Varda: Two Exhibitions and a Retrospective
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Today sees the opening of Agnès Varda’s Paris, from here to there, an exhibition two years in the making and now on view in the French capital through August 24 at the Musée Carnavalet. Focusing on the vivacious artist’s work as a photographer, the presentation of 130 prints—many of which have never been seen before by the general public—will be accented by clips from several films Varda shot in Paris, beginning with Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), which Laura McLean-Ferris, writing in the current film issue of frieze, calls “a work of subtle genius, a kind of living document that offers new forms of knowledge on every viewing, as well as larger questions about mortality, art, war, images, cities, and time.”
From 1951 through to her death in 2019, Varda’s studio on the rue Daguerre was the center of a vortex of creative activity where she worked alongside countless collaborators, including her husband, Jacques Demy. When her son, Mathieu Demy, was born in 1972, Varda began work on a project that would allow her to stick close to home. Her first feature-length documentary, Daguerréotypes (1975), is a group portrait of the community living and working along her street.
“As she explains while pulling a cable out of her mailbox and walking along rue Daguerre, where she lived her whole adult life, in 2008’s The Beaches of Agnès,” writes Alexandra Hidalgo, “she used her own electricity run through that very cable to power the filming. Since the cable—which, she says, someone suggested was an umbilical cord she didn’t want to cut—was ninety meters long, she could film only the businesses closest to her, the ones owned and frequented by her nearest neighbors.”
As it happens, e-flux will screen Daguerréotypes tomorrow evening in New York along with Charmaine Poh’s What’s Softest in the World Rushes and Runs Over What’s Hardest in the World (2024) as part of its Economies of Love series. Daguerréotypes is also lined up for I’m curious. Period., a retrospective of Varda’s nonfiction shorts and features running from Friday through May 28 at IDFA in Amsterdam. “This is a perfect film to show to students, because Varda just went outside her front door and created a masterpiece,” says filmmaker Mark Jenkin (Bait, Enys Men).
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