Jacqueline Goss
Filmmaker, Professor
"I was 19 when I saw my first Agnès Varda movie. It was Vagabond, shown in a film history classroom. As an aspiring filmmaker, I appreciated its hybrid form, its startling color contrasts, the painterly approach to landscape. Cool, raw and undoubtedly a woman’s film — I was inspired." Read more »
Introduction
Filmmaker, El General (POV 2010), Al Otro Lado (POV 2006)
"I did not know when I first saw it that Daguerréotypes was made within the 90 meters around Varda's house that could be reached with an electric cable running out of her mailbox. But it makes perfect sense to me, as if the cable had been in all the frames. I saw this film in school when I was studying photography, before I imagined I'd make films." Read more »
Filmmaker, Handsome Harry
"Varda has said, 'It's not enough to tell a story. You have to find a way to make it cinematic.' I completely agree. As a filmmaker, I have never been satisfied simply by telling an entertaining story. Rather, I have been drawn to look beneath the surface of things, to see the unseeable, to speak what is usually unspoken and to ask the viewer to explore the world below the conscious mind. " Read more »
Filmmaker, Professor
"I was 19 when I saw my first Agnès Varda movie. It was Vagabond, shown in a film history classroom. As an aspiring filmmaker, I appreciated its hybrid form, its startling color contrasts, the painterly approach to landscape. Cool, raw and undoubtedly a woman's film -- I was inspired." Read more »
Filmmaker, Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin (POV 2003)
"It would be hard not to love Agnès Varda. I think of her as the impish fairy godmother of documentary, mostly because of The Gleaners and I...The film inspires us to find the humanity, as well as the humor and the poetry, in our subjects." Read more »
Natalia Almada
There are some films, such as Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, that I love because they are mysteries to me and somehow I can watch them over and over with an odd distant curiosity. I watch these films the way I look at a painting or listen to a concert, always trying to decipher something that is slightly hidden to me. And there are other films that I love for their simplicity. Federico Fellini's La Strada and Agnès Varda's Daguerréotypes are two of them. These films are like simple gestures, beautiful in their simplicity. I watch them with a certain closeness, a certain familiarity. These are the films that have made me want to make films and allowed me to believe that perhaps I could.
I did not know when I first saw it that Daguerréotypes was made within the 90 meters around Varda's house that could be reached with an electric cable running out of her mailbox. But it makes perfect sense to me, as if the cable had been in all the frames. I saw this film in school when I was studying photography, before I imagined I'd make films. Film to me was Hollywood. It was big: big budgets, big crews, big cineplexes and big popcorn. And I wasn't interested in big. I was happy working alone with my little camera, printing in the dark room, working intuitively, privately. During my first year in graduate school I signed up for a video course by chance. The teacher of that course, Wendy MacNeil, the most unorthodox and passionate teacher I ever had, screened films such as Daguerréotypes, Jane Campion's Passionless Moments, The Apu Trilogy -- films that changed my understanding of cinema.
I have a terrible memory (that is probably why I film) and usually I cannot remember a film in it is entirety. I seem only to remember an image, a phrase or a scene at most. Yet the image from The Gleaners and I of Varda's hand coming into the frame and catching the trucks on the road is as clear to me as if I were seeing it projected in front of me.
Watching The Beaches of Agnès, I see a woman toward the end of her life, not only remembering and reconstructing her past, but playing like a child. It is as if she takes the Lego, the crayons and the Play-Doh of cinema, throws them all around her and then plays relentlessly, curiously, without limits, without fear. Unrestrained by logic, by reason. And I'm left with the hope that one day I will play as freely and relentlessly as she does. And somehow she makes that seem possible.
Natalia Almada's directing credits include El General (POV 2010) and Al Otro Lado (POV 2006), her award-winning debut feature documentary about immigration, drug trafficking and corrido music. Her work has screened at the Sundance Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Biennial, as well as at international film festivals, universities and conferences and on television networks such as PBS, ARTE and VPRO. Almada is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow. Her awards include U.S. Directing Award at Sundance in 2009 and Best Documentary Feature at Cine Las Americas in 2009. She earned a master of fine arts in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and divides her time between Mexico City and Brooklyn, N.Y.
Bette Gordon
It is no accident that as a young high school student, after attending a screening of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless at the Brattle Street Cinema in Cambridge, Mass., I consciously decided to live in Paris and unconsciously decided to become a filmmaker. Godard believed in the transformative power of cinema, in its ability to make a creative viewer, someone who would participate actively in the watching of a film as opposed to a passive consumer. Having grown up in the 1960s and 1970s, I was invigorated by this idea. I spent a year in Paris, and there I learned about movies by spending hours at the Cinémathèque Française, where one could see all kinds of films day and night. I discovered the French New Wave in Paris and fell in love with Agnès Varda's Cléo From 5 to 7.
I was drawn to Varda's film because of her use of cinematic elements, time and space. Time is actually the subject or theme of the film. The idea and challenge of capturing and reconstituting the experience of real time was fascinating to me. The film vividly captures an hour and a half in the life of a carefree young woman waiting for the results of a medical diagnosis. Instead of relying on the usual conventions of narrative, ellipsis and skipping from one place to another, Varda created an immediacy I had never seen before, concentrating on just this one hour and a half in the character's life. While nothing really happens, everything happens. The act of waiting for the results while wandering around the Left Bank of Paris, every second, every step traced, creates so much tension. This was the Paris I came to live in myself, and the portrait of this woman feels so utterly natural and even now, all these years later, so contemporary. In a way, Cléo From 5 to 7 is a portrait of a woman but also a documentary about Paris in the 1960s -- a documentary that I was conscious of reliving years later as I walked the same streets and neighborhoods every day. When I saw the film that first time, the details of character, Cléo's inner life, her passions and fears, were as vibrant and as textured to me as the streets and neighborhoods and characters she encounters during that one hour and a half. Paris is the film's visual centerpiece, but the film also reflects a woman's evolution from self-absorption to awareness, her growth from being shallow and childlike to being empathetic.
Varda's Influence
Varda has said, "It's not enough to tell a story. You have to find a way to make it cinematic." I completely agree. As a filmmaker, I have never been satisfied simply by telling an entertaining story. Rather, I have been drawn to look beneath the surface of things, to see the unseeable, to speak what is usually unspoken and to ask the viewer to explore the world below the conscious mind. My early films explored the unique aspects of the film medium -- the way we perceive an image in relation to how the camera alters that perception -- especially three of my early films: Michigan Avenue (1974), I-94 (1974) and The United States of America (1975). These three films were investigations into the material of time and space. They were made one frame at a time by alternating frames and, finally, by mounting a camera inside a car as if the car were the camera in order to document a cross-country drive as seen through the front windshield/lens of the car/camera. A later film of mine, Empty Suitcases, plays with narrative and cinematic expectations, presenting fragments of a woman's life: her work, her friendships and her relationships. The film chronicles her story and her economic, sexual and artistic struggles. She travels between New York and Chicago, but she can't make up her mind where she wants to stay and is unable to locate and define herself. Like Cléo From 5 to 7, it's a film about identity. We see the character sitting in bed with a record player next to her as she lip-syncs Billie Holiday's "All of Me" in a deadpan mockery of synchronous sound in film. Later she is shown wearing a red dress and crossing an idyllic lush field of green to greet a man in red standing on a riverbank. Trees are blowing in the breeze and a boat is pulled on to the bank, and the scene is observed from extreme distance, through the window of a room the camera inhabits. The most real shot is identical to a picture postcard, a play on rear screen projection. I love the moment in Cléo From 5 to 7 where the character disappears behind a structure and reappears instantly in a new outfit. It's about the artifice of cinema. In Empty Suitcases, one of the most notable scenes is influenced by Varda's film -- two women (photographer Nan Goldin and filmmaker Vivienne Dick) exchange clothes and photograph each other. They exit the frame behind camera and immediately reappear wearing different clothes. An X-Ray Spex song, "Art-I-Ficial," is playing in the background. Cléo also clowns around. There is a full musical number in Varda's film, and then at the end of the number we snap back to the realism of the everyday. Like Jean-Luc Godard, Varda was interested in breaking narrative rules, something that intrigued me in my early work as well. Varda has Godard and his lead actress, Anna Karina, appear in a film within a film in Cléo From 5 to 7.
But perhaps, it is my film Variety that is most influenced by Varda's Cléo From 5 to 7. Varda presents Paris almost as a character, and we follow Cléo's journey through Paris cafes and parks, and Cléo's emotional state of mind deepens. Influenced by this idea of a journey, I set about to see New York City in a similar way. New York City, the one I'd seen in movies like Pickup on South Street and Naked City -- the underground, late-night New York City of the 1980s -- is the backdrop for a film about a woman who sells tickets at a pornographic movie theater. She starts to follow one of the patrons from the theater, and we wander with her through Time Square's sleazy sex shops, through the Fulton Fish Market, Wall Street and Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. Color, texture and mood were as important as the story. I used frames within frames, windows and doorways to capture visually the idea of watching and voyeurism. I remembered the proliferation of mirrors and reflective surfaces that Cléo finds whenever she sees herself. Varda is aware of the element of performance for Cléo, sometimes humorous, sometimes slightly exaggerated. The performance of Christine, my character in Variety, is more nuanced, but she is still aware of the element of performance. The film tracks Christine's emotional state of mind through observed behavior, and her obsession grows as the film progresses.
Feminism
Clearly, Varda was a pioneer of feminist cinema and a leading director of her generation. Not only was she one of the few women directors during the 1960s and 1970s who made feature films, but her portrait of a female character, Cléo, is complex and not idealized. Cléo has strengths and weaknesses, and we come to care about her, but she is not perfect, nor is she unnecessarily sexualized. In Vagabond, a later Varda film starring Sandrine Bonnaire, the director also presents a complex female character in the story of a drifter who refuses to offer herself as a female object. Varda's earlier film One Sings, the Other Doesn't, made in 1977, was one of the first feminist testaments to friendship, the story of the bond between two women who struggle with their identities and male relationships, building their friendship over time and as it intersects with love, marriage and family. Varda celebrated female independence and survival in the late 1970s, just as the women's movement was coming into its own.
Varda is a role model for myself and others, and she is still directing movies as she turns 80. I hope to follow in her footsteps. Her perseverance, the depth of her characters and the cinematic vision in her work have stayed with me since the moment I first came upon Cléo From 5 to 7.
Bette Gordon premiered her new feature Handsome Harry at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival in the world narrative competition section. The film stars an ensemble cast including Campbell Scott, Steve Buscemi, Aidan Quinn, John Savage and Karen Young.
Gordon is best known for her bold explorations of themes related to sexuality. Her early short films have won numerous awards and festival acclaim worldwide, and have been screened at The Berlin International Film Festival, New York's Museum of Modern Art and The Whitney Biennial. Her feature film, Luminous Motion (2000), was called one of the best films of the year by A.O. Scott of The New York Times.
Gordon is a Professor of Film at Columbia University's graduate film division in New York City, where she is the supervisor of the directing program. She is also a regular contributor to BOMB, a journal of art, film, music, and writing.
Jacqueline Goss
I was 19 when I saw my first Agnès Varda movie. It was Vagabond, shown in a film history classroom. As an aspiring filmmaker, I appreciated its hybrid form, its startling color contrasts, the painterly approach to landscape. Cool, raw and undoubtedly a woman's film -- I was inspired.
It took me 10 years to see another Varda film. I'm not sure why, though perhaps years of rural living in the pre-Netflix era are a good enough excuse. But waiting to see Cléo From 5 to 7 at the age of 30 turned out to be a good move. I needed to feel that tiny twinge of mortality to love that film. It was another long wait for the revelation of The Gleaners and I at the age of 38. It is this film that I love the most, perhaps because I had finally grown up enough by then to love what I appreciate.
Political, heartfelt, smart, light and lovely, The Gleaners and I is a nearly perfect movie. Varda picks up the video camera with the playfulness of a teenager, yet the film is steeped in observations only someone who has lived more than seven decades could make. Her images and words are wise, humble, ever-curious, beautiful.
How many artists truly get better with age? After many decades of creating, how many of us truly have something new to say and can embrace fearlessly a new way of saying it? How many of us make work that reflects so honestly where we are in our lives? How many of us have as much energy as Varda has at age 82?
There's a scene in The Beaches of Agnès where Varda talks about her love of images with out-of-focus subjects in the foreground. This strikes me as a perfect way to describe how her films have worked on me over the years. It's me -- the viewer -- blurry there, coming into being before her strikingly focused films. I hope I'll be sharp by the time I'm 82. And I hope Varda will have a new film for me to see.
Jacqueline Goss makes movies and web-based works that explore how political, cultural and scientific systems change the ways we think about ourselves. For the last few years she has used 2D digital animation techniques to work within the genre of the animated documentary. Her most recent videos are How To Fix The World -- a look at Soviet-sponsored literacy programs in Central Asia in the 1930s, and Stranger Comes To Town -- an animated documentary about the identity-tracking of immigrants and travelers coming into the United States.
A native of New Hampshire, Goss attended Brown University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She teaches in the film and electronic arts department at Bard College in the Hudson Valley of New York. She is a 2008 Tribeca Film Institute Media Arts Fellow and the 2007 recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in film and video. Her current project is G10, an animated fictional film about 10 characters from various countries who meet at a Swiss hotel during a conference on globalism.
Nancy Kates
It would be hard not to love Agnès Varda. I think of her as the impish fairy godmother of documentary, mostly because of The Gleaners and I. Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse, the film's French title, is much better than the English translation. Actually, a more accurate translation might be "the gleaners and the woman who gleans." Varda's exploration of gleaning -- gathering bits of abandoned food in fields, in the detritus left behind after the farmer's market or the trash -- is ostensibly about hungry people finding free food. But it is also a powerful metaphor for documentary filmmaking: With her camera, Varda gathers the stories of the people she meets; to edit, she picks and chooses the best bits from what she has filmed. This acknowledgement that she, too, is a gleaner gives The Gleaners and I its poignancy. Très sympathique, tender and loving toward her largely destitute subjects, Varda identifies with marginal people who collect what others throw away. The film inspires us to find the humanity, as well as the humor and the poetry, in our subjects. Varda clearly loves making films, loves being alive and has fun making films. You can feel infectious joy in The Gleaners and I, even though it focuses on downtrodden outcasts.
There is a piece of footage for the film I am working on that shows the film's subject, Susan Sontag, and Agnès Varda discussing their respective films shown at the 1969 New York Film Festival. Young and attractive, both women smoke and wear mini-dresses. Jack Kroll, the critic from Newsweek conducting the interview, is clearly out of his depth. They subtly make fun of him, disagreeing with his off-the-mark observations about their decidedly avant-garde films. Varda's film from that year, Lions Love, is a playful look at three hippie actors in a house in Los Angeles. The characters might be oddballs -- certainly in Kroll's eyes they are -- but Varda makes them understandable, and perhaps appealing, just as she does her gleaners. I love this footage, and the ways in which the joyful, creative, magical Varda honors her work and stands up to Kroll and his ridiculous questions. Her wit, intelligence and humanity come through clearly in the interview. I see the same qualities in her personal documentaries, made 30 years later. In her later films, including The Beaches of Agnès, she experiments with a childlike playfulness. Varda reminds the rest of us to have fun making our films. She remains a true international treasure.
Nancy D. Kates is the producer/director of Regarding Susan Sontag, a feature-length documentary currently in production. She also produced and directed, with Bennett Singer, the documentary Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin (POV 2003). The film premiered in competition at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival. It went on to win more than 25 awards worldwide, including the 2004 GLAAD Media Award.
Kates received a master's degree from the documentary film and television program at Stanford University. Her master's thesis film, Their Own Vietnam, received the 1995 Student Academy Award® in documentary and was exhibited at the Sundance Film Festival and other festivals. Kates has worked on a number of other documentary projects as a writer, producer, story consultant and editor. Before turning to film, she worked as a writer and reporter in New York and Boston, including five years as a staff writer at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. She continues to work as a writer, consultant and researcher, in addition to working in film.