Art and Film!
This new French documentary film made jointly by Agnès Varda (born in 1928) and the photographer and muralist JR (born in 1983), is named “Visages Villages,” meaning “Faces Villages,”. They travel in JR’s van (equipped with a photo booth and a large-format printer) to small towns in France, which are as infused with nostalgia as are American small towns, and which are similarly threatened by the economic and social forces of modern life.
In the movie’s first set of extended encounters, in a former coal-mining town, the filmmakers speak with a woman named Jeanine who’s the lone holdout in a row of miners’ homes that’s soon to be demolished, and then with neighbors from the town who lovingly describe the ways of life that have vanished from the town along with the mining industry. What Varda and JR do with their filmed knowledge is what distinguishes it from the familiar round of investigative documentaries: a headshot of Jeanine, taken in the van, is blown up dozens of feet high and pasted by JR and his crew to the wall of her house, magnifying and honoring her on a scale usually reserved for public and historic figures.
The filmmakers’ meetings throughout France result in similar large-scale projects that are based on the work of JR (whom Raffi Khatchadourian profiled for The New Yorker, in 2011) but are in keeping with Varda’s explorations and encounters in previous personal-documentary work, including “Daguerréotypes,” “The Gleaners and I,” and “The Beaches of Agnès.” 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.
