Orcas Island Film Festival Recap: “Visages Villages (Faces/Places)

— a review by Paula Treneer —

from the film “Visages Villages”

Released at Cannes last spring to international acclaim, “Visages Villages” by French director Agnes Varda is a glimpse of a celebrated female cineaste of the French New Wave plying her trade and characteristic humor in celebration of art and life. Made in collaboration with the French photographer/street artist J.R., the film follows this amusing artistic odd couple as they travel through rural France in his mobile photographic lab, creating large-format photographs of ordinary French people, and posting these gigantic images in all sorts of public settings, from medieval walls in bustling town squares to abandoned ghost villages.

Varda’s collaborator, the street artist J.R., is a celebrated Parisian photographer whose origins in the French banlieue (working class suburbs) inspired him to create art for people who never attend museum exhibits. His large-scale photographic art projects have been installed around the world, from the streets, rooftops and underground of Paris, to the Brazilian favelas. His 2009 “Women Are Heroes” exhibition was displayed on the bridges of the Ile-St.-Louis and the walls of the Seine, as part of his 28 Millimeter project (named after the wide-angle camera lens he uses to shoot). In his 2008 series, the eyes of women who lived in the favelas stared down into the city center of Rio de Janeiro from the walls above in a virtuosic display of ingenuity and vision.

The collaboration between Varda and J.R. is by turns sweetly sentimental and wistfully nostalgic, particularly the last vignette when Varda takes J.R. to visit Jean-Luc Godard, a close friend of her deceased husband Jaques Demy (“The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”). Godard is a no-show, provoking an unusual display of pique from the usually equanimous Varda. Tenderly, J.R. finally removes his sunglasses, an acerbic source of commentary for Varda throughout the film, who is reminded of Godard’s signature look, as depicted in the footage shown briefly from Varda’s tongue in cheek 1961 short film “Les fiancés du pont Mac Donald ou (Méfiez-vous des lunettes noires).”

Varda has a varied oeuvre, but her typical meditations on the theme of rural place and community are alluded to here through the stories told by their photographic subjects as they are interviewed in the film. Dock workers’ wives, chemical factory workers, goat farmers, and J.R.’s hundred year-old grandmother; all become part of the project as their large-scale photographs are pasted over all manner of surfaces.  Some of the more stunning visual images were created by the photographs of the wives of dock workers pasted on stacked containers, and Agnes Varda’s eyes pasted on successive rail cars.

“Visages Villages” is a more lighthearted film than Varda’s 1985 “Sans Toit ni Loi” (“The Vagabond), as well as “The Gleaners and I” (2000), but nonetheless equally moving. It was a delight to see, screened at the Orcas Island Film Festival in advance of its U.S. premier at the New York Film Festival.

Paula Treneer is senior strategist at Madrona Partners, and co-founder of Idun Partners, a financial education services provider. Paula relocated to Orcas Island from Paris in 2013-14.