La Pointe Courte, Agnès Varda

· "The materiality of the existential world of la Pointe Courte is present right from the credits, shot over the close-up grain of a piece of wood — revealed to be a section of a tree trunk when the camera moves away in a long tracking shot that leads us into the village. There follow several forward and lateral tracking shots ... of the windswept, straight streets of the neighborhood and its low-lying fishing houses and shacks. One can almost feel the wind, the mistral that howls up the Mediterranean coast, making the washing dance frenetically on the line. The camera pauses to show the interior of a house where a woman feeds her many children, starting a theme that will run through the film.

Varda documents these people's lives, their eating, gossiping quarreling, courting, working, seemingly at random, although she subtly weaves in several narrative threads. ... Women gossip while hanging the washing, men repair the nets and go fishing in the lagoon, women and children help them pack the shellfish to be sold. Varda's ethnographic approach is clearly prompted by her fascination with a place that seems to exist outside of time, a premodern space connected to contemporary France only by the railway line. ... [T]he amazing bric-a-brac in people's backyards evokes Eugène Atget's photographs of vanishing trades and habitats in the late nineteenth-century Paris, pictures of which Varda the photographer would no doubt have been aware. The fisherman's homes are poor, and in a heartbreaking (yet unsentimental) scene a sick boy, who later dies, is lying in a wooden box." Vincendeau

> vernacular architecture as the dwelling, 'thesis as house.' the vernacular of Varda's sea-side village of La Pointe Courte contrasts in its nature, development, purpose, material, and mood with the occupier-designed, occupied-built Atlantikwall line of defense bunkers.

References - La Pointe Courte: How Agnès Varda "Invented" the New Wave, Ginette Vincendeau