rounds up features, shorts, and documentaries, which range from great to unsuccessful (Varda has yet to make a bad film). Varda, in fact, with her amazing magenta pageboy, never stops. She'll be in town for several of the films, and her exquisite new memoir, "The Beaches of Agnès," which is part of the series, was just named the year's best French documentary.
There is a place in her best movies where the commonplace and the exalted meet - rather, where the commonplace achieves exaltation. This is especially true in her documentary "The Gleaners and I." In 2000, when she was 72 years old, Varda traveled around France conversing with people who find sustenance in the discards of others. The cumulative achievement of so many picked-up potatoes, oysters, grapes, and objects of refuse was a kind of religion - the church of Finders Keepers.
Varda never says, "Voici! This is holiness." She doesn't have to. The backhanded sanctity you might get from certain filmmakers - a bourgeois condescension that says, "I have lifted this rock and discovered the human condition" - never arrives in "The Gleaners & I." In her way, Varda lives under the rock, too.
Even in 1954, when her life as a film artist began, Varda was gleaning; she picks up people. "La Pointe Courte" (1954) is set in a Mediterranean fishing village, and the actual residents (big-boned women, barrel-chested men) embody the movie's earthly concerns. What's so wonderful is that Varda never seems like an outsider interpreting foreign lives. Her technique is essentially neorealist. I could watch sheets flap on a clothesline and piles of wood do nothing all day. The spell is broken only when an actual outsider drops into town and sparks all kinds of philosophizing about the meaning of love.
"Cléo from 5 to 7" was released in 1962 near the height of the New Wave and is fondly regarded as part of the movement. Essentially a day in the life of a successful singer nicknamed Cléo (Corrine Marchard) who thinks she is dying of cancer, the film is full of play - jump cuts, musical interludes, roving handheld camerawork - but it feels studied, like work.
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