Murmurs from the Heart: Agnès Varda in California

I fell hard for the late French filmmaker Agnès Varda when I saw her onscreen in her Oscar-nominated Faces Places (originally Visages Villages). In this late-in-life documentary, a big hit at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, the then-88-year-old Varda travels throughout the small towns of France with a decades-younger artist known as JR, snapping photos and posting giant murals of the citizenry. On screen, she’s a charming gamine: with her tiny frame, huge eyes, and mop of auburn hair, she looks like someone’s most amusing elderly aunt, still spry after all these years. (The tall, thin, bearded JR provides a wonderful counterpoint.)

 Varda was married for almost three decades to the equally creative Jacques Demy, best known for his all-musical 1964 hit, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Both gained fame as filmmakers during the rise of the French New Wave. (You can see them both represented in Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater’s 2025 salute to the making of a seminal New Wave classic, Breathless, directed by Jean-Luc Godard in 1960.) It’s been a very long while since I watched Varda’s much-admired 1962 movie of the Paris streets, Cléo from 5 to 7, though I remember it being very much in the seemingly impromptu New Wave style. I was not a big fan of her equally-honored 1985 drama, Vagabond. But I suspect that Varda’s real talent lies in documentary filmmaking, in finding the pulse of a place, a time, and a people.

 Always a wanderer, Varda spent part of the 1960s in California, where she reunited with an elderly relative, captured the dynamism of the Black Panthers on film, and goggled at the L.A. mural scene. For her, as the film’s off-camera narrator, L.A.’s street murals are “living, breathing, seething walls.” She considers them “as beautiful as paintings,” revealing “everybody dreaming together,” even though some of them are crude, amateurish, and marred by graffiti.

 The 1981 film she made to celebrate L.A.’s murals is called Mur Murs . Clearly fond of word play and multilingual jokes, she has adapted the French word mur (for “wall”) into a variation on the English word “murmur.” (Around the same time, she also shot a modest dramatic film that used L.A.’s murals as an occasional backdrop. That 1982 piece, Documenteur, is wittily subtitled “an emotion picture.” I watched it too, but couldn’t find much interest in observing the low-key characters go about their business. It’s as a documentarian that Varda shines the brightest.)

 In Mur Murs she introduces the viewer to some of L.A.’s major mural artists , like Kent Twitchell. It’s poignant to see Twichell’s iconic L.A. Freeway Lady captured on film, since this monumental portrait of his grandmother and a world-spanning knitted afghan no longer gazes down on the Hollywood Freeway, having been painted over in 1987. I also enjoyed the glimpses provided by Varda of several of Santa Monica’s liveliest wall paintings. And it’s lovely to see the giant blue whales someone painted on a large wall in Venice dwarfing a solemn row of live tai chi practitioners.

 But though she has an eye for aesthetic appeal, Varda also seems fascinated by the cruder murals of East L.A. She views these as continuing the tradition of Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco, who for a time lived and worked in SoCal. These dramatic works, often painted by collectives of amateur artists, are marked by deep emotion and a strong community spirit, because they tend to commemorate homeboys who have lost their lives to street violence.   

 Varda loves it all—the refined and the raw—and I love her celebration of these loud, bright murmurs. 

 

Scenes from the Long Happy Life of Agnès Varda: “Faces Places”

Agnès Varda, the Belgian-French filmmaker who left us in 2019 at the ripe old age of 90, was a force to be reckoned with in European cinema. She was also one of the most truly adorable filmmakers around. Though she once hobnobbed with New Wave masters like Jean-Luc Godard (and was married to Jacques Demy until his 1990 passing), she was distinctively her own person. Small, petite, with a mop of hair and a wonderfully impish face, she wrote, directed, and edited films up until the year of her death.

 No wonder the film world loved her. Such masters as Martin  Scorsese, Ava Duvernay, and Guillermo del Toro  sang her praises.  In 2017 she became the oldest person ever selected for an honorary Oscar; in that same year her Faces Places was nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar. Now the Academy Museum is dedicating a small but well-packed exhibit to her life and career. One wall (see below) features her unique self-portraits, in which she demonstrates her passion for art—and for distinctive faces—by making herself into a series of saints and sinners.

 Varda, always artistically restless, explored both feature films and documentaries. One of her best regarded early works is Cleo from 5 to 7 (1961), in which a Parisian pop star restlessly passes two hours while waiting for the results of a biopsy. Just recently I was introduced to Vagabond (1985), in which Sandrine Bonnaire plays a young woman who has chosen to wander the wintry Languedoc countryside without education or goals. From the opening, we know of her sad fate. But much of the film’s focus is on her interactions with those who saw her last: a kindly Tunisian vineyard worker, a back-to-the-land philosopher who tries to persuade her to raise goats, a housekeeper who envies her “freedom,” some druggies who scheme to exploit her, a Good Samaritan female biologist who sees in her a fascinating curiosity.

 Though the much-honored Vagabond  is certainly downbeat, the same cannot be said of 2017’s Faces Places (its original French title is Visages Villages).  Here the octogenarian Varda is seen on camera, making her own brand of art with co-conspirator JR, a tall, lanky photographer some fifty years her junior. The two share a whimsical journey through small-town France, taking with them a van (tricked out to look like a camera) that doubles as a travelling photo studio. Hobnobbing with residents, they make photo portraits, then blow them up into huge posters plastered on the walls of local buildings. One elderly woman in the north of France is the last inhabitant of a block of row houses once fully occupied by coal miners and their families. A miner’s daughter herself, she doesn’t want to move, because her surroundings are  too full of memories. Imagine her surprise when she walks out her door and discovers, three stories high, her own face looking down at her.

 The film is full of such celebrative moments, although the locals aren’t always sure they like their new public notoriety. In a nod to women, Varda and JR decorate a stack of dockside shipping containers with the  bold images of three wives of shipyard workers. They have fun with one another too: he decorates the tank cars of a local train with photos of her wide eyes and “too-small” feet.  And, after hours, he gaily pushes her through the Louvre in a wheelchair, moving at a wild clip so that the fabulous art on display skips by.

 All this helps make up for the chilly, puzzling brush-off by Godard near the film’s end.

 

 

The Director Was a Woman

The theory is that Little Women has been largely snubbed by the Golden Globe and SAG folks because few of the men who run those organizations want to see a movie that’s all about GIRLS. The members of the Hollywood Foreign Press, a small and exclusive group, didn’t include a single woman among their Golden Globe nominees for best director and best screenplay. This despite the contributions of, among others, Greta Gerwig (Little Women), Marielle Heller (A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood), Kasi Lemmons (Harriet), and Lulu Wang (The Farewell).

Meanwhile, BBC Culture has just presented the results of its latest polling. After surveying 368 experts from 84 countries, they’ve compiled a list of the 100 greatest films directed by women. Why choose this topic? It came out of the BBC’s realization that after several years of polling on various film-related subjects (greatest foreign-language films, greatest film comedies, greatest American films, and so on), they rarely found women’s achievements represented. I’m sure there are PhD dissertations being written at this very moment as to why it’s so rare for women to helm movies. But it’s fascinating to look back and see the names of women who did something wonderful. Too bad so many of them were working in foreign language cinema. French-speaking women, in particular, seem to prevail. On the list we find six films by the late, beloved Agnès Varda,, three by Claire Denis, several by the  Belgium-born Chantal Akerman, and a very recent entry, Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (aka Portrait of a Lady on Fire) by Céline Sciamma. There’s no surprise that Italy is represented on the list by Lina Wertmūller, whose Seven Beauties made her the first woman ever to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar. Nor that Poland’s Agnieska Holland is recognized for the poignant Europa, Europa. It’s hard to accept the name of German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, whose filmmaking talent here outweighs her use of cinema to glorify Adolf Hitler in documentaries like Triumph of the Will. (Women, like men, are not always as wise as they are talented.)

Though I haven’t seen every one of these films, I can hardly argue with the list’s #1 slot, which goes to New Zealand’s Jane Campion for her haunting feature, The Piano. Like Wertmūller, Campion was given a Best Director nod by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She was not to nab an Oscar for directing, but won instead for her screenplay. There have been only three other female Oscar nominees for Best Director: Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation, Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker (she actually won, possibly because her film had an intensely male focus), and Greta Gerwig for Lady Bird. All three are still active filmmakers, so maybe there’s hope that Coppola and Gerwig too will someday be among the chosen few. I also liked seeing on the  BBC list names like that of Lisa Chodolenko, whose The Kids Are All Right was one of the standouts of 2010, Amy Heckerling (Fast Times at Ridgemont High), Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou).and Kimberley Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry). But I don’t know how the experts could have left out such talents as Nicole Holofcener (for the delightful Enough Said) and Allison Anders (Mi Vida Loca).

Then there’s an entry that continues to trouble me: Lana and Lilly Wachowski for 1999’s The Matrix. The Wachowskis, both transgender, were considered male when they shot this big-budget film. Did that fact help them get past the barriers that stop so many female directors in their tracks?