In short: Faces Places (2017)

Original title: Visages Villages

Together with photographer JR (who is credited as co-director), Agnès Varda goes on a road trip through the French countryside to meet, interview, and photograph an assortment of (predominantly) women who don’t usually get the starring roles in anything. As part of JR’s modus operandi, and certainly fitting perfectly with Varda’s approach to people in her documentaries, the duo and their assistants then plaster giant photos of their subjects on walls (and others things). There are side trips and distractions, of course, for these two clearly find the world and the people populating it endlessly fascinating and interesting. Because this is a late period Varda movie, the encounters are presented with an emotional directness that always threatens to border on the twee but rarely if ever devolves into it.

Instead, all of this feels kind and human and genuine in all the right ways. Thus the film can also encompass themes like our heroine’s blurring eye sight, aging, and threatening mortality, JR’s fixation on wearing sunglasses probably even under the shower (and what it may mean – a Godard fixation?), an encounter with his grandmother who is basically glowing with love for her grandson, and a non-encounter with fucking Godard that leaves Varda in tears and provokes JR to show her the whole of her face in a moment that feels staged and genuine at the same time. This last bit only puts further fuel on the fire of my thesis that late period (really, post-60s) Godard and late period Varda are artistically antithetical in their documentaries – he consumed by concepts and words and so completely disinterested in people or the world we live in, he can’t conceive of things like kindness as anything but abstracts; she, finding something of interest and worth in the practical lives of everybody she meets, and going out into the world to share this even when she’s old, tired and half blind. If you think I’m making an implicit value judgement here, you’re absolutely right, for I am unfortunately not as kind as Varda in her late films (though I am trying).

Three Documentaries Make A Post: For these are the lands of my forefathers. And these are the dances of my ancestors.

Way of the Morris (2011): Despite the tagline – which is for once used in the film – this documentary directed Rob Curry and Tim Plester is not made for that clientele, but rather a very personal exploration of Morris Dance that is interested in the dance as a rural, social, working class phenomenon that’s clearly also deeply personal for one of the filmmakers. There is some diving into the history of Morris dancing, but it, too is focused on the local and the personal connection between today’s Adderbury Morris dancers, the hard cut World War I meant for many folk traditions, as well as unexpected connections to the folk revival.

It’s often a genuinely beautiful film that’s all about community as a web of personal connections.

The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later aka Les glaneurs et la glaneuse… deux ans après (2002): Keeping with documentary filmmaking deeply informed by personal connections between people – and a great, unpathetic sense for human kindness – Agnès Varda returns to some of the subjects of her utterly brilliant The Gleaners and I. If you’re of the complaining type, you’ll probably mutter that she doesn’t add anything truly new with her return to the subjects of the first film. However, there’s such an emotionally true sense of life passing and people changing in Varda’s re-encounters with these people, it’s not really a criticism I see applying. Rather, I see Varda insisting that these people, mostly poor, disenfranchised or a little too weird for polite society are worth engaging with seriously, worth being looked at not with the the eye of the social worker (nothing against social workers) but with one that truly faces them eye to eye.

Tales of the Uncanny (2020): Coming out of the same bubble of Severin films also responsible for the incredible, deeply exciting, folk horror documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (2021) – a film desperately in need of a German distributor – this isn’t directed by Kier-La Janisse (who does appear as a talking head) but by David Gregory. It’s about the long and pretty exciting history of the horror anthology movie, with a particular emphasis on Amicus. As a Corona lockdown project, this doesn’t go quite as deep as I would have wished – while there are dozens of talking heads, there’s a bit too much vague gushing about the general awesomeness of any given movie for my tastes. Also disappointing is the complete lack of any mention of the long series of Filipino, Hong Kong and Thai series of anthology movies like the “Shake, Rattle and Roll”  or “Troublesome Night” series.

On the plus side, there’s also a lot of very insightful commentary (Ernest R. Dickerson talking about Bava alone would be worth the price of admission). The use of archive footage and film clips is also very well realized, often juxtaposing talking head and footage in incisive and clever ways while also finding a genuinely exciting approach to presenting the films talked about.

Three Films Make A Post: Blood is Coming

Revenge Ride (2020): With a female director in Melanie Aitkenhead and omni-present genre movie actresses like Pollyanna McIntosh involved, I suspected this “female biker gang on a rape revenge ride” movie to be a bit more interesting than your usual entry into this genre. It has a couple of moments you probably wouldn’t see in a male-centric film of the type, and it’s certainly not going for exploitative rape scenes (thankfully), but otherwise, most of the film is just terribly tepid.

In fact, this doesn’t play at all out like the subversive version of the rape revenge movie you’d hope for, nor as a clear-cut exploitation movie, but feels like a melodramatic TV movie with neither emotional nor intellectual depth enough to be able to allow itself to be this bland as a piece of exploitation filmmaking.

Crime Hunter – Bullet of Range (1989) aka クライムハンター 怒りの銃弾: This V-cinema action film directed by Toshimichi Ohkawa is apparently the first film in a long-running series. In typical V-cinema style, this is barely an hour long and still manages to pack an actual plot, copious action scenes and a handful of mildly crazy ideas in.

The film follows the attempts of a cop (Masanori Sera) in Little Tokyo, USA to avenge the (too early) death of his partner (Riki Takeuchi!) while hopped up on very strong painkillers. Also involved are a gun-toting Catholic nun (Minako Tanaka) who does undercover stripper work (no actual nudity involved though), as well as a criminal with pretty awesome hair (Seiji Matano). There’s much shooting, manly wearing of sunglasses and a finale with a really high body count, all shot with rather impressive efficiency. If that sounds like low praise for Ohkawa, I don’t mean it that way: there’s an art to pack an actual film, even one with a simple plot like this one has, into a runtime this short and still make it feel like a movie instead of a series of random scenes, and Ohkawa does this perfectly.


Daguerréotypes (1976): This is a relatively early long-form documentary by the great Agnès Varda, portraying the predominantly elderly small shop keepers on the street she lived on for decades. At first, the film does seem to border on the cute a bit too much, until you realize that Varda has looked at these seemingly very bourgeois people and found people marginalized in their place and time, country people and immigrants having come to the city decades ago, now suggesting a part of Parisian life – and a way of life - that’s coming to an end. And because this is Varda, she treats her subjects with kindness and compassion, not setting out to make fun of them, or reveal their hidden depths in a dramatic fashion, but looking at them and consciously seeing them as something different than the quaint background to other people’s lives.

Three Films Make A Post: What was once in the deep is now in the shallows

Terra Formars (2016): When he isn’t making fantastic remakes of classic samurai films, or doing some really off-beat movie that harkens back to his really wild times as a director, Takashi Miike somehow finds time in his insane schedule to direct stuff like this big budget adaptation of a popular anime and manga series. Because this is Miike, the thing absolutely feels like a live action manga, so except acting so broad you could fit Gamera through it, absurd hair, special effects that really don’t care if they look “realistic” or not, a plot that manages to be straightforward and linear yet also difficult to parse to anyone who has no idea what this Terra Formars business is about (like me), insane moments of gore, kitsch, a Kane Kosugi cameo, Rinko Kikuchi, insect super powers, and a tone so chipper it becomes absurd. It all comes together – as far as this stuff even can come together – into the sort of film I can  joyfully let wash over me, be pleasantly entertained and only mildly freaked out, and love Miike for making this sort of pop art nonsense in between more serious, and (even) more weird and personal stuff, treating all these different types of filmmaking with the same vigour.

Hard Eight (1996): Paul Thomas Anderson’s Reno-set debut feature length film is a gambling movie, a film about guilt, a film about lies, a film about people who are all a lot more dysfunctional than they seem at first look, and a film about people trying to live in the backwaters of Americana,so it’s basically laying the foundation for every film Anderson made after. This one’s a comparatively small movie, concentrating on a handful of characters – played wonderfully by Philip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly, Gwyneth Paltrow and Samuel L. Jackson, and a few moments in their lives. While he knows how to organize large swathes of characters, Anderson has always been just as good at more intimate portrays of the lost and the lonely, so there’s great richness, depth and texture to these characters and their relations as well as to the unglamorous (Reno is basically Las Vegas without the pretence of class, right?) places they inhabit.


Les glaneurs et la glaneuse aka The Gleaners and I (2000): It is educational to compare great Nouvelle Vague director Agnès Varda’s late career documentaries with those of her lesser peer (sorry, Godard admirers, I’m half joking) Jean Luc Godard. Where Godard’s documentary work is formal and abstract, Varda’s philosophical approach concentrates on the personal and the concrete, treating ideas through their connection to people and seeking truth(s) about the large in the small. Consequently, this digitally shot – often playful in the best of ways - documentary about gleaners and gleaning (very much in the sense of people who pick what is left), their connection to art and the role of the artist – particularly Varda - as gleaner is full of a warm interest for the experience of people – particularly the poor, the destitute and the somewhat damaged who aren’t usually allowed to speak for themselves (even the people honestly fighting for their rights prefer to speak about them and rather prefer to treat them as abstracts).