Coming to NYC’s Maysles Cinema after 36 years for an exclusive one-week run beginning next Monday, December 12: DAGUERRÉOTYPES
Legendary filmmaker Agnès Varda made this love letter to her Parisian neighborhood back in 1975. Though it screened as part of series or festivals, it has never received a US theatrical release until now.
Punning on the name of her street, Rue DaGuerre, Varda likens her portrait of its various shopkeepers to the early 19th century photographs developed by Frenchman Louis Daguerre, notable as the first commercially successful photographic process. Besides a few sequences of brief narration, the bulk of Varda’s film consists of scenes set within the quaint mom-and-pop boulangerie, boucherie, salon de coiffure, and apothicaire that line the 14th Arrondissement street that’s been her home for more than half a century. Usually, the filmmaker merely observes as the shopkeepers open up for the day or tend to customers, but there are also sequences in which her subjects, speaking directly to the camera, reveal where they were born, how they met their partners, when they came to Paris, and how they began working in their trade. In a more unusual sequence, they attend and participate in a magic show. Despite the temporary spectacle the latter provides, the true magic in this understated doc is the beauty in the mundane – the everyday moments that populate these individuals lives: the way one shopkeeper folds and unfolds the shutters in the front of her store as her husband moves merchandise outside, the pleasure another merchant shows when finding and selling a customer two buttons, and the same merchant quietly coping with his wife’s apparent dementia. It’s a lovely, small film, revealing a slice of 1970s Paris that is now long gone.
what (not) to doc 