10. November |  19:00   |  Dominique Blüher (Cambridge, Mass.)

„La Miroitière“

No matter whether they are self-produced or commissioned, short or feature length, fiction or non-fiction, Agnès Varda’s films are incontestably personal. They are cinécrits, to take up the term that Varda herself has coined, which bear her peculiar cinematic style and mirror their author.

However, some of her films, as well as of her more recent video installations, go beyond an auteurist inscription and are more clearly shaped as genres of self-portrayal. These include her »subjective documentaries« L’OPÉRA-MOUFFE (1958), ULYSSE (1982), JANE B. PAR AGNÈS V. (1987) and LES GLANEURS ET LA GLANEUSE (1999), her (im)prudent film à clef DOCUMENTEUR (1981), her video installation LES VEUVES DE NOIRMOUTIER (2005), and finally her first genuine autobiographical film, LES PLAGES D’AGNÈS (2008).

However, none of these films presents the slightest sign of egotism. As a matter of fact, Varda is rarely in front of the camera, preferring to turn her gaze on others, portraying artists, vagabonds, or gleaners. Through the rhizomatic pattern that underpins her essay-films, which juxtapose multiple strands and partial views, Varda masterfully interweaves the individual and the collective, the subjective and the objective, the real and the imaginary, the beauty and the misery. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and being fragmented, multiple, and decentred is also far from being an integral entity.

Varda’s work should be considered, then, as cinematic puzzles in the vein of SANS TOIT NI LOI (1985), about which Varda has said, »there always pieces missing, when you try to understand the others«. As in SANS TOIT NI LOI, Varda traces an »impossible portrait« in her personal films through a »play of human mirrors«, but she remains sufficiently present – in front of or behind the camera – to put herself »under erasure« in the Derridean sense and to sustain in her withdrawal a presence in potency and abeyance.