Barcelona,
Five years after her death in Paris and just a few days after Avalon began screening, in cinemas and alternative venues, fifteen of her feature and short films, the Centre de Cultura Contemporània in Barcelona has today opened to the public the exhibition “Agnès Varda. Photographing, filming, recycling”, which reviews the evolution of the career of an author who fundamentally sought awaken the desire to seefirst as a photographer and artist, and later as a filmmaker who broke the barriers between documentary and fiction.
Linked to the Nouvelle Vague from the beginning of this movement in French cinema (she was the only woman linked to the group), she soon made three issues the focus of her work, making her production a recognized epitome of contemporaneity: feminism, in her words cheerful and combativeecology and marginality, paying attention equally to the social and political changes that he experienced throughout his extensive career both in France and Europe, as well as on his trips to the United States – where he met hippies and Black Panthers -, Cuba and China.
Beyond a testimonial look at her time, in Varda’s creations we find a genuine interest in the experiences of the anonymous, whom she approached with a sincere empathy far from condescension, a natural openness to the random, humor and a celebration of the simple, from the most distant to the solemn and opulent. Her curiosity about all ongoing transformations led her to experiment, likewise, with new digital languages, which have also facilitated her influence among young artists and filmmakers with whom she always sought to share concerns during her life.
This exhibition, open until December, is an extension of the retrospective recently offered by the Cinémathèque française. It has been curated by Florence Tissot, with the support of the director’s daughter, Rosalie Varda, and the critic Imma Merino. In addition to artistic and film materials, which in some cases document the relationship of Catalan creators with their legacy (Dalí and Tàpies among them), it has four installations and screening rooms where you can see her short films and a previously unpublished photographic report that tells of her trip to Catalonia in 1955.
Varda was barely into her twenties when she began working as a photographer, a job she would never abandon, not even when she devoted herself to film in the sixties and when, in her later years, she also designed these museum installations. The whole of her projects can be understood as a vast self-portrait carved by looking at the other, and the Belgian-born filmmaker was aware of this: for her, this act of self-portrait, in addition to being a path to self-knowledge, was a playful exercise that allowed her to allow herself to be filmed and to disguise herself.
In her images, which open the tour of this exhibition, we will find her and also friends who were already artists. With no more experience in the field of visual creation than that provided by these images, Varda would shoot her first film at the age of twenty-six, The Pointe Courte (1954), for which she would be considered a pioneer of some of the procedures of the Nouvelle Vague: halfway between rigor and freedom, without adhering to labels, she began to invent her own film standards; she would adapt to the requirements of each project, but without being constrained by genres or narrative forms. To understand how she was articulating her own language, the CCCB will invite us to learn more about her work. Cleo from five to seven either Without roof or law.
If she was not concerned with responding to conventions in her films, she was not concerned with responding to conventions in her personal life either, and among her many friends were figures such as Jane Birkin, Catherine Deneuve, her neighbour Alexander Calder, the sculptor Valentine Schlegel, who would also be her partner, and filmmakers within and outside the Nouvelle Vague: from Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Chabrol or her husband Jacques Demy to Alain Resnais, Jean Vilar or Chris Marker. Her ties with them (and with art and cats) are analysed in a section of the exhibition that also recalls her Greek origins and her links with the theatre; in this section we will enjoy her short film Uncle Yanco and the censored Nausicaa.
Varda was also quick to incorporate revolutions, protests, social demands and echoes of inequality into her filmography: if in the sixties she was interested in the Cuban revolution, the demands in the United States for racial equality and the hippie movement, in the eighties she would delve deeper into marginality in works such as Mur Murs and in the 2000s he would take up that concern again The Gleaners and the Gleanerwhere he confronted the growth of precariousness and consumerism and continued to sharpen his empathetic gaze. The short films await us at the CCCB Black Panthers, Plaisir d’amour in Iran and Greetings to the Cubans; Isaki Lacuesta paid tribute to the latter in his piece Where are you?.
The last chapter of the exhibition will delve into her feminism, a militancy that she maintained until the end of her life and that, in cinematographic terms, we can consider that it started with One sings, the other doesn’ta feature film that tells the story of the long friendship between two women and their different ways of facing (or not) motherhood; in any case, in the set of her films both femininity and relationships are approached from different approaches than the clichés. The journey of this tribute to the filmmaker culminates with pieces that, precisely, were dedicated to her by participants in the Mostra Internacional de Films de Dones, within the framework of the project Archipelago.
“Agnes Varda. Photograph, film, recycle”
BARCELONA CONTEMPORARY CULTURE CENTER. CCCB
C/ Montalegre, 5
Barcelona
From July 18 to December 8, 2024
