A short note on the cinema of Agnès Varda and what it matters (RIP, February 2019).

Best known for fiction films like Cleo from 5 to 7; Le Bonheur; One Sings, The Other Doesn't; and Vagabond (all films whose themes might be considered feminist), Agnès Varda, who had been making films for the last 64 years, was perhaps even more a documentarian.

But she also questioned the fiction/documentary boundary, and like most great documentarians her works in this genre are essays. She shared this interest with the other principal "Left Bank" directors, Chris Marker and, in his early films, Alain Resnais, as well as with Godard. It is a central though overlooked tendency in French cinema. 

Le Bonheur (1965) is my favorite of her fiction films. Shot in impressionist pastel colors, it tells the story of a man who innocently builds an idyllic life around both wife and mistress, delighted that there is no problem. This proves to have a cost. It is one of those beautiful films, like The Godfather, whose meaning partly lies in the way it negates its own style.

To speak of juxtaposed possibilities: Her first film, La Pointe Courte, from 1955, may be the beginning of the French New Wave. The film shuttles between two stories, told in different styles: a talky love story presented in a manner that recalls the oldest traditions of French literature, and an almost mute, character-less and non-narrative, essentially photographic neorealist documentary about people in a fishing village. Before Godard would begin doing this in his late work, this foundational film operates a montage of ideas, here represented by modes of filmmaking, and with the result being, like Jacques Derrida’s Glas, which compares texts by Hegel and Genet so that they comment on each other, a persisting question whose solution is undecidable. It poses the question, What is cinema? and does so in a way that can have no answer other than this heterogeneity, multiplicity, and contingency of modes of presentation. Cinema is this, and it is also this. While allowed no grounds of choice, we viewers can get clearer about what some of the alternatives involve, and exclude: theater and photography, fiction and ethnography, perhaps love and work, or desire’s urgency and study’s patience. Art does not ask us to choose as it does not provide knowledge or invoke belief; even when its elements are representations (in the different senses of theater and photography, the staged and the observed, the made and the found), it asks to think.

An artwork is not, in essence, a beautiful object that serves as window onto the joy of a better lived life. It is, rather, an enigma. Nor is it a product to be instantly consumed (you’ve either got it or you don’t), so much as a worked (and also, for film and narrative arts, temporally elaborated) thing that only exists in a further labor performed by spectator. Problems are solved, but enigmas can only be understood, and art exists because we must not only get our tasks accomplished, but make sense of our experience. Contra Marx, too many are busy changing the world; what we and they need is to better understand it.