Agnès Varda’s charming DAGUERREOTYPES finally gets its official U.S. theatrical release this month at the Maysles Cinema
DAGUERREOTYPES (Agnès Varda, 1975)
Maysles Institute
343 Malcolm X Blvd. between 127th & 128th Sts.
December 12-18, 7:30
212-582-6050
www.mayslesinstitute.org
Livia Bloom’s “Documentary in Bloom” series at the Maysles Cinema usually introduces new nonfiction films, but it has something a little different in store for December: the U.S. theatrical release of a thirty-six-year-old French work. It’s hard to believe that Daguerreotypes, Agnès Varda’s absolutely charming look at her longtime Parisian community, has never had a theatrical run in America, so it is exciting that her wonderful little tale is finally being shown on the big screen. In Daguerreotypes, Varda, who has made such New Wave classics as Cléo de 5 à 7 and Le Bonheur as well as such seminal personal documentaries as The Gleaners and I and The Beaches of Agnès, turns her camera on the people she and husband Jacques Demy lived with along the Rue Daguerre in Paris’s 14th arrondissement. Varda, who also narrates the seventy-five-minute film, primarily stands in the background while capturing local shopkeepers talking about their businesses and how they met their spouses as customers stop by, picking up bread, meat, perfume, and other items. Varda uses a goofy, low-rent magic show as a centerpiece, with many of the characters attending this major cultural event; the magician references the magic of both life and cinema itself, with Varda titling the film not only after the street where she lives but also directly evoking the revolutionary photographic process developed by Louis Daguerre in the 1820s and ’30s. Daguerreotypes will surely have a different impact now than it did back in the mid-1970s, depicting a time that already felt like the past but now feels like a long-forgotten era, when neighbors knew one another and lived as a tight-knit community. The film will be proceeded by the 1965 short Elsa la Rose, a twenty-minute documentary directed by Varda and Raymond Zanchi and narrated by Michel Piccoli that explores the loving relationship between French writers and communists Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet.