Part travelogue, part personal essay, Agnes Varda’s “From Here to There,” a five-part series that will screen in full at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on May 31, is a love letter to human interaction. Varda, at the age of 89, is one of cinema’s last remaining travelers, a persistent chronicler of the present whose camera eye is firmly rooted in the past.
Varda is one of the most important and overlooked French directors, partly because she doesn’t fit squarely into any category. She is sometimes associated with the French New Wave of Truffaut and Godard, although her work is dissimilar, and is sometimes grouped in with the Left Bank group of filmmakers, even if that’s little more than a name to wrap around a lot of disparate cinematic voices. In truth, Varda stands alone, partly because she was the sole female cinematic figure in a male dominated French movement, and partly because her work has often, especially as she’s grown older, dealt directly with her personal life and experience in its explorations of memory.
“From Here to There,” which acts as a sort of sequel to her 2008 film “The Beaches of Agnes,” is presented in five chapters of roughly 45 minutes, each detailing her journeys around the world meeting with artists and friends. Often the two are the same. Throughout the series, she spends time with the Spanish painter Miquel Barceló (“He may be the only painter who knows about caimans and termites,” Varda dryly remarks), the critic and curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist, and the 105-year-old Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, who dons a bowler hat and cane and dances for the camera like Charlie Chaplin.
There is little that links the sections together except for Varda’s meandering camera, which is both inquisitive and probing. Some of the most interesting sections see her walking through various museums around the world during her travels, as she lets her lens drift across the work, sometimes stopping on a piece that catches her eye and letting it act as a launching pad for another story, another question, another memory. A viewing of George Segal’s sculpture “Alice Listening to Her Poetry” brings forward a personal reflection on the grief that followed the death of Varda’s husband, the director Jacques Demy. A visit to the studio of reclusive friend and co-conspirator Chris Marker reveals a feverish array of materials piled to the ceiling, which Varda’s camera traces around the room and which she links to the densely layered visuals of his films.
For Varda art and life are one in the same, and part of the joy of watching the infinitely enjoyable fragments of “From Here to There” ultimately is the way the two converge in surprisingly moving ways. Like the lemon tree that opens each episode, whose tall and lurking branches need to be cut, Varda remarks, because “its leaves were devouring our light,” Varda’s work of using the past to take a new look at the present is like an exquisite old plant that only needs a little fresh water to keep it alive.
