‘Daguerréotypes’: how Agnès Varda injects magic into the mundane
Whether she was filming a narrative feature about a tragic love story, celebrating the art of filmmaking through cinematic retrospectives on her life, or immortalising seminal moments in history via documentary, Agnès Varda captured everything with a sense of poeticism. She squeezed every last drop out of her surroundings, utilising her own home, family members and even herself when it came to constructing films, often blurring the lines between fiction and real life.
In 1975, Varda released Daguerréotypes, adjusting her filmmaking practice to suit her needs. She’d given birth to Mathieu Demy just a few years prior, and she wanted to remain close to home for the time being. Thus, she decided to create a film on her doorstep, making the local shopkeepers the subjects of her new documentary. Varda had lived on Rue Daguerre for two decades, finding a home among the butchers, pharmacists, bakers and hairdressers. Threading the metres of wires for her filming equipment through her own letterbox so as not to use her subjects’ electricity, Varda began shooting her portrait of the iconic Parisian street.
Within the film, Varda interviews various shopkeepers about their lives, most of whom are immigrants. These are ordinary people who do the same things every day – cutting meat, fabric or hair, pouring perfumes into bottles or drinks into glasses – yet Varda imbues everything with love, attention and appreciation. These jobs and the working-class people who undertake them are so often undervalued and taken for granted, but Varda is more than aware that without just one of them, the whole ecosystem risks collapsing. The director crafts a vibrant picture of each individual, managing to bring them together in the final third for a magic show.
This magic display acts as a metaphor for Varda’s film – a transformation of the everyday and mundane into something fascinating and celebratory. In fact, Varda seems to suggest that while these jobs appear banal and repetitive, each shop is like its own little world, where new or recurring characters appear every day, stories are shared, and a sense of community is upheld. Many of the shops are run by couples, too, with Varda asking each party about their relationships, many of which spanned decades.
One couple that Varda continually comes back to more than the others is Leance and Marcelle Debrossian, who run the pharmacy. We are first introduced to them when Rosalie, Varda’s teenage daughter, comes in to pick out a perfume for a friend, and Leance asks which bottle she’d like it decanted in. Varda follows this seemingly mundane exchange closely, and we find ourselves invested in their world of glass containers, medicines and cosmetics. Marcelle doesn’t say much, with Varda often turning her camera towards her. She’s a mysterious figure at first, detached from reality and seemingly detached from herself, too.
We soon discover that she’s in the early stages of dementia, yet she still works at the shop every day with her husband, who watches his wife slowly fade away. Varda seems to feel a connection to Marcelle, filming her with care as she looks out the shop window at the rest of the street, not saying a word. In one scene, Varda films the outside of the shops, and as she pans past the pharmacy, Marcelle is standing there like a mannequin in the window, and it’s almost eerie to witness.
Varda’s career-long interest in ageing and time (she also films the clockmakers) is particularly apparent here, foreshadowing her future documentary The Gleaners and I. For the filmmaker, capturing these shops and unique inhabitants freezes a moment in time, one that she knew would eventually transform. In her follow-up documentary, Rue Daguerre in 2005, Varda visits the same shops, and of course, hardly anything is the same, apart from a few familiar faces. Evidently, as Marcelle’s memory began to fade, Varda engaged in an act of preservation.
Varda narrates the documentary, but due to her background as a photographer and a narrative filmmaker, she weaves various techniques throughout Daggerréotypes that keep it engaging and playful. The magic trick scenes are intercut with actions carried out by the shopkeepers, such as the magician touching someone’s hair and then mirroring the hairdressers attending to a customer, emphasising the magic that can be found in the everyday. Varda didn’t shy away from tragedy and social hardships – she typically focused her lens on less privileged groups and political issues – but that didn’t stop her from trying to find minute moments of kindness, connection, happiness or interest wherever she could.
Daggerréotypes is a charming film that marks Varda as one of the most creative and innovative filmmakers who has ever lived. In an industry where women struggled (and still do) to find opportunities as directors, which was even harder if they were mothers, Varda proved that it was possible; you just had to get a little creative. She improvised, looking at the street she called home for inspiration, and made a documentary that endures as a fascinating depiction of 1970s Paris and its eclectic mix of inhabitants.
