Varda’s L.A. Vision

Director Agnes Varda, in town for her American Cinematheque retrospective this month, is glad to be back in the city she loves and in which she once lived for a time with her late husband, director Jacques Demy, and in which she has made five films.

“Maybe it’s because Los Angeles is related to happy years,” said Varda, who is sometimes described as the mother of France’s New Wave. “Jacques was invited here in 1967 by Columbia. He was a young, daring director, and he wanted a white convertible so badly. He got one, too, and without a bad conscience, because he had been so poor when he was a child.

“Jacques and I, we had an American dream--a ‘dreamy’ dream. Not of Hollywood as a place for success or that we’d have to make it here to be regarded as successful filmmakers. We loved it as a landscape! The palm is my favorite tree,” said Varda, looking out at a row of them around the pool at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, which she remarked would strike her “as very David Hockney” even if he hadn’t painted waves on the bottom of the pool.

Strong-minded, impatient yet vulnerable, warm and loyal, Varda is the passionate woman she has always been. Her striking dark eyes, framed by bangs, and her impudent nose remained unchanged even though she said with a harsh laugh, “I dye my hair and I am short and fat.”

She just turned 69, but remains full of energy, bristling with ideas, plans and concerns--even though, since Demy’s death from leukemia at 59 in 1990, Varda has often found herself looking backward. She has dedicated herself in recent years to the restoration and preservation of both her and Demy’s early films; writing her memoir, “Varda par Agnes,” which was published in France in 1994; and making three films celebrating Demy’s legacy.

Those films include “Jacquot de Nantes” (1991), a dramatized memoir of Demy’s happy childhood during which he discovered how to make his own home movies (it screens Saturday at 9:30 p.m.); “The ‘Young Girls’ Turn 25” (1993), a documentary about the city of Rochefort’s gala celebration on the 25th anniversary of the making of Demy’s “The Young Girls of Rochefort” (1967), a romantic musical fantasy that Demy and composer Michel Legrand made as a follow-up to their 1964 international success, “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”; and “The World of Jacques Demy” (1995), a documentary on Demy’s career that is to be included in a future American Cinematheque Demy retrospective.

(Preceding “Jacquot de Nantes” at 7:15 is “The Creatures” (1965), Varda’s most venturesome film, an amusingly surreal and highly complex allegory. It stars Michel Piccoli and Catherine Deneuve, and criticizes the deadly lunacy of allowing machines to rule our lives and endanger our existence by giving free rein to our animal instincts.)

Varda has also overseen ongoing international retrospectives and revivals of both her and her husband’s work and has found the time to make “101 Nights” (1995), a loving valentine to the centennial of cinema starring Piccoli and featuring an array of international stars. “101 Nights” opened the Varda retrospective, and she’s eager to find an American distributor for it.

“I love it when life brings me films to make,” said Varda. “It happened when I made ‘Daguerreotypes’ in 1974 and ’75. “I was pregnant [with daughter Rosalie, a costume designer], so I did something to stay home in the Rue Daguerre by filming my neighbors with their little shops. I didn’t want to use my neighbor’s electric power, so I decided I would not film any farther away than my power cords would stretch. The thing I loved the most is that I couldn’t get out much, but I could have my life.

“When Jacques passed away, I remembered all the footage I had shot of him making ‘The Young Girls of Rochefort,’ with Catherine Deneuve and her sister Francoise Dorleac. I was planning to use that footage in a documentary when Jacques got word that Francoise had been killed in a car accident--this was 1967. I just stopped everything, I left everything in the lab. When Rochefort invited me to attend the 25th anniversary of ‘Young Girls’ as his widow, I realized I wanted to film the festivities and use that old footage. It took four months for Pathe to find it.

“The ‘Young Girls’ Turn 25” is really about happiness. Jacques was so happy to be making that film. I found out that memory has to be a pleasurable experience. And I say, ‘I don’t make a career, I make films,’ it is my life. They make sense to me and some others.”

Varda was born May 30, 1928, in Brussels as one of five children of a designer of industrial machinery and his wife. (Varda’s mother died just one month after Demy’s death.) Her father, who was Greek, joined the French Foreign Legion during World War I, in which he was injured but from which he emerged a French citizen. His work took him back and forth between Belgium and France, where he and his family took refuge during World War II, settling in a houseboat in Varda’s mother’s hometown, Se^te--”an ugly Venice,” said Varda--a seaport in the South of France. She attended the Sorbonne, but more crucial was the Ecole du Louvre, where she learned to appreciate paintings and sculpture while studying to become a museum curator.

“That really changed my life, but I couldn’t see myself as a museum curator,” she said. “I wanted to do something with my hands.” This impulse led to night classes in photography, where she made her mark as the acclaimed photographer, between 1951 and 1961, of Jean Vilar’s Thea^tre National Populaire, shooting such celebrated actors of the stage and screen as Gerard Philippe. She also worked as a photojournalist. But Varda, who loves to talk, found that photography was too “silent.”

“I had scarcely seen 25 movies, but the structure of continuity in film fascinated me. Not the movement so much as the duration. In film you impose the duration, and that duration is your rapport with your audience.” In 1954 Varda returned to Se^te to make a low-budget feature, “La Pointe Courte,” which was inspired by the parallel stories in Faulkner’s “The Wild Palms.” It tells of a couple (Philippe Noiret, Sylvia Montfort) who’ve come to the fishing village of La Pointe Courte adjacent to Se^te to try to salvage their marriage at a time when the local fishermen are being threatened by an incursion of big business interests. The two stories counterpoint each other but do not intersect. Its visual boldness and use of close-up sound, and its overall striking effect placed it in jarring contrast to the “cinema of quality” that dominated the French motion picture industry of the time.

Embraced by the Paris intelligentsia, “La Pointe Courte” proved to be a precursor to the New Wave a few years later and established the careers of both Varda and Demy, who had met at a short film festival in Tours in 1958. Varda also has a son, Mathieu Demy, who has his mother’s eyes and his father’s handsome bone structure. He’s acted in several of his mother’s films, but she is not exactly surprised that he’s decided he wants to be a director like his parents.

As busy as she has been dealing with her and her husband’s legacy, she found herself recently caught up in an unexpected diversion.

“I got involved in decorating and landscaping a small hotel-restaurant in the South of France, east of Avignon in a place called Luberon. It has only 12 rooms, and I love to imagine what people feel when they go into these rooms. All of this was a way of trying to please people, of making people feel good. I felt like I was involved in the mise-en-scene of the landscape. I built something for other people, like making a film.”

Although Varda says she feels in an “in-between state, like in a decompression chamber after a deep dive,” she is ready to resume being a feature filmmaker. “I have to stop taking care of Jacques, now I have to start taking care of myself.”