Agnès Varda’s Storyboard of French Village Life

The photos also offer vivid portraits of residents of the village (including some who appear in the film) and a documentary illustration of the joust, the grand public spectacle that takes place on Sundays. With pageantry complete with uniforms, officials, and teeming audiences, fishermen bearing long poles take positions on the sterns of boats that pass in an inlet, competing to knock their opponents into the water, roughly but harmlessly. The joust and its surrounding festivities provide the locals’ story with its dramatic climax; Varda films this at length and in detail to display both the secular celebration of the playful formalities and rituals and the class-based order that its organization perpetuates.

There and throughout La Pointe Courte, both in her photos and in the movie, Varda, showing fishermen and the women of the area at work and at rest, creates a startlingly original sort of incidental portraiture. These are pictures of people in the course of life, firm in their place; they have plenty of heart but no soul, not in any negative sense but in the positive sense of the fullness of their worldly existences—they have no need for any metaphysical supplement to complete them. Thus Varda avoids sentimentalizing manual workers with any faux-religious exaltation. In this regard, her photographic materialism, in stills and cinema, connects to the literary modernism of its day—to the philosophical materialism of Sartre and the rising nouveau roman of Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Yet it’s in the differences between the photos and the movie by which Varda proves her extraordinary originality as a filmmaker. That originality finds its roots in the audacity of her cinematic practice, going back to her very idea to make the film. Varda knew about photography, having taken a night course in Paris. After working locally as a photographer, she was launched precociously into France’s artistic beau monde when, through a personal connection, the impresario and director Jean Vilar invited her to photograph his theatre festival in Avignon and his theatre company in Paris. (She also documented art works by her friend Alexander Calder.) But when Varda undertook the film—by way of a small inheritance and the backing of friends, for a minuscule budget of about fourteen thousand dollars—she not only had no experience or training in filmmaking but, by her own admission, virtually no knowledge of the art of movies, of classic movies, or of great contemporary films and filmmakers. In a 1993 interview, she said, “I was worse than ‘non-cinephile,’ I was ignorant.”

She didn’t frequent the Cinémathèque Française, where her contemporaries of the eventual New Wave were studying the classics—she’d never even heard of it. While Godard, Truffaut, and company habitually watched three films a day, wrote criticism, and made short films as part of their self-imposed training, Varda dove right into a feature film, and admitted that she might never have dared to do so had she known the classics of cinema at the time. (In the 1993 interview, she cited, as her influences, “paintings, books, and life,” and, in 2008, she added modern music to that list.) Although Varda had never even seen a movie camera up close before the first day of the shoot, there’s nothing apprentice-like about the results: it’s not a student film or a merely promising effort but, rather, an anticipatory masterwork. From the very start of “La Pointe Courte,” Varda displayed the liberating audacity of her lack of technical knowledge by also displaying her self-awareness of the fundamental difference between photography and cinema—not merely the obvious factor of time but the mechanical one of movement.

The first sequence of “La Pointe Courte,” introducing its streets, its homes, and its people, features a roving, probing, trawling, penetrating camera that moves both freely and deliberately. Varda presents complicated changes of focus and light that an experienced director would likely have considered impossible, at least with a minimal budget and crew, and which she was able to achieve, seemingly naturally, not as a display of virtuosity but merely as a revelation of the essence of place—and of the cinema itself.

Whereas the portraiture of Varda’s photos from the village emphasizes how the residents are inextricable from the locale and its physical details, her script dramatizes their lives by anchoring them all the more widely in the region’s politics and culture—even in the abstractions of bureaucratic power. The story is launched by the presence of a mysterious stranger, who arouses suspicions and, indeed, turns out to be an inspector, one of several, enforcing regulations of health and commerce; they play large roles in the film and in the lives of the villagers. The fishermen and their families organize like the French Resistance to convey alerts of inspections, which come with heavy penalties for breach of protocol regarding where to fish and how to handle the catch. (One subplot involves a five-day jail term.)

The cat-and-mouse game of law and evasion, alongside the elaborate ruses that the villagers deploy in order to make a living, is the prime dramatic through line of the film. These abstractions of power play a concrete and practical role in the villagers’ daily lives, and they also form a key part of the local youths’ romance, when the twenty-year-old fisherman Raphaël, a target of the inspectors, and the sixteen-year-old Anna contend with her father’s refusal to allow her to go out with him. (There, Varda contrasts patriarchal dogmatism, and its alliance even with a much resented law, with the hard-won empathetic wisdom of the village’s women.)