Our job is to see, to make things seen or to inform, but we never see enough. I knew around a dozen caryatides and then I discovered fifty of them.
I fought for a radical cinema, and I continued all my life.
Agnès Varda
There is no truth, Agnès Varda once said, in speaking of documentary film. It is always a matter of perspective, a perspective that must be shaped by a particular representation or artistic language, what Varda called cinécriture. Without the self-conscious elaboration of such formal mediation, film falls into the illusions of realism, the lie of wanting to “tell it like it is”, or to narrate a total story, thereby blinding us to what is not to be seen (and to the fact that the film maker does not see everything).
There are always lacuna in what we see, in what can be seen. To be aware of these absences humbles us, weakens the hold of our ego, and thereby opens us to realities that we can never exhaust, and allows those realities to speak. We learn to see beauty.
Varda’s cinema moves easily between fiction and documentary because for her, the distinction was of no importance. Like an artisan, she crafted images, moving images with care and respect for what she captured with the camera’s eye. Her’s was a cinema not of “vérités”, but of “souvenirs”; of image-memories from which we could find and create perspectives. And it was from this in-formed perspective that she herself would move through various personal and political issues in her films.
Agnès Varda’s cinema was – is – a cinema of liberation.
Agnès Varda died this last 29th of March at the age of 90.
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Jean Grave: Autonomy and organisation within anarchy
Robert Graham continues his notable and tireless effort to make known and share defining texts in the political tradition of anarchism for english language readers.
On this occasion, we post his most recent entry, a selection from Jean Grave’s essay, Society on the Morrow of the Revolution. The value of the text, as Graham himself states in his introductory note, lies in the clarity with which Grave endeavours to define “anarchist communism” as rooted in two fundamental concerns: the organisation of human social life without hierarchy and exploitation and the autonomy of those who take upon themselves to create such a society, without pre-given models or forms, or to withdraw from it.
We also share this post because it continues to provide a possible lens through which to read contemporary social-political movements, such as, for example, the gilets jaunes of france.
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