The film-maker who never lost her sense of wonder was 90
liked recycling, in 2003 Agnès Varda built herself a shack. It was made of 35mm prints of “The Creatures”, her biggest flop, one of the very few in which she had cast a star, Catherine Deneuve. But when she sat inside this new construction the sunlight entered in the most beautiful ways, glowing through the images, so that she inhabited cinema.
Documentaries pleased her as a schooling in modesty, just placing the camera to observe, not hovering like an eagle or overlaying ideas of her own. Another, “The Gleaners”, recorded the lives of the poor or frugal who picked up wasted food from thrown-out pallets or the ground, her hand-held camera bending with them to see what they found, rejoicing especially in a potato shaped like a heart. People often told her they had nothing to say, but she drew words out of them, gleaning herself.
Social messages ran all through these films, but only one about America’s Black Panthers, and a collation of 4,000 black-and-white stills of the revolution she took in Cuba in 1963, proclaimed her left-wing convictions. Feminism was another matter. She was born a feminist, changing her name to sober Agnès from silly, giggly Arlette, signing a manifesto to legalise abortion in France and making films in which the patriarchy smothered even supper-table conversation.
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Read more »