Interview

VARDA: In my courtyard in Montparnasse they are singing a lot less than they used to.

BEAR: In 1951 you found this wonderful abandoned building with a courtyard between a former grocery and a frame shop.

VARDA: Yes, and I still live there. But now it has flowering shrubs. It's a bit House & Garden. When I moved in, it was a wreck. No heat, no bathtub or shower. Just a basic Turkish-style toilet.

BEAR: A hole in the ground.

VARDA: I lived there for four or five years without paying rent. For Beaches, an artist, Franckie Diago, reconstructed the courtyard in its original dilapidated state. She had been my set decorator for One Sings, the Other Doesn't in 1977, a story about abortion rights.

BEAR: How did you get Alain Resnais to edit your very first film, La Pointe Courte? It was before he made Hiroshima, Mon Amour [1959] and Night and Fog [1955].

VARDA: He had already made two documentaries, one with Chris Marker about African art called Statues Also Die [1953], and another about van Gogh, at a time when everyone worked in black-and-white. Resnais was an editor. I had to persuade him to work without pay, like the others. We had a production co-op, which wasn't standard at the time.

BEAR: How did that work?

VARDA: There are two kinds of capital: money and work. I had a small inheritance and my mother added a little more. Then I gave a value to the sweat equity. If we raised 100 francs, 50 percent went to reimburse the financing, and 50 percent went to the cast and crew. No commission, no contingency. I would have loved for La Pointe Courte to be a success.

BEAR: But it was a critical success.

VARDA: Well, for selected audiences. It was immediately shown in cinematheques everywhere, but, regretfully, it made no money whatsoever.

BEAR: In Beaches you found really touching ways to introduce us to some of the local people in your films who had worked with you and to show your appreciation onscreen . . .

VARDA: Exactly.

BEAR: There's another scene in Sete where you find Dédé, now an adult man, who played the little boy who ran from the dining table. His mother said, "Dédé, eat your grapes."

VARDA:  What a memory! That's what we call him now, Dédé-take-your-grapes!

BEAR: How did you persuade those fishermen's families to be in La Pointe Courte?

VARDA: I must have spent about 15 summers in Sète, so I got to know the locals. Every evening I would write down bits of conversation I had heard-I had no tape recorder. I didn't take notes on the spot because I didn't want to look like a journalist. I wanted to be friendly. Then, later, back in Paris, I wrote a script based on my notes. I wanted to recount my memories and to honor those who made me who I am. I'm not Madame Agnès with her loves and her children. It's my life story as a filmmaker, seen through the eyes of a filmmaker.

BEAR: Makes sense.

VARDA: As I see it, to use a cinematic approach or framework means finding a form for each idea you have. The best example is from La Pointe Courte. I had done a screen test with two friends, Pierre and Suzanne Fournier. Pierre died. Later, the real scene was acted by Philippe Noiret and Silvia Monfort. But the Fourniers' two sons had never seen the test scene of their father onscreen.

BEAR: So Beaches enabled them to do that.

VARDA: Yes. I rigged up a 16mm projector and screen on a wooden cart and projected the test footage of their father while the boys pushed the cart through the streets. It was like a funeral procession, a phantom carriage-a film within a film.

BEAR: All these little scenes have a special character. I thought you worked wonders of merging the chronological sequence . . .

VARDA:  And breaking it.

BEAR:  . . .breaking it thematically. I mean, there are natural segues from topic to topic, and then, bam! all of a sudden there's a historical date, so that we get our bearings.

VARDA: So you understand. The chronology's there, but an emotion will throw it off.  Here's another example: I had been a photographer for Jean Vilar, director of the Theatre National Populaire. At the time I was making Beaches, they offered me a big exhibition in Avignon of photos I had shot there from 1950. The prints were 5 meters high-everyone was complimenting me. But all I could think of was that these marvelous actors, Gerard Philipe, Jean Vilar, Philippe Noiret were dead. . .Suddenly I felt a pang of emotion which led me back to the death of  Jacques.

So there's an emotional fluidity to the film, several points of access . . .

BEAR: You have many strings to your bow.

VARDA: In another sense, the film is about one little person's creative life across half a century that saw the Cuban Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the Black Panthers, the evolution of birth control-major social changes.

BEAR: Many of which you worked into your films.

VARDA: And also the growth of popular theater and of the nouvelle vague. It's my trajectory through public events, either by chance, by affection, by political conviction . . .

BEAR: Or imagination. What was the Manifesto of the 343 Bitches?

VARDA: Well, a right-wing magazine came up with that title, not us. Around 1970 I signed the Manifesto with other women because of a specific instance of class injustice. In France at the time, working-class women who had abortions went to jail, while the bourgeois ladies who had money went to Switzerland. Not fair. The Manifesto stated, "We've had abortions: Judge us." In Beaches you see the women protesters shouting that. So we thought, if well-known people signed, like Simone de Beauvoir, Delphine Seyrig, Marguerite Duras, Françoise Sagan, then when we went to trial it would embarrass the judges. This petition affected the outcome of a famous French trial and led to the passing of an abortion rights law in  1975..

BEAR: How did you meet Shirley Clarke, who plays the documentary filmmaker in

Lions' Love (and Lies)?

VARDA:  Oh, I  met all the experimental filmmakers in the 60s, Michael Snow, Robert Breer, Ed Emshwiller, and Brakhage, who filmed his wife giving birth. And I loved Andy's films, Nude Restaurant and Lonesome Cowboy. Andy, who admired Cléo so much, invited me to the Factory and introduced me to Viva. Andy was impressed by the Nouvelle Vague. So were  Coppola and Scorsese. Because we started experimenting before them.

BEAR: According to you, how did the Nouvelle Vague get started?

VARDA:  What's not widely known is that the cine-clubs played a very important role in establishing the concept of an auteur. Until the 50s, you went to the movies in France to see a film with Jean Gabin, Martine Carol, Simone Simon, actors of the period. But the cine-clubs showed films by Renoir and Murnau and emphasized the director's sensibility. So when the Nouvelle Vague arrived, everyone accepted they were watching a film by Godard or Varda, not a Jean Seberg film. And of course, Cahiers du Cinema subsequently developed this notion, la politique des auteurs.

BEAR: What's this business about right-bank and left-bank filmmakers?

VARDA: Left-bank is a term invented by Richard Roud. In fact, Chris Marker, Resnais, and I, who had our hearts on the left politically, lived on the real Left Bank in Paris. But since that time, I like to branch out. I don't like to repeat myself. [phone rings] Hello? Radio Canada? Can you give me 10 minutes? [covering mouthpiece] My film is opening in Canada on the 13th. No? I'll stay on the line then . . . The tool of every self-portrait is the mirror. You see yourself in it. Turn it the other way, and you see the world . . .(reading a note from Béar)  My friend here reminds me that Sartre said, "Hell is other people." Well, I don't agree with Sartre. I like others. My film could use Gertrude Stein's title, Everybody's Autobiography.

 Liza Béar is a  New York-based filmmaker and the author of Beyond the Frame: Dialogues with World Filmmakers.