Films › Documentary
Faces Places
Directed by Agnès Varda, JR, 2017
Agnes Varda co-directed with the street artist JR, and the film's method is inseparable from its apparatus: JR's photo truck, a mobile darkroom and printer that produces building-sized portraits on the spot, dictates the shooting schedule and the emotional structure of every stop. Varda, in her late eighties and losing her eyesight, shoots herself into the film constantly, turning the documentary into a record of two artists negotiating collaboration across a generational and physical gap. The pasting sequences, farmers, dockworkers, a whole village of faces, are staged as events but the reactions are unscripted, so the crew has to be ready to catch a wife weeping at a photo of her husband within seconds of the paper going up. Editing by Maxime Pozzi-Garcia keeps a loose travelogue rhythm that lets tangents breathe, including a devastating detour to Jean-Luc Godard's shuttered house near the end. For filmmakers, the model worth studying is generative constraint: build a physical process into your production that forces spontaneous human material, then structure the film around what that process produces rather than around a predetermined arc.
What to watch for
Watch how the Godard house sequence recontextualizes every act of friendship shown earlier in the film.
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