Faces Places
Aug. 4th, 2018 09:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerMy friend Becky and I kicked off the Month of Agnes with Agnes Varda’s Faces Places (Visages, Villages in French), which is possibly the most French movie ever made. One of the early scenes involves iconic filmmaker 88-year-old Agnes Varda and her friend/film-making partner, 33-year-old photographic artist JR, taking photographs of people biting into the side of a baguette… and then pasting giant versions of these photos on a wall so it looks like all these people are biting into the same infinitely long baguette.
Yes. It is very very French. There are also meditations on mortality and an emphasis on the rural and the working-class, including an entire shoot in a dockyard, in which Varda and JR paste enormously enlarged photographs of dockworkers’ wives on stacks of shipping containers. Then they have the women sit in an open shipping container high up in the composition, near the heart. (“I don’t like this!” one of the women proclaims. Also very French: participants are allowed to be negative if that’s how they really feel.)
It’s a lot of fun, although I would recommend watching it with a friend; it might drag a bit if you don’t have anyone to discuss it with as you go along. It’s an eccentric and very personal movie. The movie begins by teasing the audience with a number of scenarios where they might have met: at the bus stop, in the cafe, when Varda bought the last two eclairs at the boulangerie… but never tells us how they did in fact meet.
But even though their meeting seems to be recent, they nonetheless share a number of special places in common, like a windy beach in Normandy where an old World War II bunker has fallen onto the sand and stands there, balanced on one point, like a modern sculpture.
The visuals are striking, as you might expect from a collaboration between a New Wave director and a photographer. But the collaboration is not just artistic: their friendship forms a restrained yet poignant through-line for a movie that might otherwise feel episodic.
Yes. It is very very French. There are also meditations on mortality and an emphasis on the rural and the working-class, including an entire shoot in a dockyard, in which Varda and JR paste enormously enlarged photographs of dockworkers’ wives on stacks of shipping containers. Then they have the women sit in an open shipping container high up in the composition, near the heart. (“I don’t like this!” one of the women proclaims. Also very French: participants are allowed to be negative if that’s how they really feel.)
It’s a lot of fun, although I would recommend watching it with a friend; it might drag a bit if you don’t have anyone to discuss it with as you go along. It’s an eccentric and very personal movie. The movie begins by teasing the audience with a number of scenarios where they might have met: at the bus stop, in the cafe, when Varda bought the last two eclairs at the boulangerie… but never tells us how they did in fact meet.
But even though their meeting seems to be recent, they nonetheless share a number of special places in common, like a windy beach in Normandy where an old World War II bunker has fallen onto the sand and stands there, balanced on one point, like a modern sculpture.
The visuals are striking, as you might expect from a collaboration between a New Wave director and a photographer. But the collaboration is not just artistic: their friendship forms a restrained yet poignant through-line for a movie that might otherwise feel episodic.
