French "New Wave Grandmother" Agnès Varda: Everyone loves me, but no one wants me
2024-08-17
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Agnès Varda is an indispensable soul in the history of Western cinema and the history of women's cinema. Her creative career spans more than 60 years. From starting to make films at the age of 26 after having only seen 5 films, to becoming the first female winner of the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement at the age of 80, Varda "did not want to leave her name in the history of film", but someone will always include her in it. Her passion for film, her ability to capture the mysteries of life from daily life, and her courage to break the rules throughout her life have left a deep impression on movie fans.
However, she, who is known as the "grandmother of the New Wave", has long been excluded from the French film industry. As a filmmaker, Varda once publicly stated: "Everyone loves me, but no one wants me." As a marginalized person, she has spent her life searching for and approaching the standard of "good work" in her field of vision. So, what exactly is a "good work" in Varda's eyes? How does she view the core issues of light, shadow, emotion and even lies in the film? And looking back on the road she has come, how would she define her relationship with the "New Wave"?
The following text is excerpted from the section "No One Wants Me" in "The Beaches of Agnès: Interviews with Varda" with permission from the publisher. The subheadings are added by the editor and do not belong to the original text.
"The Beaches of Agnès: Interviews with Varda", edited by T. Jefferson Crane [USA], translated by Qu Xiaorui, published by Ye Ren | Shanghai Bookstore Publishing House, July 2024.
"I don't make 'regular movies'"
A & J：Ever since Short Point, you seem to have had a desire or aspiration to make your own films.
Varda:Was it out of will or desire? No, it was out of necessity. I became a producer when “they” didn’t want to produce my work, or when the project seemed too hard to complete. After all, who would want to produce, finance, or work on a film like The Whisper of the Wall, about a wall in Los Angeles? Or The Liar, about words, exile, and pain? These projects were inherently difficult. So I took matters into my own hands, and made my own work. I remembered a fortune cookie I once had in a Chinese restaurant that said, “When you need help, you can turn to your own hands.” That’s why I became a producer, so I wouldn’t have to abandon my projects.
When I made Short Point in 1954, no one had faith in me. I also made Les Moulins de l'Opéra with my own money. After that, I started having producers, like Georges Beauregard for Cleo from 5 to 7, Mag Bodard for Happiness and Creation. It was like a dream, all I had to do was direct. It wasn't so easy with Max Raab, the co-producer of Lion's Love; he raised the money and I managed it... That was in 1969. After that, I never had any other producer, male or female, besides myself. But I didn't want to go on like that. It was too tiring to make my own films. I wasted too much energy that could have been better spent on the films. Besides, the producer is a terrible role. You end up being a terrible boss - not always, but after all... I was exhausted making Daguerre Street, One Sings, One Doesn't, The Whisper of the Walls and The Liar, not to mention Lady Oscar for Jacques and the Japanese. Enough, I'm not going to be a filmmaker anymore. Maybe I'd better give up making movies altogether.
Still from the movie "Short Cape Village" (1955).
A & J：Really? You're not going to make any more movies?
Varda:I don't know, but I need help. I want to be paid to do what I do best, which is to write and direct. I hide the fact that I'm unemployed by being both the employer and the (unpaid) employee on the sets. After ten or twelve years of this poorly disguised unemployment, I've had enough! I'm not saying that I can't make films... What I'm saying is that all this energy put into production hides the fact that no one has ever trusted my work in the usual way of the French film industry. If experimental films have to be made under such difficult conditions, then we will eventually lose this "cultural label" that has been so successful in other countries. Interestingly, I think of Cleo, the beautiful Cleo, who said "Everyone wants me, but no one loves me". As a filmmaker, I can also say "Everyone loves me, but no one wants me"!
I don't mind doing the usual stunt work of making a movie and figuring out how to make fifteen extras look like twenty, but I don't want to have to raise the money to pay the fifteen extras; raise the money to pay the technicians who filmed the fifteen extras; raise the money to hire an accountant to give the fifteen extras and the fifteen technicians payroll; find a truck to get the thirty people to the set and then figure out how to make the fifteen extras look like twenty or twenty-five. This isn't just walking a tightrope, this is dancing a hat on top of it in 8:3 time!
I remember when I was filming "One Sings, the Other Doesn't", I ran to a telephone booth under a plane tree between two shots to call the French National Film Center to ask if the advance payment could be approved and paid... I am very fortunate to have received the advance payment. Without this "dowry", I simply cannot imagine that this movie would wait until the day when it can be screened in the cinema hall.
At first, things went well for The Whisper of the Walls. The Ministry of Culture paid part of the money in advance; TV2 and Klais Hellwig also provided some funds... But the film went from a short to a feature, and the budget did not increase. I had to make up the difference.
With the feature film, The Liar, it was a completely different story. I was able to get only a small grant from the French National Film Center, and the film made almost no money. So I ended up with some debts. But the technicians were not owed money, their salaries were not delayed or cut, everyone was paid. I still had to repay all the money that the film industry and other organizations lent me, but I could repay it in installments. The film industry... You know, in Los Angeles, people ask, "Are you from the industry too?" As if it was self-evident that the industry meant the film industry. I always answer, "Not really, I'm an artist-filmmaker." I try to restore the meaning of the words "artist" and "craftsman," who, in the "seventh art," do not make major motion pictures, but films, which are also part of cinema. "I make films, not businesses."
Still from the movie "The Liar" (1981).
What I hate most is when business people say "Movies are just about thrills or fear or whatever". They usually add "Movies are not some pathetic elitist ideology..." They define what movies are... How come they don't understand that movies are all different types and styles? I'm just reiterating what everyone already knows, but it doesn't help to reiterate it. It's because of these ridiculous statements that I don't work with regular producers to make "regular" movies.
I dream of working with someone like Marcel Berbert, who did everything for Truffaut. In return, Truffaut let him appear in all his films. Berbert's cameos were as subtle and understated as Hitchcock's cameos in his own films. I would gladly offer cameos in all my films to a serious and reliable production manager!
A & J：Where are you at this stage in your career?
Varda:I can't function. Not without inspiration, but without courage, even though I feel I've made some good work recently and have made progress. Not with Whisper of the Walls, which was shot in a fairly typical way...typical for me - documentary, personal. I took the time to really listen to people, think about things, and have fun. I'm not talking about what other people consider "good work". There are a lot of film artists making decent work in a variety of ways.
For me, "good work" has another meaning, which is to reshape the stereotypes with imagination. When the mind is really open and the associations are free, when I start writing in a pure film vocabulary, this is "good work". Film writing, so to speak? The new relationship between images and sounds, which allows us to present images and sounds that were previously suppressed or hidden deep inside... Using all this and adding emotion to make a film, this is what I call "good work". In the process of making "Documentary Liar", I felt that I was progressing with the work. I have always imagined my life as an unfinished work, and I don't care much about the development of my career. I have made some films and I like to make films, but my films have not made as much progress as other films.
A & J：Do you have any unmade films that have the potential to be exciting?
Varda:Of course! I have written several scripts that have not been filmed, or will not be filmed, including "Mixed" in 1960 and "Maria and the Naked Man" in 1980. I hope to work with Theresa Russel on the former, who I think is very good. She was in Nicolas Roeg's "Bad Timing", which is called "Enquête sur une Passion" in French. And Simone Signoret, whose talent I admire very much, and her voice. I also have to find an American to play the naked man who is beaten to death by the police... Anyway, the filming plan is still there, and I haven't given up on the project.
A & J：What about A Christmas Carol?
Varda:I shot ten minutes of footage in 1966 or 1967, when Gérard Depardieu made his debut… It was supposed to be a film about young people before 1968, but I didn’t get the advance from CIC, the distributors gave up, I gave up, and I went to America. You have to let go when you have to. I remember once I went to see Jacques Prévert with Jacques. He said something to us that impressed me: for every script he had picked up, paid for and filmed, there were at least two films with complete dialogues that nobody cared about after they were finished… Just imagine how long it takes to write a script! It took me five months to write Maria et le nudaire. I worked with an American screenwriter and wrote a manuscript of about thirty pages. I needed someone to help me write in English, in creative language… We worked non-stop every day, even on Saturday mornings. Fortunately, we got paid in the end. In addition, I like to shoot the idea as soon as I have it, especially for documentaries. It was the same with Rue Daguerre and Uncle Yanko. Get the shock, get the emotion, come up with the structure, and then start shooting. I like that, too. For Uncle Yanko, I met him on a Thursday, and Uncle Yanko is a great guy! We shot three days in a row, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. That was it! I was emotionally engaged and happy the whole time. I shot the film in the throes of creation.
The time, emotion and lies of the film itself
A & J：This brings us to your connection to weather and time (le temps). Can you talk about that?
Varda:I'd love to talk, of course, I prefer to shoot in color on cloudy days and live in sunny weather... But your question also touches on another meaning of "temps", that is, the constant flow of time. I like those moments in life when time doesn't seem to pass. Time is flowing. I am amazed that children grow up and trees grow taller. One day, Godard came to our house on Daguerre Street to see Rosalie, who was making some huge angel wings with real feathers to be used in Godard's film Passion. When I saw Godard and Rosalie, I smiled. Godard and I met in the same house 20 years ago, when Rosalie was only three years old and always spinning around at my feet. I find it difficult to capture such moments in film, even though 20 years have passed, we don't feel that we are much different now than we were then.
In cinema, to be credible, we have to use make-up and other means to show the passage of time... Deep down, we don't feel that we are aging. We don't live in front of a mirror, and we can't perceive our reality from the outside. We know this, but we rarely really realize it. What fascinates me in cinema is the time of the film itself, the time of filming, about time itself and its sudden density. I showed this in Cleo from 5 to 7: when time suddenly freezes and when it starts to flow freely again. Time is like blood circulation, or as in Documentary Liar, time is emptied of substance and becomes pure space: a beach, or a corridor between two labyrinthine buildings.
Still from the movie "The Liar" (1981).
I recently saw a very interesting experiment in Nancy, done by Shirley's daughter, Windy Clarke. She has set up a small room in the main tent of the Nancy Theatre Festival, where she makes and shows her "love tapes". About five years ago, she began making a film about a group therapy group. Participants film themselves and each other, and the images are played on screens around the room so that they can see their work and then describe themselves and each other. The whole process is a bit heavy, to put it simply. But then she came up with a new plan: ask each participant to talk about love for three minutes. She has collected about 700 minutes of such testimonies. Screens are installed around the room, and these 700 minutes of "love tapes" are played in French and English. If anyone wants to try it, they can go into the room. Wendy explains how the video works, lets them choose the frame and the background music, and then leaves them alone in the room. The filmer locks the door and faces the camera to shoot a three-minute video. After three minutes, the camera turns off. Wendy comes back in and replays the tape. If the other party agrees to save it, Wendy will add it to the video collection; if not, she will delete it.
These "love tapes" are fascinating, they reveal everything about the person who filmed them and the person who sees them, and also about the time when they were filmed. I was struck by a woman in her 50s or 60s, with a bun and glasses, who looked like a grandmother. She loved everything: flowers, life, work, her colleagues... It was really touching, and I was also surprised that someone who looked so gentle and calm had such a strong love for life inside. At the 40th second, she repeated "I love flowers and life", and suddenly said "and my children and my husband", and then stopped talking; then she said, "Oh, three minutes is too long". So in the last two minutes, she just said from time to time, "I didn't expect three minutes to be so long", or to put it another way, "It's too long, three minutes is too long to talk about what love is". It was incredible. I had a feeling that I really touched the texture of the time this woman was trapped in, which was also the time I was in when I watched and listened to this "love tape".
In Documentary Liar, I tried something new by introducing a period of silence between strong emotional moments, giving the audience time to arrive there and feel the aftershocks of their own emotions, the echoes of words, and forgotten memories. It's like using the time they experienced themselves in the time of the movie. I arranged the moments full of emotions, and then the images that projected these emotions into them, and finally let the two produce a silent echo.
A & J：So this is an emotional reserve?
Varda:Yes, emotional reserve, and manipulation of emotion, through movement from one shot to the next. A kind of emotional “slippage” (a word that fascinates me): words and the images they evoke. Word-images are signs or signals for us, but not always in the way we expect. In Documentary Liar, I filmed a love scene between Emilie and her lover (literary, concrete, lovemaking). It is a graphic and a sign of physical love in each other’s arms. In another scene, shot by Naris Aviv, we see a woman in a laundromat with her back to us, stroking her hair. She absentmindedly braids her greasy hair in childlike braids. It is an unsettling image, not sensual, but clearly sexual. When I watched the film with Sabine Mamou, who plays Emilie, I noticed a move Sabine makes when she is acting out the love scene, where she raises her elbows above her head. I remember being overwhelmed when I realized I could juxtapose a shot of a woman in a laundromat with an elbow raised during sex, so that I could “slip” between the language of love in one shot and pure sensuality as a sign of desire in the next.
A & J：This separation between fact and symbol can already be seen in the Moulin Opera.
Varda:Yes. But I had rarely done that before. It was in the Moulin Opera, it was in Cleo from 5 to 7—the way Dorothee (Dorothée Blanck) was posing as a nude model and the baby in the incubator.
A & J：What about the two naked bodies? Sometimes you separate them from each other, as if to symbolize their separation. But sometimes the two bodies are together...
Varda:That's a good explanation, I hadn't thought of it that way. You only see these two bodies together in the lovemaking scene, which is undoubtedly from past memories, not some new affair or sexual experience. In addition, the shot of the naked man sleeping alone, and the shot of naked Emily spending the whole afternoon alone, do not symbolize desire, but symbolize time without sensual desire, only body time.
Still from the film "Cleo from 5 to 7" (1962).
A & J：But because of this sense of lack, these two shots are also full of sensual desire.
Varda:Yes… that feeling of emptiness… the absence has a very powerful presence. It is difficult to show desire in film. I am not talking about desire and the signs of desire being satisfied, but about the indescribable desire, the inexpressible tension, which cannot be expressed in any other way except through the emptiness that has form. Just as in the sculptures of Henry Moore, the emptiness is as powerful as the fullness, the former is even more powerful. In ceramics, too, we have to see the emptiness as a form: there, the pottery surrounds the empty form.
A & J：Is "The Liar" a film about a child's longing for a father, or a film about physical desire?
Varda:Undoubtedly, both. The child misses his father and needs his mother. For the mother, it is a confusion of fullness and emptiness, where words become a painful eroticism and a substitute for desire. In the second part, the mother's words are replaced by the child's short but precise words, which express the mother's desire in general, which is also a desire that everyone has, such as "I don't want to sleep alone" or "Without you, there is no love." When the boy says "I want to see my father" - a casual word - I establish the child as a subject and at the same time disperse the subject. The third part is about others. All those confused men and women who have no specific identity in the scene (no matter how insignificant the scene is), but who constitute the identity of the film: a waitress in a closed cafe, a drug addict sleeping on a bench, and the woman lying on the sand, crying and grabbing the sand with her hands. Naris Aviv told me later that she thought it was some kind of voodoo ritual... I don't know, I was just very moved - this suffering woman came here and appeared in my film.
A & J：Another scene, in which two men appear to be keeping a vigil for a dead person, seems more ritualistic.
Varda:This is a scene I saw one day, but I didn't understand what it was. So I reassembled it and saw a woman lying like she was dead, with a Bible on her abdomen, and two men kneeling beside her.
A & J：The Liar seems to stray from your favorite oppositions of light and dark, optimism and pessimism.
Varda:It is true in the film. The film is full of shadows. But when we put The Whisper of the Wall and The Liar together, we move from sunlight to shadow, from the outside to the inside...the two films share a love of contradiction.
A & J：The opposition is not always so tight or equal. I personally feel that the Moulin Opera is 90% pain and 10% hope.
Varda:Maybe. The two films do have things in common, including the music by Georges Delerue. They are both colorful and intensely personal. They were also difficult to make, as if I was resisting making them. I had a hard time writing the script for The Liar. I kept postponing the start date, and when everything was set, the day before shooting, I lost all my IDs in two different places, as well as the only copy of the script that I hadn't had time to photocopy. Sabina managed to find the script. Without her and Narice's patience and their persistence in bringing this project to fruition, I probably wouldn't have started the film, let alone finished it.
Later, I was thwarted by obstacles. I insisted on renting the apartment I had lived in before, but the landlord would not agree. I persisted, waited, and lost a lot of time. Three days before the shooting started, I finally gave up on the place, and half an hour later, I found a lot of slum houses from the 1930s, which were like a maze inside. This location was strangely peaceful and unsettling, and there was no better choice for Emily and Martin. It was ten times better than the apartment I insisted on for a long time. This is what I call work: concealment and revelation, obsession and reality, surrealism, magic, the desire to photograph the unphotographic.
A & J：Why do you use the word "menteur" in "The Liar"? There don't seem to be any lies in this film.
Varda:Quite the opposite. The whole film is against the principle of "real cinema". It is "film-dream-fable", what Aragon would call "real lies". It is not me, everything I say now is like a postscript, the film has escaped my control and can be seen by others. I talk about the film, I explain the film, I dream about the film, I try to understand the film, I talk about the film plan and its structure, discuss details. When I make a film, I am part of the organic reality of the film. After making "The Whisper of the Wall", I worked with Sabina Mamou on the editing for six months, processing images and texts, observing them, listening to them. Waiting for the image to become clear and release other information. Only then can I start writing something else, and only then can we come back to edit. As for "Documentary Liar", from the voice, the face to the body, it is "real lies". Who is speaking? In whose name? When the image of Sabina on the screen was edited from Sabina's hands, we were really confused. I said, "Is it you... or is it her..." We laughed at the maze we had built - reality, virtual images, real images or imagined images all ended up being similar to each other.
“I never really belonged to a group”
A & J：Finally we want to ask a historical question… How do you see yourself in relation to the “New Wave” today?
Varda:To paraphrase the song by Renaud Séchan, I felt like we were a group of kids... but I was never part of a group. They say I was a forerunner of the New Wave, but I was completely on my own, I wasn't part of the film culture. I was in the New Wave. Thanks to Godard, Georges Beauregard was able to produce Jacques's Lola. Thanks to Jacques, I made Cleo from 5 to 7. The baton was passed on, leading to some common tendencies, such as making low-budget films with characters walking through the streets of Paris.
Still from the film "Cleo from 5 to 7" (1962).
In this sense, when we look at Le Pont du Nord, we see that Rivette never aged! But I never really belonged to a group, so people used to leave me out, to exclude me. In 1976, the Musidora group published a book about women, Paroles, Elles Tournent, and I was not mentioned in it. Last year, in 1980, Cahiers du Cinéma published two special issues devoted to French cinema. In neither of them was I mentioned, nor any of my works. God knows how many people were mentioned in it, interesting people, different people, all kinds of French filmmakers, men, women, people from Auvergne. But I was not mentioned. Was it because I was in America? Louis Malle was in America. Was it because of misogyny? Of course not, Catherine Breillat, Marguerite Duras and others were included. Was it because people under five feet tall were ignored? No, Chantal Akerman was also included. I was the only one left out. No one contacted me, all my letters went to Los Angeles, but I never received any comment forms. I was really sad. If Cahiers du Cinéma, which had invited me to do many long interviews over the years, excluded me, it really felt like exile.
But it's not an accident or an oversight. It just so happens that my new film is about this very thing, about separation. It's about the lack of a place to stay, the lack of the warmth of the old environment or community, the lack of a shoulder to lean on. Now, I'm here with two films (strangely, we've barely talked about The Whisper of the Walls in this interview). When I came back, everyone was watching my films, talking to me, asking me questions. I was welcomed with open arms. Maybe I do exist in French cinema, even if I haven't received much heat or shelter, but at least I'm now in it instead of outside it.
Original author/[US] T. Jefferson Crane
Translator/Qu Xiaorui
Excerpted by Shen Lu
Editor/Shen Lu
Introduction proofreader/Zhao Lin
