52 Films by Women Vol 3. 38. VISAGES VILLAGES (Directors: Agnès Varda, JR)
Filmmaking is one of the few professions where there is no retirement age. When French director Agnès Varda started making Visages Villages , a road movie in which she collaborates with artist JR to decorate houses with giant-sized black and white photographs of their occupants, she was eighty-eight years old. Eighty-eight? Crazy! At one point JR asks Agnès to climb the stairs of a tower to better see one of his creations. She gets halfway before stopping in protest. JR may be JR Heartless - pun understandable only to those familiar with a British ‘Yellow Pages’ advert featuring the author of ‘Fly Fishing’ - but he is nothing to compared to JLG; more of him later. Varda is one of the directors who defined the French Nouvelle Vague , the only woman in a boys’ club whose members included François Truffaut, Alain Resnais and Eric Rohmer. She actually made her first feature film, La Pointe Courte , released in 1955, before any of her male contemporaries stood behind a camera, though ...