Agnes Varda Tribute

Agnès Varda  (1928-2019) was a Paris-based photographer and film director and a key figure in modern film history. She is much revered across the globe for her deconstruction of the documentary form and her boundary-pushing work. In a career spanning 57 years, Agnès Varda, is one of the most original and renowned of the French ‘New Wave’ directors; in fact she is the only female director associated with it – her early films anticipating the work of Godard and Truffaut.

Beaches of Agnes 2008

Antenna Documentary Festival, in collaboration with the Alliance Francaise, the French Embassy and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, presented a tribute to this legendary French filmmaker on October 13th 2012. The films screened in 35mm (what a treat!) Special thanks to AGNSW Curator and projectionist Robert Herbert (1958-2017) ; and thanks to Antenna for inviting me to introduce her films The Gleaners and I and Beaches of Agnes. Here is an extract from my introduction: 

 In 'The Beaches of Agnes' we are in the mind of an Elder who is ‘essaying’: she weighs up her own life, pays tribute to her lovers, friends, family and colleagues. She time travels back into her own films – and into Demy's films. It is a tribute to cinema – to the nouvelle vaugue, to documentary, to fiction, to imagination, to creativity. There is a great freedom in this film – everything is possible – as in a Melies film. It is magic, the stuff of dreams.

In  'The Gleaners and I' Varda plays with representation – from Millet’s painting – which serves as visual metaphor and foundation text – and she transforms it into her own film text of gleaning. She pushes beyond the surfaces of Millet’s three gleaners and his framing – to blow open the edge of frame and ‘essay’ into her film’s themes; and she gives us herself and her gleaners in fleshy reality. 

The people actually filmed in 'The Gleaners' – and the way she films with them – is worth thinking about.  How does Varda achieve such a special quality in her interviews? – a feeling of compassion and intimacy – a sense of shared humanity. Varda says this: “The people I have filmed tell us a great deal about our society and ourselves.  I myself learned a lot as I was making this film.  It confirmed my idea that documentaries are a discipline that teach modesty”. 

 Last year (2021) I was writing about Varda's unique approach to film-making and I came across a thoughtful interview with her by Sheila Heti in The Believer (Issue 66). Sadly, this online magazine's link is no longer active, but here is a quote that expresses Varda's film-making ethic:

If it can be shared, it means there is a common denominator. I think, in emotion, we have that. So even though I’m different or my experiences are different, they cross some middle knot. It’s interesting work for me to tell my life, as a possibility for other people to relate it to themselves—not so much to learn about me… It’s a way of living, sharing things with people who work with me, and they seem to enjoy it.  

Back in 1999,  we were blessed to meet up with Agnes Varda at the Creteil International Women's Film Festival in Paris. A group of us Australian women filmmakers screened our films in a program called, Les Antipodes. What a wonderful experience! Varda, one of our great mentors! And yes, we need them.

Margot Nash, Jeni Thornley with Agnes Varda,
Creteil International Women's Film Festival, Paris 1999

 Notes

Heti, S. (2009, October 1). An interview with Agnes Varda. The Believer. Issue 66. https://believermag.com/an-interview-with-agnes-varda/

 Sheila Heti, Interviews.  http://www.sheilaheti.com/interviews, accessed 9th August 2022.

"The archive of the self and deconstructing the national archive," Ozdox Forum, August, 2014.

My talk, 'the archive of the self and deconstructing the national archive' – was part of  "Maestros of the Archive: The Art of Archival Documentary", Ozdox Forum, August, 2014: "Gathering, manipulating and presenting archival material is an art form, one that is sometimes overlooked. Through archival film making, a seasoned story teller can tap into our nostalgic tendencies, our memories and collective subconscious with precision and eloquence". In this Ozdox Forum I presented along with Paul Clarke, Shane McNeil and Nicole O’Donohue.  Curator was Brendan Palmer, with moderator Ruth Hessey.

The focus of my talk is: what image do you choose to represent or communicate an idea, or a feeling; how do you work with your own subjective memory…and how might your own personal archive link to public history - the historical record of a nation; and where does your intention and ethics play out in all of this?  

Also I want to note the difference between approaching the archive as a source of shots for a film, in contrast to thinking about the archive as metaphor: that is, reading the grain of the archive, AND reading against the grain of the archive – to hear the whispers in the archive, to see the problem of the archive and what’s not there; and to think about the nature of power in the production of the archive itself. For instance filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, with his 1985 10 hour documentary on the Holocaust, Shoah – refutes the archive. 

Lanzmann reads the grain of the Holocaust archive (which is vast) and he rejects it. No archival footage of the camps. Nothing. For him it is an ethical decision. Lanzmann knew his intention so well ...he honed it over the 11 years of production – to create Shoah as its own unique archive, with a completely different way of representing and understanding history and what happened on the killing fields.

So back to intention – that is, trying to understand your intention with each film, sequence or image; I want to unpack my intention in several films I have made since the 1970s till now. Some colleagues who worked on these films are here tonight and I would like to acknowledge them - Megan McMurchy: co director and co producer For Love or Money, Karen Pearlman, editor Island Home Country, Erika Addis cinematographer on For Love or Money and To the Other Shore and Jane Castle additional camera on To the Other Shore; and in absentia Martha Ansara for Film For Discussion and co-filmmakers on For Love or Money: Margot Nash and Margot Oliver.

I want to start with Sophia Turkiewicz’s recent film Once My Mother – 

surely a case study in the Art of the Archival Documentary. In it we see a lucid example of intention, and the relevance of duration to a filmmaker’s internal process and filmmaking method. I refer here to the b&w 16mm footage Sophia filmed of her mother while at film school in 1976 – the film she couldn’t make then – and the crucial, integrative moment of her return decades later for a 2^nd look. Sophia says: “Looking back, I lacked the skill, the maturity and the perspective to do my mother’s story justice. The rushes lay in film cans in my hot attic cupboard for over thirty years… waiting until I was ready…”

I want to link Sophia’s ‘found footage’ to Film For Discussion, by the Sydney Women’s Film Group, a film we completed in 1974, with Ansara directing and me co-scripting and performing. It’s an improvisational drama documentary about a young woman in a crisis of identity around family, boyfriend and work – it shows the contradictions around the position of women at the time. I play the girl. Or am I playing myself? Martha composed several shots in mirrors. This clip is a 1 minute extract from the excruciatingly long 3minute mirror shot of the girl – just after a horrible family argument at dinner, with an aggressive drunken father and a submissive mother, and a boyfriend who just doesn't get it.

(BTW most of my clips tonight are from films made on 16mm 4;3 not HD – ripped from DVDs – and I am no maestro of ripping; and remember Film For Discussion was made over 43 years ago…almost half a century!)

CLIP 1 FILM FOR DISCUSSION: 0:58

 Like Sophia's footage of her mother, this mirror shot was emotionally too much for me to deal with at the time, yet it became foundational in my subsequent turn to a kind of poetic, found-footage, autobiographical film-making style – developing an ‘archive of the self’; Sophia buries her footage in an attic, but my family crisis plays out on the massive screen in the State Theatre during the documentary finals at the 1974 Sydney Film Festival. This moment is a site of instability – where, as the film’s subject, my intention is not yet realized. This is what I mean by duration – how long it takes to gain insight into one’s intention with a piece of archival footage – as an internal process of the psyche.

My next project began after Film For Discussion in 1975 as a drama script on illegal abortion – about a confused pregnant girl, her broken love affair and the police raids on the abortion clinics of the late 60s; I got a grant from the Experimental Film Fund for this project but was unable to make that film as a drama – instead I worked instinctively gathering sequences from films I had acted in, or worked on, weaving them together with my home movies and photographs – into a story of four generations of an Australian family. This became my documentary film Maidens, completed in 1978. Little did I realise the repercussions of using women’s naked bodies to represent the emancipatory, utopian impulse-of women’s liberation.

CLIP 2 MAIDENS a: 1:14 (this is not the clip I screened...)

In fact, my intention was not at all clear to me at the time – apart from the filmmaking method being some attempt to mend or reflect on the broken parts of my life. It was a time of intense personal crisis and huge social change: ‘free love’, the Vietnam war, conscription and my brother’s death in a head on car crash. Maidens was explosive – bearing family secrets in public…partly triggered by the psycho-drama of Film For Discussion, and the impact of feminism’s notion that the personal is political. 

Feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham writes of : “the contradiction …between private and public, personal and impersonal as the fissure in women’s consciousness through which revolt erupts”. My subsequent film-making method unfolded from inside the split-self of the Film For Discussion mirror shot – perhaps as a way of navigating self and society – unravelling hidden secrets and finding footage that viscerally expresses breakdown, revolt and transformation.

Also, being exposed to a range of international women’s films we screened at the Sydney Filmmakers Co-op Cinema and Women’s Film Festivals around the country…where we programmed the early films of great women filmmakers like Agnes Varda, Maya Deren, Su Freidrich, and Helma Sanders Brahms – many of them re-configuring their archives to make films with an intense female subjectivity.

Like Turkiewicz was drawn back to the footage she filmed of her mother, I was drawn back to that footage of the girl in Film For Discussion to take a 2^nd look and re-use the footage in Maidens. From a film-making craft perspective I was developing a remix or inter-textual film practice – marking a dynamic shift from being passive subject to becoming the agent of transformation.

Here’s the mirror shot remix from Film For Discussion to Maidens offering what writer Frances Lionnet calls “a space of possibility”…where the filmmaker sees her own personal history implicated in larger social processes.

CLIP 3 MAIDENS b: 1.26

              For Love or Money, our feature documentary about the history of women and work in Australia, begun in 1979 and completed in 1983 – reflects an organic shift to link the personal to larger social processes – by doing extensive oral histories and research combing archives across the nation. In all the archives we researched, as in society at large, women were stereotyped in fixed roles – in the family and in the workforce; but how to represent the known documented stories of revolt, like the struggle for the vote and equal pay, or the hidden work of women’s unpaid work in the home as wives and mothers – in images – when so few existed in the archive? In For love or money’s closing sequence you might get a sense of the visual, poetic metaphors we developed to read against the grain of the national archive. Here we re-pose the film’s main thesis – still relevant to now – 3 decades later:  

CLIP 4 FOR LOVE OR MONEY: 2:49 (this is not the clip I screened; it's coming!)

My next documentary To the Other Shore began as a diary film about motherhood, filming on super 8 starting in 1986 – and taking 10 years – collecting images from a range of archives, local and international, and editing them with my home movies and dramatized sequences. The method and structure of the film was drawn from Freud’s ideas around the ‘work of mourning – remembering, repeating and working through’. I wanted to suggest the dark side of motherhood, with its irruptions from the unconscious and the way the external world of war and violence, could penetrate the fragile membrane of a mother’s mind – especially a breast-feeding mother.  

Anne Tenney in To The Other Shore 1996 (pic: Sandy Edwards)

CLIP 5 TO THE OTHER SHORE: 2:33

A key question about intention when working with intimate family footage like this is ethics  – who might this footage harm? When you film a baby, a toddler…they can’t give permission. But what about when they become adults…do they feel violated by the footage? How do they relate to their image being appropriated for the filmmaker’s tale?  Consider the beautiful footage of my baby daughter, filmed in the golden light of afternoon while I prepare the evening meal…with its voice over about suicide and maternal ambivalence.  How does this affect her, or others in the family – then, and now?

And finally to my film Island Home Country, completed in 2008, where the ethical question on the use of the archive and working with the Tasmanian Aboriginal community and their protocols becomes the very foundation of that film’s process. This film is about my memories, growing up in Tasmania, and knowing no Aboriginal history or culture. Here is an island where the violent race war, (some call it attempted genocide, others ethnic cleansing) has been so repressed that approaching this terrain is a mine-field – whichever way you turn; the existing archive of documents, photos and film has been produced by the victors of that war. The present day Tasmanian Aboriginal community do not welcome ‘outsiders’ using that material about them.  How to proceed? The film takes 5 years of negotiation, of edits and re-filming. The Aboriginal community are crystal clear: don’t make a film about us, make a film about you, your mob. It’s here I became “the other” and experienced “instability’ around being white. For this internal feeling I created a visual metaphor – "the white ghost of Australian history" – with a remix sequence from another film I had acted in earlier.

CLIP 6 ISLAND HOME COUNTRY: 2:04

 So gaining insight into intention, timing and the ethical frame is a process and I think it’s fundamental to the art of the archival documentary.

Finally a few closing words by Sophia Turkiewicz. She is truly a maestro of the ‘archive of the self’ and its intricate linkages to international archives of memory and history.

Thinking back, it was fortunate that “Once My Mother” took so long to make. If I’d told this story when I was younger, I wouldn’t have been able to do it justice…. As I say in the film, I had ‘plundered’ my mother’s life to make various fictional films in my career as a drama director. Now that I was making my first documentary about the ‘truth’ of my mother’s life, I realized I had to be as honest with myself…. through tracking my own journey towards ‘forgiveness’.

Thankyou

my recent thinking on documentary @conferences; film reviews

 Visible Evidence Conference,  ANU (December 2012) –  my presentation: Documentary, the database and the global archive of the internet: implications for teaching documentary film history.

This paper is exploratory – a map to something I am working on in more depth. The converging digital and online media era provokes questions on how to approach the study and teaching of documentary history. How do we contextualize such rapidly evolving media–within or alongside the field of documentary?  Perhaps the case for a digitally based – experimental practice of documentary making, writing and critical thinking – exemplified by Chris Marker, indicates a way through this era; so acknowledging Marker’s passing: ‘Cat – wherever you are – peace be with you'.

My paper at the Film and History Conference: The politics and poetics of subversion: documentary film-making and the decolonization of Tasmanian history. In this paper I discuss several films (and images) that have been produced amidst the turbulent site of Tasmania’s past and present: The Last Tasmanian (1978) Blackman’s Houses (1993), First Australians, Portrait of a Distant Land, and my own documentary Island Home Country – all produced in 2008. These films work intertextually and with social and political consequences. I look at the textual strategies the filmmakers and artists have used – their politics and poetics, and my own – to explore how filmmaking and art practice can make potent contributions to processes of decolonization.

Here is my review of the recent book on Hungarian filmmaker Peter Forgacs; its in the latest issue of 'Screening the Past': Cinema’s Alchemist: The Films of Péter Forgács. In this rich and detailed book various contributors call him by different names: artist-archivist, scribe, witness, poet, cinema alchemist. His body of work is so extensive, innovating across a diversity of mediums and forms, that the term filmmaker only partly suits him. Given the unstable and rapidly changing landscape of digital-documentary filmmaking, this latest Visible Evidence Series (#25) on Forgács and his work is very timely.

Another recent review  I have done is this book Australian Documentary: History, Practices and Genres by Trish FitzSimons, Pat Laughren and Dugald Williamson Cambridge UP, 2011). It's in Metro Magazine, Issue 173,  2012  (PDF at this link).

Australian Documentary is an insightful and generous book. It offers back to the community of practitioners and broader audiences a text rich with scholarship, reflecting on ‘more than a century of practice’.  Readers can engage with an Australian documentary tradition in local, national and international contexts. We can connect with the lineage of films and the negotiated labour of producing them, and gain a strong sense of the capacity of documentary to be transformed and renewed. There is much pleasure in sensing this regenerative process.

International Anthropological Film Festival in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

I am back from the International Anthropological Film Festival in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam – organised by VICAS: Vietnam Institute of Culture and Arts Studies). Screening in four venues across Ho Chi Minh City (two universities) this was an amazing event! 

Ho Chi Minh City University of Culture

It was a really great cross-cultural experience and I learnt so much about Vietnam (and visual ethnography).  It would be great to see some of the films in this program in Australia. Here is the Festival's trailer which gives something of a feel for the festival films (although censorship in Vietnam is a real issue –  some local and international films were banned and/or cut–sometimes at the very last moment- so the program shifted here and there).

The discussions (formal and informal) were so thorough. Some-times 2 hours on one film! Incredible detail - so that more social, political, philosophical and historical issues were discussed, than film-making practice. You know, I liked this Festival so much more than the 'standard' film festival where the market place dominates - or when there are so many films (back to back) that there is no time for in-depth discussion - or discussion feel hurried.  Here at the Anthrop Film Festival the discussions were an intrinsic part of the screening – and were in depth, insightful and penetrating. At Ho Chi Minh City's University of Culture I was taken by the intense engagement of the students with the ideas presented in each film. This was no ordinary film festival, but something unique. I asked a colleague if he thought this quality was the "anthropological"  nature of the event or some quality in Vietnamese culture and-or their education system? We reckoned it was probably both!

Ho Chi Minh City University of Culture

Actually, I have never really located myself within this field of visual ethnography - perhaps because anthropological films in Australia have mostly been made from within the vexed site of colonising. I have preferred to make films  as a 'documentary maker'. Also my own film-making began as part of a political process - making feminist films for social change. But this Festival has stimulated me to review various positions I have held over the years.  All orthodoxies need to be challenged! And anthropology, too is going through its own transformations - and a genuine 'participatory',  ethical and de-colonising film-making is very much part of current practice: "The remarkable novelty comes when a Maori becomes an anthropologist and she practices anthropology as a Maori rather than studying the Maori as an anthropologist". Walter Mingolo, ('Decolonizing Western Epistemology, Building Decolonial Epistemologies') . Mingolo's essay refers to Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith and her great book: "Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples" (1998) whch has just been released in its 2nd edition (2012). The book "has been substantially revised, with new case-studies and examples and important additions on new indigenous literature, the role of research in indigenous struggles for social justice, which brings this essential volume urgently up-to-date". 

I will be writing an article about the AnthroFestival for Realtime (Feb 2013). 

Walking by David Perry

A wet morning in Sydney! And by accident this morning I came across filmmaker David Perry's grainy, silent super 8 footage 'Walking'. Filmed in 1955, Perry's camera tracks a young man walking Sydney's rainy streets, through Ultimo, across Pyrmont Bridge; it's a fragment of a city film, and it's like an original moment with Arthur Stace 'Mr. Eternity'. It's now part of an installation at Damien Minton Gallery featured in the group exhibition 'Five Bells - A Visual Ode to Sydney' (1-18 February, 2012) .

New documentary in development, “ricky on leacock”

I just backed the film with a $15 pledge and will receive a digital download of the film RICKY on LEACOCK when available! This documentary project expires on Kickstarter in 46 hours - so fingers crossed it raises this last $4000 today and tonight! Your pledge contributes to  a great new portrait on Leacock and a film that expands the history of the evolution of documentary