Ex Libris: The New York Public Library [35 points / 9 votes]
Second place:
Wormwood [39 points / 9 votes]
And the winner is...
Faces Places [67 points / 16 votes]
"Faces Places (known in its native France as Visages Villages) was directed by the pseudonymous street artist JR, who was 33 when the movie came out, and Agnes Varda, was turns 90 this May. They star in it, too. We see them traveling through the countryside, going from town to town in a van that's kitted out to serve as a photo studio, and we get to watch them interact with the people they meet, who serve as their subjects: photos are taken, which are then blown up to epic size and pasted on the sides of walls and buildings.
"Except that Varda and JR might object to the term 'subjects.' They've described the movie as a massive collaboration, not just between the two self-identified artists but involving all the people who ended up being part of the movie (some of whom contribute their own selfies). Varda, who has worked with non-actors in her fiction films, told a Variety interviewer that she and her co-director set out to 'share the idea of art, so [the people being photographed] can be part of it.' And while the movie takes it starting point from JR's street art projects, its digressive, intuitive style and thoughtful, overflowing spirit are very much in keeping with the other movies (The Gleaners and I, The Beaches of Agnes) that have marked Varda as the heir to her old friend Chris Marker as the foremost practitioner of the art of the nonfiction film as personal essay.
"Varda is also one of the two living, still-active French filmmakers with unbroken links to the New Wave, and she uses JR's physical resemblance to the other one--he had a sunglasses fetish, like a certain JLG--almost as a running gag. Faces Places feels both timeless and timely, and it has a circling-back quality that has nothing to do with nostalgia. It's about the importance of staying true to oneself, which in Varda's case means hanging on, over the course of a career that now spans more than sixty years, to the principles of the New Wave and finding new uses for them and new ways to put them into action. (Faces Places was partly crowd-funded, which is both another means to mass collaboration/collective action and a partial solution for artists who know that, however small a physical scale you may seem to be working on, money for a film budget--and blow-up printers and gas for the van--doesn't grow on trees.) JR turns the faces of a community into street art that has a strong graphic punch and a short shelf life.
"By using that project as the basis for a movie that records the process while illuminating the lives behind the faces, Varda has found a perfect metaphor for the paradox behind all her greatest work: the preservation, as cinema, of what is partly defined by its fleeting, transient nature. (She likes sandcastles as much as JR likes his sunglasses.) And when JR told Variety that 'You can stop anyone in the street and you will find an amazing story,' she corrected him: 'Sometimes it is less than amazing; it’s just simple and impressive.' That kind of precision and the refusal to insist that anything worthy of the artist's notice must be 'amazing" grows out of the decades of experience and thought that Varda has put into her work and the world around her, and it's part of the central paradox of her own late work: with every new film and every passing year, she seems to be the youngest filmmaker around." ~ Phil Dyess-Nugent
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