VARDA BY AGNES
Subtitles: Sionann O'Neill
Subtitling: HIVENTY
Thank you for inviting me.
Seeing this marvellous opera house turned into a cinema
intimidates me.
There might be children of paradise up there.
Some of my films are known,
some well-known,
others not.
I'd like to tell you what led me
to do this work all these years.
Three words are important to me:
inspiration, creation and sharing.
Inspiration is why you make a film.
The motivations, ideas, circumstances
and happenstance
that ignite your desire to make a film.
Creation is how you make the film.
With what means, what structure?
Alone or not alone? In colour or not?
Creation is work.
The third word is sharing.
You don't make films to watch them alone.
You make films to show them.
You are the very proof of this sharing.
These three words guided me.
We need to know why we do this work.
I'll start with a short film,
one I often show in my talks.
Because...
a family member is in the film.
An older gentleman who will introduce me, as in the past.
By chance, I was in San Francisco
for a festival.
A friend said, "You may know this man,
a painter named Varda.
He lives on a boat in Sausalito."
So we went to see him. It was a Wednesday.
I instantly fell in love with him.
I absolutely had to film him.
In truth,
it wasn't so much about meeting him,
it was about knowing right away how to film him.
I imagined the editing as I filmed him.
I wanted to share the spontaneity,
joy and excitement of the encounter.
Now what happens? I say, "Film clip!"
Mr. Varda?
I Don't know.
Are you Eugene Varda's daughter?
Yes I am.
Cut!
So, you are my niece!
Looks like it
cut!
A perfect example of a miracle.
From my inspiration to the shoot, there was a day and a half.
Then I took my time editing.
For those of you who want to make films,
especially those starting out,
you need patience.
You have a project, but you need money, from your school or elsewhere.
So...
you need patience, but try to get around that obstacle.
Film quickly with the means at hand.
I show this film for its good humour,
and for the wonderful Yanco.
But my most well-known film is Cléofrom5to7.
Has anyone in the audience seen Cleo?
Nice!
A fair few, as they say down south.
Cléowas inspired
by two very strong impressions.
Back in the 60s, there were collective fears, as always.
The most common one was cancer.
People feared cancer.
Also, the producer told me,
"I'll make a film with you, as I did with Godard and Demy,
but it has to be cheap."
So how would we do it?
We could shoot in Paris. No travel expenses, no hotels.
The action could take place in one day, limiting sets and locations.
It occurred to me to shorten the timeframe further.
I'd film an hour and a half of her life. 90 minutes, like a film.
I actually follow Cléo
from 5 to 6:30 p.m.
illustrating time is difficult.
Time feels different if we're happy or if we're anxious,
if we're expecting someone or having fun.
I call that subjective time.
And then there's objective time.
Time we can't argue with. Mechanical time,
counted in hours, minutes or even seconds.
I wanted
to combine objective time, the clocks we see everywhere,
with subjective time,
the way Cléo feels during the film.
You're wrong. The card doesn't necessarily mean death.
The fortune teller says it means transformation, not death.
But Cléo sees a hanged man and clattering bones.
It gives her a fright.
Her fear and the threat of death,
consciously or subconsciously, stay with her.
Just like this beautiful woman
painted by Baldung Grien.
A skeleton whispers in her ear what she doesn't want to hear.
Or pulls her hair.
I had reproductions, postcards.
Tiny images to look at.
And a big mental image at the heart of my project.
The film is in two parts.
First 45 minutes, second 45.
Exactly in the middle, she sings her song.
And if you come too late
I will have been laid fo rest
Alone, ugly and pale
Without you
ls foo much.
I can't go on.
It's horrible!
- What's wrong? - She's tired.
And you know, the word despair is evil. Like the word rope.
Rhymes matter more than words.
It's a beautiful song.
You'll revolutionise the music business!
Really? What is a song anyway? How long does it last?
Another tantrum.
Tantrum, tantrum! That's all you ever say!
You make me this way!
Treating me like an idiot or a china doll!
Now 1] lead a revolution with grim words?
You call that song charming? My big hit?
It'll be a hit funeral!
You tire me, you exploit me! Go away!
No, I'll go! Angéle will make you drinks.
Session's over!
Leave the songs. I'll choose later.
I made two cuts for this presentation.
11 wear black.
In harmony with your songs.
She goes down.
There are ten steps.
We filmed all ten.
Then we filmed every step she takes to cross the courtyard.
We chose not to cheat with the distance or the geography.
The courtyard leads to Rue Huyghens.
That's where she walked.
It's the actual street that leads to Boulevard Raspail.
The sidewalk was as it was, with people watching her pass.
I wanted to go from the coquetry of the first part
to something more real.
Cléo and what happens around her.
People,
pigeons...
Then she notices
a store called "Good Health."
And she can no longer stand the hat.
That doll face, always the same. That ridiculous hat
She takes it off. She becomes a woman who sees.
She's no longer seen, as in the first part.
She sees.
I'd noticed a street performer.
I Asked him to come back. Look what she sees.
How a guy earns his living.
C'mere, froqqy. Time for a new aquarium.
Third frog!
You can't help but notice.
Even in fiction, I like to add documentary elements.
In this film, as we follow Cléo and her fear,
we see people in cafés,
in the streets.
I love documentaries.
I know great ones have been made in faraway places.
But big documentary journeys are too far from me.
I want to film close to me. What I know.
Daguerreotypes was made on my street, Rue Daguerre.
I chose to film my close neighbours and the merchants,
those who sold me bread, meat, hardware. The hairdresser...
They create a kind of village.
At the bakery, people wait in line.
As everywhere, they wait their turn.
We were there for the time it took
to buy or sell something.
Nurith Avivis...
a director of photography. A camerawoman.
She did the work.
We had sequence shots
where the camera lingered on people waiting.
Nothing happens,
yet something happens inside.
That's it.
Videos and commercials move very fast.
But when you're in the duration,
you're really in.
We got set up.
Nurith takes no space. Neither did I back then.
We got set up, hiding in a corner.
The sound engineer too.
The idea was to film people,
whether they realised it or not.
When you decide to look closely at something
that may be trite, it's no longer trite.
The very act of looking at it changes it.
Nothing is trite,
if you film people with empathy and love.
If you find them extraordinary, as I did.
We filmed that baker at work.
I loved how he scored the bread dough
with his razor blade.
I listened closely to what the merchants said.
They weren't very open.
They weren't very friendly to outsiders.
They represented the silent majority.
That's what I filmed.
It occurs to me,
in contrast to what I just said,
that I once filmed an enraged minority.
The Black Panthers.
They were a movement of Black Americans
who, in 1968,
created a political program, spoke out and protested
because some of their leaders had been arrested
and one was in prison, Huey Newton.
They held protest rallies.
Jacques Demy and I lived in Los Angeles then.
I took a plane to film the protests in Oakland,
near San Francisco.
I was a little lady with a 16mm camera. I said, "French television"
and they let me in while they were training.
- Who are you? - Black Panthers.
- Why are you here? - To free Huey.
- How? - Huey's teachings.
- What are they? - The guns.
This brother here, myself; all of us were born with this hair.
We wear it this way because its natural.
Black people now realise that black is beautiful.
The Black Panther movement didn't last very long.
But it was a Black revolt,
for their identity, and it was a feminist revolt.
Feminism was already going strong in the USA in the 1960s.
Obviously, I was a feminist.
I was, and I still am.
And I must say,
issues surrounding women's liberation,
specifically, the question of body politics,
really concerned me.
Back then, there were struggles
fought by both women and men
that led to contraceptive rights in 1972
and abortion rights in 1975.
It's old history now,
but I experienced it
and wanted to tell the story.
To do so,
I got the idea of two young women.
One already has children, the other is a natural-born rebel.
How pregnant are you?
2 months, more or less.
Don't cry, get an abortion.
How, where? Think its easy?
Well find a way.
You're still up?
Anaré, you promised me!
Why do you lie? What'd we do to you?
- I needed money. - As always.
Why didn't you ask?
It was for an abortion, you'd say no.
What?
My friend Suzanne needed money for an abortion.
Their friendship lasts.
10 years later, we see them again,
after they've both lived, loved and fought the feminist fight.
The feminist fight
was something I wanted
to put into song.
No papa no pope no king
No judge no doctor
No legislator
Gonna lay the law on my body
Biology isn't fate
Papa's laws are out or date
My body belongs to me
I'm the one who knows
Whether or not
I want to give birth
Whether to bring new life
To this earthly existence
Whether to be flat or round
The choice is mine
My body belongs to me
I really took it to heart.
For the music, I hired Francois Wertheimer
and a girl group called Orchidée.
We used texts by Engels and Marx.
A very interesting thing:
"Nowadays, in the family, the man is the bourgeois,
and the woman represents the proletariat."
It flows better in a song.
But it's worth saying.
Hear that, birdie?
Listen.
When men and women both work full time,
you can set to music the double shift women do.
Domestic Habits
Incredible friendships formed
in that collective struggle.
The women were often joyful.
We laughed a lot as we fought for women's rights.
The joy and good humour of the group come across in the film, I hope.
Now I'll make a jump.
Much later, I told the story of a girl in a rage.
Not in a group this time, alone.
An enraged loner.
A lot of guys were out on the road.
It was kind of in fashion.
And I'd noticed women were also doing it.
Backpacking.
I wanted to make a film about these lawless vagabonds.
I wanted to film freedom and filth.
Tell the story of a young woman on the road.
So I wrote the film Vagabond.
I asked Sandrine Bonnaire,
who'd been in Pialat's A Mos Amours
and was still only 17.
She was exactly who I needed.
- Is there a tobacco shop? - Not here.
She's described by the people she meets.
They speak of her quite badly.
Mona's anger is what keeps her alive.
But saying no to everyone leads her to her death.
The film's structure was precise.
I wanted the camera to walk the roads with her.
To do that,
I used tracking shots.
There are 13 in the film.
The shots move right to left, which is jarring,
because it's the opposite of how we read in the West.
Each tracking shot lasts one minute.
We accompany Mona and her backpack.
We're in rural farm landscapes, not particularly charming.
At the end of each tracking shot, the camera leaves Mona
to film a local element or object.
Each subsequent tracking shot comes about 10 minutes later
and starts with an object or element
reflecting what we've seen.
I enjoyed setting up an enigma for which only I knew the secret.
Actually, the entire film
is a portrait in the form
of a discontinuous tracking shot.
Ten minutes later in the film...
this was the next tracking shot.
To music by Joanna Bruzdowicz,
composed solely for the tracking shots.
A lovely surprise, Sandrine has arrived.
I've talked about structure.
Now I'd like to discuss what the role meant to you.
The first thing you told me about the role was,
"She's a girl who...
never says thank you, stinks, and tells everyone to fuck off."
We never discussed
where she came from or why she was on the road.
It was about how she lives.
How she finds food, where she sleeps, how she behaves.
We didn't analyse her.
We focused on what she did.
- Her actions. - And behaviour.
You practiced putting on your backpack.
Putting on your boots.
You sent me camping with Setina.
- You slept outside. - We did.
You wanted me to learn to make a fire and pitch a tent.
There's a scene where you repair your boots.
It was all concrete, physical things.
I remember pruning grapevines.
Pruning requires simple but precise gestures.
You accepted me saying, "You're Mona, figure it out."
Your own rebellion went into the character.
I just needed to be there.
And you were. Solid and tough.
I wasn't easy on you. I gave you a rough time.
Come on!
I remember at one point, I'd dug up a whole garden patch
and had blisters.
I said, "Real blisters, like you wanted!"
You said, "Good!"
That bugged me!
I should've licked your blisters in thanks!
The film is unusual,
because you're dead at the start.
Even though I was young, I imagined my own death.
Obviously.
And we made you to do it. Get in the bag like a corpse.
That really freaked me out.
Cinema can be very humbling.
You have a project, you write it, you make it,
with an actress like yourself...
But during the shoot,
things can feel quite harrowing.
After the shot of dead Mona, a beach...
Beaches are a place of inspiration.
A mental landscape.
You have the three elements.
Sky, sea and earth.
Here, the earth is sand and seaweed.
I remember the works of Bachelard,
a philosopher whose classes I attended.
Water and Dreams,
Air and Dreams,
Earth and Reveries of Repose.
Dreams, reveries,
dreams and repose. Everything I love.
But he also wrote Earthand Reveries of Will,
I'll continue my chat here.
And I'll invite birds and children.
It's charming to talk to birds.
But real or fake, they don't understand me.
We make films to share with audiences,
so I thought, "How awful it'd be if they didn't listen or watch."
A filmmaker's nightmare.
An empty cinema
Nightmare!
Some of my films did well in the cinema.
Others less so.
We'll jump around. I can't talk about all my films.
I can't follow the crim...
Not the criminology, the chronology!
We'll jump ahead to a summer film I made
in the 1960s
called Happiness.
I imagined Impressionist paintings, with their melancholy.
And yet they're happy scenes of daily life.
I listened to Mozart and pondered death.
I wrote and shot the film quickly.
Like the bright clarity of our too-short summers.
Go to sleep kids. Daddy's sleeping.
Be quiet.
I wanted to show happiness as it is traditionally described.
A woman and a man, beautiful children.
They love nature.
They're friendly, unpretentious.
A template for happiness.
And I wanted to set the story in lle-de-France.
In places that had inspired the Impressionists.
I shot in summertime,
in soft, delicate tones.
I accompanied the story with music by Mozart,
which seemed to express happiness
with a little dash of anguish.
Jean-Claude Drouot was a TV hero.
He was Thierry la Fronde.
I went to the woods to ask him to be in my film.
He was on horseback, in costume.
I said, "Excuse me, sorry to bother you.
Would you agree to make a film with your real wife and kids?"
His wife hesitated at first, but they did it.
It's no problem. Annie can come babysit at 8:30.
We can make the 9 o'clock show.
lad love that.
On the surface, it's a simple story of a happy family.
He's happy with his wife.
But then he meets a postal worker.
She looks like his wife.
He falls in love.
He thinks you can
add happiness to happiness.
The critics had a field day. Outrageous!
Does fidelity mean anything?
Can you film happiness? Do we have the right?
I had such fun choosing the colours.
I went all out on the blue,
the yellow, the red...
Here we have a predominantly red picnic.
I also thought,
instead of ending the scenes with the traditional fade to black,
it'd be nice to fade to colours.
So the scenes ended
in red, blue, purple, yellow.
I even made a flag,
with a dissolve in blue,
one in white, and one in red
to announce Bastille Day.
July 14th.
I used to describe the film
as a beautiful summer peach with a worm inside.
A tragedy.
He cannot bear the situation.
He can't connect to it.
So I used repetition.
I tried repetition.
I used repetition.
I'd like to discuss what a film is as a whole.
In literature, they use the word style.
In cinema, I use the word cinewriting.
It covers all the choices made throughout the making of a film.
What do you film? Fluid or abrupt shots?
Clear, isolated images or crowded spaces?
Pacing? Music?
It all takes shape in the editing room.
I sometimes add commentaries,
to stay in the film and be with the audience.
But in editing and mixing we finish the cinewriting.
As for how a film starts, life sometimes decides.
At a very sad time of my life, when Jacques Demy was ll,
he shared his memories, wrote them down.
Fond memories of his childhood.
He was raised in Nantes, in the garage where his father worked.
He was taking notes.
Every few days he showed them to me.
I said, "This would be a great film. Will you make it?"
He said, "You do it, I'm too tired."
So I wrote a script about Jacques Demy's childhood.
Set in the actual garage.
We kicked out the mechanics. They let us use the place.
The old gas pump was still there. It hadn't been removed.
It was a very particular experience.
I approached the film in three different ways.
Black-and-white footage,
1930s style,
tells the story of his childhood.
Then there were colour excerpts
from films Jacques Demy made later,
all inspired
by his childhood.
The engine knocks when it's cold, don't worry.
Thank you.
Is it ready to go?
Yes.
The engine knocks when it's cold, don't worry.
And then there was a third film within the film.
Jacques was still alive, but very ill.
I loved him and wanted to be as close as possible,
help him as much as I could.
In film terms, that meant extreme close-ups.
The whole film is a desire to stop time and deny death.
No.
I don't see it that way.
Not to stop time. To accompany time.
The film accompanies Jacques as he dies.
As he remembers his childhood.
The love of cinema starts early for some.
Little Jacquot invented cinema, I dare say.
Look.
Nice set up.
- If's fragile! - What is it?
Don't bump into the camera.
Look. To make the ballerina move,
I move her leg and take a shot
Move her leg, take a shot
Get it?
It creates a continuous movement. If you film my arm...
you get a continuous movement.
Now get going. I need quiet concentration.
No good. If's all out of focus.
No good at all.
Several years later, against his will,
Jacquot worked in his father's garage.
And this goes around the customer's neck?
Start over!
Where's your mind?
On Hollywood!
Some mechanic!
It's extraordinary. Years later,
after the success of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,
he was invited to work in Hollywood.
I went with him.
In Los Angeles I discovered, like everyone,
the stars of the stars
on Hollywood Boulevard.
And I met some of the idols and stars
of the new Hippie Generation.
They wanted to make it in Hollywood their way.
Three actors with big manes of hair: Lions.
A love triangle: Love.
Television and the news: Lies.
For the cast, I chose heroes of the hippie scene.
Rado and Ragni, who wrote and played in AHarr,
and Viva, Andy Warhol's muse.
I went to the Factory in New York to see Andy,
so he'd introduce us and convince her. She was tricky.
Then he said:
Another character in the film was the television set.
It was always there, embodying the spirit of the film:
sex and politics.
Here the silence was planned, but usually they talked a lot.
They improvised.
They changed the text from one take to another.
The scenes were impossible to edit.
So I shot each take of each scene with three 35mm sound cameras.
Sometimes they agreed to pose like models.
This is an exact copy of a drawing by Picasso
from a series he did in 1936.
This is another one.
I wanted to feature Shirley Clarke,
the New York filmmaker
who was, in a way, my double.
Another tableau,
this one inspired by a Magritte painting.
I think of it as an imaginary news report, a utopian fiction.
From my time in Hollywood.
A collage, made my way.
Ten years later, a collage of names on walls.
I was fascinated by what I saw.
Giant murals.
I began documenting them in photographs.
You rarely know who made them. They're unsigned. I asked neighbours.
Some fine arts graduates became muralists.
For example, Kent Twitchell.
It was a form of resistance against the art industry.
The idea is art should be free for everyone.
Beyond the river is Bast LA, with its Chicano Art.
I filmed large murals,
like those by Willie Herron.
But I also wanted to make cinema.
I often say Murals Muralsis a film about the extroverted Los Angeles.
People express themselves through walls, clothing and words.
But I also sense an introverted,
sad, desperate Los Angeles.
It's the story of Emilie, a French woman exiled in Los Angeles,
looking for a place to live with her son.
Sabine Mamou, who edited Murals Murals, played Emilie.
This is your home.
Mathieu Demy played her son.
You mean I'll be sleeping...
all alone?
You'll be fine, you'll see.
If ] don't like it whatll we do?
If he doesn't like it whatll I do?
If they don't like it, what do they do?
He or she, what do they do?
She's extremely lonely, she's going through a separation.
But she doesn't want to discuss it with her son.
You don't confide in children.
So I decided on a specific process for this film.
I'd use documentary images to speak for her.
Or she monologues over documentary images.
When you lose words like tureen, ladle, table, warmth, togetherness,
the only words left are soup,
Solitude, separation, absence.
I had accumulated images we wondered about.
We didn't always know what we were capturing.
Silence or speech, pain or peace.
Some sequences were mysteries to us.
For example, we were on the beach
filming Sabine and the boy.
Lying on the sand
was a woman with a bible and two men on either side of her.
The boy asks Sabine about it.
She has no answer. Neither did we.
We were open to filming things we didn't understand.
Because in cinema and elsewhere,
it's important to feel, to experience.
What're they doing? Is she dead?
No. I don't know.
Why didn't we stay to find out?
Nurith Aviv and I would go out evenings to capture images.
One image in particular struck me.
There was a woman doing her laundry in a laundromat.
We'd just parked the car. We filmed through the window.
That lone woman fiddled with her greasy hair for a long time.
An extraordinary moment of solitary sensuality.
The film is greatly enhanced by Georges Delerue's music.
He watched it a few times
and improvised a score that is captivating, frail and subdued.
Like a gentle ache.
Georges Delerue also composed, 23 years earlier,
the music for this short film, Diary of a Pregnant Woman.
Like Documenteur,
this film was tied to my personal life.
I often went to Rue Mouffetard.
It was almost like the Middle Ages.
There was a market. I love markets.
And there were poor people
living on the streets.
Old folks, cripples
and drunkards.
I was pregnant.
I didn't tell people, but I filmed a clear sign of pregnancy:
a big belly.
And the way certain basic, ancestral fears
could be portrayed.
I was utterly haunted by a fundamental contradiction.
You're full of hope,
you're offering a life to a new child,
who might be happy.
And yet, I saw a population
that was terribly,
terribly... unhappy.
They really inspired me to think.
They too had been newborns.
Maybe when they were wee babies, even if they were unwanted,
someone cuddled them, stroked their belly, even a bit.
Some of them
They were newborn babes
Someone, some other
some of them
Many of you want to make documentaries.
I think it's very important...
This isn't really advice,
but when you film something,
a place, a landscape,
a group of people,
you need a viewpoint. At least to start.
You film in relation to that viewpoint.
It's both a documentary and staged.
There are two types of documentaries.
Pure and raw, reality only.
Those documentaries can be extraordinary.
But I want mine to be a film too.
I think it's fun to prepare a film
with real reality, but also a twist.
I really love organising,
not the staging per se,
but the general outline of a documentary.
From the very start, I understood
that contemporary musicians were my allies.
I've mentioned Delerue.
There was also Pierre Barbaud, the composer for La Poinfe Courte,
my first film,
shot in 1954
in a neighbourhood of Séte.
I made that film with no experience,
no film schooling,
no prior work as an assistant.
The film came out of nowhere.
I had a particular structure in mind.
I wanted to combine two films with alternating chapters,
like a Faulkner book I admired, The Wild Palms.
I'd alternate fishermen sequences with couple sequences.
Two stories with nothing in common
except the location.
It's a confrontation
between the private and the social.
The labour representative
ls coming on the boat.
Don't talk about encounters.
It's a juxtaposition of two approaches to the world.
One very stylish,
with composition and dialogue.
I know your gestures.
Your habits have become mine.
No more surprises.
And one that looks more like Italian Neo-Realism.
Though I hadn't yet seen those films.
Alain Resnais, who edited the film, taught me a lot.
I did another thing that wasn't done.
Usually sound diminishes as people move away.
It gets quieter until you barely hear them.
I decreed that the sound would remain in the foreground.
So as they talk and walk away,
it feels like voiceover dialogue,
yet they're really talking.
It's synchronised.
But the sound stays up front.
I never used to have such thoughts. Did you?
I've always noticed others.
But I don't want to live anywhere but with you.
Let's leap from Séte to Sceaux.
In Sceaux Park, a project took shape with my friend Jane Birkin.
We were walking and suddenly she said, "It's terrible, I'm almost 40."
I said, "Don't be silly! It's a wonderful age.
Let's do your portrait."
That's how it began.
I suggested to this lively, vivacious woman,
that we do the opposite of those tributes to dead actresses
that compile excerpts from their films and interviews.
I said we'd create excerpts of films she'd never made
and do pretend interviews.
We reversed the golden rule about not breaking the fourth wall.
You must look into the camera to look at me.
I'm trying!
Its like I'm filming your self-portrait.
You won't always be alone in the mirror.
There will be the camera, which is a bit me.
And if's OK if] sometimes appear in the mirror or in the background.
We were in it together. The filmmaker and the filmed.
The theme is painter and model.
It's a surprise portrait of Jane in many roles,
including that of herself.
With my jeans, old sweaters, messy hair, pajamas...
She was a good sport.
She was funny,
strange,
magnificent,
poignant.
They can eat and drink a bit of my husband.
It was her first time in a Spanish costume.
She hated it.
This is also the first time I've dared show my writing.
Yes, you let me read it.
! liked it well use it
We ended up making a whole film to tell the story she wrote.
She's a woman like me. She is me.
She falls in love with a very young boy.
A love story with an unhappy ending.
It'd be nice to shoot the film as a family.
I get your art.
You want my son to play the boy.
Yes, of course.
This was a first.
We interrupted Jane B. to make Aung Fu Master.
Starring Jane as planned, and Mathieu as planned.
They played a love story
that was a bit different than Jane's, because now
the woman was in love with a boy
who was himself in love with a video game.
They throw high or low. You gotta duck or jump.
The game was called Kung Fu Master.
And the boy wanted to master it.
Knock out a big guy or wizard to go up.
You have to rescue Sylvia on the 5th floor.
We shot in summer.
I had Mathieu.
And Jane had her two girls.
We liked that.
When school started, we resumed Jane 5.
We played with cinema and painting.
Its hard to pinpoint when you slipped
from close-ups to the background,
lo the very back of the shot
Here she is as La Maja Vestida
and La Maja Desnuda.
And vexed
in the background of Titian's Venus.
May the plague take her! And old age!
May she die, may she rot!
Now we'll go from the History of Painting
to the History of Cinema.
Cinema's 100th birthday was celebrated very officially.
They asked me to make a film about the 100 years.
I imagined a 100-year-old man.
A man whose name would be
Simon Cinema. In French it sounds like "If my cinema."
"If my cinema isn't good, see another film."
So ll called him Simon Cinema.
Monsieur Cinema,
played by Michel Piccoli,
lived in a castle that was like a film museum.
Night is coming, and melancholy.
Come now. Who and what shall we talk about?
Renoir? The Popular Front?
I was thinking of the fellow with the big eyes.
Who? Buster Keaton?
No, not Keaton today.
Burivel. That eye he slashed in two.
Monsieur Cinema had visitors.
Hanna Schygulla and Jeanne Moreau!
I worked with experienced actors here.
They intimidate me.
For this film, I dared hire a number of stars.
B for Belmondo.
D for Depardieu.
D for Delon.
I hear Monsieur Cinema has taken ill.
And D for duo. Two famous actors.
Deneuve and De Niro.
A dream.
A dreamy couple, an idyllic cruise.
In reality, on the technical side,
the ocean was a pond.
And 40 technicians found a clever way
for us to do tracking shots with light stands,
filter screens, rails and pillars for spotlights.
It was very hot.
We'd bought sunshades and 20 rubber overalls.
The crew resembled slaves going down The Nile on a fool's arc.
De Niro flew in on the Concorde the day before.
He said he rose at 4 a.m. for 3 days,
to beat the jetlag in advance
and be in good shape for the shoot.
A one-day shoot.
He had to leave the next morning.
Getting up at 4 a.m.
was so professional. We were impressed.
He was willing to shoot in a boat, in a bowtie
and in French.
He learned his lines phonetically all morning.
It was fun rehearsing with him.
Honey, did you turn off the gas,
change the cat litter and put the mayo in the fridge?
Not bad!
I can brag
about getting Deneuve and De Niro in a boat and in a film.
I can brag about writing a scene where De Niro falls in the water.
But that was a stunt double.
The film took a dive too.
A box office disaster.
I Didn't make another fiction film in 35mm
or 16mm.
Through to the end of the century.
But I'd made a few films.
They are appreciated and loved around the world.
My films are covered in affection.
Freeze frame.
Let's talk photos,
with a return to the 1950s and picture cameras.
I was a photographer in my first life.
I'll be brief about it.
Some remember
my photographs of Gérard Philippe
and Jean Vilar
at the Avignon Festival
and the TNP. People still talk about them.
Back then, in 1950, I began photographing theatre.
To document elements of staging and performance,
and also, in particular, to create images to represent each play.
For example,
The Prince of Homburg.
Officer, dreamer.
Shot outside in bright sunlight.
In profile,
the star-crossed lovers of Macbeth,
Vilar and Casareés.
And Aing Ubu, on a jaunt in Paris.
"Blue corn! Ham of God! Head of Cow!"
Caravans as dressing rooms for Mother Courage.
And in a makeshift dressing room at the Papal Palace,
Vilar alone, after playing The Miser.
Salvador Dali in Cadaqués.
Brassai on Rue Fermat.
Eugene lonesco with his three-nosed fiancée.
Pierre Székely and his daughter.
Simon Hantai with his wife and son.
And Mario Prassinos.
Calder in the 14th arrondissement.
A few filmmakers: Visconti,
Fellini,
Demy.
Jacques Demy.
Portraits of famous actresses:
Anouk Aimee,
Catherine Deneuve
and Jeanne Moreau.
And the famous L/der Maximo, Fidel Castro,
with his wings of stone.
But also neighbours:
Mimi and her mother,
Boukkra the grocer.
And friends:
Igor, my brother Jean,
Linou
and Véronique.
Chance provided the staging
on Corbusier's terrace in Marseille.
These are people seen at random
and caught at the right time.
A Portuguese woman passing.
A salt maker, some salt
and a pious woman.
People outside a circus.
I liked to do composed photographs.
Groups too.
A family in the Ardennes.
School girls in Mukden.
China was so far away.
I felt emotions there.
With children.
A little girl with a flower.
The old woman in the back has mangled feet.
A little boy.
Workers, or prisoners, pass nearby.
And a moving landscape.
A petrified forest with two living beings:
a small horse and a man bearing water.
I'll sign off this prelude with some self-portraits.
In this one, I was 20.
How I loved mosaics!
In this one, I was 36.
Standing on the right of a huge painting by Gentile Bellini.
How I loved paintings!
And here I am at 80.
I experienced the passage from one century to another.
As the year 2000 approached, there were many rumours.
It'd be the end of the world.
A computer bug of epic proportions would blow everything up.
In reality, that New Year's Eve
was celebrated a thousand ways, from anxiety to exaltation.
But on the first morning of the 21st century, all was calm.
The new century brought change.
Something new for me as a filmmaker.
Small cameras. Digital cameras.
They gave me an opportunity
to work in a different way.
These new cameras are digital
and fantastic. They can be stroboscopic,
narcissistic,
even photorealistic.
I could do more personal, intimate work.
I could make documentaries freely.
I'd like to return to three words I mentioned in my first chat.
Words that guide me. Inspiration, creation, sharing.
I'd like to discuss inspiration again.
It's quite curious.
Sometimes it happens,
and it comes straight out of reality.
I was at a café on Blvd. Edgar Quinet.
The market was just finishing.
I saw vendors loading their crates,
baskets and cash boxes into their trucks.
City cleaners were waiting with their green plastic brooms.
And people began to come.
They bent down and picked up what they could find.
A phrase took root in my mind.
"They pick up and eat what we throw away."
The phrase felt like a subject in itself.
I absolutely had to make a documentary.
Gleaning may be extinct, but stooping has not vanished
from our sated society.
Urban and rural gleaners all stoop to pick up.
There's no shame, only worry and distress.
Those small cameras really played a role here.
They allowed me to approach people who'd fallen on hard times
and would've been uncomfortable with a cameraman,
a sound guy with a boom,
assistants in caps and sunglasses...
All the clichés of a film shoot.
It was just me and my little camera, like a picture camera.
I didn't frighten them.
I intimidated no one.
I never have.
It gave me a chance to meet people. I'll tell you about Alain.
I see a man with a large bag eating on the spot.
I'd see him now and then, always with his bag,
always eating.
The day he was eating parsley
I approached him.
Are you a big parsley eater?
Sometimes. If's good for you.
Full of vitamin C and E, beta carotene, zinc, magnesium.
It's excellent.
His answer amazed me.
Over the following weeks I filmed him often,
with or without sound,
and he talked to me in snatches.
I eat a lot of fruit. I love apples. They're easy.
I find all the apples I want
How many do you eat a day?
6or/.
ls if your staple diet?
I also eat bread.
I talked to him a number of times.
I learned how he went from studying biology
to living in this difficult, humble situation.
I was also keen to explore agricultural gleaning.
Gleaning in the fields after the harvest.
We had to shoot quickly.
It was potato season.
Seasons don't wait on cinema's unpredictable schedules.
So I contacted a potato cooperative.
I saw the gleaners and went to the cooperative.
In supermarkets, firm ones are sold
in containers of 2.5 or 5 kilos.
They have to be a specific calibre.
For the stores, we sell potatoes
ranging in size from 45 to 75 millimetres.
All the rest are automatically discarded.
We reject outsized ones, green ones,
sf ones and cut
or damaged ones.
The non-standard potatoes are left in the fields.
Off 1 go with my 30 kilos.
There are several tonnes left
People could take some, if they knew about it
There you go.
There's someone who must have been tipped off.
Among the rejects, we find huge ones.
And heart-shaped ones.
The heart I want the heart!
What a surprise!
I Was happy.
I filmed them up close.
And brought some home.
Even with a documentary on a specific subject,
you are guided by what you film.
Hearts speak of tenderness, love.
It was powerful.
We couldn't help but think about it.
It inspired us to approach the gleaners with affection.
And those heart-shaped potatoes inspired me.
I let them age,
sprout
and shrivel up.
Despite it all,
they found new life as sprouts
and roots.
That's when Hans Ulrich Obrist came into my life.
He had a section in the 2003 Venice Biennial.
He created a group
called Utopia Station.
Everyone did a poster and an installation.
I had a potato costume made for me
to promote my installation Patatutopia.
There were 700 kilos of potatoes on the floor.
It was the first time I exposed on three screens.
I Loved it.
In the centre, I put breathing, heart-shaped spuds.
And on either side, I put roots
and sprouts.
This work of rot marked my entry
into the group of artists known as visual artists.
The French call artists plasticiens. We don't make plastic!
I prefer the English term: visual artist.
I really enjoyed proposing
a more complex way of seeing.
It was also a nod to 15th and 16th century triptychs,
which I love.
Some of them evoke special emotions.
I wanted to do something along the lines of those triptychs of interior scenes.
So I made 7he Trptych of Noirmoutier. Very simple. In a kitchen.
The man drinks his beer,
while his elderly mother untangles a string
and his wife peels potatoes.
I've always had questions like:
What happens before and after a snapshot?
Orin a film: What happens when they exit the frame?
Here, I used side panels
to show what's off-screen.
I proposed answers to our desire to enlarge the frame.
Visitors choose to see, or not, what lies beyond the walls.
Many visitors came, responded and reacted.
MoMA in New York acquired one of the 3 copies.
And since then, Hervé Chandes,
the inventive Director of this place,
the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art,
purchased the second copy of the triptych.
The time has come to ask him to join our chat.
Good evening.
Good evening Agnes, everyone.
We met when you invited me.
I'd seen the expo in Venice.
Then one day I called you, in 2005.
The expo at Martine Aboucaya's gallery came soon after.
We went to it together.
That's where I discovered The Triptych of Noirmoutier
and The Widows of Noirmoutier.
So you invited me and offered me that incredible space.
I was so excited to have so much space.
All my ideas and propositions were based
on the lle of Noirmoutier, where I'd lived with Jacques Demy.
I made up a title with two meanings,
L7e et Elle.
That was in 2006.
Before they built the bridge,
you could only get to the island
by the Gois highway at low tide.
Signs indicated the exact times of the tides
and access to the island.
Visitors had to go through a filter.
We built a barrier.
They had to wait for low tide to go in.
A clever idea.
On a factory curtain of heavy plastic slats,
you watched the tide go down.
Then the barrier lifted.
You entered the island
and my world.
The big postcard.
The portrait shack.
Women.
Men.
I took advantage of the dimensions and light
in that big space designed by Jean Nouvel
to make my first cinema shack.
Made with the footage of a film.
On a metal structure by Christophe Vallaux,
we mounted the 3,500 metres of a standard copy in 9 reels.
We even added a couple reels to finish the roof.
For visitors,
the film's good and beautiful actors
Catherine Deneuve and Michel Piccoli,
Were now up close.
The close-ups
and the light passing through the film
create a new form of cinema.
Let's rewind a bit.
We filmmakers used to work with 35mm film.
We handled it during editing, assembled it.
We transported reels in canisters.
And it all ended up
in cinema projection booths.
Film projection has disappeared
in favour of digital files.
We found ourselves with hundreds of reels
stagnating on shelves,
in basements, projection booths
and stockrooms.
We used the reels of my film Happiness
to build, in 2018,
my third cinema shack in the Galerie Obadia.
For those who know the film,
this is a reference to the opening credits.
Jean-Claude Drouot,
his wife and his children,
the film's characters,
arrive blurry in the background.
In the foreground is a field of sunflowers.
I made light boxes
for close-ups of the film strips,
with their projector perforations and optical soundtrack.
So, this is the archway.
The archway of canisters.
The metal canisters that contain films.
We have the contents and the containers.
The canisters are empty?
Yes. Their contents
were used to make the shack.
You're recycling.
Always.
Ever since The Gleaners, whose theme
was suggested by the gleaners themselves,
I've been interested in it.
And I've learned that recycling brings joy.
We feel things aren't lost.
By taking these unusable canisters
and that unusable film
and recycling them artistically, so to speak,
we give them new life.
It's not wasted. It comes back.
Nothing is lost. Everything transforms.
It transforms through creation and imagination.
On the same floor,
I did an installation all in plastic.
Your work is fairly serious, but this is funny.
Blowup mattresses, swim rings... It's childhood, summertime.
Today we know plastic is a scourge on the planet.
And yet, how I loved that colourful stuff,
so cheap and so funny.
A 3-euro pair of thongs
is 2 triumph of consumer society!
I wanted to celebrate it.
70 me, colour dances.
It dances in my head. It's summer.
Two things motivated me to do this.
A desire to throw myself info colour.
And the sound of it inspired me foo.
Ping Pong, Thongs and Camping.
Bernard Lubat improvised music on a pulsating table.
A ping pong concerto.
From the carefree world of childhood, we went to a moving, solemn work:
The Widows of Noirmoutier.
There are many on the island.
I went there often.
I'm a widow too.
I felt close to them.
I began by asking if they'd mind if I filmed them.
One-on-one. I was usually alone.
And they trusted me, because...
they felt they could share their distress with me.
I arranged the space in a particular way,
creating a polyptych screen.
Like the one by Jan van Kessel of the four continents.
There was a central film, shot by Eric Gauthier in 35mm.
It showed a table on a beach,
and widows walking around it.
That image was surrounded by 14 small video screens.
There were 14 chairs in the room.
Each chair had headphones,
to listen to one of the widows.
Some people say they speak to their dead.
I don't do that
As I tell my kids, Dad left 13 years ago but I can tell you...
it still feels like yesterday.
Especially at night.
During the day, things keep you occupied.
But at night you're all alone.
You think twice as much.
What I miss is touching him...
The house is still filled with his presence.
His smell, his...
Two days ago we ate green beans he bought at the market.
It's still so new.
That project really interested me.
I was used to one screen,
where everyone watches the same thing.
I wanted to modify the audience's experience.
There, you had just 14 people listening to one widow each.
But they were together in the room.
It made the experience both intimate and collective.
Having each widow speak to one person
meant that when the installation travelled,
we obviously couldn't subtitle it.
We'd lose the confidentiality.
So we dubbed it.
We dubbed the widows
in Swedish,
in English of course,
in Spanish,
and even in Chinese.
We loved each other so much...
It was so amazing for me
to see the Noirmoutier widows' words
finding listeners so far from home.
It's striking to see how something so local,
like these stories from Noirmoutier,
can be so universal.
In China, Argentina or elsewhere.
It gave me great confidence in art in the grand sense.
Because art
moves across cultures,
countries, nationalities, religions
and ages.
Speaking of ages, let's talk mine.
I just passed 90 and I don't care.
But 10 years ago,
when I was about to turn 80, I panicked.
The number 80
felt like the front of a train barreling toward me.
I had to finish something by the time I was 80.
So I plunged into a film project.
I went into it feeling I had to get it done quick.
It would be a self-portrait, a story of my journey.
I called it 7he Beaches of Agnes
because I've always lived near beaches.
I grew up in Belgium near the northern beaches.
After the bombings and the fall of France
we fled to Séte on the Mediterranean.
Jacques introduced me to the Atlantic.
In Los Angeles, we discovered the Pacific.
We felt we'd seen all the seas.
Jacques and I lived for a long time
on Rue Daguerre.
So to justify the title of the film, we made a beach outside my house
and office.
Ciné Tamaris.
You want Cecilia Rose? One moment
They want to rent Donkey Skin.
11 pass you Agnes.
Me first!
Please hold, I'l get back to you.
I'm out of tea!
Got the estimate?
Not yet. Not yet!
Beachfront houses are nice.
Our neighbours were amused and a bit alarmed.
The street was blocked for 2 days.
We had a permit.
For a private collection.
See Stéphanie.
Bank Neuflize OBC?
We need a loan without interest
lo finish this film comfortably. Please!
A loan without interest. Money was our eternal problem.
You must spend, but you must also collect.
If not money, then trophies.
In a closet or on the sand,
Demy's and mine stick together.
A Golden Palm from Cannes. A Golden Lion from Venice.
And since...
Vanitas, vanitatis...
I play the role of a little old lady,
pleasantly plump and talkative,
telling her life story.
And yet others interest me more. I prefer filming them.
Others intrigue me, motivate me,
arouse my curiosity,
disconcert me, fascinate me.
In telling my story, I thought:
If we opened people, we'd find landscapes.
If we opened me, we'd find beaches.
Good. Turn it all the way around.
Painters use mirrors as tools
in making self-portraits.
But actually,
I presented, in my mirror,
people who worked with and accompanied me.
It was a way to say
the film was about others and me.
Or me and others.
And I thought
of all the times I marched with others, for various causes.
I wanted to march in homage to a drawing by Sempé.
I hurt everywhere
We filmed the rally,
and me alone on the sidewalk
with a sign reading, "I hurt everywhere."
I can march again if you like, it's still true.
In any case, I tried,
with this film,
not only to tell my story,
but also to bring to life memories attached to my films.
To capture certain moments in the present.
For example,
I wanted to visit my childhood home in Brussels, Rue de I'Aurore.
I went to film it,
but I met a couple there who collected those little miniature trains.
Their collection was so extraordinary and they were so enthusiastic
that I made a documentary about them.
It was more entertaining than my old curtains.
So I've been right
in choosing others over myself.
This is a brass piece.
It's worth 80,000 Belgian francs in Switzerland.
Only 150 of them were made.
We call ourselves "insane for trains.”
The real term for train lovers, toy trains or real trains,
ls "trainopatl. ”
Trainopath!
And since it was unusual,
and I like making documentaries,
I jumped on the chance
offered to me by chance.
The "childhood home" part was a flop.
Then I returned to the Pointe Courte where I shot my first film.
Where I learned to choose places and faces
and work with non-professionals.
As I walked around,
I wanted to create a situation linked to a memory from the film.
Create an emotion in the present.
I found some 16mm footage I'd shot as a rough draft of the film.
I'd asked my friend Suzou
and her husband Pierrot
to pretend to be the couple
in the film.
Before the final cut Pierrot died of cancer.
Suzou raised their two sons.
Blaise
and Vincent
I invited them
lo share in a ceremony with a cart from the film.
A way to show them the fest footage they'd never seen.
They'd seen their father in photos, but never in motion.
We walked through the night with our beloved friend.
Hundreds of anonymous people, gone and forgotten,
inspired this Boltanski installation that I filmed.
It was called Personnes.
Hundreds of tin boxes
as manifestations of his project.
Each number evokes a person, and each tin is different
Its as though each box has someone inside, someones heart
or someone's Spirit.
Behind the wall of tins,
like a monument to the dead,
I filmed this gigantic installation.
On the floor were thousands of clothes.
And a pyramid of old clothes.
The artist gave them a meaning.
There's this constant movement
The claw takes and releases.
It grabs at random.
A bit like the hand of God.
It's neither good nor evil.
It just does its job. Taking and releasing.
It's part of a series I made around the world.
I filmed people and places.
And in France, artists.
Artists and filmmakers whose work I love open my mind.
They give me pleasure and energy.
And a desire to invent installations
or methods for each subject, each project.
Here, on the 2nd floor of a condemned building in Nantes,
I wanted to show
what life is like for squatters who have nothing
and are evicted unceremoniously.
I posted information on a wall.
In an abandoned room, I installed three essential items.
A mattress, because they seek a place to sleep.
A woodstove, because they're cold.
And a shopping cart with a microwave, because they're hungry.
The idea of a bed is important.
A bed is important.
Having a roof over your head.
Someone left mattresses outside.
We picked them up and brought them home.
How many people live here?
About 6.
Yeah, 6 or 5.
You can prepare all you like,
but when winter comes, at some point, it'll be cold.
This year, winter was so hard.
I Have a bad window, its alreaay broken.
Air gets in and it's very humid.
People can end up on the streets.
One day they might wake up lo the police bursting in.
It was 7 in the morning.
They knocked on many doors.
We didn't wake up fast enough to open the door.
They broke it down.
It was so violent. There were 40 of them.
Over 40 police officers.
We were surrounded, people panicked.
It was so sudden.
We didn't even have 10 minutes.
Our stuff is still in there.
Can you get it?
No, they walled it off.
The opposite of a wall is a beach.
But it can become a wall, as in this installation,
where I evoked the seaside in three ways.
A giant photo.
The seafoam on the wave is still.
Then the still image becomes a moving image.
The wave breaking on the sand.
And then sand.
A bit of tangible reality.
As in Patatutopia,
I like to bring together reality and its representation.
That's a general goal,
but I also juxtapose moving images and still images
in video...
and in photography.
The middle image is an old photograph.
A silver print from the 1950s.
On either side,
I took digital photographs in colour
of moving doves.
The metal frames resemble frames I saw in Mexico.
And he's Miguel Barceld.
Another triptych.
The photo of Alice hangs on the wall.
Next to it, we project a double video.
I was fascinated by how still the cows were.
Filming them for a moment,
we captured a fleeting instant between stillness and movement.
One flicks her ear, then starts to move.
A desire for movement linked to immobility.
For a family cat,
Zgougou,
I made a tomb.
The animation was done the old way, to music by Steve Reich,
We filmed the finished installation with shells and flowers.
Then we filmed image by image,
removing one element at a time.
Here the sequence plays backwards.
You watched me film it, Hervé. You brought your daughter.
Yes, she went up in the crane.
We put a big flower in the tree.
We needed a marker.
And I knew why.
I asked you: Will the Foundation pay for a helicopter?
Of course we would!
So we filmed from the helicopter,
using the flower as our guide,
a sequence to show that the tomb is near the sea.
And most of all, this kitty who was important to us
took on another dimension with the tomb.
But seen from further way, she was like any human.
Miniscule in the universe.
You liked Zgougou's tomb. You bought it.
I love it. I snapped it up.
But that's not all.
As always, I called you. "Agnes, why don't we...
install the cat in the Foundation gardens?"
- And? - He ordered a shack from me.
It's out there in the garden.
Just outside.
A little soundproofed utility room
where we can play a video.
The video is on a loop.
Visitors to the Foundation can drop in anytime.
They can say hi to Zgougou.
There's a pile of dirt in the shack.
- Yes. - Is there really a cat under it?
Good question.
In truth, the real cat Zgougou isn't here.
She's under a similar pile of dirt
on the island of Noirmoultier.
I haven't seen many cemeteries.
I know they're pretty sad.
But this one is more...
Even though it's a tomb
and we should be sad,
it's more...
more of a happy place, with fun colours.
I came back, because it's better
to watch the film alone.
You feel things better, in the film.
Me too, when I'm alone by the sea,
I feel things better.
Things are double.
Even as I enjoy the gentle seascape,
I know the world is filled with war, violence,
suffering and wandering.
Images of migrants
struggling and drowning.
Then this terrible image,
seen throughout the world.
We think about it, and then we forget.
That's how we live.
Occasionally I got to work on the inside of history.
I want to evoke Les Justes tonight.
I lived through the war, I remember it.
But I had no traumatic experiences.
President Chirac wanted to pay tribute
to Les Justes de France at the Pantheon.
I was asked to create a short work for the ceremony.
A ceremony, a choir
and my enormous installation.
Hundreds of portraits on the floor
of those who took risks to save Jews.
They were named Les Justes, the righteous.
I displayed photographs of them like open books.
Their names are on them.
I added recent, unidentified portraits
representing anonymous or unknown Justes.
To evoke Jews and Justes in their time,
I screened 2 films simultaneously
on 4 screens under the dome.
A black-and-white film
shows at a distance Jews being arrested.
On another screen, detail shots in colour enhance reality.
You looked from one screen to the other to follow the action.
Everyone recreated, for real or mentally,
what I'll show you
in this excerpt fusing images from both screens.
At the end of each sequence,
I showed photos of the Justes who inspired the scene
and photos of those who played the scene.
They weren't real actors,
but they were real people.
That's what I've always called
the people I film in the streets or fields.
He was a baker in my native country.
And then, well... l waited every Wednesday
when he brought his bread, fo see him.
Then, six months later, we got married.
Real people are at the heart of my work.
I have that in common with JR,
the urban photographer
who has approached thousands of real people.
We wanted to make a film of our encounters with people.
This time, in the French countryside.
We headed out in his magic truck,
with the goal of listening to people
and photographing them in the truck.
People go into the back, like in a photo booth.
The photo comes out 5 seconds later,
in large format.
The plan was to show them off.
To post them as a counterpoint to models and celebrities
selling cosmetics, cars and coffee.
We hired her as a waitress back in...
late May, early summer.
Now she's Bonnieux's most famous face.
What do you think of your mum up there?
- She's super pretty. - Indeed. I agree.
Press the button.
Show us your selfe.
Wow, nice!
You're good.
I'm no expert though.
Tickle tickle!
Our social and sociological experiment was full of surprises.
In one village, a man said he was the bell-ringer
and took us to his bell tower.
And there was a woman who made goat cheese.
She was furious, because other cheesemakers
were burning goats' horns off.
We saw it for ourselves.
We met Francoise.
You have one of the only herds
where the goats have horns.
To my mind, if a goat has horns, she keeps them.
I'm not going to remove them.
That just seems...
I can find no logical explanation,
unless you see them as a product
required to attain a certain rate of return,
So you eliminate anything that might make them less profitable
and cut off their horns.
Bum them off
But if you respect the animals,
you leave them intact
If they have horns, they keep them.
Sure, they fight.
Human beings fight foo.
I Don't know about it
until you told me just now.
This horn thing.
For this project, we didn't ask people
to answer our questions,
but rather to think, and to invent their own responses
to the situations.
I say put balls on the tips,
like with bulls. Rubber balls.
Could be funny. Or clown noses.
Rubber ones.
You could use different colours
to tell them apart. Purple, mulficolour, zebra.
Great idea, I love it! Very imaginative.
We're glad we met you.
I enjoyed meeting you, too.
Our work together
made our friendship grow,
like a plant.
Like a fish in water.
He was interested in me,
and he was interested in my ageing.
I have an eye disease.
No fun, considering my profession.
I need shots, check-ups
and exams.
What kind of exams?
Looking at letters.
ls this right, Agnes?
Yes, the bottom is blurry, but...
The letters need to move a little.
Move how?
- Up and down a little. - Got it
- Go tell them. - Right away.
Move up and down a little!
Now I'm happy. That's what I see.
It was important to me
that we find a way to bring beauty to my deteriorating eyesight.
And that we enjoy ourselves on that shoot
full of surprises and emotion.
Its surprising.
- Art should surprise us, right? - True.
Have a nice day.
Today's my last day. I'm taking early retirement.
- Today? - Today.
- If's your last day? - Yes it is.
I feel like I've reached the edge of a cliff,
and tonight I'm leaping info the unknown.
1 discover lots of things.
And we discovered that fate was with us.
Once in Normandy, fate struck three times.
JR wanted to paste on a German bunker
that had fallen off a cliff.
I said, "We can pick any bunker."
But when he said it was at St-Aubin-sur-Mer,
I pricked up my ears.
I'd been there in 1954 with friends
and taken photos on that beach.
A photo named Ulysse that inspired a film.
I was with my friend Guy Bourdin, a young photographer.
He became very famous, but died young.
I did portraits of him.
He posed sweetly, dreaming.
I showed JR my photos of Guy Bourdin,
and we decided to paste one on the bunker.
It was a difficult and dangerous shoot,
because the low tide didn't last long.
I could imagine nothing better for Guy.
Here he is, like a child in his cradle.
Resting in peace.
The next morning, we went to see.
The tide had washed the image away.
Ephemeral images are my stock-in-trade.
But the sea worked fast
The sea has the last word.
And the wind, and the sand.
At one point,
JR and I imagined ending the film this way.
Disappearing in a sandstorm.
I Think this is how I'll end this chat.
Disappearing in the blur.
Leaving you.