As her new retrospective opens at Metrograph cinema in New York, Agnès Godard talks about collaborating with Claire Denis and Agnès Varda, and the art of “deeply watching things”
“When Claire [Denis] showed me the house – Boni’s house – she decided to have colours in certain rooms; the kitchen, the mother’s room. And we were going to follow the characters very close up and everything. And also, because it was in Marseille in the south of France – it’s a sunny city – certainly I thought that it would be great to have highlights and shadow, and this would be also kind of in their mind, too.
so I felt totally immersed in the spirituality of the landscapes. I remember thinking, is it the beginning or the end of the world? “The question was, how do you put a figure in such a landscape? On scouting, I went there with the body of a camera, one lens, and a few pieces of negative to test, because I wanted to do some images to choose whether I was going to use Kodak or Fuji. I think that was the start of this ‘experimental’ film, even though we never used that word …the liberty of Claire, the faith we all had in the project … it was like we were free to try other things all the time.
“There is a lot of handheld camera, and on the first day of shooting we had the sequence where they are training, learning how to run, and I had to run too. I thought, ‘I need to exercise!’ [Laughs]. When you have the camera on your shoulder and the camera is running, you don’t work only with your eyes or your brain.
You work with your entire body, so it becomes very physical. And so it was like a very organic duet with the actors.”
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