La Pointe Courte (1955)

 Agnes Varda's "La Pointe Courte"

Many people consider the start of the French Nouvelle Vague movement to be with François Truffaut and his 1959 masterpiece "The 400 Blows." Those that consider that would be gravely mistaken, as the ignition point of the Nouvelle Vague movement lies with Agnes Varda and her 1955 film "La Point Courte." At the age of 26, Varda constructed a film that would have one of the largest impacts on cinema in the 20th century. "La Pointe Courte" is the work of an amateur, and it's only an amateur that could make something as artistic and rule-breaking that would change the film landscape. 

"La Pointe Courte" shifts back and forth between two differing sequences. In one, a group of fisherman in a small fishing village called La Pointe Courte face challenges of fishing in a polluted lagoon while their wives deal with domestic duties. These moments in the film deal with the small, sensory everyday life of lower class people dealing with lower class problems. It details their work, their free time, and their quiet and simple interactions. In the other story, a husband and wife walk through the village talking about their dissolving relationship. As they discuss the philosophy of love, their existential concerns, and where they are at emotionally in their lives, Varda films them completely differently. While the nitty-gritty nature of the fisherman are filmed almost like a documentary, the couple are filmed like an arthouse film (long before arthouse cinema was even a celebrated film form). While one section of the film is tethered to reality, the other is completely untethered. It remains unclear how these two stories intersect, if at all. However, despite this, they are contrasted against each other nonetheless.  

Perhaps the two separate stories resemble the human spirit or the duality of our being. On one hand, there is the sensory experience of life: dealing with work, domestic life, and other things that require tangible attention. On the other, there is the spiritual and emotional aspect: philosophy, love, and other intangible notions that require existential thought. Perhaps this is not the intention of the film at all. After all, while our main couple is strolling the streets of La Pointe Courte, another older couple notes, "They talk too much to be happy." So, perhaps this duality is not unionized, but a complete contrast to one another. Perhaps the young couple are completely ignorant of the real aspects of life and are too invested in the emotional meaning of it all. Regardless, Varda leaves the viewer to ponder this and to surmise the relationship of the film to one's self and it it interacts within itself.

On top of these thematic uses, Varda's camerawork and editing (with the help of her editor, famed filmmaker Alain Resnais) compose shots and ideas that are completely rule-breaking at the time the film was made. There is no limit to the kind of shot composition she employs. She mixes documentary-style filmmaking with the arthouse. She composes shots of people in reflections, characters looking directly into camera, characters' faces composed against each other, shots from overhead, shots from down below, and any other form of shot you can image. She opens the film with a dolly shot pushing in through the small village before the use of the dolly was popularized. She cuts to images of stillness, of nature, and of benign renderings. Her images flow from the abstract, to realist, and to anything in between. Because of this, her film is completely without a fixed form. It is essentially freeform. It is for this reason why it is the film that seems to have started the French Nouvelle Vague movement, a movement that ignored the standard rules of cinema in favor of the freeform.