Daguerréotypes
In the mid-1970s, Agnès Varda filmed her neighborhood on the Rue Daguerre in Paris, which at that time was one of the city’s most bustling commercial districts. She filmed butchers, bakers, tailors, grocers, hairstylists, a driving-school instructor and a street magician. Her vignettes are short, fleeting interactions combining interviews with observational shots. The camera wanders along the street moving from close-ups to tableau vivants and back. As if in ironic reference to Vertov’s classic, Man with a Movie Camera, Varda combines the tricks of a street magician with footage of her interlocutors stocking shelves and baking bread—playfully reminding the viewer of the magic of cinema, and at the same time offering a true time-travel experience.
Agnès Varda was born in Ixelles, Belgium in 1928. She studied at the École du Louvre and took evening classes in photography at the École de Vaugirard. She became a photographer for Jean Vilar when he founded the Avignon Theater Festival in 1948, then for the Théâtre National Populaire at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. She held her first personal exhibition in 1954 in the courtyard of her home. That same year, Agnès Varda made the move to cinema without any formal training. She founded Ciné Tamaris (a cooperative) to produce and direct her first feature, La Pointe Courte. She directed short films and features, both fiction and documentaries. In 2003, she began her third career as a visual artist at the Venice Biennale.