Agnes Varda: From Here to There (Cinema Guild, 2014)
The five-part documentary series Agnes Varda: From Here to There, directed by the resolute Agnes Varda and released by Cinema Guild, follows the filmmaker as she traverses the globe, meeting with friends, filmmakers (including Chris Marker and Manoel de Oliveira), artists, and locals, and visiting various art exhibits and film premieres. Her travelogue reveals a personal observational insight into the contemporary art scene, highlighting the importance of valuing the most underrepresented and seemingly absurd of innovations in today’s globalized world.
Varda’s travels are most intriguing to watch because of the diversity of places, peoples, and cultures she explores within the context of her own life. She visits Chris Marker’s rambunctious apartment, skilfully littered with films, papers, props and art trinkets, revisits Nantes, the home of her beloved, departed husband and fellow director Jacques Demy, recalling their memories and the places they spent time together, and before moving on in her trip finally reunites at a release of Demy’s Lola (1964) with Lola herself – the older, but still beautiful Anouk Aimée. Varda’s aesthetic – characterized by her spirited, free-moving camerawork, brisk, frequently serrated, yet rhythmic editing, and her lilting husky voiceover, which frames and vivifies her subject matter. Literal fragments of people’s lives (from Marker’s scattered memoirs to filmic stills of Demy – one fragment from the twenty-four frames of a second) are shown through the lens and they become singular lived moments, as the camerawork and editing are equally fragmented, yet through their conjunction, amplified by Varda’s earnest narration, they attain pace and rhythm, which connotes a sense of wholeness: wholeness achieved through fragments. In such quiet moments of exploration – through apartments, buildings, memories – Varda glimpses into the metaphysical potentials of art: fragments of the physical (apartments, buildings) express the creator’s deeper metaphysical concerns over Being in time; memory as a means of processing and disturbing ordinary time flow.
A most fascinating scene details Varda visiting artist Christian Boltanski’s exhibit, Personnes: sixty-nine rectangles composed of coats and clothes lie spread out in perfect symmetry across the floor of the Parisian Grand Palais. Every rectangle is surrounded by pillars with sound boxes, which emit heartbeats, where no one heartbeat is the same: each belongs to a different person. Boltanski emphasizes the individuality of each coat and each heart beat. This individuality becomes broken down in the literal ravaged mountain of clothes, in the center of the Palais floor, where the coats are interspersed: in the artist’s words it is ”one big mass” where the coats have ”lost their identity” (see episode three in the series). This exhibit can certainly be interpreted in multiple ways, yet what is particularly fascinating about its visual formalism is the way it uses symmetry and mathematical layout of clothing to both evoke a rigid sense of totalitarian order (lifeless coats recall memories of order, including those in concentration camps, where humans are reduced to only shapes and numbers) and a perseverance of individuality within that regime. Every coat and heartbeat remains individuated, until it becomes engulfed in the mountainous void. Through such an exhibit Boltanski intervenes as artist: he creates totalitarian order through rectangles and symmetry, retains human individuality through items of clothing and heartbeats, then shows the impossibility of its survival within such a system, through the faceless mountain. Such a unique exhibit is only one of the many fascinating pieces Varda’s 240-minute work has to offer on the relation between the being and memory.
While this documentary series can be construed as earnest personal memoir, it remains far too playful and dynamic in its energetic pace and tailored approach to each individual to be reduced to this. It is framed rather dialogically: Varda puts herself on view but defines her place (as person and filmmaker) in relation to others, exploring the contours between oneself and others as well as the individual and the artist. Such exploration is manifest through contrast: Varda often shows the artist at home and the artist at work; she sometimes goes as far as to show the life of artists living together. In the case of artist Christian Boltanski and partner, visual artist Annette Messager we – as spectators – witness the difference between their home life where they live happily together, and their work – where they create in separate art studios, never entering each other’s artistic spaces. Such boundaries in work could suggest discord that carries into the home, yet it does not. Varda patiently interviews both individuals, alone and together, at home and at work. Through such contrast she highlights at once the differences between the two individuals in their art and the harmony of their coexistence in the domestic sphere. Thus their role is defined dialogically and Varda’s role as filmmaker is defined through the exploration of these two people – artists.
Partly art essay, and partly travelogue, Varda’s series – as with many of her filmic works – bears relevance for film and cultural studies, art history, literature and politics, if not for its composed criticisms, then for the rich hybridity of work it puts on display and the genuine excitement it exudes for the state of contemporary art and cinema. While her exploration of each individual and their contribution to the art scene may not be sufficient in itself, Varda is successful at mapping out a dialectical relationship between the differing artists and the contexts from which they stem, revealing another glimpse into the contradictions and similarities of creative individuals within history, and the potentials of their art outside of traditional historical narrative. As a work that plays with notions of time and memory in some of the ways discussed, its episodes can be viewed both chronologically – to preserve a sense of cohesion within the viewer – and nonchronologically – as literal fragments of memory.
In one of her many interviews Varda comments on the word personne. She states: “‘Personne’ is no one and ‘personne’ is everyone.” Personne is singular and plural. Thus, being is individuated and exists with others, and Varda will always remain one of cinema’s most fleshed-out individuals, a “happy participant” who relishes in breaking down boundaries between individual and artist, oneself and others.
Author Biography
Mina Radovic is an undergraduate student of Film Studies and German Language, Literature and Linguistics at the University of St Andrews. He is a filmmaker and also writes regular film critiques for the University Journal and independently. Mina runs an interactive film screening series — under the title “Liberating Cinema” — each semester at the University, and organizes local film events with international filmmakers and academics. His research interests are in archiving, early cinema and film studios, Yugoslav cinema, world cinema and, in particular, the links between spectatorship, participation and voyeurism in the cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Film Details
Agnes Varda: From Here to There (2012)
France
Director Agnes Varda
Runtime 225 minutes
DVD
USA, 2014
Distributed by Cinema Guild
