from Lyon: Agnès Varda and her huts

In Agnès Varda’s most recent film Beaches of Agnes, the eighty-year old visionary recounts her life from childhood to the present, dramaticizing personal romances, her own films, and profound moments of imagination. Utilizing old footage, surreal re-enactments of past events, and personal monologues, a story is told of a life well-lived, an autobiographical account absent of staleness or convention.

Included in this memoir are Varda’s recent art installations, a newly explored creative avenue for the senior film maker. Called Les Cabnes d Agnès or Agnès Huts, the structures are occupiable spaces of different themes. Of the three displayed at La Sucriere in Lyon, France, one provides beach chairs on sand facing the interior projection of one of Varda’s newer films, a collage of beach imagery with mirrors and a young nude couple intimately engaged on an ocean front hammock, accompanied by raw footage of natural disasters and crowds of people in panic. A second hut features thirty portraits of women across from the same number of portraits of men, each photographed with a picture of a beach shore behind small enough so as to not totally obscure the actual surroundings.



However, most remarkable of Varda’s artworks is her “Cinema Hut”, a transparent hut with four walls made of 35mm film from an old movie she had shot and self-described as “a flop”. Inside are the old film canisters used to once hold the reels, now stacked on top of each other suggesting a place to sit. This particular hut is essentially made from a movie, the discarded film being construction material for a new purpose with it’s display still remaining eminent. It’s fragility is matched by it’s sheer volume of images, each individual frame on display taking on a physical quality unlike it’s projected counterpart.



“It’s cinema because the light is held by the images,” says Varda. The “Cinema Hut” is in it’s essence a new way to experience film, to be really inside and surrounded by it. There is an elegance to it’s construction as well as well as the reels tightly draping over the steel frame, carefully placed so as not to overlap or leave gaps in between. The images making up the building can be seen from both inside and out, the entire structure essentially being diaphanous through hundred of thousands of frames.




Perhaps, the gesture is most artistically conceived part of this work, the lending of a feature-length film, a series of moments in history portrayed by actors of the past, disposed to a presentation that is so removed from the original idea of intent, yet somehow still true to it. Through the hut, the movie is again seen, no longer uncared for or idly resting, rolled up in it’s metal canisters. Its removed from it’s spool and subjected to light, once more activated for an audience.