In her book Varda by Agnès, the filmmaker talks of her work like a place to be visited, gone through, stopped at and wandered around in. This invitation for a walk in her company, this way and that, shows that Agnès Varda has for a long while considered her images and the words that accompany them as installations. And it is true that the one who announced the Nouvelle Vague like “the swallow heralds the summer”, the director of La Pointe Courte (The Short Point) (1954), Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cléo From 5 to 7) (1962), Sans toit ni loi (No Roof, no Law) (1985), Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (The Harvesters and the Harvester Woman) (2000) is more and more interested in exhibitions. A number of her films deal with the nature of art, the importance of images, on ways of seeing, showing and looking, notably those three brilliant films she grouped as a trilogy, Salut les Cubains (Hello Cubans), Ulysse (Ulysses), Ydessa et les Ours (Ydessa and the Bears). Ever since the 2003 Venice Biennial where she presented Patatutopia, Varda has installed and exhibited with the big names. Last year, the Cartier Foundation displayed her magnificent vision of things seen on the Isle of Noiremoutier, both melancholy and cheerful, in an exhibition entitled L'Île et Elle (The Isle and Her). In January 2007, a commission from the Ministry of Culture and Communication crowned this artistic and civic recognition with “A creation for the Panthéon” as a tribute to The Righteous of France. All this reminds us that Agnès Varda started out as a photographer, and in particular for the Avignon Festival, from 1948 to 1960, for which she was the official image maker at Jean Vilar's request. So, it is only natural to find two of her major installations this year as part of the Festival. It is as if Agnès Varda were presenting both her own return to her roots combined with the most daring work she has done to date on images.
“I have been part of, and experienced all the great moments of the Courtyard of the Popes' Palace from the second festival in 1948.” That is how Agnès Varda recalls her arrival in Avignon, when Jean Vilar suggested she photograph the new festival. She was twenty, starting out in photography and would stay until 1960. Dozens of her clichés remain legends of photography of both theatre and of the festival itself. The serious face of “king” Vilar, “prince” Gérard Philipp in the immaculate Homburg moonlight, Maria Casarès, Lady Macbeth in profile...
But for the exhibition created for the Avignon Festival at the Cloître Saint-Louis in 1991, Agnès Varda wanted to show these legendary images differently. Like fragments of her own personal memory that she magnifies till they become shards of everyone's memories. She breaks up known images into mosaics and reassembles them like a puzzle. Around the courtyard you find all the expected places and faces in this itinerary redrawn by the artist. But it is the way of looking at them that has changed: enlargements, decompositions, fragmentations, shifted frames, montages. It is as if the photographs were dreaming of the origins of the Avignon Festival, but in another way.
Distribution
conception et réalisation :Agnès Varda
photography by Agnès Varda
scénographe :Christophe Vallaux
coordinatrice: Rosalie Varda