This interview took place on Saturday, May 17, 2014, in Paris, before, during, and after lunch at Agnès Varda’s home and studio in the rue Daguerre, where she has lived and worked since 1951. The conversation ranges widely. It touches on her friendship with Alexander Calder, his works, the parallel subjects of fiction and documentary, ideas of light and space, the photographer’s frame, film form and content, women filmmakers in a world run by men, the restoration of early and contemporary movies, and the pleasures of eating lilacs and potatoes.
Often referred to as the grandmother of the French New Wave—having shot her first feature, La Pointe Courte, in 1954 (released in 1956), some six years prior to Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960)—Varda was also included in the Left Bank Group. That designation, as Varda notes, was invented by the critic Richard Roud to refer to Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Varda. (Jacques Demy was added to the group later.) Varda says that she and Roud were, in fact, friends but didn’t discuss film. Both of them held leftist political beliefs, lived on the Left Bank (of the Seine), and liked cats.[1] Varda invented the concept of cinécriture and founded a cooperative film production company called Tamaris Films in order to make her ambitious first film. The production company, now called Ciné-Tamaris, is still going strong.[2]
Agnès Varda began her career as a still photographer at the age of 19; made her most recent feature, Les Plages d’Agnès (2008), at the age of 80; and continues to work in many different media. She has created sculptural installations such as the one recently shown in her first US museum exhibition, “Agnès Varda in Californialand,” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2013–14). In “Triptyques Atypiques” at the Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris (2014), she exhibited her photo/video combines, including the wall-mounted triptychs Marie dans le vent (Marie in the Wind), 2014, and Alice et les vaches blanches (Alice and the White Cows), 2011, which feature a Varda gelatin silver print flanked by two HD videos, as well as her installation Beau comme …, 2014, a work inspired by her long-standing interest in Surrealism and, in particular, a famous quotation from Isidore Ducasse (writing as the Comte de Lautréamont) in his 1869 novel Les Chants de Maldoror: “Beautiful as … the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”
Varda’s work is collected in several box sets: Criteron released a set of four DVDs, 4 by Agnès Varda, in the US in 2008. Tout(e) Varda, a box set of twenty-two DVDs, was released in PAL format in 2012. Arte Editions and Ciné-Tamaris recently co-released Agnès Varda in California, a set of five films shot in California. In the US, Criterion is soon to release the same project in its Eclipse collection.
Joan Simon: The first museum shows I saw after I moved to California this past January were at LACMA [the Los Angeles County Museum of Art]—yours and Calder’s—and I wondered how you felt about those two exhibitions’ being on view at the same time.
Agnès Varda: A feeling of absolute humility, because for me Calder is a great master. He was a friend, but he was a master. He invented, instinctively, a way of re-creating the gentle movements of trees in the wind. He reinvented the beauty of nature. The architect Frank Gehry had a good idea for the installation: To avoid making the place look like a lighting store with all those mobiles hanging there, he created a little universe for each mobile; he gave each mobile its own space.
It was also important for the background of each space to be painted, so that the colors and especially the delicate lines in space of the mobiles and stabiles would stand out clearly. Also, each work had to be out of reach to avoid being damaged by visitors. That was achieved efficiently and with great subtlety.
I thought it was a magnificent idea—that’s how Calders should be seen. But you can’t do that in a gallery; it’s too expensive. Even in a museum I had never seen them displayed like that. I was absolutely delighted to see some mobiles that I had never seen before. As for the little ones, they were marvels.
I was thinking about them as I sat inside my film shack [My Shack of Cinema (1968–2013)]. I couldn’t believe my work was being shown alongside works by Calder.[3]
You are referring to the shack made out of film stock.
Yes. I was delighted and surprised to be invited to LACMA to build a film shack similar to the one I had done at the Fondation Cartier in Paris [Ma Cabane de l’Échec (My Cabin of Failure, 2006)], which I had made using strips from a burned-out 35-mm print.[4] Along with Scorsese’s Film Foundation and with help from the Annenberg Foundation, LACMA had suggested restoring the films I made in California. Then [LACMA director] Michael Govan said, “We’ll do an exhibition at the same time.” And they picked Rita Gonzalez, who I think is a very good curator. I suggested making a film shack with an old 35-mm print of LIONS LOVE (… AND LIES), one of the films I made in Los Angeles—that one was in 1968. At the beginning of November 2013, LACMA held a gala to honor David Hockney and Martin Scorsese … and, I guess, me a little bit, seeing that they had helped pay for the restoration.
Your exhibition consisted of the cinema shack, the mural with still photos and dialogues from the film, and a 1970s television set covered with an American flag and a pink boa. The entire installation My Shack of Cinema (1968–2013) is now in the LACMA collection.
I wrote out lines from the dialogue by hand on the mural because they’re worth reading in big letters. I had originally authored those lines with Carlos Clarens, a Cuban who had become an American and was intelligent, witty, and wonderful—actually, he was writing a book about Richard Brooks at the same time. He helped me write the dialogue. He had an ear for the hip style of talking in those years at the end of the 1960s. We realized that there were things we could say, we could call a spade a spade. So I listened to him; he assisted me. Gerome Ragni and Jim Rado, the writers of Hair, who were both acting in it, helped me too. Sometimes they came up with phrases like, “I hate all kinds of entertainment, including living”—you see what I mean, phrases like that, and I love them. And Viva, too. She was full of life and very inventive: “All the dead actors have turned into cockroaches. That’s why there are so many of them in the hotels here.” I would say “Three is a perfect number” because that was obviously what the film was about. At the end of the 1960s there were buttons everywhere, those funny little badges with messages on them. I loved those buttons, so we enlarged them and put them on the mural.
There were buttons with slogans like “Poetry Not Poverty” on the mural, along with stills from LIONS LOVE and lines of dialogue.
There was one button, I remember, that read, “Sterilize Johnson, we don’t want any more ugly children”—funny things like that, which were aggressive at the same time. I think people have calmed down now, apart from a few punks and singers. But it was fun, because that period set something free in me, too. There is a bit of punk in all of us and a bit of the hippie.
Jacques [Demy] and I arrived from France, with our French culture—interesting, organized, and logical. For me it was a marvelous moment of liberation to show up in Los Angeles in 1967, with the flower children, the hippies, Marshall McLuhan (“the medium is the message”), the Vietnam War, pop music, and, of course, the Black Panthers, whom I filmed.
Let’s take a break. I’ll put some water on to boil potatoes. They are a very special kind, from the island of Noirmoutier; they’re called Bonnottes. They grow in sandy soil and they’re fertilized with seaweed. At Christmas, you spread seaweed over the ground; you wait until the seaweed goes soggy, then you dig it into the soil and plant your potatoes. When you pick them and eat them, they’re like little cakes. I’ll cook you some so you can taste them.
Thank you.
Just simple boiled potatoes—you’ll see how good they are.
You’ve done quite a few films with potatoes, and a big installation.
Great big potatoes shaped like hearts, filmed as if they were breathing.
And there was your potato costume at the Venice Biennale—what was that about?
Oh, that was just for fun. I did that for a laugh … and out of shyness. It was the first time I had been invited to a Biennale.
After you had worn it, you said you left it as part of your installation at the Biennale.
No, no, not at all … Patatutopia [2003] happened by chance, because in the movie Les Glaneurs [The Gleaners and I, 2000], I followed trucks that were dumping the potatoes that were too small or too big for the standard size sold in the supermarkets. Of course the potatoes go green in three days. But people come and pick them up. So, in Les Glaneurs, I filmed a guy who’d gone along straightaway to the places where the trucks had dumped them, and picked them up—gleaned them, in fact. He put them into sacks to sell them …
He said, “There are big ones, small ones, ones that look like monsters; there are even some heart-shaped ones.” And I said, “Oh, I want the heart-shaped ones, I want the heart!” So I brought all these heart-shaped potatoes home with me here and I started to film them. Then I put some on glass, in the light; I put some in the cellar, in the dark; and I put some in a cardboard box. And they grew like that. In other words, I started aging potatoes and filming them. I was happily occupied filming my potatoes when [Hans Ulrich] Obrist invited me to the Venice Biennale. He had interviewed me in a book called Interviews.[5] He had already noticed my films.
Anyway, Obrist invited me to be in a section called “Utopia Station.” One of the utopias involved bringing people into the big, official house of the arts who weren’t yet part of it, including me.
I was overjoyed because what I wanted to do was to present three big screens. I already had nearly all the material.
On the central screen you could see those heart-shaped potatoes breathing. And on the two sides you could see all the shoots that had grown and the new thin roots. Those wrinkled old potatoes that just kept growing and germinating—I thought it was quite beautiful. I was already seventy-six years old. It’s kind of silly to say so, but it was very invigorating for me. I was old and I was still creating life, germinating.
When I was watching your film L’Opéra-Mouffe [1958; released in English as Diary of a Pregnant Woman] I was struck by the balance between the joy and beauty of the young couple and that of the older people.
The film was mostly inspired and motivated by my pregnancy. As I said in the DVD extra of Varda Tous Courts, I was very happy to be pregnant.
What I was hoping for included the hope of happiness—happiness, whatever that might be—for the child. And I was watching people in the rue Mouffetard, old people, drunks, cripples, lonely people, and all those bums. My feeling was that I was looking at these poor people as they were, but they were all babies once. And when they were babies someone planted kisses on their little tummies and powdered their bottoms. They all started out as babies. And there was love for even the unexpected and the unlovely children when they first arrived.
The film is so tender—the shots of the couple in bed, just their eyes, their faces next to each other, one of them holding a foot, and when they are on the street kissing and the older people are looking at them with pleasure.
Pleasure or envy. All those people are so abandoned, so lonely—poverty and solitude in old age is a terrible thing, in the cafés … I thought those people … Oh, I was so grateful that they let me film them.
There was something that surprised me at the end of the film: the shot where she eats the flowers.
Those tiny lilac flowers are very good to eat—they’re very sweet.
There is a chapter heading that says “Les Envies,” which means “longings,” just before she eats the lilacs.
The short song at the beginning of the chapter talks about desires and longings. People always say that pregnant women have longings.
There is something else, too. There’s a certain confusion between the fat belly you get when you are expecting a baby and the fat belly from eating too much. At that time, there were people selling incredible meat products. It doesn’t happen any more. Those parts of animals that they call lights—the lungs and the spleen, those rather disgusting parts—are no longer sold. And the song you’re talking about goes, “Entre le dégoût et l’envie / Entre la pourriture et la vie” [Between disgust and desire / Between decay and life]. They were little haikus that Georges Delerue set to music, very beautiful music.[6]
What really surprised me when I watched and listened to your film was that it reminded me of an Alice Guy film called Madame a des envies [Madame Has Cravings]. It’s about a pregnant woman who …
Ah, I don’t know that film, but I know that you’re an Alice Guy-Blaché specialist.
It’s very funny. It’s a chase—she’s dragging a baby carriage behind her and an unfortunate husband, and she keeps stealing very phallic food from passersby. She steals a banana from a tramp, some absinthe from someone else, then she steals a lollipop, and there’s a close-up of her sucking on the lollipop.
I didn’t know she had such a sense of humor.
Oh, it’s really funny.
It’s sexy.
But when I saw the way you approached the subject …
It was very different.
Totally different, but …
My approach to those people was one of tenderness, as if I could pass on to those desolate people some of the tenderness that I felt for the baby I was expecting, and I really piled love onto them. I prepared for the film on my own by taking photographs. I’ve got some really good photos of the rue Mouffetard. I didn’t have any equipment for the shoot. Somebody had lent me a 16-mm camera. Then I would fetch a garden chair and take it into the street, I would stand on the chair, fix my tripod, and start filming. In the time between the preparations for the film and the actual filming, some of those tramps—I was already very affected by homeless people—some of them had died of cold. I mean, at the time, I was already disturbed by the idea of people dying of cold. You find this in Sans toit ni loi [1985, released in English as Vagabond]. Do know that film? At the end, she freezes to death.
I edited L’Opéra-Mouffe in my bedroom—I had very little money then, but I managed to finish the editing and put in Delerue’s music with the money I had earned as a photographer. There was an international fair in Brussels in 1958 and the director of the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, a wonderful man named Jacques Ledoux, set up an experimental film festival. He invited the obvious people: [Paul] Sharits, [Ed] Emshwiller, [Jonas] Mekas, [Michael] Snow, [Stan] Brakhage, and others—all the American experimentalists from the ’50s. And he invited me, too. I said to him, “I don’t know if my film L’Opéra-Mouffe is experimental.” He said, “But was it an experiment for you?” And I said, “Yes.”
The black and white in that film is so beautiful, the light—
It’s winter light, it’s beautiful. I was already a photographer, so I knew how to frame a shot.
Did you first meet Calder in your role as a photographer at Jean Vilar’s Théatre National Populaire, when he was designing the sets and costumes for Nucléa in 1952?
Maybe before. When Calder came to Sète, which is Jean Vilar’s hometown, I saw them. I took pictures of them on the beach.
According to the Calder Foundation archives, Calder performed his Cirque Calder in 1953 at Galerie Maeght.[7] What was it like to see him perform?
Oh, you can imagine how it was: this man, slightly plump, sitting on the floor and manipulating tiny, tiny little things that he had made himself. He would hang the trapeze artist on the trapeze and he would make the whole thing move. He was very ingenious. It was all done with strings and wire. It was funny and it was marvelous to see him laughing as well—especially when he was sweeping up the lion shit …
Have you seen the little film about the circus?
There are two films: one by Jean Painlevé and another by Carlos Vilardebó. Jean Painlevé’s film is very well done. Painlevé observes Calder the same way he looks at sea creatures in his underwater films: The camera stays still, facing straight ahead. Calder wears a dark blue shirt, not his usual red one, so he sort of fades into the background, like a Japanese puppeteer. Vilardebó’s film is a little more …
Carlos’s is more complicated.
Yes, the point of view moves around.
Carlos was my assistant and my savior on my first film, La Pointe Courte. He had made short films, but he hadn’t done the Calder yet. He helped me in 1954.
How?
He persuaded me to make the film! Because I’d written my screenplay, like a poem that you put in a drawer forever. I had never been taught, I had never been to film school, I knew nothing about films. I’d only seen half a dozen or a dozen films. And we met and he read the script and said it would be a nice film and I said, “So what do we do?” And he said, “Let’s get it organized.”
He got the crew together, a tiny crew: He was the assistant and also was the grip. His wife was the script supervisor. We found a cameraman—an old man … he was thirty-two! We rented a house and we all stayed in it. No hotels, no restaurants. Somebody came and did home cooking for us.
I asked all the actors to come and work without pay—we didn’t have any money at all. The money was for the film stock, for renting the camera and the house, and for buying food. The actors were fabulous. It was Philippe Noiret’s first film … Silvia Monfort had already acted in a Cocteau film. They were very generous. My first film was made as a result of everyone’s generosity. Alain Resnais, who was an editor, had already made a short, and he agreed to edit my film for no pay. It’s a miracle that it exists.
Nobody directed a film at twenty-six years old, because you had to be an assistant first. You had to wait. Third AD, second AD, and so on. Even Antonioni came to France to be [Jean] Renoir’s assistant.
