Visages Villages (Faces Places)
In the last few years, female filmmakers have experienced a lot of victories, so Visages Villages comes to us as a reminder that before the Coppolas, the Gerwigs and the Jenkins, there was always Agnès Varda, arguably the single woman who has given most to the cinema in its whole existence. An amazing storyteller both in fiction and in documentary, films like Cléo de 5 à 7, Sans Toit Ni Loi, and Les Glaneurs Et La Glaneuse have been key pieces in tracing the story of social and feminist cinema.
This time, Varda teams with visual artist JR, a guy that challenges the dynamics of the public space through big sized images posted in buildings or walls. Together, they go on a trip through France to discover both the different towns and the people that inhabit them, and will make a tribute to them through their art. If the premise sounds straightforward and simple, the richness in this documentary comes through the discoveries and the analysis they achieve of personal identities and how oneself can be discovered through the sight of others.
It is, first, an exploration of self-identities. In the present day, when we produce and consume selfies on a daily basis, the power of an image printed in large scale in the public space has quite a different effect in people. The artists make a real effort to get to know their subjects, to extract their life stories and translate them into art; they prints are not ready-made as your breakfast Instagram post, they go beyond the "existential instant" that has took over photography; they still see those images as both abstractions and representations. Varda and JR asks themselves: who is this people and what is the place that they inhabit, and how can we translate all that in a single image? And the stories we get (the woman that is posted in the compound where she is the only inhabitant; the family that get printed a picture of their young grandparents in their home) are a beautiful discovery of human beings, of the richness of memory and the way that we are shaped by how are we seen by other.
Second, it's a search for representation. Faithful to the subjects of her lifetime work, Varda doesn't care rich privileged people or celebrities (though it also make a side-comment on how images can make a celebrity of random people), but goes to the working class, to understand what are the struggles of labour workers, of farmers and rural communities. Varda show us that their stories could be much more powerful and engaging than those of any reality TV star, and its necessary that artists go out and give them a voice and a representation. The documentary, as well, makes a great work with a few moments that are truly feminists, and that aim to bring women to the forefront of their own stories, what she manages to do, with the wives of the port workers, for example, is empowering and beautiful.
And finally, it's a self-portrait about Varda herself. It was necessary that filmmaker was one of the characters of the documentary, and by being in it, she opens to our gaze. In what possibly could be her last film (even if we don't want to talk about it, she's 88 years old already), Varda also shares her life and her memories as part of the tales told. It's a beautiful recollection of her ideas, her passions, her concerns. JR is kind enough that, even if he appears as a co-author, makes sure that this film entirely belongs to Varda, he is there as a supporting character (an über-cool one, though) and that final act, where the filmmaker herself is the object of his camera, is the most beautiful and poetic in all the film.
It is a noble, beautiful and very artistic film. A testament of a superb artist and her passing the baton to a younger artist with a vision as powerful and as compromised as hers. Together, Varda and JR create a delightful experience about the act and the concept of "the human gaze" and how, through art, it can sublimate its subjects into the better versions of themselves.
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