the limping messenger

AGNES VARDA 1928-2019

It must have been the Cineclub of Den Bosch, a provincial town in the Netherlands where I attended the art academy, where I saw in 1962 Varda’s just released movie “Cléo de 5 à 7″… and as young would be intellectuals afterwards we discussed the hidden meanings which we thought to have discovered… but of course we had read in the newspapers… the Greek drama unity of time and space as indicated by the title (in fact the events depicted take half an hour more)… the confrontation between the glamorous life of the central figure a female pop singer – Corinne Marchand – and the the young man she meets by chance, drafted to serve in the French colonial war in Algeria… this last thing was something we Dutch youngsters understood at that time as the Dutch government had started to send young drafted soldiers to the other side of the globe, Nieuwe Guinea, to be employed into what soon was expected to develop into a colonial war with the new state of Indonesia… I was eighteen then and when I failed my exam in the art academy I would have to go into the army as well..

What was engraved into our memory the most were the aesthetics of this black and white movie, especially the Parisian loft, home of the pop singer, painted all white, floor, ceiling, roof-beams… it’s bareness created beauty, widened both space, and mind. A swing hangs from the ceiling and some more gymnastic contraptions (at that time such things would have no reference to bondage and sexual acts for us).

Of course Agnes Varda did not invent such a space, she used mostly existing spaces in a documentary way… (photos of bohemien parties in Amsterdam in the early sixties come to mind, with a lady with a mini-juup on a swing and some saxophonist playing) [*]… brings us back to the movie with a jazzy rehearsal in the lof with the singer with wonderboy Michel Legrand on the piano and Jean Luc Godard as supporting actor…
“tu joue sur ton piano
des noires et des blanches
et moi et moi
et moi je joue des hanches
j’en joue, c’est fou
des hanches”…

The pop singer Corinne Marchand who sings these lines in fact acts her own future life – as she had hardly had a career as a singer before she is chosen by Varda to play in her movie… which made Corinne Marchand famous overnight…
there is an inherent critique in several movie scenes of the manipulative practices of the music industry that uses such pretty girls to just reproduce the music and lyrics written for them and not by them…
“you play your piano
the blacks and whites
and me and me
and me I display my hips
I play them, it’s mad
these hips”

The pop-singer during the Greek drama time frame is waiting for the results of biopics taken, as she may have developed a cancer… which throws her out of the fancies and fairy tale life style of a celebrated singer… she is seen entering a cafe and playing on the jukebox one of her own songs… admidst reguar customers not aware of the contradiction between the joyous song and her anxieties… this a short moment before visiting her doctor… also she is seen when visiting a friend who is posing for a sculptor class with her attractive body amid representations of her formed by the hands of the students… this scene shows the other talent of Varda, that of a photographer, in the way the differences of light are captured between a naked body and its representations, displaying contrast between a wide and a narrowed down spectre of black and white and greys.

At the time a saw the movie in 1962 I was living in a loft of a small industrial building near Den Bosch in the South of the Netherlands and often working in a sculpture class studio of the art academy, including the exercise of directing one’s hands fo follow one’s eyes with a model on a turning platform. I must confess that my hands had hardly any experience then of touching a naked female body (I was a late comer say) and thus the enticing figure with the bobbed hair of the singer dressed in flurry white gripped me… images spun in my head of being with such a being, in such a space.

Three years later I got a job as an assistant for an Italian artist, Lucio del Pezzo, who was working that winter on an installation for the coming up Venice Bienale in 1966. So I found myself in a house in Paris that belonged at that time still to the artist Max Ernst at Rue Mathurin Régnier 58… many avant-garde artists and associates of name had stayed there, like Dorothea Tanning and Marcel Duchamps… the house had a small front courtyard with a shack and the main building had about four floors, not including the huge cellar. The floors were subleted and I was working on the floor that belonged to the Italian artist Enrico Baj who, on his turn, had rented it to Del Pezzo.
I was given this shack on the courtyard which looked sad and downtrodden.
That was my moment to reenact Varda’s spirit of Cléo de 5 à 7 by painting the whole shack and everything in it WHITE! What looked miseable at first, became a glorious space, be it on the ground floor and much smaller than the lofty loft in the cinematic original. No swing from the ceiling, no piano, no big baroque bed… but those who know how to live their fantasy do not need an exact replica.

Newer generations than me may have a hard time understanding such sentiments, when they see that movie. It looks banal to them. The story line is awkward. The acting unnatural. Maybe the scenary is the only thing that remains attractive. Travelogues through a Paris showing a soul that has eroded since.

I can not escape the nostalgic aesthetics of this early Varda movie. Interesting is the fact that her visual style is adaptive to the subject she chooses. She has a method to construct her drama according to a specific subject… something she produces by using existing scenery and – often – amateur actors.

Was it by chance that I saw her 1985 “Sans toit ni loi” (Vagebond) on ARTE tv only a week ago? It traces back the rebellious life of a young homeless woman who refuses any compromise when it comes to her independence… she is both adorable in her non compromise attitude and sad in her incapability to accept empathy and help. She ends up frozen to death in a ditch of a farmland.

I have a hard time to connect the message given by these two movies from 1962 and 1985. Maybe the only parallel is the process of self consciousness of the two female protagonists. Varda is certainly not delivering happy endings… apart then her own long, full and creative life that came to an end today… a life symbolised by the colours of sea, beach and her beloved fabric pattern of polka dots.

[*] Picture by Ab Pruis of a house party in Amsterdam, most probably 1963 showing a girl on a swing (the later added caption says Marijke Koger, but I doubt if that is correct) and next to her Robert Jasper Grootveld. Photograph from the Provo movement archive, now in the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. Grootveld went to Paris in 1963 doing a happening in the avant-garde Galerie Cordier (also photographed by Ab Pruis)… he may also have seen the movie of Varda in Amsterdam. Often it is hard to know if something is copy cat or simultaneous. From fall 1962 the movie “Cléo van 5 tot 7” was running in Amsterdam in Kriterion and Leidsepleintheater (with the documentary “De werkelijkheid van Karel Appel” (the reality of Karel Appel) by Jan Vrijman as a warm-up.