Interview

[March 9, 2009. An office on the fifth floor of the French Embassy, New York, after a lunch in honor of the filmmakers participating in Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2009, where The Beaches of Agnès is being shown. Varda is seated behind a desk facing the interviewer. She and Liza Béar talk between phone calls.]

AGNèS VARDA: [hanging up the phone] I'm having an exhibition in Boston.

LIZA BEAR: Formidable! Where?

VARDA: At the Carpenter Visual Arts Center.

BEAR: I noticed you did Patatutopia at the Venice Biennale in 2003 with 700 kilos of potatoes.

VARDA:  Yes. Listen, is it okay if we talk in French? Speaking French is more restful.

BEAR;  Oui. Vous voulez de l'eau?  [From  now on, the dialogue is in French.]

VARDA: You know, the boundaries between contemporary art and cinema are so rigid. It's unbelievable. The film critics don't know my artwork and the art world doesn't know my films. I had a very big show at the Fondation Cartier in Paris with seven or eight video installations. At Harvard, I'm showing just one, The Widows of Noirmoutier. It's 15 screens about the collective and individual experience of mourning. Installations-my new life. I'm very happy that MoMA bought one of them. [looking across the desktop] Ah, I see you have a little package there. Looks like note cards.

BEAR: Well, a literary agency on Bond Street went bust and threw their stationery out on the curb. That's how I got these cards.

VARDA: You are a gleaner. By the way, buying stuff cheap at a flea market is not gleaning. Gleaning is reclaiming what others have discarded.

BEAR: It was fascinating to watch your films again. I first saw Cléo from 5 to 7 in the '60s, but to see it now, after seeing Beaches . . .

VARDA: See how everything crisscrosses?

BEAR: I watched it with my son.

VARDA: How old is he?

BEAR: Twenty-eight.

VARDA: Then he had to see it.

BEAR: The opening sequence of Cléo is a scene with a nécromancienne . . .

VARDA: A cartomancienne [fortune-teller]. She has tarot cards. I see. You wanted to make question cards. Very good. [Béar laughs] So lay out your cards! This is very amusing. Don't put out too many. Four up, four down. Allez, hop! Here goes: [reading from a card] "At 18 years old, I bought a train ticket to Marseille and a boat ticket to Corsica without telling anyone." It's a quote from the film, not a question!

BEAR: I know. I'm off questions. It's a prompt.

VARDA: My response is that my son wouldn't believe I did that.