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I’ve watched all of Agnès Varda films while discovering Criterion’s lush celebration of the French New Wave’s progenitor. If you could only have one filmmaker’s oeuvre on your private desert island, Agnès Varda’s films are the right choice to last you the rest of your life.
In Varda-approved random fashion I begin my slight review of Varda’s supremely personal, transgressive, and satisfying films with Daguerréotypes, a documentary film that fully expresses Agnès Varda’s confidence and openness to the world around her.
In this case that meant the 90 meter distance of cable that her camera could reach from her floor-level apartment to the shops and locations in the Rue Daguerre district of Paris. Varda was raising her two-year-old son at the time, so she needed to stay close to home. Varda’s catlike curiosity pours through every second of this truly delightful movie.
The magician who appears at the film’s opening credits returns during a public performance in front of an audience of (Parisian) neighborhood regulars. Everything from the magician’s formal approach to his audience and their delightful reactions to his Grand Guignol-inspired tricks, Varda captures a dynamic personal immediacy to time and place. Think Les Blank. There’s boldness in Varda’s subtle simplicity. Agnès Varda retained this transparency throughout her spectacular career as a filmmaker of the first water.
The film’s title comes from Rue Daguerre, the street that Varda lived on. The street was named after Louis Daguerre, “inventor of the Daguerreotypes of photographic printing.”
Naturally this movie is a time capsule of French life, by virtue of Agnès Varda’s generous and willing ability to reach out to her neighbors in a cinematic way. There is much to enjoy, relish, and learn from the elderly subjects in this treasured movie. Taken with the joy that Varda captures and inspires, “Daguerréotypes” is a social study for all time. What love. What magic. What a celebration of life.
