Agnès Varda’s du Côté de la Côte: Place as “Sociological Phenomenon”
The Commande de l’Office National du Tourisme commissioned Agnès Varda to complete a short documentary on the subject of the French Riviera in 1958 after the success of her first tourist short, Ô Saisons, Ô Châteaux (O Seasons, O Castles, 1957), an official selection to the Cannes Film Festival earlier that same year. It was just months later, in July and August, that Varda traveled along the French Riviera with her notebook, le guide bleu, and “Rolleiflex around her neck” in preparation for eight weeks of filming during the height of the 1958 summer tourist season (Figure 5.1).
Figure 5.1 Agnès Varda, Notebook, du Côté de la Côte, 1958. © Ciné-Tamaris.
Varda had already completed her first feature film, La Pointe Courte (The Short Point, 1954), set in her native fishing village of Sète. Her keen attention to the very materiality of place is an informative element of this narrative, a force with detectable effect on the local characters’ actions and motivations.1 Shot in black-and-white film, the tension between the main characters, a couple seeking to revive their marriage, is a parallel to the inhabitants of the town straining to maintain their regional culture despite the effects of industry and commerce signaling the demise of an existence predicated on an inextricable link with the sea. The textural quality of this film—its attention to searing light, wooden ship-making as a tradition and refuge, and the physical features and reserve of the main characters, inspired by the mid-Renaissance master Piero della Francesca in contrast with the informal expressivity of the villagers—results in a pervasive sense of existential uneasiness.
This formal rigor and attention to material details are also evident in Ô Saisons, Ô Châteaux, which veered away from conventional promotional travelogues by manifesting the director’s subjectivity through an articulation of the author’s voice.2 As Bill Nichols has noted, this is evidenced by “a sense of a text’s social point of view, of how it is speaking to us and how it is organizing the materials it is presenting.”3 Titled after an Arthur Rimbaud poem from his publication Une saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell),4 Varda devotes eight minutes of this twenty-two-minute court-métrage (short film) to the famed chateaux architecture,5 with much attention devoted to fashion models in haut couture by Jacques Heim, while commentary by groundskeepers and a voiceover of readings by famed sixteenth-century poets dispenses with any sense of documentary objectivity.
These early signature elements—a focus on materials and an essayist approach—inform du Côté de la Côte (Along the Coast, 1958). She later explains in her “cousin album,” La Côte d’Azur (1961), that her aim was less “to showcase the French Riviera town by town, but rather to pose questions to the landscape itself.”6 It is through the geography of place that she seeks to uncover the motivations of tourists who crowd the region during their “window of freedom”; and to interrogate these modern tourists’ aspirations within the context of the history of travel, writing, and art along this slip of Mediterranean coast. Her preparatory still photographs constitute a “picture-sequence” approach to film, where each shot can stand as a still photo and function to alter the tempo of the film sequences within the whole.7 The opening sequences distinguish the major towns from Menton to Saint-Tropez via postcards, commissioned train posters, and photographs. With a twist of wit, Varda juxtaposes a Belle Époque poster/postcard of Menton with a contemporary fashion shot taken from the same tourist vantage point, thus reinforcing the ways that modern geographic spaces are “postcarded” to identify the totality of the locale in a single enduring image8 (Figure 5.2).
Varda further signals her aim to survey the region’s identity through a play of readymade images and highly structured film sequences where humor emphasizes the incongruity and clashing perceptions of place.9 By entering the phenomenon of mass tourism through the perspective tourist geography, she also probes the locale’s underlying “place-myth,”10 the clichés associated with specific regions, to construct a “film-essay.” Varda chose the overriding theme of exoticism as the key attribute of the French Riviera. With its root in Greek word eksotikos, emphasizing the region’s foreign-ness, this “capricious outline of a coast” has a Mediterranean history of being outside, an outpost beyond French borders until 1860—with a legacy of myth and cosmopolitanism that has endured since its classical beginnings.
The promotion of both recreational and cultural tourism in the post-Second World War era reaffirmed the French Riviera as an international destination rich with geographic and artistic capital. From its history as a health resort to the luxury tourism of the Belle Époque and postwar egalitarian tourism, the geographic experience played a stabilizing role in naturalizing these shifting social and political values.11 The complex relationships between residents and tourists became more pronounced as the congés payés (paid vacation), instituted on June 20, 1936, afforded state-guaranteed vacation that was expanded to three weeks in 1956, increasing government, partisan, and commercial interests in the region. The value of leisure itself became a topic of public discourse, a counterpart to changes in industrial production, as exemplified by Michel Crozier’s view that the rigidities and tensions within French society necessitated leisure time.12 With a fivefold increase in tourists along the French Riviera in the 1950s and early 1960s,13 the development of this leisure zone became inseparable from postwar consumerism, with the Côte d’Azur epitomizing an experiential commodity in popular magazines, French and American films,14 and resort fashion and product features.
Varda worked with producers Anatole Dauman and Philippe Lifschitz (who appears with his wife as the couple in Eden in the film) for Argos Productions, known for their support and promotion of young vanguard directors. In this court-métrage, Varda also interrogates her own prejudices against tourist sites, which she has admitted in relation to both of her tourist documentaries.15 One senses this bias as Varda distances herself from her subject, while using her still photographs, her script and music lyrics as a diegetic proxy to construct a narrative framework. The film begins with the refrain “azur, azur, azur,” perhaps an ode to her former Sorbonne professor Gaston Bachelard16 or to Stéphen Liégeard, who first coined the phrase “Côte d’Azur” in 1887. The bird’s-eye view of this opening sequence above the port of Nice tracks sea and sky as a continuous blue space from a classically fitted pavilion. Her use of vivid color signals awareness of a Mediterranean palette identifiable in painters from Pierre Bonnard and Matisse to Nicolas de Staël and Yves Klein, who, in 1957, decided to concentrate on the single color blue for his monochrome paintings, emblematic of his concept of pure space.17 Varda also evokes the timelessness and limitlessness of this monochromatic expanse soon brought into focus with George Delerue’s nostalgic musical homage to the charms of the coastal capitals from the resort of Menton on the Italian border with its celebrated gardens to Saint-Tropez’s picturesque port.18 Evoking the ambiance of the Belle Époque, Varda introduces the region as a mecca of the leisure class affording this string of coastal towns historical specificity with stills of promotional railroad travel posters and contemporary shots of key tourist destinations.
Enlisting cinematographer Quinto Albicocco, a native of Cannes who had just filmed Ô Saisons, Ô Châteaux, the choice of 35 mm Eastman color film enhances vivid effects and heightens the ocular-centric experience of tourism, which Varda described as “very baroque.”19 This visual effect, combined with Varda’s experimentation with formal elements such as abrupt juxtapositions, extended tracking shots, pan shots, and the interplay of words and images (“Living or dead, the location is ideal”—a breezy comment that links camping sites with cemeteries), her tightly structured image sequences and counterpoint script exemplify what she referred to as cinécriture.20
One of the overarching themes in this court-métrage is the stability of the geographic environment—sea, sky, trees, coastline, and an island—in contrast with a parallel cyclical production of space21—seasonal travel, fashion events, and camping. Edgar Morin observed how in the postwar era the cycle of vacations “punctuate the year and become the object of planning and imagination.”22 While for Varda the reason people choose the Côte d’Azur as the destination is not obvious, reinforcing her role as observer and agent in the production of this cinematic discourse.23
With Varda’s cinematic focus on the allure of this landscape as a tourist motivation, she quickly dispenses with some of its picturesque residents in less touristic towns such as Cogolin—“the natives are always elderly and invariably charming.” Staged as living tableaux, she dispatches them to their countryside existence along with the ox and the donkey seen pulled across the screen as if opening a stage curtain. With this tracking shot, we, too, are led into the author’s real subject, “the crowd: the tourists, sightseers, and migrants who assemble here for their interlude of freedom.”24 And with this, she describes her aim to position her film “between a documentary on the Côte d’Azur and an essay on tourism, between le guide bleu and la petite planète.”25 In her cousin album she describes her approach as a “conversation” because the Côte d’Azur is both a “place and a sociological phenomenon.”26
Varda initially claims that the Côte d’Azur is an English invention, providing evidence of their power in shaping Nice through urban design, postcard images and historical photographs, and the English presence in its place-names: Promenade des Anglais, l’Église Anglaise, la Pharmacie Anglaise. But she also discovers layering of diverse identities, showing the image of the “English pharmacy” on the Boulevard d’Italie below the graffiti “Le Côte d’Azur” in Nice’s Vieille Ville, revealing another side of the history.27
Varda uses visual analogies and juxtapositions to convey a sense of time. In her still photographs of the inflorescence of an Agave Americana, also known as the “century plant,” with its once-per-century flowering, she moves to an echo of this vegetal form in the electric poles’ ceramic caps, a visual trope of a musical score; this is followed by a visual shift to an approaching train along parallel wires where time is measured in departure and arrival schedules. In this sequential arrangement, she relates botanical time, musical time, and spatial time. By contrast, mass tourism mobility was enabled by an increase in postwar buying power used principally to purchase cars.28 Varda captures the optimal advertising image with her shot of a fashionable ingénue arriving at a luxury hotel in a convertible sports car to the welcome embrace of the concierge. This sequence presents a more immediate temporality where fashion, speed, and youth epitomize the contemporary moment.
Through Varda’s observation of a hotel concierge in Cannes, we witness the breakdown of elegant travel. Once at the disposition of the wealth with a comportment matching their own, the concierges of luxury hotels upheld social and economic distinctions. Now this formality appears out of synch with the new realities, but reinforcement of social hierarchy soon comes into focus in the ways in which Varda films areas restricted by privatization of gated estates, hotels, and gardens.
The French Riviera embodies what Arjun Appadurai calls the “touristic imaginaries,” a transnational phenomenon of “imagined vistas and mass-mediated master narratives.”29 Two areas where Varda explores these cultural narratives are in literature and the visual arts. Her research into literary figures from Dante to Françoise Sagan reinforces the importance of place in inspiring these “touristic imaginaries” over a half-century. Yet with humor, she likens the face of Colette to the local cats and she finds the schoolboy Apollinaire among the elegant pilgrims in Monaco. This aspect of Varda’s research is expanded in the cousin album where one finds a “Tableau d’Honneur des Belles-Lettres ‘du Côté de la côte,’” a double-page featuring locket-size photographs of writers with accompanying phrases such as, “une lune de miel à Monaco … ” and a drawing of opera glasses under the photograph of Émile Zola.30 From the Divine Comedy to Tender is the Night, the effects of the region are evident in literary history.
Turning to the visual arts, Varda, who studied art history at the Louvre, displays Joseph Vernet’s Vue d’Antibes (1756), a landscape showing the border area of France with a distant view of Nice, then on the Italian coast. With this pastoral scene, she shifts its modern equivalent in Picasso’s La Joie de Vivre (Antipolis) of 1946, installed in the Château Grimaldi, an idyllic memory of the town’s Greek origins set before a blue field of sea and sky celebrating the joy and sensuality of the Mediterranean. Varda’s use of still images freezes history momentarily, locking in a sense of historical time. But in a witty turn, Varda emphasizes that it is Picasso, the “baker,” who reigns having succeeded in reviving the regional ceramic production in the hill town of Vallauris, and whose local celebrity can only be challenged by the sun itself.
Varda speculates that it is this pure solar power that draws the crowds to the beaches where the tanning rituals shift the beachfront into a surreal space of body fragments, plastics, beach towels, and snorkeling equipment, which she approaches with the eye of an “inquisitive anthropologist”31 and that of the art historian. Using bird’s-eye and worm’s-eye perspectives, she references the Surrealist cadavre exquis, and the technique of foreshortening as seen in Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation of Christ (c. 1480). Varda constructs playful juxtapositions highlighting the strangeness of beach behaviors and seashore accessories, which turns this coastal expanse into a crowded, bizarre landscape (Figure 5.3).
Figure 5.3 Sunbathing on the Riviera, still frame, du Côté de la Côte. © Ciné-Tamaris.
The beachfront is also where one detects the French rapport with its own seaside through the choice of color-seasonal fashion. Expanding the blue of shoreline onto the body, the French sunbathers pay homage to their environment, while a penchant for red and yellow beachwear quickly distinguishes the English tourists, and the fashion-failure green bathing suits worn by the Germans seem to justify their placement in crowded camping grounds. The posturing of women in these scenes is reflected in accompanying music with quick upbeat notes as French women promenade in resort wear, slowing to a two-note brass musical interpretation of the sigh “uh-oh,” as the German campers circle back and forth in and out of tightly packed tents in ill-fitting bathing suits.
This sequence reflects a broader sentiment that the French Riviera is French and the geography itself has now been inscribed into a national agenda. Varda quotes Paul Haag, a prefect from the Midi in her companion publication. He describes the French Riviera coastline in 1949 as an “immense tri-color flag,” and a decade later, deputy mayor of Nice, Jean Médecin, defines the region as the gateway and essence of France (“la porte et synthèse de la France”). Furthermore, given the rise of La Jeunesse with greater mobile and social independence, the Côte d’Azur became a manifest symbol of France’s recovered vitality,32 exemplifying health and rejuvenation of the French nation. Celebrity icon Brigitte Bardot personifies this spirit and Varda includes a clip in which Bardot appears as a free-spirited force in the streets of Saint-Tropez. According to Simone de Beauvoir, who would soon champion Bardot as revolutionizing the image of women in postwar France, Bardot represented “eroticism brought down to earth.”33 She is also a tourist phenomenon in Varda’s film, drawing crowds to Saint-Tropez for a glimpse of her aura, even while she remains an illusion. In her absence, tourists satisfy their fantasy by lingering in cafés in hope of an appearance.
Place and image united in the 1950s to redefine the Côte d’Azur as young and sensual with a modern taste distinct from that of Paris, the adult capital. Film stars featured in popular magazines and exploding paparazzi established the celebrity culture of the Cannes Film Festival, and Varda showcases a roster of international stars whose appearances at galas and along the Cannes beach celebrate this rendezvous of extravagance. But the theme of inaccessibility parallels her theme of proximity, as this Eden of the Hexagon is at once perceptible yet unattainable. So, whether a celebrity autograph or a chef-d’oeuvre by Henri Matisse, the tourist must substitute yearning with an empty alternative, and in the case of Matisse, a visit to his gravesite in Cimiez as Varda jauntily remarks, “even the dead have their following.”
The specter of fatality also finds its way into the “the most spacious form of freedom,” with Varda referring to crowded campgrounds as a “giant still-life,” the counterpart to the region’s famed cemeteries. She also turns to architectural spectacles scattered from the Var to the Italian border, a pastiche of the far-flung exotic: the Chinese pagoda (Fréjus), Sudanese mosque (Fréjus—“Africa is calling you”), Middle Eastern palaces (Menton and Monte Carlo), and Nice’s Russian Orthodox Cathedral (1900). Likewise, the fabricated botanical gardens of Monte Carlo and the extravagant garden collections at the Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild exemplify desire for paradise-like spaces. Yet Varda portrays tourists as displaying scant interest in these botanical wonders as they file through on tours, and with rather more interest in marking their visits by scratching their initials into these exotic specimens.
If the gardens provide scenic diversions, her attention to the indigenous marvels of a thousand-year-old olive tree (Beaulieu) or century-old cork oak (Saint-Cassein) showcase exceptional yet near-invisible phenomena. It was Jean-Luc Godard who first recognized the importance that wood played in Varda’s film La Pointe Courte. And her attention to these enduring trees as she lingers on their surface textures reveals a cast of nostalgia for these rare specimens as if to suggest that one can hardly register the value of nature in contemporary notions of paradise. Varda then erratically pans back and forth between the signs on hotels named “Eden,” a sequence that captures the sheer elusiveness of this collective dream. This turbulent scene breaks into the raucous claustrophobia of the Carnival in Nice, controlled disorder and, ultimately, a restoration of social order played out in the frenzy and exhaustion of this popular culture festival.34 Varda seizes on the violence of the carnival, especially the relationship between men and women, as she repeatedly juxtaposes a scantily clad reveler with a dagger-wielding papier-mâché character. Jean Vigo earlier highlighted the surreal quality of the carnival in his social documentary, À Propos de Nice (About Nice), a collaboration with cinematographer Boris Kauffman, brother of Dziga Vertov, combining a cinema-essay approach with Surrealist techniques inspired by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s 1929 film Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog).35 Both directors use repetition in their sequences of the carnival, but where Vigo uses slow motion to create a dream-like sequence, Varda’s emphasizes the frenetic aspects and brutality through closely observed details. An example of this is the torching of the “king of the carnival,” filmed at close proximity to capture the fire’s intensity.
An immediate counterpoint to the destruction at the carnival’s end is the calmness of dawn, as she the then proposes, “Eden exists.” With the Île de Porquerolles in the distance, we accompany the director as the camera rocks back and forth in a dinghy as the island draws near. Yet, even this sequence is not without cliché—a pair of free-running horses in an isolated cove; close-ups of roots of native coastal pines wind and twist in a serpentine manner across the sand; a pair of abandoned espadrilles and towels signal distance from civilization; and finally, a couple in slumber, a modern Adam and Eve. This is the collective dream she imagines motivates the crowds seeking rest in their time of freedom. Instead, this côte mal taillée (badly cut coast) is an unsatisfactory compromise leaving tourists with the “false Adams” and “false Eves” in “false grottos” on exhibit in designed gardens. For Varda, Eden is nostalgia for the natural world forever lost in the inescapable rhythms of modernity. So any illusion of utopia becomes a fading dream as the summer season ends, and this false Eden shuts down that brief “interlude of freedom” in a wistful haze. George Delerue’s voice captures that sense of loss, concluding, “La fin de la fête, la fin de l’ été,” as Varda’s still photographs of gated coastlines, shuttered beach umbrellas, and the vestiges of a gala celebration underscore how intangible this dream of contemporary Eden remains (Figure 5.4). But, this persistent desire, even for a counterfeit paradise, animates the tourist cycle with its unrealized desires and collective aspirations.
Figure 5.4 Summer’s end, still frame, du Côté de la Côte. © Ciné-Tamaris.
Marc Boyer has pointed out that meanings assigned to places are embedded in the historically contingent and shared cultural understandings of the terrain. They are a means by which we perceive and remember.36 The French Riviera, with its Mediterranean echo of arcadia and exoticism, does retain the “shared cultural meaning of its terrain” and has adapted to the desire for escape from the modern world, as a space on which dreams are projected.
The Côte d’Azur is more than a scenic backdrop, with geographic agency capable of maintaining and producing meanings. Thomas Gieryn has suggested that place actually saturates social life: it is one medium (along with historical time) through which social life happens.37 Varda’s film is fully attuned to the effects of geography on the social sphere in her probing of mass tourism motivations. But what remains striking about this film is the sense that the French Riviera is both a privileged geography and an illusion that becomes tangible only seasonally. With the near-absence of residents, she implies that there is yet another place, hidden but real, with its own social life inaccessible to transient populations; but for the tourists, when the party ends, there is no one in sight.
Varda’s film captures the success of mass tourism, but the pursuit of paradise does not exist within a vacuum. The realization of mass vacations along this Mediterranean coast discloses a model of postwar modernity contingent upon on social factors: the fulfillment of French policy (congés payés), structuring of free-time and holiday zones, emphasis on youth and recreation, and the “touristic imaginaries” that positioned this region as an Eden of the Hexagon. But the inventive finesse of Varda’s film transcends its formal rigor and counterpoints of script and music. Godard described this film as the “journal of a free-spirited woman let loose between Nice and Saint-Tropez”38 and it has an esteemed place within the history of French travel-inspired film and writing. Godard wrote:
Du Côté de la côte est un film admirable.
C’est France Roche multipliée par Chateaubriand (celui des Impressions d’Italie),
par Delacroix (celui de Croquis africains),
par Madame de Staël (celle de De l’Allemagne),
par Proust (celui des Pastiches et mélanges),
par Aragon (celui d’ Anicet ou le panorama),
par Giraudoux (celui de La France sentimentale),
et j’ en oublie.39
Du Côté de la Côte was first shown at the Festival de Tours in 1958 and it received a prize for tourist documentary in Brussels in 1959. When it was released in Paris, in June 1959, it was a program selection shown with her friend Alain Resnais’ film Hiroshima, Mon Amour (Hiroshima, My Love).40 This pairing reminds us, as Varda herself has done in her cousin album, that it is impossible to speak of paradise without the memories of destruction. Du Côté de la Côte has pivotal significance in Varda’s oeuvre, drawing together themes of social change, and the pursuit of Eden in parallel with the presence of time and loss, with technical precision that emphasizes the materiality of place and impacts of geographic space and color.41 This court-métrage further demonstrates her ability to probe her subject and to channel cinematic discourse while deferring meaning and refusing irony.42 Varda has stated, “I only begin to see my films when they are completed,”43 suggesting that she, too, is imaginatively maneuvering in this model of cinécriture, one that is precedent-setting in her filmography.
1 Ginette Vincendeau, 4 by Agnès Varda (New York: The Criterion Collection, film notes, 2008), no page.
2 Claudia Gorbman, “Finding a Voice: Varda’s Early Travelogues,” SubStance 41, no. 2, issue 128 (2012): 40, accessed April 22, 2014, doi: 10.1353/sub.2012.0018.
3 Bill Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” in Film Quarterly—Forty Years: A Selection, ed. Brian Henderson and Ann Martin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999): 246–247, accessed May 26, 2015, d0e: 5582.
4 Agnès Varda, Varda par Agnès, filmographie par Bernard Bastide (Paris: Éditions Cahiers du Cinéma, 1994), 229. The film also features Antoine Bourseiller reading poems by sixteenth-century poets Pierre de Ronsard, Charles d’Orléans, François Villon, and Clément Marot.
5 Jean-André Fieschi and Claude Ollier, “A Secular Grace: Agnès Varda,” trans. T. Jefferson Klein, Cahiers du cinema 165 (April 1965), reprinted in Agnès Varda: Interviews, ed. T. Jefferson Kline (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 27. Varda states: “Worthy of a student of the Louvre Art School.”
6 Agnès Varda, La Côte d’Azur (Paris: Les Éditions du Temps, 1961), no page.
7 Alison Smith, Agnès Varda (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), chapter 2.
8 Naomi Schor, as quoted in Jordana Mendelson and David Prochaska, “Introduction,” Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), xii.
9 Simon Critchley, On Humour (London: Routledge, 2002), 4.
10 R. Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1991), 46–47.
11 Ellen Furlough, “Making Mass Vacations: Tourism and Consumer Culture in France, 1930s to 1970,” Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History, 1998, 248–249, accessed May 9, 2012, doi: 0010–4175/2454–0310.
12 Michel Crozier, as quoted in John Ardagh, The New French Revolution: A Social and Economic Survey of France, 1945–1967 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 282.
13 Ibid., 281–283.
14 Agnès Varda, La Côte d’Azur (Paris: Les Éditions du Temps, 1961), no page. Varda illustrates this point with reference to three films: La Dame de Shanghai, La Main au collet, Folies de Femmes.
15 Smith, Agnès Varda, 61.
16 Agnès Varda, as quoted in “The Underground River: Interview with Gordon Gow,” Film and Filming (March 1970): 7. “My idea was to become a museum curator, which I didn’t. But this professor, Gaston Bachelard—he’s dead now—he really blew my mind. He was a very old man with a beard, and he had this dream of the material in people; a psychoanalysis of the material world related to people, wood, rivers, the sea, fire, wind, air, all of these things … He taught us to study writers not by the stories they told but by the material things they mentioned.”
17 There are several publications on these topics. See for example, Kenneth E. Silver, Making Paradise: Art, Modernity and the Myth of the French Riviera (London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); Impressions of the Riviera Monet, Renoir, Matisse and their Contemporaries, exh. cat. (Portland, OR: Portland Museum of Art, June 25–October 18, 1998); Rosemary O’Neill, Art and Visual Culture on the French Riviera, 1956–1971 (Burlington, VT, and Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2012). Yves Klein’s eleven identical blue monochrome paintings were first shown in Milan’s Galleria Apollinaire from January 2–12, 1957, commencing his “blue period”; this exhibition was followed in May 1957 with the exhibition “Yves: le monochrome” at Galerie Iris Clert (May 10–25) and “Pigment Pur” at Galerie Colette Allendy (May 14–23). Also see: Yves Klein, “The Monochrome Adventure,” extracts Yves Klein, 1928–1962: Selected Writings (London: Tate Gallery, 1974), 31. It is unclear whether Varda knew of Klein’s work at this time.
18 Gorbman, “Finding a Voice,” 48. Gorbman characterizes Georges Delerue’s accompaniment as “touristic music in bel canto with guitar and mandolin” set to Varda’s lyrics.
19 Fieschi and Ollier, “A Secular Grace: Agnès Varda,” 29.
20 Agnès Varda, Varda par Agnès (Paris: Éditions Cahiers du Cinéma, 1994): 14.J’ai lancé ce mot et maintenant je m’en sers pour indiquer le travail d’un cinéaste. Il renvoie à leurs cases le travail du scénariste qui écrit sans tourner et celui du réalisateur qui fait sa mise en scène. Cela peut être la même personne mais la confusion persiste souvent. J’en ai tellement assez d’entendre: C’est un film bien écrit, sachant que le compliment est pour le scénario et pour les dialogues.Un film bien écrit est également bien tourné, les acteurs sont bien choisis, les lieux aussi. Le découpage, les mouvements, les points de vue, le rythme du tournage et du montage ont été sentis et pensés comme les choix d’un écrivain, phrases denses ou pas, type de mots, fréquence des adverbes, alinéas, parenthèses, chapitres continuant le sens du récit ou le contrariant, etc.En écriture c’est le style. Au cinéma, le style c’est la cinécriture.
21 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 117.
22 Edgar Morin, as quoted in Furlough, “Making Mass Vacations,” 264.
23 Fieschi and Ollier, “A Secular Grace: Agnès Varda,” 28.
24 Ibid., 29. “The film belongs to a genre of observation which is very indulgent as indicated by the voiceover. The idea is that people are looking for a kind of Eden which they feel they have a right to because they are so tired. It isn’t really their fault if the Eden the Côte d’Azur offers is so tacky. But whatever the reason, this tacky Eden alludes to another, the greater idea of Eden—the idea of rest for the weary which is a beautiful idea, a fundamental idea.”
25 Varda, La Côte d’Azur, no page. Also note that Varda’s close friend Chris Marker became editor of La Petite Planète published by Editions de Seuil in Paris in 1954. He avoided promotional propaganda generally associated with tourist books, favoring instead some intimate link with place through conversation with one informed about the country, corresponding with the intimacy of his film script style. Varda would become a contributor to this publication under Marker’s editorship. Anatole Dauman of Argos Films, also financed Marker’s travel documentary, Lettre de Sibérie in 1958 and Editions de Seuil briefly launched a series of “ciné-essai” with Marker’s film on North Korea.
26 Ibid.
27 Varda’s later feature films Daguerréotypes (1975) and Mur, Murs (1980) reinforce her sensitivity to the sociological diversities of urban spaces as a “documentarist.” In Daguerréotypes, an intimate experience of her local street in the 14th arrondissement, the only still images are the “daguerreotype portraits” combined with her aim to have “the camera running all the time.” See: Mireille Amiel, “Agnès Varda Talks about the Cinema,” in Agnès Varda Interviews, ed. T. Jefferson Kline (Mississippi: The University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 65–66. Varda describes Mur, Murs as “a 1980 ‘look’ at the murals in Los Angeles and their socio-political context.” Varda as quoted in Delphine Bénézet, The Cinema of Agnès Varda: Resistance and Eclecticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 74.
28 Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Re-ordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1995), 19. She points to a correlation between the modernization of production facilities for the manufacture of cars and the focus of French spending power directed to the acquisition of cars.
29 Arjun Appadurai, “Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology,” Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1991), 201.
30 The rosters of literary figures in this cousin album are: Apollinaire, Zola, Colette, Nietzsche Giraudoux, Flaubert, Fitzgerald, Sagan, and Dante. She includes excerpts of their works on the inside covers of this publication.
31 Delphine Bénézet, The Cinema of Agnès Varda: Resistance and Eclecticism (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2014), 96.
32 Ardagh, The New French Revolution, 339.
33 Simone de Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1972), 12. Originally published Esquire (August 1959) trans. Bernard Fretchman, with Reynal & Co., Inc., 1960, 24.
34 David Picard and Mike Robinson, Festivals, Tourism, and Social Change: Remaking Worlds (Clevedon, Buffalo, and Toronto: Channel View Publications, 2006), 18–19.
35 When Varda’s film La Pointe Courte was first shown in 1956 at the Studio Parnasse in Paris, it was shown with Jean Vigo’s Apropos de Nice. See: Richard John Neupert, A History of the French New Wave Cinema (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 60.
36 Marc Boyer, Histoire générale du tourisme du XVIe au XXIe siècle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995).
37 Thomas Gieryn, “A Place for Space in Sociology,” Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 463–496. http://www.jstor.org/stable/223453.
38 Jean-Luc Godard, as quoted in Varda par Agnès, 233.
39 Ibid. In regard to this note, in a separate email to the author from Cine-Tamaris dated Thursday, November 28, 2013, Agnès Varda emphasized this exceptional citation by Jean-Luc Godard and further noted that France Roche was a journalist “très ‘en vue’” in the 1950s.
40 Alain Resnais was the film editor on Varda’s La Pointe Courte. Her work has been noted as an important precedent for Resnais’ subsequent films. See Roy Armes, French Cinema Since 1946, vol. 2: The Personal Style (London: A. Zwemmer Ltd., and New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1966), 80.
41 These qualities are later evident in her feature film Le Bonheur, released in January 1965.
42 Ruth Cruickshank, as quoted in Bénézet (2014): 86–87. Also see Fieschi and Ollier, “A Secular Grace: Agnès Varda,” 29.
43 Ibid., 31.