Reading｜Interview with the “Mother of the New Wave”: Witnessing the Youth and Eternity in Film History
2024-08-13
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Agnès Varda is a fearless pioneer in the film industry, the evergreen "Grandmother of the New Wave", and an indispensable "soul of film" in the history of Western film and women's film. Her creative career spans more than 60 years, and at the age of 90, she is still making new attempts, influencing countless fans and successors. She interprets the true meaning of film art with rich and free forms and natural yet profound expressions. It can be said that Varda is creativity and vitality itself.
"The Beaches of Agnès: Interviews with Varda" is a collection of interviews with Varda, including 21 interviews she gave between 1962 and 2008, covering the complete trajectory of her film career and her works, and involving her relationship with the "New Wave", Hollywood, different social groups, lovers and family. In Varda's half-life story, we can understand the stories behind the pictures, the deep meaning conveyed by the images, where her passion for movies comes from, why she can always capture the mysteries of life from daily life and "find beauty in impossible places", and as a marginal artist-director, what difficulties and bitterness did Varda experience, what kind of satisfaction did she get from her creation and life, etc. Open these interviews and you will find the vast beach that belongs to Varda.
The Beaches of Agnès: Interviews with Varda, edited by T. Jefferson Crane, translated by Qu Xiaorui, published by Shanghai Bookstore Publishing House
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The so-called style refers to film writing
"I am a woman," Agnès Varda told Andrea Meyer, "who works intuitively and as intelligently as possible. Feeling, intuition and the joy of discovering things come together like a torrent. Finding beauty in impossible places. Observing." Throughout her extraordinary artistic career, Varda has never stopped her quest to "find beauty in impossible places." First with photography, then, from 1954 to the present day, she has turned to the medium of film. No one familiar with Varda's various works would doubt her success on this path.
Agnès Varda is known first as the “Mother” and then as the “Grandmother” of the New Wave, and it’s not for nothing. Years before Truffaut burst onto the scene with The 400 Blows and before Godard broke all the rules of cinematic grammar with Breathless, Varda had already made her first New Wave feature film.
Varda had lived for a long time in the French Mediterranean coast, in a place called "Short Point Village" near Sète. In 1954, Varda decided to make a film of the same name, about the fishermen there and their family life. With an extremely limited budget and no experience (either as a moviegoer or as a film student), Varda made an excellent film with resilience and wisdom, its story line alternating between a couple in crisis (played by Philippe Noiret and Sylvia Monfort) and a fishing community struggling in economic difficulties. Although the film was not a box office hit, it laid the foundation for the arrival of the "New Wave" in the future due to its low cost, minimalist storyline (partly borrowed from Faulkner's narrative techniques in "The Wild Palms"), neorealism and expressive film style.
Varda was born in Brussels in 1928 to a Greek father and a French mother. She spent most of her teenage years in Sète. During the Nazi occupation, the family moved to Paris, where she began to study photography. Her first jobs included taking four hundred photos of children sitting on Santa Claus' lap every day at the Galeries Lafayette, and taking archival photos for the French National Railway Company (SNCF). In 1951, Varda was invited to join Jean Vilar's National Theatre of the People (TNP) as the institution's official photographer. Over the next decade, she took a series of stunning portraits of France's most famous actors, including Vilar in different roles and France's most anticipated actor, Gérard Philippe, among many others.
Varda was very lucky to have Alain Resnais take on the editing of Les Poins, who then introduced her to the future "surfers" of the "New Wave": Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Eric Rohmer. They all worked at the magazine Cahiers du Cinema under André Bazin and entered the film industry through this. The "Cahiers du Cinema" group gradually became known as the "Right Bank" group to distinguish it from the more politically concerned "Left Bank" group, which included Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, as well as Agnès Varda herself. Resnais also introduced Varda to the Cinémathèque Française, where she began to study the history of world cinema.
Varda's film career received a major boost in 1957 when the French Tourism Board commissioned her to shoot a short film promoting the Loire Valley, Seasons, Chateaux, which was selected for the 1958 Cannes and Tours Film Festivals. It was at the Tours Film Festival that Varda met the love of her life, Jacques Demy, and for the next nearly four decades, their directing careers progressed almost in parallel. Demy introduced Varda to Georges Beauregard, who, excited by the success of the "New Wave" (especially Godard), agreed to produce Varda's next feature, Cleo from 5 to 7. In preparation for this film, Varda shot another short film for the Tourism Board, The Shoreline, and a documentary called Opera de Moulin. Varda was pregnant with her first child at the time, and she said of the second documentary that it "tells how one can be pregnant and feel extremely happy while being aware of the suffering and aging that is so common in the Rue Mouffetard more than anywhere else. This contrast is so striking and it fascinates me" (Mireille Amiel).
Cléo from 5 to 7 was filmed in mid-May 1961 and tells the story of two hours in the life of a pop singer (Corinne Marchand). On this day, she receives the news that she will soon die of cancer. But then she meets a soldier who is about to go to Algeria to fight. Under his influence, she seems to regain her peace and develop a new sense of self. The film was well received after its release and was selected as the official French competition film at the Cannes Film Festival. Varda's pioneering role in the overwhelming "New Wave" has not yet attracted public attention, but she has now officially "debuted" and invitations are pouring in. In addition, after the great success of Cléo from 5 to 7, she and Demy married in 1962. In the same year, she went to Cuba and made "Homage to the Cubans" after returning, which included more than 4,000 photos she took there, as well as a personal speech by Fidel Castro. The film won the Silver Dove Award at the Leipzig Film Festival and the Bronze Award at the Venice International Documentary Film Festival.
It was during this period that Varda began to conceive a more theoretical approach to her artistic creation. She said: "The core question to be shown in (my work) is 'what is film', specifically how I express what I want to say in a specific film technique. I can tell you the content of the film in six hours, but I choose to express it through images." (David Warwick) In order to reflect her special personal thinking on film language, Varda coined a term: film writing. As she explained to Jean de Cock: "When you write a musical score, other people can play it, it's a symbol. When an architect draws a detailed floor plan, anyone can build the house he designed. But for me, I can't write a script for others to shoot, because the script does not represent the writing of the film." She later explained: "The editing, movement, perspective, shooting rhythm and the rhythm of image editing are all designed and thought out in advance, just like the writer chooses the depth of meaning of each sentence, the type of words, the number of adverbs, paragraphs, narration, and decides where the story climaxes and turns. In writing, it is called style. In film, the so-called style refers to film writing." (Excerpt from the introduction of "The Beaches of Agnès: Varda's Interviews")
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Editor: Jiang Chuting Editor-in-charge: Zhu Zifen
