_
And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
Hope
To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.--
Erich Fromm
Faces Places (Visages Villages 2017)
Visages Villages
A documentary where the road is the canvas, and every face tells a story. Agnès Varda and JR embark on a journey across rural France, turning the ordinary into the monumental.
"A playful, surprisingly powerful document of an attempt to understand France by looking closely at its people. JR and Varda travel the country, bringing the Inside Outside van with them and talking to people in small hamlets and tiny villages as they seek out good subjects — both human and architectural — for their work."
Agnes Varda is almost 90 years old and she is still making films and this one you should see .
Faces Places (French: Visages Villages) is a 2017 French documentary film directed by Agnès Varda and JR, photographer and street artist. It was screened out of competition at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival where it won the L'Œil d'or award and the Toronto International Film Festival Documentary People’s Choice Award afterwards.
The film is a part of the “Inside Outside Project,” an art initiative in which the accomplished French street artist JR makes enormous portraits of people he meets and then pastes them onto buildings and walls, each of them reaching several stories high.
They travel in JR’s van (equipped with a photo booth and a large-format printer) to small towns in France threatened by the economic and social forces of modern life.
JR’s is a humanist artistic mission; he gets ordinary people to partake in his work, which inevitably delights them. The movie opens with scenes set in various places where, Varda and JR explain in voiceover, they did not meet.Once each describes the others’ work, and their mutual admiration, they’re off in JR’s van.
As they make their way, sometimes merry, sometimes melancholy, a double-portrait of the artists forms. It’s very moving. Varda’s sight, which served her so well so many years, is getting dimmer. At the same time she wonders why JR always wears dark glasses. This habit, she tells him, reminds her of an old friend, Jean-Luc Godard. The resemblance sets up the film’s finale, which is puzzling, heartbreaking, but ultimately celebratory. And wobbles the line between documentary and fiction so strongly that the vibrations will linger in your heart for days afterwards.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/faces-places-2017 
MORE ABOUT FILM
Often affectionately called the "Grandmother of the French New Wave," Agnès Varda was actually its true pioneer. She directed her debut feature, La Pointe Courte, in 1954—years before her male contemporaries like Jean-Luc Godard or François Truffaut released their landmark films.
Varda famously lived "three creative lives," starting as a professional photographer, expanding into a radical fiction and documentary filmmaker, and culminating her later years as an installation artist.
The Concept of Cinécriture
At the heart of Varda’s entire filmography is her self-coined philosophy of cinécriture ("cinema-writing"). To Varda, directing wasn't just choosing a script and casting actors; it was an holistic act akin to a novelist choosing words or a painter choosing brushstrokes. It encompassed the choice of location, the tracking shots, the editing rhythm, the voiceover narration, and the spontaneous reactions to real-world accidents on set. She treated the camera as a fluid extension of her thoughts.
Key Eras of Her Work
1. The Left Bank and Radical Fiction
Unlike the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd (Truffaut, Godard) who were deeply obsessed with classic Hollywood, Varda belonged to the Left Bank cinema faction alongside her husband Jacques Demy, Chris Marker, and Alain Resnais. They were more aligned with literature, modern art, and left-wing politics.
Her fiction films rarely followed classic Hollywood structures:
Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962): Captures a pop singer drifting through Paris in near-exact real time while awaiting the results of a medical biopsy. The film masterfully shifts from treating Cléo as an object to be looked at, to an active observer of the world around her.
Vagabond (1985): A uncompromising, non-sentimental portrait of a fiercely independent young woman freezing to death in winter, told through a pseudo-documentary lens via flashbacks of people who crossed her path.
2. The Tactile Documentaries
As video technology evolved, Varda was among the first veteran directors to embrace lightweight, consumer-grade digital cameras in the early 2000s. It allowed her to strip away huge production crews and achieve a radical intimacy.
The Gleaners and I (2000): A poetic study of modern-day foragers—from rural potato gleaners to urban dumpster divers. Varda mirrors their resourcefulness by using her small camera to "glean" leftover stories and images from society.
Faces Places (2017): A collaborative road-trip documentary with the young muralist JR, driving through rural France to paste massive photographic portraits of overlooked working-class locals onto the architecture of their towns
Essential Filmography
| Film | Type | Core Focus |
| La Pointe Courte (1954) | Fiction / Doc Mix | The juxtaposition of a crumbling marriage with the daily survival struggles of a small Mediterranean fishing village. |
| Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) | Fiction | Existential dread, feminist self-actualization, and the vibrant textures of 1960s Paris. |
| Le Bonheur (1965) | Fiction | A sharp, pastel-colored satirical critique of patriarchal ideas regarding "happiness" and domestic fulfillment. |
| Vagabond (1985) | Fiction | Extreme freedom versus absolute social isolation on the fringes of society. |
| The Gleaners and I (2000) | Documentary | Consumer waste, aging, and finding immense value in things society throws away. |
| The Beaches of Agnès (2008) | Documentary | An imaginative, playful autobiography tracking her life through the beaches that shaped her creative vision. |
"If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes. If we opened me up, we’d find beaches."
— Agnès Varda
Varda’s genius lay in her complete lack of creative snobbery. Whether she was filming a famous movie star, her beloved cats, an aging fisherman, or a heart-shaped potato thrown out by a supermarket, she approached every subject with the exact same level of profound empathy and formal curiosity.
Key Themes
The Power of the Gaze: A recurring motif is the act of seeing. The film addresses Varda's failing eyesight (due to macular degeneration) and JR's refusal to remove his signature dark sunglasses.
Intergenerational Friendship: The chemistry between the 88-year-old Varda and the 33-year-old JR provides the film’s emotional core. Their relationship is marked by playful teasing, mutual respect, and shared curiosity.
Mortality and Memory: As Varda nears the end of her life, the film serves as a reflection on what remains. This is highlighted by a bittersweet attempt to visit her old friend and collaborator, Jean-Luc Godard, and a visit to the grave of photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Art as Community: The film explores how public art can bridge gaps between neighbors and give a voice to those who are often invisible in society.
Major Awards & Nominations:
Academy Awards: Nominated for Best Documentary Feature (making Varda the oldest person ever nominated for a competitive Oscar at the time).
Cannes Film Festival: Winner of the L'Œil d'or (Golden Eye) for Best Documentary.
Toronto International Film Festival: Winner of the People’s Choice Award for Documentaries.
Independent Spirit Awards: Winner of Best Documentary Feature.
