Hacker Cinema
Daguerréotypes
1978 · Film · documentary · 80 min
Directed by Agnès Varda
An intimate portrait of the small shops and shopkeepers of the Rue Daguerre in Paris, a picturesque street that has been the filmmaker’s home for more than 50 years.
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I love Varda so I’ll bite.
Off the top of my head, her most HN-relevant movie is The Gleaners and I. In France, there’s a right to glean — to harvest food that will not otherwise be harvested. (Actual French people should help explain that better.) Varda made a movie about gleaners, which covers everything from people living without a home to people making art from found objects to herself.
It’s HN-relevant because finding usefulness in seemingly useless material has the hacker nature. It’s also HN-relevant because she used a new fangled digital camera and it’s absolutely wonderful watching a master director explore what she can do with new technology.
She was always enthused about working with technical constraints. One of her lesser movies, Daguerréotypes, was a documentary about the street she lived on. She was pregnant when she made it, so her limitation was the 300 foot long power cables for her equipment.
Varda is also one of the few directors I know who loves postmortems. Both the movies I mentioned above have sequels revisiting their topics and discussing how the act of making those movies affected the people who were observed. She also revisited her own life with two late career retrospectives, and her husband Jacques Demy’s career with a biopic, a retrospective on his overall life, and a specific retrospective about one of his movies.
She was above all else an observer of life. I recommend her work highly. It’s easily available on the Criterion Channel and much of it is on Kanopy, free with a US library card.