Responding to Globalization

Responding to Globalization:The Evolution of Agnès Varda

Kelley Conway

Long before Luc Besson shot ¥ifih Element (1997) in English, and longbefore the squabble over whether Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Un long dimanchede fiançailles (A Very Long Engagement [2004]) was really a French filmor a Warner Brothers' film, the "national" in French national cinema wascomplicated. And yet a quick glance at the course offerings of most filmdepartments will tell us that the discipline of Film Studies persists in em-ploying a national cinema model when conceptualizing non-Hollywoodcinema. In fact, French cinema has been global from its inception, if wethink of globalizafion as the "increasing speed, ease, and extent with whichcapital, goods, services, technologies, people, culfiares, information, andideas now cross borders" (Gordon and Meunier 5). Indeed, throughoutthe history of French film, we can find examples of films, filmmakers,and business models that challenge a unified nofion of nafional cinema.

The crossing of national borders, whether in terms of production,distribution or exhibition, occurred in French cinema early on in the his-tory of the medium. Indeed, "in its first decades (prior, say, to World WarI) a primary way that film understood itself was as a medium that couldexpress a new sense of a global identity" (Gurming 11). Following the in-vention in 1895 of the first moving picture camera, the cinématograpite, theLumière brothers began almost immediately sending cameramen aroundthe world to shoot and exhibit films. By 1903, Pathé had opened officesin London, New York and Moscow (Millar 35). Hollywood's ParamountPictures set up shop in the Joinville Studios in Paris from 1929-31 andmade multiple-language films (Danan). During the 1930s and the 1940s,Jean Renoir, Jacques Tourneur, Julien Duvivier, Maurice Chevalier, SimoneSimon and Charles Boyer all worked in Hollywood. New Wave directorssuch as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut were adept at the interna-fional promofion of their work, traveling to film fesfivals around the world.

Most obviously, perhaps, films regularly bear the influence of filmsmade in other countries. French cinema—and indeed, cinema traditionsaround the world—absorbed many of the norms of classical Hollywoodcinema. More specifically, the influence of German cinematographers on1930s French film has been well documented. Another, more auteur-spedñc

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example of fhe transnational loop of aesthetic influence can be found inJean-Pierre Melville's crime films, which manifest both American andFrench influences, and, in turn, exerted influence on American indepen-dent film director Quentin Tarantino and on Hong Kong / Hollywood di-rector John Woo. Thus, phenomena such as fhe mobility of directors, cast,and crew and the transnational characteristics of style and genre have longchallenged the notion of French cinema as something confined to France.

It seems sensible to think of globalizafion's impact on French cinemaless as a phenomenon of fhe last twenty years, than as something thatebbs and flows in its intensity. French cinema in the 1950s, for example,was particularly marked by globalization, which manifested itself in theemergence of infernational film festivals (Schwartz). An intenstificationof European co-productions occurred in the 1960s (Bergfelder). Mostwould agree, however, that globalization's impact on the film industryas a whole intensified again starting in the 1980s, and that the effects offhis can be seen notably in the rise of the Hollwyood blockbuster, withits skyrocketing production and marketing budgets, its saturation re-lease patterns, and the expansion of the multiplex. This recent wave ofglobalization has presented profound challenges to the film industries ofsmall nafions such as France, which struggle to remain viable in the faceof competition from Hollywood films.

Understanding globalization's large-scale impact on the film in-dustry is certainly crucial, but globalization is not a homogeneous, top-down force. Filmmakers, industries and policy makers in small nationsrespond in a variety of ways to the pressures of globalization (Michael).Moreover, transnational filmmaking often has strictly economic motives,but it can also serve to promote solidarity, community and a sense of be-longing (Hjorf). To explore fully the variety of responses to globalization,we need to look closely at individual filmmakers' work and their careertrajectories. Filmmakers are acted upon by the forces of globalizafion, butthey also act. They respond to production opportunities, learn new skills,take up new tools and make rhetorical interventions in their films andinterviews. This essay will focus on the work of one French filmmaker,Agnès Varda, who has responded to the pressures and the possibilities ofglobalizafion throughout her career in a variety of ways. Varda's incessantmobility, her political commitments, her embrace of digital tools, and hershifting identity in the cultural marketplace reveal her engagement withglobalization on multiple levels.

If one index fo globalization is the intensification of fhe movemenf ofhuman beings across national borders, Agnès Varda's career was "global"as early as the late 1950s. Varda's curiosity about other cultures was earlyon an important part of her arfistic persona, and indeed a major inspirafion

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for her work.' In 1957, she traveled to China as a professional photogra-pher, documenting the lives of shopkeepers, laborers, and children. Thissort of trip was not typical for French women in the 1950s, and challengesthe standard version of cosmopolitanism in which it is a question ofl'homme du monde (the man of the world [Tomlinson 196]). In 1962, by thenan internafionally known filmmaker thanks to Cleo de 5 à7 (Cleo From5 to 7 [1962]), Varda traveled to Cuba to explore the post-Revolutionaryenvironment. While there, she took more than 3000 sfill images of artists,soldiers, and people dancing in the streets. Back in France, she used thesesfills as the source material for Salut les cubains (1963), her affecfionateportrait of Cuba. Later she would take other, longer trips abroad.

While living in Los Angeles from 1967 to 1969, Varda immersedherself in the avant-garde and political culture of the era, making UncleYanco, a short documentary about her artist uncle living on a houseboatin Sausalito, and Black Panthers, a documentary about the Black Powermovement in Oakland. Varda's most ambitious work of this period, thefiction feature Lions Love (and Lies) (1969), showcases important figuresfrom the New York avant-garde, including experimental filmmaker ShirleyClarke, Warhol collaborator Viva, and the co-authors of the musical Hair,Gerome Ragni and James Rado. The film is set in Los Angeles and focuseson the playful interactions of a trio of lovers and aspiring actors played byViva, Ragni and Rado. They have meandering conversations, swim nudein the pool of their rented home, watch television, and perform lengthy,improvised, monologues, often in direct address to the camera. The filmalso chronicles the frustrated attempts of their visifing filmmaker friend,played by Shirley Clarke, to get a film deal in Hollywood that will allowher final cut. Finally, the film features authentic television reports of thedeath of Robert Kennedy and the shooting of Andy Warhol. The film isthus deeply embedded in its cultural time and place, representing themediated nature of political and cultural life in the United States in thelate 1960s, creating protagonists who are resolutely uninterested in con-ventional coupling and parenting, experimenting with improvisafionalacting techniques, and revealing a Hollywood at odds with a youngergenerafion of directors. In the early 1980s, Varda would again live andwork in Los Angeles, making Mur Murs (1980), a feature documentaryabout Chicano street murals and the more personal Documenteur (1981),a fiction feature about a lonely single mother living with her son in amulti-cultural, poor Los Angeles. Whether traveling to international filmfestivals to promote the films she made in France or living abroad andcreating new work that engages profoundly with a foreign culture, Vardawas an active participant in a globalized film culture long before the waveof globalization that began in the 1980s.

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Varda's early and mid-career explorations of foreign cultures aremerely one way in which she can be seen as a filmmaker engaged inthe positive mechanisms of globalization. Varda has also engaged withglobalization by featuring multi-cultural communities in her films. Her1975 documentary. Daguerréotypes, explores the shops on the modeststreet in the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris where she has lived since1951, the rue Daguerre. In one sense, the film could not be more "local/'providing as it does poignant portraits of Varda's neighbors. The filmconsists largely of vignettes about couples who manage small, traditionalbusinesses: a butcher shop, a hair salon, a bakery, and, most movingly, theBlue Thistle, a notions shop run by an elderly man and his melancholic,nearly mute wife. In making this film, Varda worked against her historyas a world traveler by setting herself a constraint: she would film only asfar as her ninety-meter electrical cord would stretch, which would bothallow her to use the electricity from her home and stay close to her son,Mathieu Demy, then a toddler. And yet the film moves beyond the "lo-cal" in several ways. First, it was funded by ZDF, a German televisionstation, and had an international existence, traveling to festivals all overthe world and being shown on PBS in the U.S. Moreover, the ethnicityand the geographic origins of the shopkeepers themselves stretch ournotion of the "local" and the "Parisian," in that these people are revealedto have migrated from the provinces or to have come from former Frenchcolonies—Tunisia and Algeria.

When Varda updated her portrait of her neighborhood in 2005 inthe short documentary. Rue Daguerre in 2005, created for the DVD releaseof Daguerréotypes, she emphasizes the neighborhood's increasingly inter-national quality in the voiceover:

It all began in 1975 because of the Blue Thistle shop window and thecouple who ran it... .Thirty years on, they're gone, of course. For a longtime, a nice photo gallery was there. Now there's an Iraqi-Lebanesecafé. Hookahs have replaced the buttons and the flasks.

We also learn that a Thai take-out occupies a former wedding dress shop,while the café on the corner is run by Mélie, an Algerian-French woman.Varda herself is directly implicated in the neighborhood's transformafions:an old hardware store now serves as her editing room and DVD boufique.

In 2000, Varda made another film that addresses thematically anaspect of globalization. Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I)explores contemporary practices of scavenging—borne of necessity, thrift,political conviction or aesthetic pleasure. One of the film's most powerfulrhetorical devices is its implicit criticism of waste created by the large-scaleproduction of food. The film is thus linked to an emerging subgenre ofdocumentaries that are critical of global food culture, such as Super Size

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Me (Morgan Spurlock [2004]), Darwin's Nightmare (Hubert Sauper [2004]),Food, Inc. (Robert Kenner [2008]) and Dive! (Jeremy Seifert [2010]).

Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, despite its connections to the worldwideconversation about the ethics of food production, was, once again, quitelocal in its origins. The film was initially inspired by something Vardawitnessed weekly at the open-air food market in her neighborhood: el-derly people bending over to pick up discarded produce after the closeof the market. These experiences led to the documentary, which weavestogether interviews with farmers, unemployed people, vineyard own-ers, judges, activists, and artists. The film celebrates the resourcefulnessof those who glean out of necessity or intelligence, while criticizing theexistence of waste and those landowners who will not share their bounty.

Varda frames the ethical issues of waste most pointedly in a seriesof interviews with potato farmers, potato gleaners, and a celebrated chef.At an industrial farm, we learn that potatoes are sold in supermarketsin half-kilo or kilo-sized containers, and that the potatoes must be of aspecific size. Any outsized or merely idiosyncratic potatoes are pluckedfrom the conveyor belt, loaded onto a tractor, and discarded. Emphasiz-ing the enormity of the waste, Varda shows big trucks dumping tonsof potatoes in a field, where, we learn, they will quickly turn green andbecome inedible. Although there is apparently no system in place for alert-ing people about the imminent dumping of potatoes, Varda finds a fewgleaners picking through the mounds of potatoes, and interviews them.The gleaning of discarded food is shown to be essential for people likeClaude, a homeless man who struggles with alcoholism, but for others itis simply a good business practice.

Following the poignant scene with Claude, we meet a chef, theyoungest person ever awarded two Michelin stars for a restaurant. He,too, is a gleaner, picking herbs and fruit for his restaurant. When Vardaquestions why a chef who can charge enormous sums for a meal engagesin gleaning, he responds that he likes to know where his food comes fromand that he would rather pick his own herbs than buy herbs transportedby truck from Italy and refrigerated for three weeks. Thus, in a few briefscenes, the film has introduced us to farmers who participate directly ina system that produces enormous waste, poor people who supplementtheir diets with discarded food, and a chef who gleans because he caresabout fresh, locally produced products.

This is one way, then, in which Varda is participating in trendsbrought about by globalization: her film's subject and its rhetorical stancealign her with her peers who use film to critique the impact of globaliza-tion on the environment or on vulnerable populations. Les Glaneurs et laglaneuse not only references the forces of globalization, but participated

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in the globalized network of film festivals, winning awards in France,Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Montreal, New York, Prague, Santa Barbara,and Venice. The film generated an enormous amount of positive press forVarda, restoring her visibility and critical reputation after several yearsof relative inactivity and the 1995 failure of Les cent et une nuits (OneHundred and One Nights), the fiction feature Varda made in honor ofcinema's first century.

Another way in which Varda's work is inflected by the forces ofglobalization is her embrace of new technology. Since 2000, she has useda digital video camera and nonlinear editing in the creation of two the-atrically released feature films. Les Claneurs et la glaneuse (2000) and LesPlages d'Agnès (Agnès's Beaches [2008]]. Not only has she used digitaltechnology, but she explicitly celebrates it in Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse.Posing as a rural gleaner in front of Jules Breton's massive painting "LaGlaneuse" (The Gleaner [1877]), Varda drops the sheaf of wheat she holdsand picks up her new digital video camera, extolling its virtues in verse:"Ces nouvelles petites caméras, elles sont numériques, fantasfiques, ellespermettent des effets stroboscopiques, des effets narcissiques et mêmehyper-réalistiques" (These new little cameras are digital, they permitstrobe effects, narcissism, and hyper-realism). After demonstrating thestrobe effect and showing us a page from the camera's user's manual,Varda turns the small camera on herself, documenting her aging handsand the gray roots of her hair. Later in the film, she provides an extremeclose-up of her wrinkled hands, marveling at their strangeness. The sizeof the camera, she implies, allows her both a kind of infimacy and distancefrom her own body and its aging process. Likewise, the tiny camera Vardaused when working alone or with a sound recorder on the road createdan intimacy with her subjects that encouraged disclosure, allowing herto approach homeless people, young people, and the elderly.

The choice to use digital video has also had a profound impact onVarda's mode of production. First, digital video has permitted Varda toconfinue to make feature films. She created two feature-length works dur-ing a decade in which she probably would have found it impossible toraise the funds to shoot a feature on 35mm. The average cost of a Frenchfilm in 2008, the year Varda made Les Plages d'Agnès, was 5.4 million euros,or approximately 7 million dollars (European Audiovisual Observatory ).̂In contrast, the budget for Les Plages d'Agnès was 1.9 million euros.^ Evenmore startling was the miniscule budget for Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse:300,000 euros. While Varda has enjoyed immense respect and visibilityin France, due notably to the critical and commercial success of Cleo de 5à 7 and Sans toit ni loi, (Vagabond [1985]), it has never been easy for herto raise funds to make films. She usually manages to get a small portion

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of her budgets from the Centre National de la Cinématographie, fromFrench felevision and cable companies, regional funding agencies, and faxcredits, but she must often invest a substantial portion of her own funds.

Not only are her relatively small budgets indicative of Varda'splace in the ecosystem of French cinema, but the number of viewers herfilms attract indicates the modesty of her mode of production. In 2008,the year that she released Les Plages d'Agnès, the most successful film inFrance was Bienvenue chez les Ch'Tits (Welcome to the Sticks), which at-tracted a record 20,413,165 viewers in France (Simsi)."* Les Plages d'Agnès,in contrast, attracted 239,761 French viewers. Even in comparison to otherauteur films, the box office performance of Varda's films is usually mod-est. Art house successes released in 2008 include Cédric Klapisch's Paris,which attracted 1,743,592 French viewers and Laurent Cantet's Entre lesmurs (The Class), which attracted 1,617,601 French viewers and won theGolden Palms award at Cannes. In 2000, the year that Varda releasedLes Glaneurs et la glaneuse, the most successful film in France was Taxi 2,which attracted 10,239,830 French viewers. In contrast. Les Glaneurs et laglaneuse attracted 193,390 French viewers. Other art house successes from2000 include Agnès Jaoui's Le Goût des autres (The Taste of Others), whichattracted 3,799,215 French viewers and won a César for "Best Film." Larsvon Trier's Dancer in the Dark (2000) attracted 1,178,930 French viewersand won the Golden Palms at Cannes. Varda is thus not only competingwith American blockbusters; she is competing with French blockbustersand other global auteur films. That Varda continues to make feafure filmsat all in this difficult climate is due not only to her considerable resilienceand energy, but also to the lower costs of digifal filmmaking.

The use of digital video has also altered Varda's working methods.Instead of shooting an enure film in the customary twelve weeks, Varda'swork rhythm now consists of periods of traveling and shooting, then re-turning home to edit, and then setting off again to shoot some more. Forthe making of The Gleaners and I, Varda traveled around France off and onfor close to year, finding her subjects and filming them intermittently. Forthe making of Les Plages d'Agnès, Varda traveled over the course of twoyears to Brussels, Sète, Noirmoutier and Los Angeles in order to gathermaterial. This new flexibility and elongation of her production schedulereached its apogee with the making of her five-parf television seriesAgnès de ci de là Varda (Agnès Here and There Varda [2011]), filmed overthe course of several years in France, Germany, the U.S., Portugal, Brazil,Belgium, Sweden, Italy, Switzerland, Russia, and Mexico.

Digital technology has been important to Varda in another way: herproduction company has been able to work in an arfisanal fashion fo creafeunusually elaborate DVD supplements concerning her work and the films

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of her late husband Jacques Demy. When Varda released the DVD of Sanstoit ni loi in 2003, she included the typical supplements, such as interviewswith cast and crew, but also engaged in something rather rare: a rigorousstylistic analysis of her own film. In a twelve-minute supplement entitledMusique et Travellings (Music and Dolly Shots), Varda interviews the film'scomposer, but also isolates the twelve lateral tracking shots placed inter-mittently in Sans toit ni loi, explains why she created this pattern, and howthe shots connect to one another via the repetition of graphic elements.

The DVD of Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse contains an even more elabo-rate supplement: a 60-minute follow-up to the film Deux ans après (TwoYears Later [2002]). This film is a sequel, consisting largely of encounterswith people we met in Les Glaneurs, notably François, the volunteer literacytutor. Here, Varda affably registers Francois's objection to the autobio-graphical element in Les Glaneurs and then documents his participationin the Paris marathon. But the DVD supplement also offers Varda thechance to create new material and, in an unusual gesture, to express hergratitude to her fans. She marvels at the beautiful letters and art sent toher by admirers, and even visits a few of them and interviews them abouttheir own gleaning practices—reminding us that sometimes films reallyare a "conversafion" between artist and spectator.

Such supplements tend not to have a theatrical release, but aretreated as new works by the press. Deux ans après, notably, was reviewedpositively and extensively in the French press. It is hard to say whethersuch practices extend significantly the commercial life of her featurefilms, but they certainly sustain Varda's presence in the Parisian cul-tural marketplace and in that of international art cinema. Varda's useof digital video tools has helped extend her working life well beyondthe traditional length of a filmmaker's career, all without the benefit ofenormous production and marketing budgets. Theatrical distribution isincreasingly challenging for filmmakers who work on a small scale, butdigital techjnology makes it easier to continue to create new work and tomaintain a presence in the media.

In another surprising response to globalization's challenges, after 50years of photography and filmmaking, Varda began making multi-mediainstallations that combine digital video, 35mm film, photographs, andsculptural elements. In 2003 she was invited to create an installafion forthe Venice Biennale. Drawing on her imagery in Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse,her installation consisted of a triptych of three huge video screens, featur-ing abstract images of potatoes in all stages of decomposition. She thenscattered thousands of potatoes on the floor of the installation and, in acharacteristic display of whimsy and shrewdness, strolled the halls of the

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Biennale wearing a potato costume that recites, in her voice, the varietiesof potato—thus drawing attention to herself and her show.

Her most ambitious installation work occurred in 2006, when theCartier Foundation invited Varda to create and exhibit a suite of installa-tions that filled the entire space of Jean Nouvel's beautiful glass structurein the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris.^ The show, entitled L'île et elle(The Island and Her, also a pun on "him and her") was devoted to theisland of Noirmoutier, where Varda and Demy shared a vacation home for30 years before his death in 1990. The exhibition's evocations of the islandare a rich mélange of formal experimentation, compelling narrative, andautobiography. Ping Pong, Tong et Gamping, for example, contains an arrayof precisely arranged bright plastic objects: beach pails, shovels, plasticbags, and flip flops, as well as video images of beach activities projectedon a plastic raft and an inner-tube. In sharp contrast. Les Veuves de Noir-moutier (The Widows of Noirmoutier) offers 14 individual video portraitsof widows, while in the middle of the small screens, a large 35mm movingimage shows the women walking slowly on a beach, circling a dining roomtable. In order to hear the stories, viewers must move from chair to chairand put on headphones. The installation offers intense emotion, aestheticpleasure, and an ethnographic investigation of widowhood on the island,including that of Varda, who occupies one of the fourteen screens. L'île etelle is Varda's most varied and ambitious series of experiments with theproliferation of the frame and the manipulation of space and fime. Withthe multi-media installation, Varda has clearly found a way to continueto experiment and to reach new audiences.

These and the many exhibitions that followed catapulted Vardainto a new cultural marketplace: that of international art fairs, museums,and galleries.* She is, of course, not the only contemporary independentfilmmaker to cross over into the space of the museum and art gallery.Chantai Akerman, David Lynch, and Jean-Luc Godard have all hadimportant exhibitions recently in spaces traditionally reserved for thefine arts. And contemporary artists such as Matthew Barney and SteveMcQueen have made the opposite journey, from the realm of installationsto feature filmmaking. This is not to say that Varda has entered a Utopianspace in which art-making is miraculously free from the demands of themarketplace. On the contrary, by entering the realm of the museum, theart gallery, and the art fair, the film director must still grapple with theforces of globalization—this fime in the form of the speculative economyof the art market (Pantenburg 86). But creafing installations has enhancedVarda's standing. L'île et elle was a huge critical success for Varda; it led tothe commissioning of Quelques veuves de Noirmoutier (Some Widows from

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Noirmoutier), a documentary based on the installation, and broadcast onFrance's Channel 5, and to the purchase of her installations by major insfi-tufions, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Carfier Foundafion.

The creation of installations has also generated ideas and workingmethods that found their way into Varda's 2008 feature film. Les Plagesd'Agnès.^ This autobiographical documentary combines photographs, filmclips, interviews, and the staging of fantasy scenes. In one such stagedscene, we watch Varda navigate a little boat from Sète to Paris, taking ustoward her young adulthood years. In another, trapeze artists perform onthe beach in Sète, fulfilling a long-held fantasy of Varda's and introducingthe theme of sexuality. This diverse array of material results in a complexcollage structure. The film jumps from one source to another and movesbackward and forward through time, emphasizing discontinuity, playful-ness, and joy. Certainly, Varda was no stranger to stylistic and narrativeexperimentation before the emergence of digital tools, but Les Plagesd'Agnès reveals the influence of her work in multi-media installations,with its layered compositions and digital effects.

Varda's experimentation with digital tools and the autobiographi-cal impulse that we see in Les Plages d'Agités persists in her most recentproject, a five-part documentary series, Agnès de ci de là Varda (AgnèsHere and There Varda [2011]) made for the cable channel ARTE. The fivedocumentaries last 45 minutes each and document Varda's exploration ofcontemporary art. Varda weaves together documentafion of her own exhi-bitions and brings us into contact with the work of other artists, includingChris Marker, Manoel de Oliveira, Annette Messager, Christian Boltanski,Miquel Baracelo, and Pierre Soulages. The series combines elements ofher traditional documentary practice—her propensity for the travelogue,her portraits of outsiders and artists, her essayistic and autobiographicalinterventions—with her newfound fluency in the language of mulfi-mediainstallations and the culture of the contemporary art world.

The series is full of interviews of famous artists, but Varda is justas interested in people we might not know, such as Belgian artist KikieCrêvecoeur, an engraver who works with erasers to create large abstractworks, or the woman who makes the best mole in Mexico City. When aSwedish woman arrives at Varda's hotel room in Stockholm to interviewher upon the release of Les Plages d'Agnès, Varda ends up doing a mini-documentary on the journalist's state of baldness that includes excerptsfrom the journalist's own documentary about her condifion. That ges-ture—the sympathetic, improvised portrait of the intriguing, idiosyncraficperson—has long been a part of Varda's documentary film practice (thinkof Uncle Yanco or the shopkeepers on her street in Daguerréotypes). Indeed,

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this scene is reminiscent of the moment in Les Plages d'Agnès when Varda'svisit to her childhood home in Brussels results not in the expected tripdown memory lane, but in a portrait of the current inhabitant of the house,a collector of model trains.

One element of Varda's documentary practice reflected in all of hermajor works since 2000, but foregrounded in Agnès de ci et de là Varda, is thetheme of travel. Each installment of the documentary series begins withthe same prologue: the pruning of a tree in the courtyard of her home onthe rue Daguerre in Paris. The locale, emphasized once again, is Varda'shome base, where she comes to edit what she has gleaned from her travels.But we do not spend much fime here. Instead, we accompany Varda onher travels around the world. This prologue sets up poetically the idea ofregenerafion (the tree quickly reconstitutes itself), which of course is anapt metaphor for Varda's entire life trajectory, but it also foregrounds fheproductive interchange between the local and the global. There is alwaysa "here" in her work, but also, there is always a "there." Varda addressesthis dynamic throughout the series.

More interesting still, in terms of the series' links to globalization,is Varda's staging of her explicif engagement with the positive forces ofglobalization. In Episode Four, we visit the 10* Biermale of ContemporaryArt in Lyon, France. Varda shows us the work of Yang Jiechang, a Chinesearfist whose Underground Flowers installation features thousands of meficu-lously reproduced human bones made of painted porcelain. We see thework of Takahiro Iwasaki, a Japanese arfist whose Ou t of Disorder (Complex)consists of thread drawn from heaps of ordinary bath towels scatteredon the floor to form tiny, delicate communication towers. A collective ofChinese artists. The Yangjian Group, exhibits The Pine Garden - as Fierceas a Tiger, a happening in which men prepare and eat food, drink beerand bef on soccer games that run on a live video feed. We also see Varda'sCabane aux portraits (Porf rait Shack), which consists of portraits of men andwomen from Noirmoutier placed inside a corrugated metal structure, andLa Cabane de cinéma (Cinema Shack), a structure made of recycled stripsof celluloid taken from a print of Les Créatures (The Creafures), Varda's1966 commercial failure sfarring French film icons Catherine Deneuveand Michel Piccoli. At a certain moment, the Chinese group wanders overto explore Varda's shack installations. She wonders aloud, in voiceover,"What do they think of the images of Catherine Deneuve and MichelPiccoli?" and reports that the translator has just murmured the words"New Wave." When the men enter the La Cabane de cinéma, she muses,"Here, Chinese men from the Guangdong region west of Canton gaze atthe women of Noirmoufier Island." She has watched the Chinese artists

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at work and now she watches them look at her own work. The scene is asubtle foregrounding of the process and value of looking at work madeelsewhere and, in turn, having one's work seen by others.

Varda once again emphasizes the friendly confrontation of differentperspectives that global exchange can elicit in a chat with the Biennale'scurator, Hou Hanru. She comments: "There are many artists from theOrient here." Hou replies:

One could say that. It depends how you look at it, from what angle. Ifyou're in Tokyo, America is the Orient. If you're in Paris, in that case, theOrient is probably Japan, China, etc. We're in Lyon. So it's true. We havequite a few artists who come from east of Lyon, Including Strasbourg,Germany, etc. It is indeed all a bit mixed up but it accurately reflectsthe concept of the world today. A mixed-up world.

Hou thus articulates the contingency of geography, reminding Varda andher viewers that one is "eastern" only from certain perspectives.

Such moments, handled with understatement and restraint, balanceanother, more negafive, view of the forces of globalization seen a bit later inthe same episode, when Varda introduces us to her video La Mer Méditer-ranée, avec deux retunn (The Mediterranean Sea, with Two Rs and One N).Made for an installation called La Cabane de pécheur (Fisherman's Shack)the video features a barrage of disturbing images of riots, refugees, anddead soldiers. There is also a stylized figure of a beached whale "angryat the state of the world." In response to these images, she says, "I flee toSète" (the fishing town in the south of France where Varda's family livedduring WWII). For Varda, the town is synonymous with old friends, goodmemories, and even professional landmarks; it is here that Varda shother first film. La Pointe Courte (1955). In its entirety, the series suggeststhat cross-cultural exchange and the periodic return to our hometowns,authentic or adopted, can mitigate the negative effects of globalization.

Agnès Varda's work since 2000, like globalization itself, is both oldand new, a phenomenon of continuity and change. Varda has alwaystraveled, but now her movements around the world structure her work.She has often inserted herself into her films in subtle ways—via thevoiceover {Sans toit ni loi ) , the cameo {Lions Love) or characterization(the single mother living in Los Angeles in Documenteur), but now herworks of the 2000s are overtly autobiographical. Likewise, she has alwaysembraced aesthefic experimentation, but her enthusiasm for digital toolshas introduced a new spontaneity and intimacy in her shooting methods,and a kaleidoscopic, collage effect in the work itself. She has always beenimmersed in fine arts (as a young woman she studied art history at theÉcole du Louvre, and has often been inspired by paintings in the makingof her films), but now she exhibits her installations in galleries, museums.

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Globalization and the Evolution of Agnès Varda Ltl

and art fairs around the world. The emergence of digital technology andVarda's expansion into the world of fine arts has shifted her profile from,as she often says, "vieille cinéaste à jeune plasticienne" (old filmmaker toyoung artist). Whether offering a critique of globalization or benefifingfrom the technological and promotional possibilities associated with it,Varda has adapted to the pressures and the possibilities of globalizationin polifically active and aesthetically audacious ways.

In pondering the impact of globalization on French cinema, theexample of Varda reminds us that we must avoid the notion that the na-tion is always the most relevant filter through which to understand film.We should also challenge the negative view of globalizafion that holdsthat blockbusters have snuffed out all culturally specific, independentand auteur cinema. Filmmakers working in small nations making smallbudget films cannot compete economically with big budget films (whetherAmerican or French), but we must remain attuned to the opportunifiesbrought about by globalization that help filmmakers achieve and retaintheir visibility in the cultural arena.

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Notes1. Varda is not, of course, the only French filmmaker to travel widely, to make films in

countries other than France and to seek meaningful exchanges with people from othercultures. Chris Marker, Varda's close friend, is likewise known as an intellectually curi-ous, playful, politically engaged traveler, as seen in his films such as Letter from Siberia(1957) and The Koumiku Mystery (1967).

2. When one considers that the average budget of an American film in 2008 was $107 mil-lion (including production and marketing), the ongoing visibility of a filmmaker likeAgnès Varda in the global film market seems even more startling.

3. Cecilia Rose, e-mail correspondence, December 10,2012. Cecilia Rose was the productionsupervisor for Les Plages d'Agnès and currently works for Ciné-Tamaris in the realms ofdistribution, production, and restoration.

4. All of my attendance figures come from Simon Simsi, Ciné-Passions, Le guide chiffré ducinéma en France (Paris: Dixit, 2012).

5. For more detail on this exhibifion, see Kelley Conway, "The New Wave in the Museum:Varda, Godard, and the Multi-Media Installation," Contemporary French Civilization 32-2(2008): 195-217.

6. Other important installations created by Varda include Les Justes (The Just), commis-sioned by the government of President Jacques Chirac and shown at the Panthéon inhonor of those French people who provided aid to Jews in France during World War II.LA MER... ETSETERA (The Sea, etcetera ([2009]) consisted of eight new installations foran exhibition in Sète, France. In 2012, Varda created installations for an exhibition at theArt Museum of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing.

7. For more information on Les Plages d'Agnès, see Kelley Conway, "Varda at Work: LesPlages d'Agnès," Studies in French Cinema 10:2 (2010): 125-139.

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122 Kelley Conway

Works CitedConway, Kelley. "The New Wave in the Museum: Varda, Godard and the Multi-Media

Installation." Contemporary French Civilization 43:2 (2008): 195-217.. "Varda at Work: Les Plages d'Agnès." Studies in French Cinema 10:2 (2010): 125-139.

Bergfelder, Tim. International Adventures: German Popular Cinema and European Co-Productionsin the 1960s. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2005.

Danan, Martine. "Hollywood's Hegemonic Strategies: Overcoming French Nationalismwith the Advent of Sound." "Film Europe" and "Film America": Cinema Commerce andCultural Exchange 1920-1929. Ed. Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby. Exeter: Universityof Exeter Press, 1999.

European Audiovisual Observatory. Focus 2008 World Film Market Trends. Strasbourg:Council of Europe, 2008.

Gordon, Phillip and Sophie Meunier. The French Challenge: Adapting to Globalization. Wash-ington, DC: Brookings Institute, 2001.

Gunning, Tom. "Early Cinema as Global Cinema: The Encyclopedic Ambition." Early Cin-ema and the "National. " Ed. R. Abel, G. Bertellini, and R. King. New Barnet: John Libbey,2008.11-16.

Hjort, Mette. "On the Plurality of Cinematic Transnationalism." World Cinemas, TransnationalPerspectives. Ed. Natasa Durovicova and Kathleen Newman. New York and London:Routledge, 2010.12-33.

Michael, Charlie. "French Blockbusters: Globalization, National Cinema and the Discoursesof 'Cultural Diversity.'" Diss. University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2010.

Millar, Michelle. "A Re-Examination of Key Milestones in the Development of the Industry."The French Cinema Book. Ed. M. Temple and M. Witt. London: BFI, 2004.

Pantenburg, Volker "1970 and Beyond: Experimental Cinema and Installation Art." ScreenDynamics: Mapping the Borders o/Cinema. Ed. G. Koch, V. Pantenburg, and S. Rothöhler.Vienna: SYNEMA, 2012. 78-92.

Schwartz, Vanessa. It's So Frenchl Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Simsi, Simon. Ciné-Passion, Le guide chiffré du cinéma en France. Paris: Dixit, 2012.Tomlinson, John. Globalization and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

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