The Believer just published an interview by Sheila Heti with Agnès Varda, whose first film, La Pointe Courte (1954), is sometimes thought of as the first breaker in the nouvelle vague. Criterion just released a box set collecting 4 of Varda’s most influential films.
Contrary to what Heti writes, neither Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (aka the Gleaners and I) nor Deux ans après are included in that set. But they’re a wonderful pair of documentaries about scavengers and scavenging that I recommend you see. They were released in 2002 as a single DVD.
Early on in the first section, Varda talks about her motivations in 1954 for trying to make a strikingly different kind of film from what had gone before:
When I saw what painting had done in the last thirty years, what literature had done — people like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Hemingway — in France we have Nathalie Sarraute — and paintings became so strongly contemporary while cinema was just following the path of theater. Theater! I mean, psychology and drama and dialogue and making sense! At that time, when I started, in the ’50s, cinema was very classical in its aims, and I thought, I have to do something which relates with my time, and in my time, we make things differently.
And of The Gleaners, she says:
I wanted to catch the problem of consumption, waste, poor people eating what we throw away, which is a big subject. But I didn’t want to become a sociologue, an ethnographe, a serious thinker. I thought I should be free, even in a documentary which has a very serious subject. It made me feel very good that I could investigate a certain way of doing documentaries in which I’m present — I’m myself — knowing I’m doing a documentary and speaking with the people, telling them I have a bed, that I can eat every day, but I would like to speak to you.
And on the subject of why be a filmmaker — why write, if you will — she says she wants to:
share a lot of ideas — not ideas — emotions, a way of looking at people, a way of looking at life. If it can be shared, it means there is a common denominator. I think, in emotion, we have that. So even though I’m different or my experiences are different, they cross some middle knot. It’s interesting work for me to tell my life, as a possibility for other people to relate it to themselves — not so much to learn about me. There’s nothing special.
