Agnes Varda / Lisa Robertson Interview January 4, 2012, Paris
Agnes Varda and I met in late afternoon at her studio on the Rue Daguerre, the place she has so thoroughly occupied with her life and her creativity for 61 years. The rooms were small, filled with plants, images, activity, ringing telephones, young assistants, stacks of papers and videos and files. Varda sat happily in the midst of this movement, organizing an exhibition over the phone as she watched over all the activity. The call finished, we went to a corner where we could speak without interruption, and even there, assistants were quick to bring the book she needed to refer to, placing it between us open to the image she had just spoken of in our conversation. We looked together at many images as she talked about her current projects, her ideas about art making and composition, and about her three lives as an artist.
AV You know, I just completed a series for television--not soap opera! It’s travels and meetings with contemporary artists. It’s called Agnes d’ici de là Varda, which means Agnes from here to there Varda, and I spent two years on it, because it’s five times forty five minutes. And my pleasure was, wherever I went, to try to meet people—essentially artists. . .
LR —Boltanski and Messanger--
AV -- and Barceló and Pierrick Sorin, and less-known people like Judith Reigel or –well, he passed away, but-- Wilfredo Lam . . . Sometimes I’d meet paintings in museums. Also I met with some film artists who I consider artists, like Manuel de Oliveira who’s 102 years old, still working, and Cristina Regadas in Mexico, and I did something about Bergman in Sweden. So this was my work. I just completed it, and I’m pooped and tired because it took me more than two years. But it was on air. So I just came out of that. And I was just in Sète in the south of France—it’s a city with a harbour, it’s the city of Jean Vuillard, it’s the city of Paul Valéry, and Georges Braessens—and now me—if I may say so. I had a big exhibition at the museum there. That’s my life today--it’s a mixture of photos and video. That’s what I love to do now. In my own life, I’ve had three lives. I was a photographer, then I became a film-maker, and now I am an artist, a museum artist. . .
LR Do you find more freedom in the work as an artist?
AV —yes, and I find it different work, I find a different pleasure, to be able to use all my little knowledge, about photo, about cinema, about video, about travelling, about speaking with people—I did documentaries, I did fictions—so I can bring the whole thing together. The exhibition in Sète includes an image with a little hole in it, and in the hole there’s a little film about the same image. It’s about using my knowledge, whatever it is, with the freedom of being old, which gives a big freedom about the subjects I choose. . . For the museum exhibition, I chose a photograph of a little girl with a white dress in front of a huge white cow. And on the sides there are two videos, like a triptych, but the videos are about white cows. And the effect is beautiful because sometimes they don’t move, you know, and sometimes they move a little. But the photo is a photo, and I’d love to have it in the Hobo portfolio, because it’s a beautiful photo about white cows. But in the exhibition the side cows move.
And this is another one of the photos I want Hobo to choose. . . it should fold here you know, it could have two. . . this is what I like—mixing photo and cinema. So, cinécriture was a word I used for total cinema, I would say. But now I would say just being an artist, because its inspired by some forms of ancient art: triptych and polyptych. You know, I did a polyptych work about widows, The Widows of Noirmouiters. . .
LR I saw that work at the Fondation Cartier.
AV Ah, you have seen that. I’m glad you did, because its something I’m very attached to, and I tried to make it very strong. [Varda shows me an image] This, you know, is a typical diptych of the 15th century. In the same way, this is a triptych of a potato.
LR One of the interesting things about triptychs, diptychs, polyptychs, is that you get many times in one frame. . .
AV and you get duration, distance. You look at something but because it’s nourished by something else, or contradicted, or accompanied. Your mind goes from one to the other. . . There is a big, big Patatutopia—you have not seen that? [Varda is referring to her 2003 installation for the Venice Biennale]
LR No. I heard about it but I didn’t see it.
AV This is three huge screens, and in the middle this heart-shaped potato. I would like them in the portfolio—I will make a list. Use one of the incredible potatoes—they are like pieces of art, you know, each heart-shaped potato. And it took a long time because I kept them in my cellar, or in boxes, or outside in the light. Then I had a beautiful background I installed, with old pumpkins, and I took pictures with the Leica, with another video camera, and I took portraits of potatoes—very old, less old. . .
LR They become portraits of time, too.
AV Of time passing by, and of—
LR --decay and surface
AV --of energy, surviving energy, in old potatoes that you can no longer eat. They are rotten, they are finished, they are green, but the life is there. And they sprout, and they seed. And I kept them. And for me it makes sense. And I spend a lot of time taking photos of the daylight. This is the daylight in my hall. And this was when the day was very grey, So, what can I say, you know, this is not cinécriture, this is the pleasure of looking very carefully at things existing, and seeing them grow.
LR It is a portraiture, in a sense.
AV C’est un portrait des patates. Portraits des patates-coeurs. And this is a series I did of trees that were cut back and start again. I would say that I am very interested in the energy of nature. It’s not a subject, but it’s an energy.
LR That’s something that I see in your film I’Opéra Mouffe, in the images of food—the pumpkin that’s being cut, and the cabbage with the little cabbage growing out of the centre. But there, it wasn’t about decay.
AV It was about being pregnant, you know, what I felt. Do you have a little paper?
LR You can use the back of this.
AV You don’t need this side?
LR It’s alright.
AV Voila, photo proposals—because I speak about this—un patate-coeur, et les vaches.
LR So are you thinking too about Renaissance still life tradition, Flemish still lives, the whole thing about food and decay and time. . .
AV No, no, I never did nature morte of food and flowers, which is beautiful by the way. What I did—I did a self-portrait. This one. That you know maybe. And my self portrait is—this is from ‘62—
LR That I have not seen. Is it a still?
AV It’s a photo, it’s just a photo. It’s at the museum of The Academy in Venice. And the painting, I should show you. C’est La Miracle de la Saint Croix. It’s a painting of Bellini’s, it’s big like this. [gestures] It’s just my height. I could stay there, standing. The bottom of the painting was there [gestures to shoulders]. It was interesting because I had that raincoat, with the fabric looking old-time. And I thought I had a hairdo fitting with these men.
L Yes!
AV The scholar look. They were a group of men near a church. So I put myself there, just standing. I had organized the camera on a tripod, and somebody did the “click.”
LR It’s beautiful.
AV So just to say—as a photographer, and as a filmmaker, I have references to the art of old times, and then I jump to contemporary art. Picasso was really an incredible inspiration. Not that I copy Picasso, but his energy, his painting—I love his paintings—of almost all periods.
LR He continued reinventing painting.
AV Yes, inventing all the time. So, you know, it’s very difficult now. Sometimes what I like in photos, especially when they are printed, is to have face to face, again, the diptych feeling, the polyptych syndrome. You know I have that photo of Fidele Castro facing that woman with her baby. The same presence. It’s not the theme, you know, it’s. . . .graphically. . . you know, this is that woman.
LR I’ve seen that image before, I don’t know where.
AV It’s a postcard. Here. This is a portrait of Ionesco. But he had a bride. And this is a bride in a black church.
LR It’s a kind of rhyming. I’m starting to think. . .
AV Yes. Rhyming, and contemporary poetry, where you don’t have to rhyme, but you bring things together. What I’d love, when Hobo does a portfolio, is that each double page is a diptych. This is in Germany. This is the rue Mouffetard. These are two Italian film makers, Visconti and Fellini. . .
LR I was really moved by what you said about your relationship to surrealist poetry. . .
AV --which I read a lot when I was young.
LR You were talking about collage and. . .
AV Not only collage, but when they let go, l’écriture auomatique, and l’association libre. My films are made like that. But it’s not just association d’idées, or association des mots, it’s association d’images, which means I associate with the freedom of automatic feeling.
LR . . .hmm, and that’s what I think of as a kind of rhyme.
AV It can be rhyme, it can be just l’écriture automatique, and it can be the asscociation of images. Because they feel. . .
LR . . .so it changes each image once you bring them together.
AV Look, it’s that same thing here. This is stairs in Havanna. And this is stairs in San Francisco. The stair is the rhyme but the feeling is so different. Peaceful, joyful people, then those are all drugged up and sick. Or this is in China—a little girl, and a little boy. But he feels freedom, and all these men are working.
LR You did that a lot in Daguerrotypes, in the montage. Those gestures, cutting between the magician, and the shop people.
AV It was mostly their hands. In the editing of Daguerrotypes, I did a sequence of hands, because the tool of the magician is his hands. He makes things disappear, they change. Then there were gestures of trade in shops. You give something, you give food, you give meat, and the person pays. You give bread, and the other gives money. So it’s an editing trick I would say. But this is not surrealist, because it’s logical.
LR It’s a way of organizing images.
AV It’s called alternating editing.
LR OK.
AV It’s a trick of editing—you show hands. No, in what I speaking about, I prefer to let myself go to images which are not obvious in the logic of the series. What I like is when I don’t know what I do. And I do it. Then I feel like I can follow something that is instinct, that is desire. Why did I pick the white cow? I don’t know. Maybe one day my grand-daughter had a little white dress, and I thought, oh, what about white cows. Then I went and I filmed the white cows, and I went there and spoke with farmers, and they let me do that. You don’t know how it starts.
LR It seems to me that you’re often moving towards very humble, very modest kinds of gestures and images. Here I’m thinking of The Gleaners and I, definitely. Kinds of objects and activities that go on in the margins yet are full of life.
AV Yes. I see what you mean.
LR I would say a potato is like that too. A potato, a cow, they’re basic. . .
AV A potato is an object that I’ve looked at in a very intense way, a way that people don’t do with potatoes I would say. But you know now people are so grateful to me—I receive heart shaped potatoes all the time. By mail, in my mailbox, or people bring them. But, you see, another subject of The Gleaners is the social subject that I notice. But I made it a documentary-- very free, very simply open. It’s about people who eat what we throw away. That’s the subject.
LR Yeah. It’s also about that gesture of bending.
AV Yes, and the gesture of bending is a gesture that has been painted. It’s related to the famous painting of Millet. But also in the DVD for The Gleaners I made a little investigation on that, and there is a chapter like a poem. A lot of painters have been working on that subject, that gesture. It reminds me—I jump to Noirmoutiers, since you saw the exhibition. When they go clamming, you know when the tide is low, they go to get clams, and they bend the same way. And in my mind I say it’s very strange, because the gleaners getting potatoes and onions, and these people—not fishermen, but fishermen also—getting the clams—it’s the same gesture. The modest gesture. . .
LR I see that gesture in people picking snails too, early in the morning in the countryside.
AV Yes, same thing. So I found that interesting, because it’s the gesture of getting things, you know in one place or another. It is true that I have not made a film about the bourgeoisie or fights between the bourgeoisie, because I think people need, they deserve that I speak about the people of the margin. People on the roads, and the gleaners. . .
LR Yes. It’s one of the things I find the most moving about your work. You bring this serious and open attention to what people are really doing. . .
AV But people who we don’t care so much about. . . . I made this book, which has disappeared, in 1994. . .
LR I wish I could find that book!
AV You can find it sometimes on ebay. It’s a big big filmography, very well made. In the book I tell a lot of different stories, like, L’Univers of Jacques Demy, with images I love so much. That’s the Annunciation. It was Jane Birkin, it doesn’t make sense, you know. She was supposed to wear the wig, and she found herself stupid with the wig. Naturally when we did that scene, two things happened. She’s English, she’s British, and she said, “it’s so strange-- the gesture of annunciation goes like this” (points up)-- the famous gesture of the arm pointing the finger to the sky. This is the gesture of annunciation. The angel does that to the virgin. Then she said, “it’s so strange—if I extend my arm, then it is the gesture of denunciation.”
LR That’s beautiful.
AV It’s beautiful and it came out. At that time she said, “anyway, I don’t want to wear a wig.” And she took the wig off. And finally he points his arm, not as an annunciation, but as a denunciation, and she holds out the wig. I’d love that to appear. It’s a perversion of the gesture we know and the concept we have about Annunciation.
[break in conversation for phone call]
AV . . . Anyways, I was explaining how much I love to pervert cliché.
LR Gesture really is cliché in a way.
AV All the gestures we make every day are cliché. Understand that we can innovate them, we can reinvent them.
LR Yes. This idea of reinvention—In the little television film you made on women, you said “il faut reinventer la femme, donc il faut reinventer l’amour.”
AV Yes, it was a very short feminist film called Réponse des femmes, because television asked seven film directors, women film directors, what it is to be a woman, and they gave us each seven minutes, imagine? So I limited this thing to sex and the body, showing women so different, beautiful and less beautiful, young and not young, saying that a woman’s head doesn’t think like a man’s head.
LR The idea of reinventing love was very beautiful to me.
AV Men have that speech you know—“come on, women are meant to have children, and if you don’t make things to our desire it will happen that we don’t love you any longer.” Then we say that we have to reinvent love, because the condition of women and men has changed. The physical condition and attitude of women has changed, and some men go with it, some men try to reinvent things, and some just stay put and nothing changes. They don’t want to change, they want to be served, they want women to do the ironing. I’m still a feminist. They ask me “Are you still a feminist” very often. And I say yes, I am totally a feminist. When I think of what’s happening in the world, in South Africa, and in the Islamic countries, women’s circumcision-- these things kill me. So I want to be an artist open to people who have difficulties. You can do everything. You can be at the same time a feminist, a mother, a grandmother, a filmmaker, an artist. . .
LR You said once—“We all have inside ourselves a woman who walks alone on the road.”
AV This was related to a film I made, called Vagabond.
LR And “in all women there is something that is in revolt that is not expressed.”
AV Which is true.
LR Yes.
AV And I remember people saying that they loved that rebellious girl-- beautifully played by Sandrine Bonnaire—
LR That was the first film of yours I saw.
AV It’s a strong film.
LR Yes.
AR And that incredible Sandrine was not even 18. She was carrying something that I believe that people need—to see somebody mad enough to say no to everything. Not that we are all able to do it—I never was camping on the road with my backpack. But I know that I have, and a lot of people have something rebellious, sufficiently rebellious. . .
LR Don’t you think you need that to make art, to create—is that related to rebellion?
AV That film expresses the need but I had to find the shape. The shape was this woman, young and rebellious and beautiful, who loses not only relationships but dialogue. When you lose dialogue you die. But the thing is, what I wanted to do was also have her looking rebellious. But you have to sleep in the station, you have to drink with people—it’s a tough life. I made that film very strongly. It was thirteen traveling shots from right to left, always with the music of Bruzdowicz. She was always walking. On roads, on fields. . .
LR Like some of Bela Tarr’s work now.
AV I have not seen the last one. C’est bien?
LR I haven’t seen the last one. It’s playing right now.
AV I know it’s playing. . . And I took the opportunity to speak about the trees that I love also and I was concerned about the here-ness of the trees. And you see, that’s the way I like to speak about things. In the book that I made, there are 16 pages about Vagabonde. Because it’s certainly the film in which I express the best my shape of cinécriture.
LR Your work is in part about solitude. . .
AV Well, sure.
LR . . .and I’m just curious to know what you have to say about the relationship of solitude to making art, to being an artist.
AV There is something solitary in working, in inventing.
LR Has your feeling about that changed in your life?
AV No. What I’ve changed is—I always, when I was surrounded by my family, or living with men, or working here with a group which is surrounding me—when you invent, you are alone. I can be in the middle of everybody—I have my idea and I work. Because expressing is loneliness, for everybody. And some shy women they do it in their room, they do embroidery, and it’s fine. But as an artist who wants to share specific shapes—photo, cinema or art—you have to find the shape and the idea. Now I’m working on two ideas that I have to refine. And I do it on Saturdays or when I am alone at night—but I am too tired now—that’s another story—at night I want to sleep. I used to work very late.
LR Do you write about what you’re making?
AV Not enough. That’s terrible, because I should. People ask me, people who are supposed to put up the money. They ask me, and I say well—I tell the story. I’m not good at it but I have to do it. I’m afraid that when you write a project you freeze it. Then you have to do what you wrote.
LR Exactly.
AV As long as you go like this, and it’s not made, there are many possibilities. I should write all the possibilities and leave room for the others. I don’t know.
LR Do you make sketches, or what is your process for doing your installation work?
AV What do you mean sketches?
LR How do you build the idea?
AV Sometimes with—oh I don’t have the book here. Sometimes with a little drawing—then I think that’s enough for me to tell the people how to prepare it.
[an assistant brings a book, with drawings for the Widows of Noirmoutiers]
AV This is the case, that’s all I do.
LR I see. And that’s just so you can show the installers what to do.
AV You understand?
LR Yes.
AV Then I have to make the film, and to interview—for The Widows, you know, interview fourteen, fifteen women, person to person, quietly, because then they would give their confidence, that they would share with the people in the chairs with headphones. You saw that.
LR Yes.
AV Then I kept some images and some words. I was very touched by that. And I’m very happy that that installation touches the people who see it. You saw it at La Fondation Cartier, but it has been shown in a church, it will be shown in a chapel at the end of June somewhere in La Rochelle, and it is right now in the Séte museum. And people see it and they take the headphones. . .
LR You could spend all day in there.
AV You could spend the day. So you see my pleasure is really to understand how the connection works between my ideas. Whether you think they’re surrealistic or normal or logical or illogical—it works. People get something. They maybe don’t get what I wanted them to get, but they get something. That sharing is my reward I would say.