Agnes Varda and Me, 2013-2021, I-phone videos, 20:21 minutes.
Part 6/6 of The Realist Manifesto.
Agnés Varda’s documentary film The Gleaners and I (2000) is the inspiration for Agnés Varda and Me (2013-2021). Finally, a woman--and a filmmaker--enters The Realist Manifesto. Describing her filmmaking as cinecriture (“cinema writing”), Varda was an early participant in both French New Wave and cinema verite. But neither movement could define her work, which embraced selfhood, domestic and family life, the complexities of womanhood, motherhood, aging, and mourning amidst contemporary life and all its vice, variety, and violence. Her work goes beyond film and even art, directly into life.
For The Gleaners and I, Varda used for the first time a compact handheld digital camera as a tool, ushering her work and her audience into the new millennium. The Gleaners and I kicked off a reality revolution not only in documentary film and TV but also consumption itself while embracing the global diversity of the local. In The Gleaners and I we encounter industrial farming; consumer waste; urban and rural isolation; addiction; welfare, health, and aging care crises; refugee and immigrant assimilation; artistic solitude; bricolage; alternative economies, etc). We should all glean from her.
Like Gustave Courbet witnessing his stonebreakers alongside the road, Varda captured her muses in their own environments and with their own voices. A Realist truly in the tradition of Courbet’s manifesto, Varda was not only a filmmaker-artist but also a human, who shared her domestic and urban adventures (and reflective monologues), creating generations of fans and followers (see The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later, 2002).
Agnés Varda and Me is a simple homage composed of Iphone video footage recorded between 2013 and 2021. This material was recorded without the intention of making an artwork but rather to document moments I didn’t want to forget: a 2013 voicemail from former colleague Molly Nesbit asking if I could accompany her to Philadelphia to pick up Agnés Varda at the airport; a Q&A with Agnés’ daughter Rosalie Varda and Kent Jones at the 57th New York Film Festival premiere of Varda by Agnés in October 2019; an impromptu memorial for Varda made the day she died (March 29, 2019). To this material I added a stream-of-consciousness performance with a mini heart-shaped potato and a twin tomato while my spouse practiced the piano in 2021. I had been planning to make an installation or even a painting (in reference to how Varda is always finding paintings in her films) but somehow this digital portrait of Agnés and myself touches more on the crossover themes in our respective art practices, and it lives where most people live now–on the World Wide Web.
Like all the other artworks that make up The Realist Manifesto, The Gleaners and I made an undeniable impression on me and my reality. I first saw it in a movie theater in 2000, just after graduating from college and dedicating myself to making art full-time. The anthems of my Gen-X youth—REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE and FUCK THE POLICE—were writ large in this wonderful documentary. As it happens, Varda’s influence on my artwork and my adult life has materialized in the economic and political decisions I have made every day for twenty-plus years. Feminism, environmental responsibility, self-sustainability, concepts of restraint and sacrifice as opposed to gluttony and greed, assemblage/bricolage, and the lone and autonomous worker morphing into a family operation all entered my work at the new millennium and still feed it.
