Notes on ‘La Pointe Courte’
In La Pointe Courte (1955), Agnes Varda’s faith in the empathy of photography and her inspired flirtations with intermediality (just one of the film’s many proto-New Wave flashes) come together to create a picture of surprising maturity and thoughtful boldness for somebody’s first dance with the medium of cinema.
A lot of attention in promotional material for the film focuses on this married couple — a boy local to the eponymous fishing community and a Parisian girl who visit the town but who soon find the foundations of their love crumbling beneath them as they walk-and-talk, waxing introspective, across the coastal landscape. This marketed attention towards a heterosexual couple may fool an audience into believing that this ‘love story’ forms the film’s central pivot point — that the working-class town through which they walk is but symbolic set-dress for their romantic exploits; that all thematic roads lead to their Rome. The truth is almost precisely the opposite. Varda’s story is first and foremost about La Pointe Courte, a small corner of the French commune of Sète, a place Agnes Varda herself at one point considered home. Occasionally, we drift over towards wherever the couple have found themselves wandering to, but like one of the many vagrant cats that populate the town, her lens is perpetually curious and becomes an ever-inquisitive stranger of its own.
Visually, Varda captures the blurred dichotomy of a space awash with existential stagnation and yet pulsating with life. The hard stillness of wood (a living thing now dead), the seemingly immovable materials of concrete and stone, lay the foundations of a town restricted; reflective of a post-war economic malaise where the notion of change is entire mythical, almost hostile. The miracle of the moment is in the celebratory bunting that adorns the films streets — the white cloth and linen sheets that wave like flags at full-mast, signs of life turning what would otherwise be bleak stillness into a collage of vitality. The importance of human life and its persistence to this community is immeasurable. Though the film ends in a raucous celebration of local culture, epitomised by a lavish and well-attended boat-jousting competition in the nearby river, Varda rather morbidly also examines the importance of life by elevating death into a community-wide spectacle of fear. The passing of life is treated as a fracture; a black plague on the collective conscience. When a local child passes away, the camera witnesses the town watching on as a mourning mother sits distraught by the body of her dead son, left lying in his crude crate-like coffin.
The sight of people crowding around to watch a mother weep over the death of a child is a disturbing one — it feels impersonal, disrupting the deeply private experience of domestic loss and grief. Yet this disturbance of the personal by making it a public moment is no different to what Varda’s camera has been doing this whole time. She brings to La Pointe Courte the curiosity and impressionable realism of photography exemplified by her own work in the field, but alongside this lies the irrefutable invasiveness that photographic culture holds — an invasiveness she is acutely aware. By allowing the camera to gaze upon the scene of mourning, and then drifting back through the entrance-way to have us watch with the crowd, Varda places us among the unwelcome spectators so that our role as a spectator is made aware to us. The weight of this realisation is amplified once we appreciate the isolationist nature of the town, and how much its inhabitants cherish their moments of privacy and comfort. The film opens with a stranger (a government official) standing lonesome beneath a tree. Within seconds of being noticed, his presence is treated as a potential threat by the townsfolk. The omnipresent cats of the town are seen as vermin by many; their uninvited ubiquity coming across as nosy, a distinctly antagonistic feature in the hearts and minds of La Pointe Courte’s residents — wishful talk of their death is as common as the cats themselves. Rather than outright dismiss their isolationism, Varda empathises with their situation. She treats their suspicious natures as accepted, expected and ultimately fitting; entirely appropriate considering the fragile state of the world around them as their very means of survival, the local fishing industry, is at risk of drifting away from an increasingly globalised world and struggling further beneath a strict control of the waters around them.
That very distance, the discord between global/urban modernity and the secluded but intimate world of the local, is also mirrored through Varda’s cinematography. Though once a Sète local herself, Varda’s relocation to Paris and (along with it) her newfound sense of modernity, influenced the aestheticised precision of her imagery — along with us, she and her camera become outsiders once more. This discord is also seen through Lui and Elle, the romantic couple whose journey through the town becomes a major narrative focal point. Their dismantling marriage, the bond they share together despite their differences, is reflective of that deeper disparity between Elle’s Parisian world — connected, kinetic, and concerned with the future — and Lui’s coastal working community — bristling with intimate vigour and dogged tradition, frightened by the prospect of the world’s fading memory. As its own narrative strand, I felt somewhat removed from their musings — the cold sterility of their conversation, the factual bleakness in their lack of passion for each other, echoes the lack of passion in their own romantic life. Varda would rather communicate the unspeakable emotional vacuum through the landscape on the outskirts of the town (a hollow boat washed ashore, a shallow beach, an overgrown railway line) and a creative use of acting space and blocking that suggests distance and separation — expressive sentiments that would foreshadow the likes of Antonioni’s L’Avventura and Bergman’s Persona. Varda herself has admitted that the crux of the story, a side-by-side narrative of people and a place, was inspired by William Faulkner’s ‘If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem’. This admirable investment in artistic experimentation; in the intermediality and intertextuality of forms; and in cinema’s lofty literary ambitions is precisely why La Pointe Courte’s significance as a fundamental root in the development of the French New Wave could never be understated.
This is why it should anger us that the phallocentric passages of cinema’s documented history canonised the likes of Godard, Truffaut, and Chabrol but did very little to recognise Varda and La Pointe Courte until much later — even now the film, Varda, and many of the New Wave’s Left Bank stars are often relegated to side notes in the studies of the French New Wave. The film is hardly ‘quiet’ in its message and to call it that would perhaps seem condescending, but one cannot help but feel as though a masculine critical environment has sympathised more with the boyish tendencies and rampant cinephilia of Godard’s Breathless and Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, as such unfavourably overshadowing the patience and understated creativity of Varda’s early work. Looking back on the feature within the timeline of Varda’s own filmography, La Pointe Courte is surely proof of the untiring artistic inquisitiveness and spirited socio-political intrigue that both her and her films have championed for decades.
