The Digital Mirror. Varda Through Fontcuberta

The work of Agnès Varda and Joan Fontcuberta experiment with and reflect on the emergence of the digital image.

Self portrait. Barcelona, ​​1972 | Joan Fontcuberta

Self portrait. Barcelona, ​​1972 | Joan Fontcuberta | Courtesy of the artist

Around the turn of the millennium, the filmmaker Agnès Varda and the photographer Joan Fontcuberta illustrated the moment of transition marked by the end analogue film. Separately, each in their own field, they explored the creative, playful and experimental implications of the digital revolution.

In 1983, French television broadcast a programme created by Agnès Varda in which the filmmaker and various guests discussed a different photograph each day. In Une minute pour une image, 170 photos were analysed, including Autoretrat (Presagio de mutilación) by Joan Fontcuberta. The image, which is included in the exhibition Agnès Varda. Photographing, Filming, Recycling, shows a hand reaching out towards a figure, in the manner of a greeting. Surprisingly, the part that is offered for shaking is the mouth of a sea bream, which waits threateningly, teeth open. Varda says that it reminds her of surrealism, because it is “beyond the extraordinary precision of reality.”

In the early 1980s, Varda was an experienced filmmaker with a career spanning more than twenty-five years. Fontcuberta had taken the picture in 1972, at the age of seventeen, and although he was an active figure in the growing Spanish photography scene, he had not yet embarked on his most significant artistic projects. He was a Joan “Pre-Fontcuberta,” to borrow the words of Javier Arnaldo in the prologue to Imágenes Germinales 1972-1987, which brings together his works from this period.

As far as is known, the paths of Varda and Fontcuberta did not cross again, not even ephemerally, as they did in Une minute pour une image. Even so, the separate work that they created two decades later shows suggestive philosophical convergences, all of them related to the changes ushered in by the emergence of the digital image.

The two sides of the camera

Agnès Varda is often associated with the Nouvelle Vague, but her career extends beyond this film movement, encompassing some twenty feature films made over more than six decades. Although the main themes of her films are female subjectivity and life on the margins of society, in the last phase of her career she became more autobiographical and intimate, starting with The Gleaners and I (2000), a socially themed documentary open to interpretation on different levels.

The Gleaners… explores the concept of gleaning in contemporary France, a subject that piqued Varda’s interest as she observed people collecting discarded food at a Sunday market. In the film, she talks to very different men and women, some collecting potatoes in the countryside, others scavenging for old junk in the city; some out of necessity, others by choice. She interviews them face-on, without appearing on screen, but she also comes round the other side of the lens for various interludes in which we see her in the privacy of her home or in her car, posing in front of the camera or zooming in on her hands, revealing her point of view. In these parenthetical inserts, she takes us on digressions that become the most memorable parts of the film. As analysed by the researcher Miguel Ángel Lomillos, the people Varda talks to make one-time appearances, “they arrive, occupy their space and leave. The filmmaker is the only one who reappears throughout the story, the true protagonist, the only subject in the film who shows her intimate self. The entire economic and symbolic logic of the film is permeated by the filmmaker’s subjectivity.”

What makes this marked subjectivity possible, and one of the things that defines the style of the film, is the fact that Varda uses a small digital video camera, which she learns to use almost at the same time as she’s shooting, explaining the ins and outs of the technique to the viewer. The device would be antiquated from today’s perspective, but in 2000 it offered one of the first possibilities for filming in digital format. Thanks to the filmmaker’s use of this camera, both from the technical viewpoint and in terms of the film’s personal tone, The Gleaners… becomes a reflection of the moment of change that both film and photography were undergoing – the transition from analogue to digital images.

Photography and truth

When Agnès Varda commented on Joan Fontcuberta’s photograph on the television, the Catalan artist’s work was entering a stage of maturity. While in his earlier works he played with the creative possibilities of trick photography, in the mid-1980s he embarked on what is still today his main line of work – delving into the limits of photography in order to reflect reality.

Using a highly refined and characteristic irony, Fontcuberta’s projects use images to construct alternative narratives which he presents as being real. This is the case of Fauna, Sputnik and Deconstructing Osama; series in which he plays with appearances to remind the viewer of the need to question their own presumptions and to distrust the prevailing narratives. He also defends this tactic in his abundant work as a theorist, in works such as The Kiss of Judas: Photography and Truth and Pandora’s Camera. Photogr@phy after Photography.

While his work as a critic and theorist is inseparable from his artistic output, in his essays, Fontcuberta broadens his focus to a wide variety of aspects related to visual culture in the digital age, ranging from pigeon photographers and drones to phrenology and AI. Unsurprisingly, his work also addresses the implications of smartphones and social media on the representation of the self. And this is an aspect in which Fontcuberta’s work clearly intersects with Varda’s The Gleaners…, the documentary in which, almost a decade before the popularisation of smartphones, the Belgian filmmaker personally foresaw of the aspects that Fontcuberta deals with in his analyses – the use of the digital image for self-exploration and play.

Agnès Varda on the set of the film "Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse"

Agnès Varda on the set of the film Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse | Photo: Didier Doussin | ©1999 ciné-tamaris

Digital privacy

In one of the interludes of The Gleaners…, Varda zooms in on some Rembrandt postcards she brought back from a trip to Japan. At one point, the filmmaker covers the portraits with her hand and expresses her surprise at what she sees in the close-up of her age-wrinkled skin: “I find it extraordinary. I’ve a feeling that I’m an animal. Worse, an animal that I don’t know.” In the documentary Varda, Gleaning a Gleaner (Isabel María, 2014), the Belgian director explains how this scene was created spontaneously: “It was a surprise, all because I had the camera in my hand. I never thought of filming my hand, the camera filmed by itself.”

Anyone with a mobile phone is well aware of the potential of the digital image for introspection. The fact that you can take a photo and check the result immediately, at no cost, makes trial and error easier, and the opportunity to see yourself reflected on the small screen encourages self-examination. As Fontcuberta explains in La furia de las imágenes, in digital devices “the exploration of reality is not performed with our eye glued to the camera’s viewfinder (…). There is no longer any proximity, reality now appears in a projection external to the body, different from direct perception, in an image that appears on a small digital screen.”

The possibilities of this separation become apparent in another scene from The Gleaners…, when Varda uses the digital camera to explore her grey hairs: “My hair and my hand tell me that the end will soon come,” she reflects ruefully. Analysing these images, Miguel Ángel Lomillos writes that “There is something strangely intuitive and spontaneous in this sequence, a certain amazement at her own body, as if the filmmaker were astonished at what the camera reveals to her about herself.”

This idea of the camera as a mirror has been studied by Fontcuberta in several of his essays, reminding us that this is a simile that was born with photography itself, when the camera was the only object capable of reflecting an image perfectly. If the camera is a mirror, does this mean that photography, and even more so, digital photography, encourages narcissism? According to the artist, this is not necessarily true. Although formats such as the selfie turn the subject into the object, society has always been egomaniacal, but “the difference may lie in the fact that today we have the means to display this vanity.”

Play and experimentation

In addition to using the digital camera to learn about herself, Varda approaches the new medium with a desire to test it, to have fun, to experiment. In one of the film’s opening sequences, she plays around with the special effects that the device offers as standard, creating a multi-layered image, morphing it, showing the viewer her own process of exploration. In the same sequence, she portrays herself lying on a sofa, covering and uncovering the lens, showing and hiding herself as she pleases. The director plays with the device as anyone would, and although the result is unremarkable, it stirs the empathy of the viewer, who feels drawn into the game.

This spirit of playfulness comes in at different moments throughout the film. In one of them, Varda tries to catch the lorries on the motorway by circling them between her thumb and forefinger. “To hold back what moves by?” she asks, “No, to play.” In another sequence, she shows how she forgot to turn off the camera on one of her journeys, meaning she filmed the ground for several minutes. In the final montage, she can be heard talking to other people as the lens cap sways, hanging by a string, something she includes in the film with all naturalness, celebrating “the dance of the lens cap” that she was lucky enough to capture.

This casual, carefree approach could be interpreted as a lack of respect or professionalism, but in fact it is a vindication of simplicity by someone who has nothing to prove. Varda acts like an amateur in the original sense of the word, as someone who loves what she does. Something that is also related to how she approaches the digital medium since, as Fontcuberta writes, the new technologies turn us all into amateurs of one thing or another: “The amateur has been stigmatised as someone who performs an activity with a lack of skill or exactitude,” he writes, but “an amateur is someone who works for no other reward than simple personal satisfaction, or the pleasure of discovery, or entertainment or narcissistic ecstasy.”

Through the mirror

In the documentary Varda, Gleaning a Gleaner, the filmmaker recognises that “the danger of digital cameras is that we film all the time, that we want to film everything.” She notes how these devices lead to an overabundance of images, which could not exist without such a versatile format. The subject of visual excess has also been dealt with by Joan Fontcuberta in several of his essays, as he points out how “the endless abundance of indiscriminate data does not satisfy our need for information.” In a world with too many images, photography has lost its meaning, for which the artist recommends one of either two strategies: the promotion of an ecology of images, or in other words, restraint in the production of new images; and the search for “missing images” – those that nobody shows or that are hidden from society.

Filmed in the precise moment of change from analogue to digital, The Gleaners… could be considered the epitome of the latter strategy. Varda produces new images, but tackles a world – that of gleaners and food waste – which, despite being clearly visible, goes unnoticed. And although, as we have seen, the documentary has a large component of self-portraiture and personal digging, it is a far cry from “selfie culture.” Varda uses the digital camera to focus on others: “The self-portrait is a mirror, but in fact I turn it towards those who accompany me,” she explains in Isabel María’s documentary. “The mirror is to reveal others. I mean, it’s a self-portrait, but mainly of others, much more than of myself.”

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The Digital Mirror. Varda Through Fontcuberta