Until end October 2006
L’Ile et Elle
Fondation Cartier
261 Boulevard Raspail
75014 Paris
www.fondation.cartier.fr
A great opportunity to discover Agnès Varda as installation artist, the exhibition "L'Ile et Elle" revolves around installations and videos inspired by the island of Noirmoutier in the Vendée. One floor is also dedicated to her past films of which excerpts are presented.
The Passage du Gois, a long causeway that becomes submerged at high tide, occupies the entrance to the lower level of the Fondation Cartier. Before the completion of the bridge the causeway was the only link between the island and the mainland. The installation consists of a video projected onto a translucent curtain showing the ocean rising and descending on the causeway. Only at low tide can visitors walk through the curtain.
There are various other installations including Le Tombeau de Zgougou, Ping Pong, Tong et Camping, and La Grande Carte postale or Souvenir de Noirmoutier, as well as Les Veuves de Noirmoutier which has been shown at other exhibitions.
Agnès Varda, the film director
Agnès Varda, a director with the talent of Godard and Truffaut but inexplicably not their international reputation is known as the Grandmother of the French New Wave. Varda enhanced the cause of women to be regarded as equals by creating formidable feminist stories that experiment with subject and form. Four of her films - La Pointe Courte (1954), Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961), Le Bonheur (1964), Vagabond (1985) – are among the best of the New Wave, while her early documentaries capture the essence of the feminist movement of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Varda’s success is all the more extraordinary if one considers that she had absolutely no production experience and never went to film school. After studying the history of art, her first real job was as a freelance still photographer doing publicity shots for French theatre in Paris. Varda however had that rare talent of persuading talented people to work for a pittance because they believed in her projects. La Pointe Courte, for example, was edited by Alan Resnais and starred Philippe Noiret, both highly successful in their field. Everyone, including the technicians, worked for nothing and a new vogue in filmmaking was born.
When she started, Varda had no particular love of movies, which made the comedy she made in 1994 to celebrate the centenary of French cinema unconsciously ironic. Called 101 Nights, it is the story of a centenarian and retired director known as ‘Monsieur Cinéma’, played by Michel Piccoli, who sits around all day with his old movie stars talking about past productions. When they grow tired of him, Monsieur hires a beautiful young film student, played by Julie Gayet, whose only task is.. to sit with him all day and talk about movies. Varda succeeded in persuading a parade of celebrities to appear unpaid, in cameo roles, including Gina Lollobrigida, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Catherine Deneuve and Robert de Niro. Leonardo de Caprio came but at the time he was not famous enough, so, much to his indignation when the film was released, Varda cut his appearance. Alan Delon came on condition he could show off and arrive in his own helicopter, which Varda duly filmed, and Gérard Depardieu came because Varda gave him his first break in the movies when he was only seventeen.
Asked recently to name her favourite documentary from her repertoire, she compromised by naming the best title – a documentary known in French as Documenteur translated into English as ‘Emotion Picture’. Her favourite film remains Kung-Fu Master (1987) a feature length drama about an older woman, played by Varda's great friend, the actress Jane Birkin. The woman falls in love with a young boy and one critic described the sensitive subject as “tailor-made… to frighten British distributors”, who duly declined to show it on the British circuit. The boy Julien was played by Mathieu Demy, Varda’s son by the love of her live and late husband, the celebrated French director Jacques Demy, best known for his masterpiece, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg.
Born in Belgium, now aged 78 but still making documentaries, Varda describes herself as more loved than famous, “bizarrely half-known”. A French critic called her "le premier son de cloche d'un immense carillon”: the first sound of the carillon that became the fifty films of the New Wave.
From our 2006 August e-newsletter
