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Documenteur, Agnès Varda’s companion piece and follow-up to her documentary Mur murs, shares with it a filming location and a similarly punning title (a menteur is a liar, in French). But the similarities end there: while Mur murs is a more or less straightforward film that purports to document the murals, the artists who created them, and the effect the pictures have on the neighborhoods surrounding them, Documenteur, which includes shots of some of those same murals and has scenes set in those same neighborhoods, is, by its own admission, “an emotion picture.” Neither pure fictional feature film nor documentary, it’s perhaps best described as a documentary with a fictionalized main character.

Both films were made during Varda’s second sojourn to L.A. from 1979 to 1981. This time, Varda was separated from Jacques Demy, filming Mur murs for French television, and trying in vain to put together financing for an ultimately abandoned film called Maria and the Naked Man. She was charmed by L.A. with its glittering façades and population of dreamers, but felt isolated by its sprawling highway system that encouraged segregation and discouraged community. Feeling adrift and alone after the completion of Mur murs, Varda picked up her camera and, in a sense, turned it on herself to make Documenteur. The autobiographical impulse has always been present in Varda’s filmmaking, but until her recent films it has always been expressed obliquely. Up until 1981 she had made documentaries about her neighborhood, her family, her friends, her political heroes, and her political beliefs. Documenteur is the first Varda film that can be said to be about Varda herself; and yet it is not about her, exactly. It is about a woman named Emilie, separated from her husband in Los Angeles, accompanied by her precocious and inquisitive son Martin (played by Varda’s own son, Mathieu Demy).√Ǭ† But Varda deflects true autobiography by casting not herself but her editor, Sabine Mamou, as Emilie, and making the character not a filmmaker but an assistant to one (represented in the film only by her voice).

If Documenteur feels like a documentary about a fictionalized Varda, it also, at times, feels like a documentary without a subject. Not much happens to Emilie in the film, at least not externally. She takes in some old furniture, giving it new life in a new home (an early glimpse of Varda the gleaner); she does some laundry; she struggles with her son as he learns to sleep alone in his own room; and she types and types and types, apparently working on an endlessly revised script for her boss. Internally, though, Emilie roils with emotion, and this is expressed in the voiceover narration, if one can call it that: it seems more apt to label it an audible, stream-of-consciousness internal monologue. It is poetic and amusingly punning at times, maddeningly close to a private game of word association or list-making at others, but its droning tones are often a good match for the onscreen images of inaction. The overall effect of the sound and the images is to create a convincing portrait of a woman who is, physically and emotionally, just plain stuck.

Documenteur didn’t get a very good reception upon its initial U.S. release as the bottom half of a double bill with Mur murs. After the exuberance of the earlier film, nearly any other is bound to pale in comparison, and Varda’s dour and uncharacteristically ramshackle elegy of marital separation is no exception. Far from the riot of color and movement of Mur murs, the images in Documenteur do not seek to engage the viewer, and the voiceover and dialogue might actually turn some audience members off entirely. Janet Maslin, writing about the film in the New York Times, noted that the voices are so flat that the film sounds badly dubbed, which, in many scenes, it quite plainly is. Furthermore, the dubbed voices are curiously lifeless, as if recorded in an airless room. While this is surely just an artifact of the film’s production and not an intentional choice by Varda to distance and disengage the viewer (though distanciation and disengagement are precisely the effects it has), Varda includes a clever reference to voiceover recording and dubbing in a scene where Emilie is asked to record some voiceover for a film in the absence of the filmmaker for whom she works. Emilie reads aloud a bit of narration (which happens to be from Mur murs, further linking the two films), and when it is played back, the voice on the tape is that of someone else. When she expresses surprise at the sound of the voice, the sound man replies, “You never recognize your own voice.”

Because of its technical limitations, alienating manner, and dissimilarity with the rest of Varda’s work, Documenteur will never be considered one of her best or most characteristic works, but it commands more attention and respect than the “for completists only” kinds of films that pepper other directors’ filmographies. For me, it has even become something of a favorite among Varda’s work precisely because it is so surprisingly different from most of her other films. It is such an introspective film — really, the “emotion picture” subtitle is not a conceit but an accurate description — and it is the rare film that attempts (and mostly succeeds) to express the often oppressive sadness and vulnerability that comes with the end of a relationship. After Varda’s overtly and politically feminist films of the 1970s that immediately preceded Documenteur, it might seem incongruous to make a film about the despondency of a woman without a man. Yet if there is anything characteristic of Agnès Varda, it is her unwillingness to play it safe and to do what is expected of her. By Matt Bailey ©2010 NotComing.com

Agnes Varda - (1981) Documenteur.mkv

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Runtime: 	1 h 4 min
Size: 	985 MiB
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https://nitro.download/view/A0B02BEAE311A52/Agnes_Varda_-_(1981)_Documenteur.mkv

Language(s):French, English
Subtitles:English

The post Agnès Varda – Documenteur (1981) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Marie-Christine Questerbert’s La Chambre Obscure (The Dark Room) stands apart as a costume drama set in Italy in the 14th century.

Aliénor is the daughter of Gérard de Narbonne, a distinguished doctor of medicine of the 14th Century. She puts the skills she has inherited from her father to good use by curing the king of France of a life-threatening fistula. By way of recompense, she asks to marry Bertrand de Roussillon, whom she has loved since childhood. Alas, Betrand has no love for Aliénor, and rather than consummate the marriage he goes off to fight in Tuscany…

1.45GB | 1h 45m | 952×572 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/1B621FCF7B18D83/La_chambre_obscure_(2000,_Marie-Christine_Questerbert).mkv

Language:French
Subtitles:EN [text]

The post Marie-Christine Questerbert – La Chambre Obscure AKA The Dark Room (2000) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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Aesthetically, Agnès Varda’s two 1988 features, Jane B. par Agnes V. and Kung-Fu Master!, are diametrically opposed, but they’re linked by the showcase opportunities that they provide actress, singer, and model Jane Birkin. Kung-Fu Master! is, on its surface at least, a straightforward drama, one that concerns a middle-aged single mother, Mary-Jane (Birkin), finding herself smitten by her adolescent daughter’s classmate, Julien (Mathieu Demy). But like any story about this kind of subject matter, the simplicity of the setup belies the moral and emotional quandary it underpins. Even the midlife crisis suggested by Mary-Jane’s infatuation must be viewed within the context of the pressure that society, not internal doubt, places on women who turn 40.

Varda doesn’t tackle that aspect directly, instead diverting attention to various minutiae of the characters’ interactions. Frequently, she focuses on the absurdities of how much women try to adapt their interests for a man’s comfort; much of the film tracks Mary-Jane roaming from arcade to arcade in search of Julien’s favorite video game in the hopes of impressing him. The film also complicates matters by incorporating the specter of AIDS, which appears in the form of various posters and pamphlets warning of the dangers of sex and in the nervously flippant conversations of Julien’s peers, who mask their fear of the disease in dismissive homophobia. This exacerbated anxiety over sexual inexperience adds another wrinkle to Mary-Jane and Julien’s fumbling relationship, and it suggests that each party uses the other, albeit without manipulation or exploitation.

For her part, Mary-Jane doesn’t get love from her romance so much as a feeling of rejuvenation, speaking to a fear that also runs through Jane B. Par Agnès V. The film takes the concept of an actor’s showcase to postmodern, avant-garde extremes, doing away with narrative in favor of freeform confessions and performances. The opening establishes the freewheeling tone, placing Birkin in a tableau vivant of a 16th-century painting before spoiling the classical mood by having the actress talk about vomiting on set on her 30th birthday.

The blur of acting and autobiography, of sophistication and vulgarity, prefigures a film that constantly leaps in an out of Birkin’s reminiscences into random performances that gradually reveal an underlying commonality of portraying the actress in various muse roles in relation to domineering male artists. In one scene, she assists a painter who ruffles through the pages of art books in search of money he’s hidden, enduring his self-absorbed prattle as he mocks recurring tics of classical painters while bustling around a room filled with his stripe-patterned artwork.

Later, she hangs around the grave of her unnamed master, the muse as valkyrie holding vigil for her god. The god/artist connection peaks in macabre fashion with a recreation of Joan of Arc’s execution, positing the heroine as God’s own muse. The film even questions Birkin’s own muse status, depicting her collaborations with ex-husband Serge Gainsbourg, who coaches her so thoroughly in a recording session that one wonders whether the two are play-acting or letting slip why they grew apart.

Absent the presence of a man, however, Birkin and the film around her move from sardonic commentary to sui generis liberation. Varda stages some shots as subversions of aesthetic expectation, as when she has Birkin pose in the nose for another tableau vivant portrait, only to cut to a close-up that scans over the actress’s body, calling attention to the anachronism while also suggesting that this more salacious camera movement is merely the logical endpoint of artists painting and sculpting their models in the nude. Birkin exhibits easier comfort around Varda, and the film is at its loosest when the two riff silly diversions and frank conversations with each other, but gentle conflict arises when Varda begins to act like the director that she is, ordering Birkin to look into the camera or to act a certain way. Birkin’s relationship to Varda brings things full circle to Mary-Jane’s relationship to Julien: Each allows the protagonist greater freedom to exert her own desires, but heavily established roles can never be fully overridden.

1.57GB | 1h 20mn | 944×576 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/E0761102345311D/Anges_Varda_-_%281988%29_Kung-fu_master%21.part1.rar
https://nitroflare.com/view/43A7EAAA9B64A37/Anges_Varda_-_%281988%29_Kung-fu_master%21.part2.rar

Language(s):French, English
Subtitles:English

The post Agnès Varda – Kung-fu master! (1988) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A man who returns to Los Angeles to wrap up his mother’s estate sets out in search of the mysterious woman named in her will.

2.31GB | 1 h 45 min | 1024×436 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/764151EB4AFA7D5/Mathieu_Demy_-_(2011)_Americano.mkv

Language:English, French, Spanish
Subtitles:English

The post Mathieu Demy – Americano (2011) first appeared on Cinema of the World.