Agnès Varda

Summary

In her retrospective volume Varda par Agnès, Varda writes that her mother had a collection of postcards of the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary (1994, 212). Images from Christiane Varda's collection are included in the catalogue to the exhibition Agnès Varda: patates et compagnie [Agnès Varda: Potatoes and Company] held in the film-maker's birthplace and childhood neighbourhood, the Ixelles district of Brussels, in 2016. Varda writes in an accompanying essay:

Il y a au moins deux albums pleins d’images d’Annonciations: La Vierge, lisant ou pas, voit arriver l’Ange annonciateur […] Moi, j’ai fait comme maman, j’ai des cartes et des cartes d’Annonciations. Je les regarde souvent. (2016, 19)

[There are at least two albums full of images of Annunciations: the Virgin, reading or not, sees the annunciatory Angel arrive (…) And I’ve done the same as my mother, I’ve got cards and cards with Annunciations. I often look at them.]

Varda's narrative of her mother's art as collector offers an insight into the film-maker's passion for art reproductions. This collecting seems to lead into her own collage practice with art historical images in her films. The mother's images of the Annunciation are pasted into a ring-bound album with squared paper.3 The images overlap. Juxtapositions give a sense of serial variations on the image of the Angel and the Virgin, the same image sometimes reappearing on a different scale or in a different colour, or quality of reproduction. It feels as if there is a pleasure in the images and also in the act of gathering and arranging them, materially pasting them together. Varda makes her mother's albums part of the exhibition. She also recalls her own practice of looking at images, her own collections. This image of the film-maker as collector contemplating a series of images allows this chapter to take shape. I am collecting here the reclining nudes in Varda's films.

In an article in the catalogue to the same exhibition, ‘Agnes Varda la triptyquesse’ [‘Agnes Varda Triptych-Maker’], Jean-Luc Douin looks at the relation between Varda's film practice and the other arts. He claims her narratives of herself speak to others, who find their own lives and images reflected in hers (2016, 27).