Feeling Seen
AGNÉS VARDA has left us, improbably. I had good reason to think her energy and generosity would last forever. I first encountered Varda on the telephone in 2001. My written invitations for her to come to Madison for our retrospective of her work had gone unanswered, and so, perhaps lulled by her down-to-earth persona in The Gleaners and I (2000), I dialed the number of her production company, Ciné-Tamaris. She hung up on me, but not before barking, “Don’t you know how busy I am? Call me back in six months!” So I did, after which, miraculously, she spent a week in Madison the following year. Witty, sometimes irascible, Varda was marvelous with audiences and unusually generous with researchers and critics.
The polar opposite of the celebrity protected by the armor of publicists and agents, Varda traveled the elicited thousands of appreciative letters, Varda became curious about her fans and set out to meet them, eventually profiling their gleaning practices in . In Sweden for a retrospective of her work, she found herself being interviewed by a journalist who had lost all of her hair. Varda, intrigued, turned her camera on the woman—a fellow filmmaker, as it turned out—and profiled her in (2011). A sequence from (2008) meant to chronicle Varda’s return to her childhood home near Brussels became instead a portrait of the home’s current occupant, who detailed for Varda the finer points of his model train collection. Even in ostensibly autobiographical works, she couldn’t help telling other people’s stories.
