Agnès Varda’s Open Harbour

Yvette Bíró

We know it well: man is but an island. A self-contained, independent entity, far away from or near to those similar beings within the vast water. And it depends on one’s inclinations and disposition to reach out to the others, to those other islands. But to create a truly open, attentive connection, providing profound affective resonance, maintaining a giving and taking relationship – this faculty needs a particular sensibility.

Agnès Varda’s new installation in the Fondation Cartier (Paris) offers a fortunate experience of this kind. The poster clearly names her subject matter: L’Ile et Elle – ‘The Island and She’, a pun on Il et elle or ‘He and She’. Knowing her rich work it is, not surprisingly, full of emotion-filled ideas and original observations. She is at once playful and meandering, identifying herself with people and events, but also projecting her own vision into everything that can be revealed to the eyes. Her meditation is both abundant and melancholic. The island represents not only what it is but also what it lacks; something is confined, marked off.

The aforementioned poster is forcefully telling: in the foreground of the greenish-reddish sea coast (its colours have been digitally treated) there are two chairs: one is light blue and empty, and next to it is a pink one, with the author, Varda herself, sitting on it. She is alone, abandoned, close to her eighties – yet she radiates liveliness, and the sorrow does not hide the power and sincerity of her regard. She looks at us, straight, like all the masterful portraits in the exposition. She is turned toward the spectator; we are in a vivid dialogue. Not only is the composition so expressive: the chosen colours are no less bold. The light blue and the pink, with the ‘red desert’ in their background, elevate the whole phenomenon into a more intricate level of vision. It is not just ‘me’, she suggests; I also convey my state of mind with a tint of unbiased interpretation, with a slight flavor of irony, as if placing the constellation in a kind of quotation mark ...

This is because the fact of solitude, the commonness or even banality of it – reflected in the infinite perspective of the near yet distant ocean – is indeed not unparalleled, but indeed frequent, very familiar. The loss of a companion: such mourning is part of our everyday lives; even an empty chair can express it. Thus, if it is painful and distressing, it however remains prosaic, deprived of pathos. In this finely grotesque tone we have to feel the recognition of the commonplace and also what exceeds it, individually. While applying, almost defiantly, the opposite of the customary colour of mourning (black), Varda dares to use kitsch colour symbols: blue for the boy, pink for the girl. In this way, she is able to transcend the ordinary, adding a sense of layered ambiguity to the work.

The island, Noirmoutier, a tiny, odd piece of land, resembling a short bobtail in the middle of the Atlantic, is indeed an important part of Varda’s life. From the 1960s on she has stayed there, for a time with Jacques Demy, enjoying its peace, absorbing the stimulations of its inhabitants. These days, left to herself after the passing away of her companion, the small everyday events of the island have become suddenly more significant The ‘talking heads’, the house furnishings, special objects, the ‘spirit of place’ all call for interpretation and recording. And the filmmaker, relying on her diversified means, ‘paints’ them with keen eyes and great devotion.

We can find cabins here, two lodges, small, makeshift houses: one constructed from the celluloid strips of an old film (The Creatures, 1966), inventing a novel way to re-use the ‘discarded’ reels of this commercial failure; the other a gallery, offering room for her exquisite photo-portraits. Sixty headshots, arranged in opposition to each other – thirty women and thirty men, yet they only look at us. They are neither beautiful nor extraordinary; they do not represent a group in which people cluster together in terms of age or occupation. But, despite the seemingly incidental order, there is a sense of cohesion. The measure and frontal form of the portraits are precisely identical; they maintain the particularity of each character, but the continuous tapestry of the landscape in the background gently accentuates their affiliation to the place. According to Varda’s accompanying statement, ‘It is a segment of sexed population, but there is a secret sexuality behind the serene faces.’ They are captivating individuals, although there is nothing exceptional about them – simple human beings simply marked by the uniqueness of their existence, bearing the true enigma of every individual. Indeed, what is so unique in a face, within a single personality? The irregular features, the unmatched traits, the betraying taste which can be detected in each tiny detail? Or the special hairstyle, the accidental grimace of the mouth, the seriousness or defying smile, the odd shape of an ear, a funny wrinkle of the shirt? ... At any rate, their openness as they accept their age, the aura of their lives, is arresting: they watch us in the same way as the camera watches them, without any artificiality. I think also that the unusual closeness matters: we are pleased to have time enough to stare at them like the photographer did when she stretched out time, so that we, too, can observe them undisturbed.

Then we wander further, downstairs to the reconstructed entrance – the island’s rail bar – and we arrive at the receding sight of muddy sand on the seashore. We could call it barren, yet it is not a bleak picture. The greyish-yellow colour of the sand, the emptiness of the coastline, the scattered stones and dunes, along with the rolling sea in the distance, open a great vista. There is silence here, and elemental peace. One photo bears the title La petite mer immense: the immense small sea. This duality characterises Varda’s vision: the intimacy and the magnitude of the experience, the enframed boundlessness.

Once we reach the site of the video material, we better understand Varda’s deeply felt and conveyed emotional attachment to this landscape. We come to a small community of widows, fourteen reserved and disciplined women, as they recite in the most personal and artless way their observations about life. Their faces, one to each small, television-size screen, surround the much larger moving picture in the middle – similar to those old icons where the unfolding smaller parts develop the story. The portraits are related, since they all speak about the same subject: mourning, the incomprehensible solitude which has befallen them, astonishment (how can anyone get used to it?). Their speech is broken off, so open and frank, as if talking to themselves (despite the presence of an unseen interlocutor) in a deep interior monologue. The dead are, of course, with us, they say, they live with us, but lifelessly and soundlessly, and if houses and bodies might try to save the memories – but they are mutilated, without response. All the women bear witness to the same feelings, but in a different way – this repetition and slight alteration lending a precise authenticity to the confessions.

The mise en scène of the installation uses fourteen chairs, arranged exactly according to the order of the images, with the text beaming separately from each screen through a headphone, thus establishing a truly personal relationship with the listening spectator. We have to move from chair to chair in order to find the voice we seek. It is part of Varda’s personal involvement that her own self-portrait is equally part of the installation – but, this time, without any spoken text. She sits opposite the spectator like the other widows, in the same position as in the exhibition poster, with the empty chair next to herself. We are not surprised to see also, for a split-second, the face of Jacques Demy, tired, silent, already marked; a last shot, like an indelible relic.

In the middle of the composition, at the darkness of the setting sun, a mute Calvary of black-clad women suddenly appears. A poetic scene, in which a long, bleak table becomes the metaphorical embodiment of the dead, a coffin, and the moving shadows evoke the rituals of mourning in an unadorned choreography.

Besides the melancholy, Varda’s characteristic playfulness is also revealed in various parts of the exposition. A short video evokes the tourist paradise, in which children splash in the water, surrounded by colourful plastic toys, small and big buckets, shovels, happily enjoying the blessing of the water. We can also see a huge blown-up, typical postcard from the ‘30s or ‘50s, exposing a beautiful naked sunbathing blonde – with the trick that, at the push-button flick of a finger, little drawers open up on the surface projecting funny, burlesque (and somewhat disquieting) clips for our amusement. There is also a small hill of salt, accompanied by a biblical quote from Matthew, reminding us of the unique value of the irreplaceable taste of salt. Finally, among the tender memories, there is the grave of the deceased family cat Zgougou, appearing in a six-minute video that reveals, through the beauty of the garden, the loving emotions felt for him. Once again, Varda alludes to the combination of the island and mortality.

At the entrance of the island, before the rail bar, a standard timetable indicates the hours of ebb and tide, advising us when, dependent on the water level, a crossing is possible. Varda, perfectly avoiding the menacing tide, has opened up to us a small domain of her personal island: we can pass, dry-footed, through the not-always-modestly undulating, sometimes stormy waters. We are invited to a promising and tender harbour.