Jacques Demy, Nantes (44)

For many, the film director Jacques Demy is a highly important figure in the history of Nantes, and certainly the Médiathèque is named after him. But unfortunately there remains very little of L'Allée des Tanneurs, and nothing of which I'm aware of 9 Allée des Tanneurs, where Demy's father had a garage, where his mother serviced the local women in hairdressing, and where Jacques spent his childhood and adolescence. Jacques's wife Agnès Varda brought much interest to this spot in her film Jacquot de Nantes.

Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy in La Guérinière, Noirmoutier, Vendée (85)

Film directors Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy bought a derelict windmill in La Guérinière, L'ile de Noirmoutier, which they to some extent restored and where they spent their summers and Christmasses, sometimes hounded by paparazzi because of such guests as Cathérine Deneuve and Michel Legrand. The setting, right in front of the beach, is idyllic. There are four defunct windmills shown here, of which the first is the one which belonged to Varda and Demy. Apart from the last windmill, all shots are taken from the beachside. (A sail on Varda and Demy's mill is broken because it was hit by lightning.)

Le Mur tombé du ciel #5: Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda and Anouk Aimée

Jacques Demy – a major film director and a major person born in Nantes – is sadly on the point of being almost forgotten in the city he loved so much: Varda's loving tribute to him in Jacqou de Nantes is an important film, as are the films which Demy set in Nantes – Une chambre en ville and Lola. But he's not forgotten in this mural, which shows him behind the movie camera, Varda behind him and Anouk Aimé (as Lola) in front. Some shots were taken in places which no longer exist, although others are set in the art nouveau splendour of La Cigale restaurant.

Agnès Varda's T'as de beaux escaliers tu sais | You've Got Beautiful Stairs, You Know (1986)

The title T'as de beaux escaliers tu sais is an allusion to one of the most famous lines in French movie history: 'T'as de beaux yeux tu sais' ('You've got beautiful eyes, you know'), spoken by the Jean Gabin character to Michèle Morgan in Marcel Carné's Quai des brumes just before she says 'Embrassez-moi!'. In this tiny short which celebrates fifty years of the Cinémathèque Française, with its fifty steps, Varda says it's not an advert but 'c'est un hommage en forme de réclame' ('a homage in the guise of an advert'). When Varda names the title of the film and shows the steps, this is immeditely followed by a short clip of Gabin not from Quai des brumes but from Pépé le Moko. A number of other films are shown: Varda packs a great deal into just three minutes.

The above photo is of course of Isabelle Adjani.

Agnès Varda's Du côté de la côte | Along the Coast (1958)

Although it was made twenty-eight years after Jean Vigo's À propos de Nice (1930), and although Varda directed Du côté de la côte commissioned by the tourist office, it is impossible not to view the two films side by side. Varda's work is by no means exlusively about Nice, although inevitably the town features strongly. La promenade des Anglais is of course present in both, as is the welcoming of visitors in cars as they roll up to the forecourts of expensive hotels, ditto the Grosses Têtes of the carnival. Obviously the clothes both on the beach and off are particularly starchy and formal in Vigo's film, but that's not the essential difference.

Varda's film is not without its humour: as she speaks about the tranquil spots the viewer sees hordes of tourists, and it is with obvious tongue firmly in cheek that she takes shots of every mention of 'Eden' that she can find: it's not too difficult to see the very subtle criticism of the mindlessness of tourism. Vigo, on the other hand, wasn't working to a commission, and could afford to show the other side of Nice: the poverty in the slums.

Agnés Varda's Salut les Cubains (1963)

Salut les Cubains is Agnès Varda's love letter to revolutionary Cuba four years after the event. It shows the Cubans greatly praising Fidel Castro, and generally living their lives in celebration of the downfall of the dreaded Batista. But this (it is the wonderful Varda after all) is no mindless eulogy: what we have here is a secular hymn to Cuban culture in all its forms – the variety of the music, the literature, the architecture, the continuing ghost of Hemingway, etc. A glorious little film taken at the height of Cuban joy. Michel Piccoli is the voice.

Agnès Varda's Cléo de 5 à 7 | Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962)

Agnès Varda's Cléo de 5 à 7 was shot in (more or less) real time in June 1961 in Paris, with the main character Cléo (Corinne Marchand) as a young pop singer who fears that she has cancer, and she has to attend hospital in two hours to find out the results of her medical. Cléo is superstitious and the essentially black and white film begins in colour when she's having a tarot card reading; later she's frightened of a hat being put on a bed and mirrors breaking: mirrors are all over, and Cléo looks at herself, as if wondering what she is, or how long she will be. Added to this are such shots of a funeral parlour and several clocks remind of the passing of time, the death that awaits her.

Cléo's journey through Paris begins by her taking a taxi with her friend and housekeeper from Rue Rivoli over the Seine. At the Dôme on Boulevard Raspail she puts a loud record of hers on the juke box, isn't recognised (as if she's already dead?) and drinks a swift cognac. At her studio-cum-apartment she is briefly joined by her lover, then by her songwriters (one being Michel Legrand), although she leaves and sees a friend, then takes a taxi which takes her beyond the steps on the Rue des Artistes near what is now Allée Samuel Beckett (even though it's not an allée) and lands in Parc Montsouris. In the park she meets Antoine (Antoine Bourseiller), to whom she tells her story, and as a soldier in the Algerian war he hasn't chosen to fight in, he is only too aware of possible impending death.

Above all this is an experimental film, not just with the real time business but there's a film within a film within a film, a silent movie with exaggerated movements starring Jean-Luc Godard and his wife Anna Karina, in which death is prominent but ends happily: Varda didn't like Godard's dark glasses, and in the silent movie the glasses are seen as giving him a black vision of life. Antoine has given her a more optimistic way of looking at things, but he has to return to fight, as must Cléo. Nouvelle vague this cetainly is, and I'm still uncertain if Varda and her husband Demy aren't the main figures in it.

Agnès Varda's Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2008)

'The  Gleaners and I'! I'm aware that I have almost an obsession with translations, but wow is that a bad one. The suggestion in English is of opposition: gleaners against a single person, whereas the French links a number of people and one individual doing the same thing. It's best to largely ignore the distinction made in this film between a glaneur and a grappilleur – in  other words someone who picks something up from the ground contrary to a height (say, potatoes versus grapes on the vine) – although it's nevertheless an interesting one. And although glaner, like 'glean', can have a literal and a figurative sense, isn't 'glean' used far more figuratively in English?

'We're going gleaning.' No, I don't like it. 'We're going scrumping.' I like it, but it doesn't quite fit because it has a suggestion of schoolkid misbehaviour, and anyway does anyone use the word anymore? 'Scavenging'? Again, there's a slightly dodgy suggestion that isn't present in 'glean'. So glean it must be?

I'm digressing hugely because I've strayed from Varda's film, which a number of people seem to think is her best, or one of her best. Well, it's certainly extremely interesting, concerns a very contemporary theme (waste), but surely most people just find some of her other films too difficult for consumption?

Les Glaneurs et les glaneuses is episodic, a collection of instances of, er, gleaning. We have, for example, people collecting potatoes that have been rejected because too big or too small, too misshapen or cut, etc; we have the collection of grapes rejected or missed during the vendenge; we have people collecting oysters; we have a secondhand goods shop; and we have a visit to Bohdan Litnianski and his brut art  in the Jardin des Merveilles in Viry-Noureuil (Aisne), which of course should be gleaning information, but the Litnianskis didn't seem too forthcoming in their explanations.

This DVD includes an hour-long film two years on from this movie, in which not everyone is any longer there or in the same place, partly because of death, partly because of move of home, etc. Perhaps the most interesting things are the responses Varda received as a result of people seeing this film, particularly as a result of it being shown on television. A terrifying thing: one member of a trailer park had found a boyfriend and drank less now, whereas she used to drink 'a lot'. Varda asks: 'What is a lot?' 'Ten or fifteen litres a day'. 'Of what?' 'Rosé.' Erm...

Agnès Varda's Les Plages d'Agnès | The Beaches of Agnès (2008)

Les Plages d'Agnès (which inevitably translates terribly in English) is Varda's autobiography, but of course a very quirky one: imagine any other film director setting up mirrors and old family photos on the sand. As is to be expected, there are similarities between this film and Jacquot de Nantes, Varda's tribute to her husband Jacques Demy.

At the beginning of Les Plages Varda says that if she were split down the middle there would be a beach, that the North Sea and sand were a beginning for her. She starts with a beach in Belgium, and states that her childhood in Belgium is lovingly remembered by the beaches she went to in that country during her early holidays: Knokke-Le-Zoute (which reminds me of Brel's song), Blankenberg, Ostende, Mariakerke, Middelkerke, La Panne and Zeebrugge.

Varda's family fled from Belgium to Sète – a town usually evoking Paul Valéry and Georges Brassens who were born and buried there – which holds particularly important memories for her. It was there too that she directed her first film, La Pointe Courte (1954), which is an experimental film inspired by William Faulkner's The Wild Palms (1939). This book today is usually called If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, which consists of two interwoven short stories: 'The Wild Palms' and 'Old Man'.¹

Other beaches included in the film are in the peninsula of Noirmoutier, where Jacques Demy had much earlier spent his holidays, and where the couple bought a former windmill overlooking the beach at La Guérinière.

Venice Beach also features within the context of the hippie period of free love and the Black Panthers, etc.

As opposed to what the title might suggest, Les Plages d'Agnès isn't just about beaches, but is a kind of collage with reconstructions of Varda's memories – old photos, clips from films, modern filming of places mentioned, reflections on the past, etc. A delight.

¹ La Pointe Courte was a small fishing village now incorporated into Sète itself.
²  Varda's forename was 'Arlette' because she was conceived in Arles, although she changed this name officially to Agnès.

Agnès Varda's Jacquot de Nantes (1991)

Jacquot de Nantes is Agnès Varda's tribute to her husband, the film director Jacques Demy, who was known as 'Jacquot' in his childhood. He grew up in Nantes, and in the film we see three different versions of children playing him as we go from pre-war, through the war to Jacquot becoming Jacques at the end as he moves to the bright lights of film school in Paris.

The film is mainly in black and white to match the period, although it reverts to colour during epiphanic moments, or shots where Demy's colour films excepts are shown, or when the camera dwells in close-ups of Demy's dying body: he was initially said (according to his wishes) to have died of cancer, although he died of AIDS.* There are brief scenes from such films as Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, La Peau d'âne, Le Joueur de flûte, and the amazing mid-19th century shopping centre, Le Passage Pommeraye in Nantes, from Lola, etc.

Demy was brought up around his car mechanic father's garage, and although his father wants his son to follow him professionally Jacquot is obsessed with the cimema, constructing brief movies with his camera: the original Garage Demy in L'allée des tanneurs was used in the shooting, and Varda was thrilled that some of Demy's original films from his youth were found there so many years after.

The originality of Demy's Les Parapluies de Cherbourg partly lies in the fact that the film is entirely related in song, and Jacquot de Nantes is full of songs sung by a number of the characters, and songs are a frequent backcloth to the action, notably Charles Trenet singing 'Le Temps des cerises' as a perceived song of revolt during the war. Varda made a remarkable tribute to her husband.

*Inevitably Jacques Demy's films have, since 2008, been researched for homosexual motifs, which Varda dismissed as 'un ruisseau dans un fleuve'.

Agnès Varda's Le Bonheur | Happiness (1965)

Le Bonheur was Agnès Varda's third full-length film, and her first in colour. It caused something of a scandal at the time because the sexual morals in it were contrary to the norm, and the film received an 18 certificate.

This is a simple, but disturbing, story in which picnics in the woods are set against a painterly, Impressionistic background. First we have idyllic shots of the young carpenter François Chevalier (Jean-Claude Drouot) with his wife Thérèse (Claire Drouot) and their son and daughter, before François meets Émilie Savignard (Marie-France Boyer), who works for the PTT. Then a secret love affair begins between François and Émilie, which François honestly and alarmingly casually reveals to his wife, seeing nothing wrong with having two relationships at the same time: it's 'happiness'.

Émilie, however, doesn't relate to François's idea of happiness, and after a love-making scene in the woods while the children are asleep, she apparently kills herself. After a necessary period of mourning, François re-joins with Émilie, and the two continue as a new family, with the two children. Today, it is still evident why people found the film so shocking.

Agnès Varda's Sans toit ni loi | Vagabond (2008)

Agnès Varda's Sans toit ni loi – unsurprisingly – is abysmally translated into English as Vagabond. This film is based on truth in that it concerns a young woman who was sans toit ni loi – literally without a roof and without law, and an expression punning on the expression sans foi ni loi, roof replacing faith.

Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire) is the principal character here, many of the others being non-professionals. This can't be called a documentary, nor even a biopic: very little is known of the dead young woman, other than that she drifted around places, walking or hitching, having sex with the odd person she came across, occasionally finding the odd job and mixing with marginals or agricultural workers, drinking, smoking pot, often acting contrary to the norms of mainstream society.

Not that she made specific criticisms of or actions against society – she said very little at all – but she was, dare I use the word, an outsider par excellence. Her roof was temporary, being her tent which she pitched – camping sauvage – in any place she found she found suitable, including a cemetery.

Death – the same one – begins and ends this story. And it's from here that Varda begins her story, which is inevitably false but with some truths, many culled from the people who knew her, in so far as it was possible to know her.

The Angel, 3e arrondissement

57 rue de Turbigo. This is said on a few web sites to be a homage to Augustin Fresnel, the founder of modern optics, although what relation an angel has to Fresnel is a mystery. This huge structure, spanning three floors, has been called various nicknames, among them 'l'ange du bizarre' and 'la femme au sac', and she is discussed in Agnès Varda's short film 'Les dites Cariatides'.