The history of film, if you look at it a certain way, is full of movements that have influenced the type of cinema being made. One such movement would be the modernist period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Film during this period was unique in its cinematic techniques and topics explored, and one of the greatest filmmakers who worked with this form of cinema was Agnes Varda. My first exposure to Varda’s work was through Cleo from 9 to 7, wherein I solely looked at it as a modernist text. When I grew attached to Varda’s filmmaking and explored more of her work, I grew connected to the filmmaker and her cinematic endeavours. However, the documentary-style reserves a separate section within the auteur, an element of their capabilities I had not previously explored and was excited to discover.
Agnes Varda is a legend not only for her visual techniques but also for the wide range of thematic exploration she undertakes. Black Panthers (1968) was one of the many films by Varda that was restored at a later date. The opening of the film itself sets the tone for the manner in which the shots are placed within each sequence: an insert or a few inserts that create a cue (either auditory or visual), after which the subject of that shot is further discussed.
The opening of Black Panthers starts with an auditory cue in the form of a song playing over which shots of an area that is not entirely revealed to us is shown. After a few minutes, this series of inserts extends onto the setting of the primary sequence of the film: a concert organised in support of Huey P. Newton’s release from prison. What Varda accomplishes right off the bat is a representation of black people and their protests which steps away from the kind in white media outlets. The convenient way for those in power to portray political demonstrations, especially those led by black people, is to paint them violent. Although there have been well-informed depictions of movements and their subsequent protests, Varda, by placing the story in a non-violent set-up that almost reflects the celebration of their unity, makes the documentary immediately appealing since she carefully and surely establishes the position she places herself in within this movement.
Although following a rather serious matter, the camera does not shy away from the joyous atmosphere of the gathering, with the crowd singing and dancing with a raised fist. The Panthers march amongst this crowd, complete with their erect posture and standard outfit of the black leather jacket which symbolised the tough urban ghettoes from which they came, the beret which signified their identification with the revolutionary programs of the Chicago Brown Berets, and the sunglasses that defied the gaze of the onlookers.
The expository type of documentary filmmaking includes a voice-over narration that guides most of the story and provides an informative understanding of all the things that cannot be shown visually. However, multiple aspects of this type of storytelling make the viewer feel disconnected from the story. The use of ‘they’ in this narration, for instance, to refer to the black people, drastically separates the narrator from the film and indicates a non-black person is leading a story about black people, which makes the narration style slightly off-putting.
While the voice-over narration alienates the topic of discussion, the visuals do otherwise. The visual narration, although shot from an outsider's perspective, considering the filmmaker, Agnes Varda, is non-black, gives the viewers an in-depth inner understanding of the functioning of political rallies. When the visuals of the different people involved in the political rally end, the film truly feels disconnected. The first interview of Bill Brent, captain of the Black Panther Party, created a segway for many possibilities for the people involved to guide the latter parts of the story rather than the narrator. However, the documentary makers decided not to take that opportunity and presented the viewers with only an introduction of this person, which felt highly misplaced since the topic was brought up and almost immediately dropped.
What the documentary fails to showcase in its narration style succeeds in the shot taking. The focus of each shot is usually on a singular person, paying great attention to each person, close-ups of their faces, almost seeming like the film is making prolonged eye contact with its subject, acknowledges the importance of each person in a movement. The documentary points at the continued controversial and challenging relationship of the Oakland Police Department with the black community by telling the stories of black people who have been subjected to police brutality. While the inserts of the people are a wonderful addition to the story, the random shots of posters and presumably the ghetto point at a blatant lack of archival footage to evoke the appropriate emotions of outrage and empathy from the audience towards the appropriate emotions the people who have been wronged.
Although a concert, Agnes Varda does her best not to make the entire set-up look pretty in terms of cinematography and camera work. She films the orators of this gathering in lateral medium close up shots or from somewhere below the stage where they stand. Varda blends into the background of the discussion but still engages with the story and makes her physical presence known through the movements of a hand-held camera. The documentary picks up, mainly in terms of emotional connection, when footage of an interview with Huey Newton himself is conducted from within the prison. The answers from this conversation carry the entire point of discussion. The narrator and the interviewer’s voices are incredibly similar, if not the same, so a sense of auditory continuity is established. One scene in this sequence that I believe was an excellent creative decision is the inclusion of the books Huey P. Newton was banned from reading during his imprisonment in the protest outside the courthouse for his release.
In making a documentary about a particular incident and trying to make commentary on the entire movement, it is challenging to discern Varda’s focus for the film considering its continually shifting. Regardless, the beauty of the film lies in the camera’s interactions with the different people of the protests. While filming outside the courthouse, Varda cuts to long shots of police officers who have been scrutinising the Panther’s activities from afar with a rather uncomfortable zoom: when some of them stand in the entrance of the courthouse behind glass doors, symbolically delineating space from the activists . Varda visually marks the distant figures of police officers as a hovering threat by zooming in and out of their half-hidden figures, enhancing the state of constant surveillance to which the Panthers are subjected.
Finally, taking the opportunity to guide the stories with the conversations, although creating an inconsistent narration, does develop a connection between the viewer and the story. Essentially it is more appropriate to listen to the program of the movement from a black person or, for that matter, someone who plays an integral role in the Black Panther Party rather than a non-black woman and her voiceover. The film's closing scene introduces a lot of interesting aspects of the movement separate from Huey Newton’s arrest, such as the fight for the exemption of black people from the draft law and the role of women in the military and political sections of the party.
Another film by Agnes Varda I would like to look at is Salut Les Cubains (Hi There, Cubanos). I picked these two films out of an endless list that Varda had created since they indicate a period when people showed resilience in the face of adversaries, particularly in the 1960s. The time period is across the same decade for both the films since it would be more likely that Varda’s style would remain the same, and the differences in them would lie in the way she chooses to create the two stories visually. While it was Huey P. Newton’s arrest in the first film, in this one, it is the aftermath of the overthrowing of the pro-US dictator Fulgencio Batista by Fidel Castro in a post-revolution Cuba, a period in time when rebellion coursed through the culture, a fact reflected in Varda’s pictures.
An interesting characteristic of most of Agnes Varda’s films is that she engages in political discourses wherein she is an outsider. However, unlike other documentaries done in this fashion, Varda doesn’t try to change her position and involve herself in the discussion either. It would be unfortunate not to acknowledge Varda’s incredible ability to explore the curiosities and intimacies of the precarious cultural history through her film.
The photomontage documentary short that is Salut Les Cubains intends to capture the defiant vibrancy of a nation three years after its revolution, 4000 black and white images that observe the energy of the women, workers, artists, students and political revolutionaries. The final 1500 photographs were arranged with an original soundtrack featuring voiceover narration by Varda and actor Michel Piccoli, audio recordings of Fidel Castro, and Afro-Cuban music (in particular, songs by the great Benny More).
The opening scene is in a gallery in 1960s Paris, where the popular image of Cuba has been literally transported. Cuban musicians are performing their instruments and voices, which are rendered culturally inextricable from the images of Fidel’s Cuba for the Parisian audience. In a brilliant manner of meta-cinema, Agnes Varda films the various filmmakers and photographers who are documenting this performance. Varda experiments with a clever combination of the traditional and the modern with her still and moving photography. Similar hybridity in narration is noticed through the dialogue’s male and female voices, weaving together the sensual and the conceptual.
This film is constantly self-aware. It is effortless for the filmmaker to document the story in a way that the new rule is lauded in the process of celebrating revolution and its change in power. However, Varda disallows this through her self-aware and attentive form of cinema. A masculinist body politic is diffused through a playful survey of Cuban beards and the Cuban cigar— “Here’s to seasick revolutionaries! Here’s to romantic revolutionaries!”
The undertones of political fervour are more muted in her shots than the sense of vitality. Socialism and cha-cha-cha is what Varda deems this balance in her work. Varda’s admiration of the proud and poetic beauty of spontaneous street dancing behind the camera is evident in front of it. Agnes Varda creates a rhythmic film by editing her shots meticulously to the joyous and fervent pace of Cuban music, quite literally making her film dance with still images.
The film showcases the everyday, the intimate, the familial and the artisanal of social movements in a poetic form. The liminal space between the personal and the revolutionary is laid bare as Varda presents us with images of the communal made individual: education, artistic expression, agriculture, labour and religion are rendered as an elemental Cuban cloth segmented into animal and human; women, men and children; black, white and mestizo; Spanish, African and French. For better or for worse, the revolution’s paradoxes of difference are brought together under Varda’s curious and affective eye for cultural proximities that transcends cultural boundaries.
Agnes Varda is a brilliant documentary filmmaker with a style that exemplifies the harmonies between political idealism and the eclectic intimacies of image-making.
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