Agnès Varda and JR

Faces Places

Faces Places

A late-career triumph of lovingly handcrafted humanism, Agnès Varda’s Academy Award–nominated penultimate film sees the octogenarian director joining forces with the thirty-something street photographer JR. Crisscrossing rural France in their roving camera-mobile—a truck that produces larger-than-life portraits of the people they meet, which are then pasted onto local walls—the pair encounter an array of farmers, former miners, dockworkers, and others whose stories form a collage of a country where meaningful traditions persist in the face of encroaching modernity. A detour-rich road movie, a charming intergenerational buddy film, and an ode to artisans of all stripes, Faces Places finds Varda making new memories while revisiting old ones, yielding what is ultimately a bittersweet, puckishly profound reflection on the ephemeral nature of art, relationships, and life itself.

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Film Info

  • France
  • 2017
  • 93 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.85:1
  • French

Available In

Collector's Set

The Complete Films of Agnès Varda

The Complete Films of Agnès Varda

Blu-ray Box Set

15 Discs

$199.96

Faces Places
Credits
Director
Agnès Varda
Director
JR
Written by
Agnès Varda
Written by
JR
Produced by
Rosalie Varda
Agnès Varda’s assistant
Julia Fabry
Director of production
Cecilia Rose
Coproduced by
Charles S. Cohen
Coproduced by
Julie Gayet
Coproduced by
Nadia Turincev
Coproduced by
Nichole Fu
Coproduced by
Étienne Comar
Associate produced by
Émile Abinal
Cinematography by
Claire Duguet
Cinematography by
Nicolas Guicheteau
Cinematography by
Valentin Vignet
Cinematography by
Romain Le Bonniec
Cinematography by
Raphael Minnesota
Cinematography by
Roberto De Angelis
Cinematography by
Julia Fabry
Edited by
Agnès Varda
Edited by
Maxime Pozzi-Garcia
Music by
Matthieu Chedid
Artistic director, collages
Guillaume Cagniard

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Agnès Varda

Writer, Director

Agnès Varda
Agnès Varda

The only female director of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda has been called both the movement’s mother and its grandmother. The fact that some have felt the need to assign her a specifically feminine role, and the confusion over how to characterize that role, speak to just how unique her place in this hallowed cinematic movement—defined by such decidedly masculine artists as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut—is. Varda not only made films during the nouvelle vague, she helped inspire it. Her self-funded debut, the fiction-documentary hybrid 1956’s La Pointe Courte is often considered the unofficial first New Wave film; when she made it, she had no professional cinema training (her early work included painting, sculpting, and photojournalism). Though not widely seen, the film got her commissions to make several documentaries in the late fifties. In 1962, she released the seminal nouvelle vague film Cléo from 5 to 7; a bold character study that avoids psychologizing, it announced her official arrival. Over the coming decades, Varda became a force in art cinema, conceiving many of her films as political and feminist statements, and using a radical objectivity to create her unforgettable characters. She describes her style as cinécriture (writing on film), and it can be seen in formally audacious fictions like Le bonheur and Vagabond as well as more ragged and revealing autobiographical documentaries like The Gleaners and I and The Beaches of Agnès.

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