A couple of week’s ago, at City Cinema, I saw Agnès Varda
and JR’s wonderful Faces Places. I’ve
been thinking about it ever since. What a sublime piece of personal filmmaking! It reminds me of Ian Frazier’s work. “You
read an essayist like Frazier primarily for the encounter between his
sensibility and the world,” Carl Rotella says, in his New York Times review of Frazier’s Hogs Wild. Yes, exactly. And that’s what I go to Varda’s films for
– the encounter between her genial, curious, idiosyncratic sensibility and the
world. To quote Richard Brody, “Shot by shot, line by line, moment by moment,
Varda rescues the vitality and the beauty of the incidental, the haphazard, the
easily overlooked—because she fills each detail with the ardent energy of her
own exquisite sensibility” (“What to Stream this Weekend: Seaside Frolics,” newyorker.com,
August 18, 2017).
In Faces Places,
Varda travels with JR in his van (equipped with a photo booth and a
large-format printer), exploring a number of small French towns, talking to various
people (e.g., goat farmers, dockworkers, chemical plant workers). To quote
Brody again, “The subject of Faces Places
is the heroism of daily life, the recognition of the daily labor and struggles
of factory workers, farmers, waitresses, and, for that matter, women over all
whose private roles in sustaining the public lives of their male partners go
largely uncommemorated” (“Agnès Varda and JR’s Faces Places Honors Ordinary People on a Heroic Scale,” newyorker.com,
October 10, 2017). Varga and JR honor the lives of ordinary people, but also
transfigure them, making huge black-and-white murals of their portraits, and
pasting them on arresting surfaces such as railway tank cars, barns, and
towering stacks of shipping containers. In the process, Faces Places magnificently fulfills one of
art’s primary aims – giving the ordinary its beautiful due.
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