In her new five-part travel series "From Here to There" (available through SundanceNOW's subscription program, Doc Club), the French filmmaker Agnès Varda, now 86, sometimes referred to as "The Grandmother of New Wave," attends art and film festivals, visits old friends, interviews favorite artists and makes new acquaintances. Most of the time, a camera is in her hand. Occasionally, someone else is filming and she enters the scene. Whether in front of the lens or behind it, her curiosity is boundless and rooted in a desire to share her friendships and pleasures. "The main subject is 'the other,'" she says. "I'm present in my films, I'm among the others."
Varda, who was married to the French New Wave filmmaker Jacques Demy, made her first feature, "La Pointe Courte," in 1954. Working in the small fishing town of Sète, she recruited locals and two professional Parisian actors, contrasting and comparing their different realities with fictional stories. Later work, like "Cléo from 5 to 7," "Vagabond" and "Daguerréotypes," similarly married poetic and documentary impulses. Her most recent film, 2008's "The Beaches of Agnès," an autobiographical stroll through her memories as she celebrates her 80th birthday, is a precursor to this latest series of vignettes, many of which she filmed during her publicity tour.
"Thanks to life, I'm continuously allowing new thoughts to replace others," Varda explains. "It's like a river. It flows nonstop." That's the feeling the vignettes create. She goes to see her camera-shy friend Chris Marker, the director, most famously, of "La Jetée." We don't see him, but we see his gloriously messy studio, and he introduces her to his hobby, the online virtual world "Second Life." She travels to Nantes for a celebration of the 20th anniversary of her husband's death; there, she sees Anouk Aimée, the star of Demy's 1961 film "Lola," which was shot there, along with her children, Mathieu and Rosalie. In Portugal, her friend Manoel de Oliveira dances for her, after she discusses his magical-realist film, "The Strange Case of Angelica." In Stockholm, a bald female journalist enters the room to interview her, and immediately, Varda asks if she has been ill, pulling us into the woman's world. In St. Petersburg, she considers the young press photographer sent to take her portrait, noting that he has the face of a dreamer. She travels to Sète, chats with the old fisherman who starred in her first film, and visits the artist Pierre Soulages at his beach home. In Mexico, she visits Frida Kahlo's house and talks to the filmmaker Carlos Reygadas.
Throughout, Varda also offers glimpses of her own art: recent installations at museums and biennales, retrospectives of her films, new photography projects. And she has always inserted herself into art that she finds compelling; she reveals an old self-portrait she took in the Venice Accademia and stands with the wise men in the painting "Miracle of the Cross at the Bridge of S. Lorenzo" by the Renaissance artist Gentile Bellini, as if she were one of them.
"Another level of truth appears in the representation of life," she says. "Another level of showing off as well."
"From Here to There" is available now through SundanceNOW's Doc Club as part of the series "Agnès Varda and Personal Cinema," docclub.com.
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