6 Agnès Varda and Alain Resnais
In 2001, after the release of her film ‘Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse’ (The Gleaners and I) Agnès Varda was invited to the Tate Modern in London to talk about her career.
In describing her entry into cinema she emphasised that she had no training or background in the medium and drew on other forms for her inspiration and approach: She emphasised that: ‘Literature – Joyce, Faulkner, Dos Passos – showed that linear narrative was not the only way’ and therefore her films from the beginning have not embraced linear narrative. ‘Not A to B to C even if “the guilty one” is identified at the end’.
She said that ‘A film should offer something to everyone – images, sounds, emotions, maybe a story, but above all the chance to feel something’ and that she wishes ‘to project real things but not to make realistic films’.
Even the making of films should be non-linear: ‘Write–shoot–edit–shoot–edit–write: an integral process’. To begin a film neither script nor even idea is necessary. You can ‘start with an image’ which itself can be surreal for instance ‘If my aunt had wheels she would be a beautiful bus’.
She believes in ‘the accidents or chances of cinema’ and ‘narrative by association – both instantaneously and predetermined’.
By returning to film the people who are her subjects in ‘The Gleaners and I’, two years after the original shoot, Varda added another dimension to this non-linear and reflexive cinema. The subjects are part of the dialogue with the filmmaker and her audience. In all this her editing is informed by a different consciousness of the why of filmmaking. To her ‘The audiences are witnesses’.
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In 1954 Agnès Varda made her debut film, ‘La Pointe Courte’. She knew virtually nothing about cinema or filmmakers. Literature and painting were her passions. Her ignorance of filmmaking included the editing process. This is how she describes what happened after the film was shot.
RESNAIS MONTEUR
Alain Resnais editing (Courtesy of BFI)
Back in Paris, I needed to find an editor who was willing to work without wages, as part of the co-operative, like the other technicians. People mentioned Resnais of whom I knew nothing. I write to him. He replies requesting my scenario. I send it to him.
His next letter was discouraging: ‘Your research is too similar to mine … I am sorry’. I ring and insist. He agrees to look at the rushes. We meet at the Éclair Laboratory in Epinay.
There are ten hours of silent images. We are planning to show him only four. He sits in the middle of the room towards the front and me four rows behind him. We don’t exchange a word whilst the film passes in silence, although I could have spoken the dialogue to him out loud. After two hours he stands up and says: ‘I have seen enough, I don’t believe I could work on that film’.
He is smiling but distant. I am demoralised and ask him what I should do. He says: ‘In any case to edit a film you need to number the material, one number each foot. If you wish I will lend you a rewind with a crank, a rewind without, a piece of film marked up for the length of a foot, and a small synchro’. I had the distinct impression he had spoken Javanese!1
He brings everything to the rue Daguerre.2 I screw the rewinds on a table and start numbering the film outside of the perforations with white ink and a tiny nib. I turn once, tick, then write down the numbers: one for the shot, one for the take (1st time, 2nd time, etc.). I was on a treadmill.
After ten days of working with almost no break, I ring Resnais: ‘I have finished what you asked me to do’. ‘You have numbered 10,000 metres in ten days! You are mad! Okay, I will come and do your editing but on my conditions. I agree to the co-operative salary, but I want my lunch paid for each day. Also I stop at 6 p.m.’
In short, working for nothing but no overtime!
I hired a CTM editing machine and fixed up the rest of the installation. Resnais was living in the 14th arrondissement like me. He came on his bike with clips on his trousers. He was punctual.
I will never forget his generosity, the way he worked for months on this editing without any wages, nor the lesson I retained from it. Noticing that ‘La Pointe Courte’ was shot at a slow pace without safety shots (no cutaways, no alternative angles, no safety closeups), he was saying that we needed to keep the rigidity of the film, its slowness and its bias without concession.
But he also made remarks like:
This shot reminds me of Visconti’s ‘La Terra Trema’.3
‘Who is Visconti?’ I would ask.
‘There is in Antonioni’s “II Grido”4 the same taste for walls’
Resnais did not try to use his talent as an editor to transform the film, re-arrange or adapt it to a simpler form, more lively or rapid. He was looking only for the right rhythm of this film.
I also remember the dazzling laugh of Anne Sarraulte, Resnais’ trainee assistant, the wrinkling of her eyes and her cascading giggles.
The ‘Estro Armonico’ records which I had listened to when writing the film also influenced the rhythm of the editing. When Resnais was riding home on his bike, I listened to Brassens, Piaf, Washboard Sam and Greco when she was singing Queneau:
‘If you think little girl, little girl, that it will, that it will, that it
Will last forever
You got it wrong little girl’.
FROM INNOCENCE TO RULES OF THE GAME
Resnais talked to me about Renoir, Murnau, Mankiewicz, all strangers to me. He led me to discover that a Cinémathèque existed in Paris, Avenue Messine, advising me to start with ‘Vampyr’ of Dreyer.5 He came as well on his own. We talked on the pavement afterwards. He led me to know the names of the great filmmakers, if not their films. Apart from my evolution from rough cineaste to debutante, it was through him that I discovered an exotic Paris, its Chinese restaurants, its Jewish district, the green path where the circular train used to run, and the mound of the Buttes Chaumont.
He astonished me one day that he knew the number of spectators for a film. He told me how one could read every morning – as for the stock exchange – the number of entries in the cinemas, by film, by day, by week, etc. There I was thinking that a film was like a painting, viewed by a few and going from gallery to gallery, and I discovered the commercial controls of the industry, certificates, the committee of censorship, the agreement files. How funny life was, to be taught all this by Renais, the cineaste of ‘L’Année Derniére à Marienbad and of ‘La Chante du Styrène’,6 always searching for an inventive cinema, sincere and structured. Nowadays beginners, both talented and untalented only know Cine-Chiffres, the CNC,7 the Box Office and Audimat!
From:
‘Varda par Agnès’, Cahiers du Cinéma et Ciné Tamaris, 1994. © les cahiers du cinéma, 1996.
Notes
1. Javanese – Resnais was describing the process which is used to identify each foot of the film rushes and to keep it in sync during the editing process. In France this was done by hand at that time – a painstaking and laborious job.
2. rue Daguerre – Where Varda had her home. She made a film about the shopkeepers on her street ‘Daguerrotypes’ in 1978.
3. La Terra Trema – Luchino Visconti, 1948.
4. II Grido – Michelangelo Antonioni, 1957.
5. Vampyr – Carl Theodore Dreyer, 1932. The Cinémathèque run by Henri Langlois was where whole generations, especially that of the ‘New Wave’, discovered world cinema.
6. ‘L’Année Derniére à Marienbad, 1961, and La Chante du Styrène, 1958 – both Alain Resnais.
7. CNC – Centre National (de la cinématographie) – The public body in France charged with supporting and regulating the Industry. Despite much criticism from filmmakers it has been a major reason that cinema has maintained its strong cultural and economic base in France.