Audio transcription

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Audio Collection page.

Cléo de 5 à 7 and Lions Love introductions and discussions with Haden Guest and Agnès Varda. Saturday March 14, 2009.

Haden Guest  0:12

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Harvard Film Archive. My name is Haden Guest, I'm the Archive Director and I'm really thrilled that you're all able to come to this. Our second evening with the legendary Agnès Varda, one of the progenitors of the French New Wave and one of the most original and exciting voices to emerge from the postwar French cinema. To this day, she continues to dazzle us with her truly unique approach to filmmaking and her singular way of blending documentary and narrative filmmaking techniques, approaches, ideas, philosophies, and this film we're going to see tonight, Cléo from 5 to 7, from 1961—and this was Varda’s breakthrough film.

We're gonna be seeing a beautiful new print. And it's among her more stylistically daring and breathtakingly beautiful films. The French New Wave had a long love affair with the city of Paris. And this film, I think, offers one of the more sublime expressions of that, and representations of Paris seen through the eyes of a troubled chanteuse. Varda has spoken quite often and especially in the film we saw last night, The Beaches of Agnès, of her interest in defying easy categorization and her equal interest in both documentary and narrative. And in this film, which in one—in some level seems to be her most pure narrative film, actually has many remarkable documentary features to it. We can consider for instance, one of the most beautiful moments is the scene with Michel Legrand (the composer for the film as well as for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and many other classics) and there's just this incredible improvisational energy in spirit to the scene that was suddenly—just lifts the film to a whole new dimension. Varda’s long interest in surrealism, which began in her earliest career as a still photographer, which serves as an apprenticeship to her eventual move into filmmaking. Her interest in surrealism is quite clear in this film, which I think offers a really remarkable sort of use of the objet trouvé, the found object—you'll see African masks that suddenly jump out, objects in store windows, and a real interest in the vernacular fantastic. The sort of street performers who suddenly arrest the young singer’s vision and ours as well.

Tonight, we have an opportunity to see two very different works from different moments in Varda’s long and remarkable career. Beginning with Cléo, and the second film tonight, which I really encourage you to remain and see, it's called Lions Love (... and Lies)—it's actually the subtitle. It’s a work from 1968, which takes Varda’s superimposition of documentary and narrative to its furthest and most radical extreme. This is Agnès’ Hollywood film. And it's an extended meditation on stardom, on cinema and history, and on the city of Los Angeles. So definitely stay for Lions Love. It's a film that rarely screens. It's a major work and criminally under appreciated. I'll say no more now because I'd like to call Agnès up to the podium. We're going to have an extended Q&A afterwards. So please stay for that. And now, with no further ado, I give you Agnès Varda.

[APPLAUSE]

Agnès Varda  4:28 

You know, the first day, Haden welcomed me with one kiss, I told him that in France, we have to do two. So today he improved, he gave me two kisses.

[LAUGHTER]

Very good, but don't go to three kisses tomorrow, because I'm here every day. You must be tired of seeing me. And each time it starts again, you know, legendary Agnès, and career, please, please, please. I'm not the legend. I'm here. Here and now.

So the film you're about to see is a film in which I put a very intense intention to be with that person, Cléo, from the minute the film starts to the end. This “five to seven” is a French expression for people [to] meet in the afternoon to make love, so there is a glimpse to supposedly daring French people, but this is not from 5:00 to 7:00, this is from 5:00 to 6:30.

[LAUGHTER]

But in the story—in the 90-minute story—without live Cléo, you see, you notice that the minute we see her, not only the time of the story, which is 90 minutes, but the geography of the story is exact, which means when she goes out if she has twenty steps to reach this place, from one place to another, we have the twenty steps. When in cinema we are used to ellipse the time. I mean like, you take a luggage and then you are on a train—you accept that you don't have to see to buy the ticket and go on the dock, on the quai.

Cinema movement is made of skipping time, all the time. And that was an experiment in which I didn't want to cheat the time, to cheat the geography. When she takes a taxi, the taxi going from Rue de Rivoli to Vavin, this is the right exact itinerary of the taxi. So that seems very realistic, what I said, but now inside that realistic time and geography we have to feel that Cléo feels that time differently, because subjectively she's afraid (that, you'll see in the story). And she's afraid she's under pressure. And she meets somebody who also is under pressure. So it's a specific thing I did in ‘61, wishing to work on something which is the material of film itself, which is time, duration, and geography and topography. So, I hope you enjoy the film. I see you later for Q and A.

[APPLAUSE]

Haden Guest  7:38 

And just a reminder to please turn off all cell phones and refrain from playing with electronic devices. Thank you. 

[APPLAUSE]

Haden Guest  8:05 

Please join me in welcoming back Agnès Varda.

[APPLAUSE]

Agnès Varda  8:14

Thank you.

Haden Guest  8:18 

Great. So, maybe I'll just start, Agnès, with a question for you before we turn it over to the audience. You were the one woman director really working in these early years with the group that would become known as the Nouvelle Vague. I was wondering, in what ways was this film, Cléo, intended or thought of by you as a feminist or political work in terms of its conception?

Agnès Varda  8:50 

I didn't think of that at all. What is political is that there were the war in Algeria and that the guys going there were not all agreeing to go there, like it happened later in Vietnam, like it happens in Iraq, and they had to be there, and then they were on leave and they didn't feel like going back again. And they were naturally afraid of dying, and I would say even dying for a cause they didn't believe in. So on that level it is political that he said that he was not so happy to go back. But who would be happy to go back to the war?

I mean, in terms of feminist, there is something feminist in it if you want to see it like that way. You know, exactly in the middle of the film—after 45 minutes—she gets mad, she gets rid of her wig, gets rid of her déshabille beautiful, and put a little straight black dress, and she goes out. And the way it is built, in the first part she's defined as being looked at. Like she's looked [at] by the people, she’s looked [at by] the men in the street. Her kind of governess maid looks at her, the woman in the shop, and even the way that Michel Legrand (Michel in the story, Bob) and the other one, they look at her as a doll. Beautiful doll, not being able to sing, she's described as being looked at. From the moment she goes in the street, she's the one looking at things. And there she sees the people in the street, the one who swallows frogs, and in the coffee shop where she goes, she puts on her own record and nobody listened to it and she started to look at people—their conversation. The same way she goes to see her friend, [who] was [a] model, and she looks at that girl, that friend—she listened to what the girl has to say. And the same way, another day, I think she would have just pushed that soldier saying, “Okay, [don’t] get close. Don't speak to me”. And because she’s different, you know, she looks at him, she speaks to him, she listened to what he has to say.

So on that level, I always defined feminism as starting to look at other people and not being a self, woman, you know. So, on that level, you can say so, but it's like an under subject. This is not the subject—it’s more the way she feels her fear, and how the subjectivity of her feelings makes the time be different. Some pieces of the time are narrow and sometimes she has the time. And the way she said to the soldier, “we have so little time” she sits and then she says, “we have a lot of time.” I think that's the way our feelings go from [one] impression to another one. So that was a perception of time. That was mostly for me, the subject, and on that level I’m very different of the other people that have been called the New Wave. It’s a general name for films made in that time, but I think it's not a school, it's not common goals or aims. Every of these filmmakers, you know, was doing his thing. And as much as I love Jacques Demy, my concern was never the same that he had. I didn't have the same as Truffaut, and people I even love, and adore, and admire, including Godard. Our films are very different and my always films were based on structure a lot. Structuring a story, structuring the time—that was my way of working.

Haden Guest  13:03 

Here you also had the structure of Cléo’s walk through Paris—how was that conceived, your decision to walk through particular neighborhoods?

Agnès Varda  13:17 

Well, I found the places first and—like the house that she's in—I had to find a studio that we could rent, you know, and I wanted it to be near Vavin, because I wanted her to go to a cafe like Le Dôme. So we started from that, but then I wanted her to cross town, to describe Paris in a way. That's why I chose the Rue de Rivoli on the other side of the river to have the storyteller [fortune teller]. It's a very crowded street and also I wanted to think to communicate, because I didn’t make setups you know. I really had a shop of hats, and on the corner there was something like [UNKNOWN]—you know like these shops for mourning, these shops for enterrement, burial. It was the cafe that I loved a lot called Ça va ça vient. It goes, it went—what is it?

Haden Guest  14:23

It comes and goes.

Agnes Varda  14:24

It comes and goes. And so I've been around with my assistant—we were trying to find things being joined like the cafe, the [UNKNOWN] and the magasin chapeau and then the taxi, that. So we looked around you know to find places that you could have one, like one neighborhood once and then the taxi crosses town. And I had noticed in the street that if she takes the Rue Guénégaud—which is a real way of taking—you have all these antiques, you have masks, and you will go through the School of Beaux-Arts—fine arts school—in which they do always, you know, feasts and costumes and stuff like this. So it was organized that that would be places where the real places, the real shops, would be used. I could have made a shop with [UNKNOWN] or flowers. No. I like the idea that we have to find in a real city what fits the story.

Then on the DVD that I made in France, I think they took the bonus here (I say one bonus, many boni), but one of the boni is I asked William Glam who was a DP, very good one, but he's a very good motorcycle man. And I said I want you to go, in very high speed, the real itinerary of Cléo’s that he could see that it's the real one. So on a Sunday morning, around 4:30 in the summertime, he took his moto and I was waiting because he did like, deux cent cinq kilomètres par heure you know like, [REVVING ENGINE SOUND] like a crazy man because it [was] early early, you know he went all the red lights, cross them you know, and arrived at the house of Cléo where we began, then started again with the [UNKNOWN] —the Parc Montsouris, and directly to the hospital and he did, I think, less than seven minutes to do the whole thing.

[LAUGHTER]

So, but it was just to prove—and there is also a map in the DVD that shows the real itinerary of Cléo. I was very, not proud, but I mean, happy to have decided was a real thing that was not cheated. When in a lot of film, because it's okay with film, you are here, then next to that, and then you know, you're in a cafe, which is two hours from the place. That's the game in films you can make believe whatever, you know they’re shooting Romania because it's cheap, and then they make believe it's Berlin, and shoot in other places. So in that one it's a specific case. Maybe it's only one like this that really is a specific itinerary that can be believed. But maybe it's not important. It was important for me.

Haden Guest  17:28 

Let's take some questions from the audience. We do have audience mics if you wait for one to be passed to you.

Audience  17:40 

My question is, how did you get the idea to embed the silent film within this film? What did that symbolize?

Agnès Varda  17:54 

Oh, you see, I was afraid that the story of Cléo would bore the people—that they would say “oh my god, she’s still walking and walking, and nothing is happening.”

[LAUGHTER]

And I thought, because I noticed that in every film after the third quarter, there was a kind of fall you know, before the fifth, cinquième, there is somewhere in the film, in a film somewhere here, there is sometimes, or just gets a little tired, or there is a hole, or maybe the story doesn't hold together, so I thought I should do something to distract them, you know?

[LAUGHTER]

And I thought if I bring Cléo and her friend to a booth, I could show a film. And at that point, I thought I should ask all my friends and we all went to that bridge, which is all broken now because the neighborhood is totally changed. The bridge was called McDonald, not Janet McDonald, not the McDonald with hamburgers, but McDonald, because of I don't know what, maybe a General or something. And there was a bridge with another bridge where you could see the train in the water. I thought it was a nice place. So I decided on that and one of my reasons was—a personal reason—we were very friendly with Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina at a time together and Jacques and me were seeing them a lot. And Godard would never leave his dark glasses.

[LAUGHTER]

But now they’re okay, they’re half dark but at the time they were black, totally black, very dark. And I was pissed with that. And I said, I have to find a way to make him quit his glasses and see his eyes because he has beautiful eyes, you know. So I invented that stupid story that he had glasses, dark glasses, make him see everything dark and when he get them out he sees the truth which is clear and beautiful. Anna Karina is not a black woman. It's not a burial, but it's an ambulance, etc. So, it's maybe a little story. I made it up and they all came very generously, Anna and Jean-Luc, but also Eddie Constantine showed up and Brialy, Sami Frey, and the sailor that was in Lola, Alan Scott. And so they all came. Oh, évidemment, Yevs Robert, Daniele Delorme is selling the handkerchief, she's selling the flowers. I made it up in a minute, so they all came—we did it in one day—we had to because they came and they had to leave. They were so nice to do it—so, so generous. At that time we could do things like this or just come in and—Beauregard, the producer, is playing also the one who drives the ambulance and the one who drives the funerary car. He does both. He has a lot of work.

Haden Guest  21:09 

Next question, right here in the back.

Agnès Varda  21:13 

But to finish, it does make a distraction to the case of Cléo. And when we come back to her, and the minute she goes down the stairs and breaks a mirror, her fear comes back stronger than before even. You have forgotten about that and it comes back like strong in her feelings and strong in her impressions that I hope it worked.

Audience  21:38

Well, my question is related to mirrors, because, of course, there were so many mirrors in Les plages d'Agnès and there are many mirrors in Cléo de 5 à 7. But it seems to me that the mirrors are different in the two films. Could you talk about that?

Agnès Varda  21:56

Sure. Between ‘61 and 2008, I was allowed to change a little. Now the mirrors in Cléo are, as I said before, the mirror of the beginning of the self narcissism of Cléo. She's a beautiful woman by the way, Corinne Marchand is a beautiful woman. So, she sees herself as beautiful. Everybody sees her as beautiful, you know. Now in the second part the broken mirror is something, it's supposed to be bad luck. And you know when she comes out of the house, just before the man who swallows frogs, she sees herself in the mirror in the street and says “ah stupid face with a stupid hat.” I mean, she started to not see herself as an object of pleasure, of seeing herself. And then the broken mirror is—

My mother was very superstitious. She is the one who told me that you cannot put a hat on the bed, you cannot wear something new on Tuesday, and a broken mirror is bad luck. So that's why she speaks about that. She said “don't do that in a new dress or something.” Is that a word, superstition? Well it’s part of the fear. You know it’s stupid but it's what it is. Some people are afraid of what is supposed to be bad luck or something. So the mirror is totally different when I use it in Les plages d'Agnès, as I said before, it was a metaphor about starting supposedly a self portrait and actually turning the mirror toward other people and, and trying to have them be in the mirror, and not me.

Haden Guest  23:38 

In the very back there's a question.

Audience  23:43 

There were two sequences in your film, which reminded me very strongly of a later film by Antonioni actually—Blow Up—the scene where the art students come in and surround the cab, and later when she walks by herself into the park, and there's just the sound of the brook—it's perhaps a little silly—but I wonder if he ever acknowledged either an influence or an homage to those sequences in your film.

Agnès Varda  24:15 

Is Blow Up before my film or after?

Audience  24:17

It’s after.

Agnès Varda  24:18

So he was impressed?

Audience  24:20 

Yes.

[Laughter]

That's what I mean, and did he acknowledge any influence or—

Agnès Varda  24:26 

I met Antonioni many times and he was a very strange, very serious man—not really inclined to laugh and make bad jokes, like I like to do.

[Laughter]

But I admire his film and I think at the time L’Avventura did a big effect. So did—no the one in London, that one you spoke about—Blow Up. I mean, he really invented—Red Desert—and while he was really trying to bring the art of films into an artist universe that was his. I think he did beautifully in that category, if I say so, of his films. Oh, I met him. I liked his film. But he’s not like the pal you go out and have a beer, you know.

Haden Guest  25:22 

Other questions? Over here.

Audience  25:25 

And what's the significance of the African masks and also the silent film and the black woman in that, and just the underlying discussion of Algiers, are they connected?

Agnès Varda and Haden Guest  25:38 

[Barely audible whispers explaining question]

Agnès Varda  25:46  

Where is a black woman?

Haden Guest  25:48 

Which black woman? Oh, in the silent film.

Agnes Varda  25:54 

This is not a Black by the way. This is a woman who we painted in black like in the early films about Blacks. No, it's because of the black glasses of Godard. Everything had to be black. It has nothing to do with politics or colonization, it was just black. Everything was black and when he got rid of glasses, then the woman became Anna Karina, who was blonde in this film. The Black mask, well, they are in that street, Guénégaud, you know, and I thought again, you could see this box every day and not be impressed and say, “oh beautiful African art,” but one day you feel afraid. They speak differently to you. We know that when we have a specific feeling everything turns to explain or comfort, or at contrary, attack you.

You know if you have somebody going in an ambulance, and in that day you will see 10 ambulances and another day you will not even notice them. So I wanted the feeling, I wanted to explain that because she's afraid, almost ordinary views become frightening for her and it's obvious when you are emotional on something, the view of things that you could see another day, you know. Okay, she passes by the shop called Bonne Sante, good health, you know I didn't make up the shop but I had her pass by and the camera went up like this, because that day—it's a shop she knows, next to her door—but that day that title hits her. So it's the same way the Black mask, the mask of Africa I mean, frightened her, the same way these guys playing around the Beaux Arts, the fine art school. It's a joke, you know, to do this and this out the window, but it frightens her. She cannot take things normally that day.

Audience  28:10 

I'd like to ask you about the end of the movie. It's so surprising and unexpected.

Agnès Varda  28:17

Well first it was a mistake because I don't know why they put back the Cléo from 5 to 7 sign at the end. It shouldn’t be there, it should be really further on the reel just to help the projectionist. It’s supposed to be—you know I hate the end credit even though I did it in the Plages, but I think I hate end credits. I like a film to stop and just be a film. They're supposed to walk. She says, “I feel that I'm not so afraid, I feel some happiness-kind of feeling.” They walk like this, they look at each other so, and the music “da da de da de da da” and then once sound was gone and you got that title, but nothing more was happening. They’re just like this, just suddenly like time is suspended. And this is the end. I don't like the word end, and I don't like something written at the end. So you will miss the thing. But it is abrupt and I like an abrupt end because then you stay with yourself and you feel, “oh, oh this is it.”

[Laughter]

Haden Guest  29:22 

There's a question down here in the front.

Audience  29:31 

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your working method and [inaudible] the documentary style of someone shooting on the street, and your work with your DP, while also working obviously with fiction.

Haden Guest  29:42 

Let me just repeat the question so everyone can hear. He’s asking you to comment on your experience working in documentary.

Audience  29:51

You want me to say it again?

Agnes Varda  29:55 

The DP was Jean Rabier, who had done already—I don't know, I mean I can't remember if it was the first time I worked with him. But later he made The Umbrellas of Cherbourg with Jacques Demy and he had been working with Chabrol. He is one of the DPs of the New Wave, to say, to use the word. Because I've been doing documentaries, even before Cléo, and I did after. It's always trying to capture something, as I said the other day, that I wouldn't miss. But the difference is that I met this man who swallows frogs—let's say I saw them. And I thought it would be nice to have it on film. So we did ask a man who did that to be on that corner near her house, but the method of filming him is documentary, the same way I did ask a man that I had noticed, who has a knife like this, and crosses his arm, that I had seen somewhere. We hired him to be at place de [unknown], so that would be on her way.

So it's at the same time filming these things as documentary, but it is set up. It is organized further for the meaning of the story I wanted her to be—I spoke that in my little lecture the other day—because I wanted her to realize the way she comes out of her place. As I said, now she's looking at things and she can see the demand, make this to make money. That's his job to make money by swallowing and vomiting. And this is something disgusting. And in the same time, it's just a normal job for that man. I think Cléo should meet [those] kind of things in the street to make her believe that life around her is very different from what she used to look at, and what she feels.

So this is true that it has a little texture of documentary, even though I follow Cléo in a very fictionesque way and style, but when we went into the cafe—the cafe Le Dôme—I wanted her to notice so many people, different ones speaking about art, and the one is expecting somebody, somebody makes a gossip. I want her to feel the humanity of other people, like a category of other people. But half of them were extras that we asked to be there and half of them were really in the cafe. So you know, it's a mixture. Like in the first cafe, the one I liked so much—Ça va ça vient—it comes and goes. In that cafe—which was a real cafe, the waiters are true, the people behind the—everybody is true, but a couple that I asked to come.

So, you know at that time we could. It's more difficult now. You know, at that time, you could shoot in a real place and just say to the people a sign, you know, “we're filming, if you mind let us know, but if it's okay with you, let us film”. Which now is so difficult. Now you're supposed to have only extras, organized, paid, you know, union, etc. But it's sometimes using some of the documentary technique to feel good about where we are exactly where it is and then bring some elements that I needed for the story I needed. Especially I needed in the first cafe to have another couple discussing while she's telling a story. While her governess tells a story to the waiter. So she's just totally mixed up into two stories that she doesn't listen to one or the other. She's just afraid, she turns to the mirror, and to come back to your question, the mirror has broken and she sees her face in two pieces. The same way you have that in L'opéra-mouffe, a short I made, in which some old women are totally broken by the mirror. And then working on my next show, my next installation is also using that to do portraits of people broken by the difference of two mirrors and losing the exact shape. So mirrors can be very treacherous and perverse.

Audience  34:27 

So, I've always loved your films because they document what's seeable and what's perceivable on the outside, but also there's so much interior metabolizing your experience in so much to me, it's emotional and psychological. And I'm curious if you were interested in psychoanalysis or psychotherapy. Were people in your circle interested in Lacan or, you know, what was popular at the time and how it influenced anything, if at all?

Agnès Varda  35:00 

I'm interested in it because it's part of life. Part of the way our civilization now is holding things, but I’ve not been through that. I spoke with two or three times a psychoanalyst including asking questions, eventually advice, but I never went through the process. And I'm not so much interested in that. Maybe I could use it and take advantage of it…“oh, pain.” I don't know. But I think it's—the way I work, I let so much go out of—

I don't know what it is, you know, sometimes I speak about, I don't know how it's translated. There was a book by Groddeck called Le livre du ça—The book of—I don't know—ça. What is that ça? That's this? I don't know. It must be a famous book here too. How is it named?

Haden Guest  36:14 

It? It.

Agnès Varda  36:16 

I don't know. In French it's called Le livre du ça. It's something you don't know what it is. And sometimes I feel when I work that there is something in me that works. I don't know exactly. I don't analyze. I don't ask. But I know there is like your work inside, inner work that decides sometimes, as if I don’t know why but I’ll do it. And I don't ask why and from where it's coming. So it's a way of saying that I try to let go. Free association, mixing memories and surprises. Mixing the everyday texture with things. I don't know what it means. Sometimes I make sequences I don't know why I make. Especially in Les plages d'Agnès. Then in the editing room, I try to make them work. Still not really knowing why I added this and decided that. Even though I'm very organized. I agree that there is a part in creation that I’m ignorant of. It just builds something that I don't know.

So is that what you mean? In your question? Even though I'm not going through psychoanalysis in a very official—well, I never worked—

Audience  37:39

[Inaudible]

Agnès Varda  37:40 

Excuse me?

Audience  37:41

[Inaudible]

Agnès Varda  37:44 

Yes, yes. The Surrealism that I met when I was younger, and read and saw—it freed my mind, and the second one that freed me—that when we came to California in ‘67, as I said the other day, it was so different civilization, so different subculture, but I understood that. Just let it go and we'll see, and then organize, and then structure, and then make it, you know, make it work. But creative potions, I don't know from where they come.

Sometimes people say, why did you make that film? Sometimes they say, oh, was it a very personal experience? Well, so I say about Cléo I never was tall, I never was blonde and never had the cancer. So it's not like autobiographies. But I could see things around me and went to investigate and I was touched by being afraid. I don't have to be afraid myself to express the fright and the fear of having cancer or dying. So it's, we have to get out of the idea that an artist just expresses things he has known or felt or understood. I mean, it's just like you have to be like a leaf in the wind and get the wind to push you there and there and that's part of the work even though I work seriously.

Haden Guest  39:22 

I think that'll be the last question then because we need to get ready for the second film tonight, Lions Love, which I encourage you to stay for. We'll need to clear the theater if you're staying for Lions Love, you can leave things on the seat.

[APPLAUSE]

Haden Guest  41:27

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Harvard Film Archive. My name is Haden Guest, and I'm the director. I want to thank you for coming and I want to welcome Agnès Varda for another screening of one of her great films. This—Lions Love—being one of her most underappreciated films, and under-recognized. In a way of introduction we're gonna have a little conversation beforehand about this film. There won't be a Q&A afterwards. But I just want to thank the numerous individuals and institutions that made this series possible, beginning with our friends at the French Cultural Services at the Consul General of France here—Consulate General in Boston, François Gauthier, the console himself, Brigitte Bouvier and Eric Jausseran, also our friends in the Visual Environmental Studies Department. On the third floor of this building, the Sert Gallery, there's something quite extraordinary going on, which was in fact the impetus for this retrospective and this is the first exhibition of a major video installation by Agnès Les Veuves de Noirmoutier, The Widows of Noirmoutier, and this is something you absolutely must see. So please, it's up through mid-April and I encourage you to see this very important and marvelous work. And now, Agnès, let’s talk a little bit about Lions Love. You knew Los Angeles, you'd been to Los Angeles earlier, how did this—and you got to know the city—but here you made, I think, one of the most indelible and sort of insightful films of this period about this city that's so difficult to map, and so difficult, I think, to understand, but you do something quite unbelievable.

Agnès Varda  43:17 

Yeah. It's also one of my less known films. And, you know, there is a half room tonight. It also proves that it's a film that doesn’t seem to be important or has not been catched as one of my films. It's like a special thing. And it is so special. I was in the States, this is in ‘67, and I was impressed. I was really impressed of what was happening there, the hippie time. All the people around you know. And I'd been meeting Andy Warhol in his Factory in New York, and he had introduced me to the people around him, these actors and Viva. I had seen the film that they had made with Viva. I don't remember if he—‘67—Nude Restaurant was made and Lonesome Cowboy, and all these scenes. I don't know if it's before or after we met. At the time, there was also a play that was very famous and very radical and very subversive called Hair. The writers of this play, Gerome Ragni and Jim Rado, they were acting in the play and you know, it was a scandal because they were naked, they were throwing their draft cards and putting fire. I mean, all these things was happening there and I was impressed. And I had in mind to do something about this world, like a hippie film, a hippie Hollywoodian film. That's what I had in mind. So I thought of a trio conjugal—how could I say that?

Haden Guest  45:04

A love triangle?

Agnès Varda  45:05

But I mean, yes, living together as three persons. That was part of the scene.

Haden Guest  45:09

Ménage à trois?

Agnès Varda  45:10

Ménage à trois makes it dirty.

[LAUGHTER]

I mean it was more, you know, more natural. And as I wanted these guys, when I called them lions, because I thought they were people—there was so much hair at the time, not only the play, but everyone had hair, you know, it was the beginning of the afro. That was the beginning hair, and then girls have hair all over, blonde where you know, you shouldn't cut your hair. I mean, it was something about—so I thought I should have these people like lions. I must say I did ask Jim Morrison to be one of the guys and he was coming to our plays, Jacques Demy and mine, and he said, “no, I have a project for myself. I want to make film. I don't want to be actor in somebody else's film. Sorry, sorry.” And then I thought of these two guys, Rado and Ragni. I thought, okay, they are the guys if they come together, they could be the film. And I did ask Viva. There is a funny story because I was at Andy Warhol’s when he introduced me to Viva and I told Andy that I wanted her to play in my film. And he said, [IMITATING WARHOL’S VOICE] “Oh, Viva, you know, you should, you should really do her films. She’s great. But you know, that film Cléo from 5 to 7, it's great. But if I had done it, I would have filmed it between 5:00 and 7:00.”

[LAUGHTER]

He was doing these real-time films, you know. And Viva maybe followed his advice, or maybe just thought it was nice to have a role. And I must say, you'll see she's a beauty, she's total beauty. She was a beauty for her age. She's well photographed, you know she looks like a real star—and hair again.

So there was something also I remember I met at the time was The Beard was a play of [inaudable] and that play was also making a big noise. It was the love of Harlow and Billy the Kid and was full of, you know, words. So I use all this. I asked permission to use a little piece of that play and have these—but I tried to exercise my imagination. How could it be something related to stardom. So they all wanted to be stars, but on their own conditions. They were ready to be stars, but they're not ready. You know Viva says, “if I could be the new Garbo.” Okay fine, but she was not ready to do what Garbo was, you know, obeying the studio, she wanted to do it her way. So you will see her naked half of the time. They want to eat what they want. And they want to film themselves, very narcissistic, the three of them.

And I remember that I thought about stardom and stardom is close-ups. I've even heard some stars I don't want to name, that we're counting on the contract. If they had 85 close-ups, they would go in the editing room to check, you know, they got the 85 close-ups they deserve. So I thought this is fake, but they would ask for close-up. So in the film, you'll see they will do that, like this. I don't know. Now it's today, up [CLAPS TWICE] tak tak, and so here comes a close-up and to end the close-up, up [CLAPS TWICE]. So the editing allows us to do it and obviously, this is not true again between documentary and fiction—we made up when they would ask for the close-up. But they do ask for close-ups and we film close-ups when they ask. I did another thing about the sound you know, the sound man comes in, checks the sound in the room. It's self cinema in a way because it says clearly that it is cinema. And it says clearly that the method to work with them was difficult because they were, okay, they were high all the time, and difficult to handle.

[LAUGHTER]

So was the crew, and just with the smoke, with the smell, I was high too, just with the smell of everybody.

[LAUGHTER]

It was like, the whole thing was like this. But you see, they were unable to learn a text. So what I decided was—no, that's where they were—they were wonderful but free. So, about each scene I would say, what if you improvise. So endlessly, because they weren’t very bright, you know and we had to tape, we will listen to what they would say about the scene. Then I had a woman with me, Lynne Littman, who became a director and a good director, she has done [?Holocaust?] and other things. So Lynne was my assistant at the time, she would take the tape, type it, totally type, then I would have to increase things that I wanted them to say, because to make the story go little by little to the end. So I would use some of their words [and] some of mine. Make a page of the scene then half an hour before the shooting, I will give them the page, they would read it twice and then get back to me. So what they said was more or less what I had organized with their words, my words and intention. Since we're unable to do two takes if we had to redo it, I shot with three cameras. Three 35mm cameras, so I could match, because there was no way to ask them to redo it the same. They would redo it, but differently. So we did sometimes two takes, they were totally different—that's fine with me. You know, that was the game. We all accepted the game. And the other thing was that she, Viva was, you know, really, sometimes wonderful, sometimes difficult.

We had found these vintage dresses here and there, you know, special costume. And one day she had a beautiful green sort of classy dress, and she had a scene around the swimming pool. Oh, and then she threw the—comment dites? 

Haden Guest  52:13

She shredded it.

Agnès Varda  52:16

She shredded it, that was it, I had to just do another scene with another dress, because the thing was I had to adapt myself. And I love the idea that—I have nothing against the way they behaved, you know, they were just their own, their own actors, and still it follows because the subject is how could they become adult and famous.

So about famous they had little to do because they knew nobody, I mean as a character. An adult, you see they try a lot of things. Sometimes they try to be mystic. So they have like St. Augustine, they try to read St. Augustine to do contemplation. Once they think that maybe with children, you become an adult. So, they borrow children to see how they behave, to spend time that day with them and then Viva says, “ah, they just want french fries and ketchup.” You know, so at the end, they give the children pills, you know, to just put them to sleep.

[LAUGHTER]

So it's in the same time—it is true that children are a way to become adults you know. So it's the film is not so much a comedy that’s also related to truth and experience and [UNKNOWN] one after another and they have that. You'll see the scene, they see a film, Lost Horizon that becomes a kind of dream you know, utopia about lost horizons. And meanwhile, meanwhile, there is a character coming in town. This is Shirley Clarke. We actually acted by Shirley Clarke herself and she's a director coming from New York. You know, the big battle between New York, and by the way New York has contempt of Los Angeles. And she comes to Los Angeles because she may work in a studio, which was the truth. Shirley was invited to come and make screenplays and make something. And in the story she tries you know, and obviously it doesn't work because she’s too much different, you know. And in a way if she tries, and it's a kind of another myself in a way, because I also tried to deal with the studio. I had almost a deal and then it fell through—what is the word?—because of final cut, because of stories. But, so in the story, she comes with a white heart, wonderful Shirley, and she stays with them. And there is another one coming, Carlos Clarens, that I miss a lot because he passed away, but he was a very nice friend, knowing a lot about the history of Los Angeles.

At some point the film tells the birth of Hollywood from an orange grove to a big studio. So the film goes from my impression about Hollywood to this trio trying to, in the same time to get along together the three of them, and become famous. I think the film, I tried to make it as free as the life was there when we went. And so in cinema, it means a radical film because there is no way to be free else if you don't go out of the way you're supposed to tell a story to film. And at the end there is a strange scene because obviously I asked him to do tableau vivant because they do some, they imitate. I asked him to imitate some Picasso drawings of the ‘36 and also a Magritte, you know, I try to bring always my love for painting to enter in a film. And at the end, I was questioning myself, at the end, what is it? What is cinema, a head on the screen? So at the end, I asked them to do monologues about just being a head on the screen—you see Viva pushes the thing to the truth, just a head, you know, just as face.

Haden Guest  56:20

Her screen tests.

Agnès Varda  56:23

Like a screen test, endless screen test, because this is what is cinema. Be there, you know, be real, or are we real or unreal, you see at some point they say, is art imitating reality or reality imitating art? And that's the question that the film raises because it's out of reality, but it also tells about all these people came to Hollywood to try to make it, all the streets, the city of Los Angeles, the studio. This is, you know, Henri Langlois, who was running the French Cinematheque said, “keep the leftover of your film, because it's a fiction film, but it's maybe the best documentary about Los Angeles because it's the fake joins the truth at some point.” Oui, oui?

Haden Guest  57:10 

That's perfect.

Agnès Varda  57:12

He says it's perfect. I can go.

[LAUGHTER]

Have a nice evening.

Haden Guest  57:16

Thank you, Agnès.

[APPLAUSE]

Haden Guest  57:21 

And please turn off all cell phones and other electronic devices. Thank you

[APPLAUSE]

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