EN
“In 1954, while working as a photographer for theater legend Jean Vilar at the Théâtre National Populaire, Varda returned to her native Sète and shot her first film, La pointe courte. So Varda’s journey in the world began with a trip home, at least the home of her adolescence during the war. From this small Mediterranean fishing village, she launched a career spanning sixty years and counting, one that has never fit smoothly into the conventional categories of French film history. In the 1950s and 1960s, Varda worked in an industry populated almost exclusively by male directors, and, unlike the directors who began their careers as film critics writing for Cahiers du cinéma, Varda was not a voracious cinephile.
[…]
During the summer of 1954, when Varda shot the film, people in the nearby village of Mèze were trying to get the locals expelled from La pointe courte since they had turned their cabins into homes without official permission. This idea of a clash between official and accepted practices and their unauthorised and spontaneous counterparts runs deep into the film’s script. Many of the questions asked in the film actually relate to whether it is acceptable to do certain things, like to catch fish and establish your home where you want to, or to say certain things such as ‘I want to marry you’, or ‘I don’t think our love is what it used to be’. The only difference is that some of these questions manifest themselves in the domestic arena while others do so in the public sphere.”
Delphine Bénézet
Pierre Uytterhoeven: Let’s talk about La pointe courte, that you directed in 1954. Do you still think today that the two themes of the film, treated in such very different styles, can’t be mixed and shouldn’t be?
Agnès Varda: I had a very precise idea when I did La pointe courte and that was to propose two themes that weren’t necessarily contradictory but which, placed side by side, were problems which were mutually exclusive. They were: a couple coming to grips with their relationship and, on the other hand, a village trying to resolve certain problems through a collective process. The film was divided into chapters, so the two themes were never mixed together but I left open the possibility for the spectator to confront them or superpose them. I’ve always thought it was very difficult to integrate one’s private problems with public issues. In Hiroshima, Mon Amour Resnais succeeded beautifully in giving the audience an impression forged from the mixing of these two levels by having the French woman experience a passionate encounter with the Japanese man in Hiroshima. The violence of their encounter resuscitates her memories of her first passion for a German man. In this way the larger social issues are integrated with the private problems of the couple.
But in La pointe courte why did you choose to separate these two problems?
The construction of the film was inspired by Faulkner’s The Wild Palms. If you remember, there’s no connection in the novel between the couple, Charlotte and Harry, and the old ex-con from Mississippi. It was neither allegorical nor symbolic, just a feeling you get from reading which moves back and forth between these two stories. It’s up to the reader to be able to reorganize these feelings. […]
What I hoped to show in La pointe courte was the paralysis of the couple who can’t seem to shake free of their intellectual and emotional problems, and hence can’t manage to think about their affinity to any group. I wanted my audience to understand that there’s no connection between social issues and private problems. Of course, there does exist a level of understanding where these antagonisms disappear. But in La pointe courte, I presented a couple in crisis and not only between themselves, but in terms of their inability to connect with others.
Agnès Varda in conversation with Pierre Uytterhoeven
FR
« La pointe courte ressemble à quelques films récents conçus comme des étude de moeurs. Comme dans Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot, et surtout le Voyage en Italie les notations du réel composent une trame serrée d’un style nouveau ; mais alors que ces films se situent naturellement dans les prolongements du néo-réalisme, La pointe courte, plus apprêté de forme, trouve difficilement place dans l'histoire actuelle du cinéma. Aussi bien les rêveries, les entreprises incertaines que happe l'oubli n’ont rien à voir avec l’histoire. Le film d’Agnès Varda semble sortir de cette préhistoire rêveuse où se gâchent en particulier beaucoup de vies de femme. Il émerge d’un néant, d’un tohu bohu où se mêlent la photographie, la philosophie moderne, les romans de Faulkner, la poésie (il faut lire Le cimetière marin et voir le film pour sentir à quel point la lumière de l’écran et les progrès des images évoquent un élan poétique arraché au même sol : La pointe courte a été tourné près de Sète), le sens plastique et le goût de l’observation, tout et rien contribue à donner à cette oeuvre une signification. »
Annette Raynaud
« La pointe courte est un film miraculeux. Par son existence et par son style […]. C’est un film de femme, je veux dire comme il existe des romans féminins, ce qui est quasiment unique au cinéma. Ensuite, l’auteur a adopté un parti pris paradoxal de stylisation dans le réalisme. Tout est simple et naturel et, en même temps, dépouillé et composé. »
André Bazin
