Essaycineast Agnès Varda: "I was a feminist and I still am"
Seated in a director's chair in front of a cinema screen and in front of a small audience that listens attentively, Agnès Varda tells about her life. "I was a feminist and I still am." She is almost 90 years old and speaks slowly but mischievously, it is the French purr of a shy but playful lady.
The camera is between the people and takes it; she wears violet and has her classic round haircut like a little cap; half white, half red. She moves, emphasizes what she says by moving her body back and forth, dizzy a pair of glasses in her hands: truth. At that time there were struggles for abortion… ”. The image corresponds to her latest film Varda por Agnès, an autobiographical essay that traces her career as one of the most important directors and screenwriters of the world's cinematheque, a forerunner of the Nouvelle Vague. She left a clear and deep mark on the work of the women and dissidents that came later, even without knowing it, even without considering themselves feminists, even in the south of the world, even in Argentina.
But who was he? Varda was born in 1928 in Brussels, the daughter of a Greek father and a French mother. During the Second World War, the family took refuge in Sète, southern France, where at the age of 26, the young Agnès filmed her first film, La Pointe Courte, in 1954. With a low budget, almost handmade, the film was the forerunner of a style that would later make Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Demy - the love of his life - or François Truffaut famous: he alternates real local stories with the fictionalized dialogue of a couple in crisis. The influential film critic and theorist André Bazin defined his first film as “free and pure”, and this is how Varda can be defined because she was his work. Agnès died in 2019 and was a woman, a feminist, in front of a camera.
Varda's cinema is full of stories of real people. She sought her own identity and that of the communities she portrayed through her work: the French potato harvesters, the residents of her street, the collective mural artists in Los Angeles, the lonely and perpetual travelers of Europe, the women of the seventy fighting for emancipation, the Black Panthers or those events in life: love, infidelity, illness, the passage of time. However, that didn't become her signature stamp, which passed down through generations of filmmakers.
Agnès Varda: For her, cinema was a composition in which formalities were mixed into the narrative, in which fiction and reality go hand in hand, coexist and nourish each other.
Her work, which includes short films for television, award-winning feature films, museum installations, and documentaries, is free of genre corsets. What she does, in her words, is "prepare a film with the elements of reality".
And it is this gesture of transgression that can be seen in cinema. In the works of Lucrecia Martel, Ana Katz, Albertina Carri or Agustina Comedi, it is not difficult to find a trace of Agnès Varda.
In Los rubios (2003), the documentary in which Carri uses fictional narrative devices to compose a story - that of a daughter trying to investigate the moment when the military kidnapped and murdered her parents - there is the same gesture of transgression of forms. The Argentine filmmaker plays with the solemnity with which the subject of the children of the disappeared is treated, incorporating fictional lines into the script and plastic languages in her film.
Something similar can be seen in Silence is a Body That Falls (2017), the comedi documentary in which the artistic operation is also part of the non-fiction: hundreds of hours of footage shot by her father in the last years of his life. She edited them out, examined, operated on and made assumptions about his life. She works with archival material, with fictionalisation and with different film materials. "Varda is like a great reference for me. She's very playful, very free, I think that's what moved me the most about her cinema," she says. From Portugal, where he shoots, Comedi appreciates the character of Vardanian essay cinema for its ability to bring together very different materials and break the boundaries between fiction and documentary. "Its freedom to play or emphasise forms, to build with elements that could hardly coexist, are for me its way of looking at the world."
One of the editors of the book Transits of the Gaze takes the same line. Women who make films, Agustina Pérez Rial. For her, there are thematic denominators that the women of Argentine cinema - among whom she counts Anahí Berneri, Toia Bonino, and Celina Murga - propose in parallel with Varda's work: their mise-en-scène, especially in everyday life, are "common denominators" for me. Writer and audiovisual producer Fermín Acosta explores the intersection between images, genders, and sexualities, and for him, Varda's influence on Argentine feminist cinema has been transversal and even more evident since 2000 Work, abortion, the body, desire, pleasure, the possibility of making a film from a personal perspective, themes he has addressed in new ways in his work, moving standards.
But she was not alone in the world. At the same time as Varda, the Argentine María Luisa Bemberg proved to be a committed feminist activist. In 1970 she co-founded the Argentine Feminist Union (UFA) and in 1972 she presented El mundo de la mujer, an ironic approach to the great fairs for the sale of female products for the "conquest of man" organised in La Ländlich. In this story, she also used documentary images mounted on fiction. Somehow they engaged in a dialogue.
In 1971, Varda was one of the 343 signatories of the petition for the legalisation of safe and free abortion in France, along with Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Jeanne Moreau, and Catherine Deneuve. Her freedom with cinematographic forms was a tributary of the flow of art, a wild but modern stream and universal at the same time. Varda's activism had contemporaries in struggle and, over the years, supporters in view, in the play of transgressions. An undeniable quality in the work and life of the French filmmaker.
