Daguerréotypes (Agnès Varda, 1976)

Daguerréotypes

1976 // France // Agnès Varda

Letterboxd (LINK)

Absolutely adorable, Varda points her camera to the neighborhood on the Rue Daguerre, the street where she lives and works, the result is an exalted, picturesque Parisian life consisted of merchants and shopkeepers from middle-aged to old married couple. It’s a glimpse of the time when traditional, artisanal practice still existed and social life was still simple and benign. Partly a documentary, partly a personal memory, the film title references the 19th-century portrait photographs by Louis Daguerre of whom the street was named. The film consists of direct interviews of Varda’s neighbors, including bakers, butchers, tailors, grocers, and driving-instructors, interwoven with a magic show of which the neighbors are the audience as well as the participants.

On occasion, the camera simply exhibits the daily route, the ‘work’, of the neighbor within their shops, with a commentary narration by Varda herself. It’s intimate but peripheral, the film evades any particularly deep examination by singling out a character, instead, it sketches a broad social profile of the working class. It’s implicitly political with deep humanitarian concern. Through the interviews, Varda scrutinizes where her neighbors came from and how they met their significant other. It shows the economic migration from province to the capital, and acknowledges the fact that there’s a large part of their life story the film could never embrace fully.