Agnès Varda will be at FIAF on March 7 to talk about her 1975 documentary, DAGUERRÉOTYPES
CinéSalon: DAGUERRÉOTYPES (Agnès Varda, 1975)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, March 7, $14, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesday nights through March 21
212-355-6100
fiaf.org
On February 28, legendary auteur Agnès Varda was at FIAF for the special talk “Agnès Varda: Visual Artist.” The Belgium-born, France-based Varda, who is eighty-eight, will be back at FIAF on March 7 for the 7:30 screening of her 1975 documentary, Daguerréotypes, after which she will participate in a Q&A with former MoMA curator Laurence Kardish. (The film will also be shown at 4:00; both screenings will be followed by a wine and beer reception.) The eighty-minute work, which only received its official U.S. theatrical release in 2011 at the Maysles Cinema, is an absolutely charming look at Varda’s longtime Parisian community. In the film, 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 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. Daguerréotypes has quite 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 FIAF CinéSalon series “Agnès Varda: Life as Art” continues with Jacqot de Nantes on March 14 and Lola on March 21. Varda fans will also want to check our her gallery show at Blum & Poe, which runs through April 15.
Film Forum is presenting a new 4K restoration of one of the most important and influential — and greatest — works to ever come from Japan. Winner of the Silver Lion for Best Director at the 1953 Venice Film Festival, Kenji Mizoguchi’s seventy-eighth film, Ugetsu, is a dazzling masterpiece steeped in Japanese storytelling tradition, especially ghost lore. Based on two tales by Ueda Akinari and Guy de Maupassant’s “How He Got the Legion of Honor,” Ugetsu unfolds like a scroll painting beginning with the credits, which run over artworks of nature scenes while Fumio Hayasaka’s urgent score starts setting the mood, and continues into the first three shots, pans of the vast countryside leading to Genjurō (Masayuki Mori) loading his cart to sell his pottery in nearby Nagahama, helped by his wife, Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka), clutching their small child, Genichi (Ikio Sawamura). Miyagi’s assistant, Tōbei (Sakae Ozawa), insists on coming along, despite the protestations of his nagging wife, Ohama (Mitsuko Mito), as he is determined to become a samurai even though he is more of a hapless fool. “I need to sell all this before the fighting starts,” Genjurō tells Miyagi, referring to a civil war that is making its way through the land. Tōbei adds, “I swear by the god of war: I’m tired of being poor.” After unexpected success with his wares, Genjurō furiously makes more pottery to sell at another market even as the soldiers are approaching and the rest of the villagers run for their lives. At the second market, an elegant woman, Lady Wakasa (Machiko Kyō), and her nurse, Ukon (Kikue Mōri), ask him to bring a large amount of his merchandise to their mansion. Once he gets there, Lady Wakasa seduces him, and soon Genjurō, Miyagi, Genichi, Tōbei, and Ohama are facing very different fates. 
At the beginning of Miles Joris-Peyrafitte’s compelling feature debut, As You Are, two figures disappear into the woods, and a gunshot is heard. The rest of the film goes back and forth between the videotaped interrogation of the main characters and the events leading up to the shooting, told from multiple points of view. Carefully trying to avoid coming-of-age genre clichés, As You Are is an astute, expertly told story about teen angst by the twenty-three-year-old Joris-Peyrafitte, who cowrote the film with Madison Harrison and composed the score with Patrick Higgins. It’s 1993-94, and Jack (Owen Campbell) is a loner, a friendless high school skateboarder who listens to music (GG Allin, the Melvins, Nirvana) in his room, takes long, solitary bus rides, and lives with his single mother, Karen (Mary Stuart Masterson), in an isolated house in upstate New York. Karen is dating Tom (Scott Cohen), whose own loner son, Mark (Charlie Heaton), hits it off immediately with Jack. They are soon joined by fellow high school outcast Sarah (Amandla Stenberg), as flashbacks show the trio dealing with bullying, drugs, first love, physical abuse, firearms, and sexual identity while Detective Erickson (John Scurti) continues his questioning and the narrative heads toward an ambiguous conclusion.
