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Notes from Underground

  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...
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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


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Faces Places (Visages Villages 2017)





"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


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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.














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