Intermediary and the Politics of (Un)Making in Agnes Varda's Visages Villages

Agnes Varda and JR's 2017 documentary 'Visages Villages' is an extended gesture toward a creative politics that privileges decentralized, communal, and constantly shifting authorial positions. The co-directors not only explore the French countryside in their creative endeavor, but also expand upon preconceived notions of what constitutes a creator and a creation. Using the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as a theoretical framework, Varda and JR's interactions with space and place offer a radical and subversive transformation that necessarily multiples everything it touches. This multiplicity is enacted not only through a Deleuzean-Guattarian brand of corporeal movement, but through the consistent regeneration and recycling of individual texts and images, all of which coalesce into an endlessly transformative body of work that resists totalization even as it suggests that textual possibility. Keywords: Agnes Varda / Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari / intermediary / creativity / photography
One does not create by adding, but by taking away --ROBERT BRESSON, NOTES ON THE CINEMATOGRAPH INTRODUCTION Filmmaker Agnes Varda was a pioneer of the French New Wave and Left [...]