Who better to document the
culture clash that was the 1960s than a French New Wave filmmaker living in Southern
California?
Contemporary viewers may see more
of John Waters than traces of La Nouvelle Vague in Lions Love (...And Lies,) in its newly
remastered digital format, but
Agnes Varda's film is still a very funny movie and a delightful addition to her available oeuvre. Of Los Angeles, Varda recalled recently : “ I found it very
dreamlike. It had the quality of daydreams, which I like. And a quality of
strangeness." From now until June 22, 2014, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents the first U.S. museum exhibition devoted to her work: Agnes Varda In Californaland.
When Agnes Varda moved
to Los Angeles in 1968, she came with
her husband Jacques Demy whose 1967
film Les Demoiselles de Rochefort had paired the American Gene Kelly
with the Snow White and Rose Red of French cinema – sisters Catherine Deneuve
and Francoise Dorleac – in a color-filled
musical that attracted the attention of Hollywood movie makers.
While Demy worked a
project offered to him, Varda was free to make her own projects: a
documentary about the Black Panthers,
Oncle Yanco a short film about a distant relative living in
Sausolito, and a celebration of the new
counterculture, the feature film
Lions Love (... and Lies). Varda
describes her “Hollywood” films this way: "The films are about sex and
politics, like they were at the time.” For the LACMA installation Varda designed a room within a gallery, using stacks of celluloid film cans from Lions Love.
Structured like nesting dolls, Lions Love takes a trio of real
people: Jerome Ragni and James Rado, whose Hair:
The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical had created a sensation when it
opened Off-Broadway, and Viva, an actress who appeared in Andy Warhol
films, and sets them loose in a film
partly scripted and partly improvised.
In filming. Varda plays with cinematic
illusion, as she often has, allowing the actors to look directly at her while on camera or by
panning past a mirror that captures herself at work. A heavenly choir, heard in voice-over, hymns the creature comforts of
their rented house in the Hollywood hills: a giant bed, a curvaceous, heated swimming pool, a loopy mix
of plants, plastic and real. Varda frames Viva in a halo of light that crowns her pre-Raphaelite
beauty, a more generous gesture than Warhol was capable of making. Like a masculine version of Snow
White and Rose Red, Rado is the quiet one and Ragni is the clown. It took a woman to imagine this kind of poly-amorous group.
The plot has this trio of flower children, waiting for the break that will make stars of them, rubbing their bushy heads together as they murmur their mantra: “Star. Star. Star.” These three couldn't care less about the 'new morality', living as they are in what they imagine to be a new garden of Eden. Like children at a sleep-over, they lounge endlessly in bed, conversing about the meaning of life. They kiss and nuzzle and make crank phone calls to the bank ( "I'd like to order $200 to go"). They while away their afternoons in the pool, smoking substances that dilate their pupils as surely as their casual nudity does to the pupils of viewers. Into this group, comes Shirley Parker, an independent filmmaker also trying to make it in Hollywood. A New Yorker in over-sized sunglasses, she is both attracted and annoyed by the indolent trio.
When Viva decides, like 'the folks who live on the hill' that they should have children, the trio borrows (abduct) some from
the neighborhood. Not surprisingly, at a
time when abortion was illegal and safe and effective birth control was hard to
find, Viva contemplates pregnancy without enthusiasm. "Do you think I
could go through nine months of it and only come out with one?" Domestic disaster ensues. The kids refuse to take naps, urinate in the pool and eat nothing
but french fries. "I think," says Viva, "we have to find another
way to the spiritual life."
Into this technicolor dream comes a nightmare in the form of
black-and-white television coverage of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in Los
Angeles, just three days after the
shooting of Andy Warhol in New York.
Like everyone else at that moment, the three are glued to the screen but
drape the television set in a black cloth.
The characters, as much as the fact of their nudity, caused consternation when Lion Love (...And Lies) was relearned in 1969. At the New York Film Festival that year where it was screened, Lions Love was coupled in the public mind with Duet For Cannibals, the first film by the American intellectual Susan Sontag. As a sign of the times, the two women endured an excruciating joint interview on Public Television with Newsweek's award-winning but clueless film critic Jack Kroll. Varda immediately bristled at Kroll's repeated characterization of her stars as "grotesques" and "marginal characters" who would be of no interest to ordinary moviegoers. When she pointed out that Viva and Andy Warhol were real people, Kroll questioned why anyone should be interested in them. Both Varda and Sontag were at pains to remind Kroll that, in the films he preferred, the characters act out conventions of behavior manufactured for the movies, not the behavior of real people. Too bad, neither woman interrogated their interrogator about his characterization of attractive unclothed people as "grotesque."
The discussion only went downhill from there. If Kroll had done his homework, he might have mentioned Varda's previous release Le Bonheur (1967), a film that raises serious moral questions and still leaves viewers unsettled to this day. When Varda asserted that movie stars and politicians like the Kennedys were now on equal terms as "public effigies" because of television culture, an idea that Sontag explored in Duet For Cannibals, Kroll responded testily: "Reality is being shoved in our faces." At one point, Kroll even pointed out to Varda and Sontag that they were both women. It was a long half hour.
For
the lucky visitors to Agnes Varda In Californialand, the retrospective
may shed new light on the filmmaker's career.
The ultimate test for Lions Love (...And Lies), or any movie, is
how it strikes the viewer on its own merits. If Lions Love shows a moment when everyone was young and optimistic, that is a fair
description although Varda expresses some reservation with her additional
parentheses (...And Lies) .
Sex and politics was in the
process of becoming a subject unto itself when Lions Love was made and
film critics were not the only ones who were uncomfortable. Events moved quickly enough so that in 1985
when the California director Donna Deitch.released her film Desert Hearts, a
lesbian love story set in post-World War II Las Vegas, critics wrote admiringly
of what are some of the most erotically-charged love scenes ever filmed - and by a woman.
Notes:
1.Varda and the cast of Lions Love were featured in the first issue of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine in 1969.
2. Jim Morrison of The Doors, Peter Bogdanovich, and the European character actor Eddie Constantine make cameo appearances in Lions Love.
3. Lions Love (…And Lies) a film directed by Agnès Varda, France 1968, 35mm, color, 110 min. Printed by Cine Tamaris
4. Lions Love (...And Lies) was screened at Yale University on November 8, 2013, the second showing of the new digital transfer.
1.Varda and the cast of Lions Love were featured in the first issue of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine in 1969.
2. Jim Morrison of The Doors, Peter Bogdanovich, and the European character actor Eddie Constantine make cameo appearances in Lions Love.
3. Lions Love (…And Lies) a film directed by Agnès Varda, France 1968, 35mm, color, 110 min. Printed by Cine Tamaris
4. Lions Love (...And Lies) was screened at Yale University on November 8, 2013, the second showing of the new digital transfer.
Agnes Varda - portion of wall installation for Agnes Varda in Californialand, 2013, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
4 comments:
Surprising movie and reception ! Agnès Varda is great. I did not see "Lions love" but I adored "The beaches of Agnès".
Thank goodness a lot has changed! The video of the interview is online, as is the movie. I'm sure a DVD of Lions Love will be out soon.
I liked The Beaches of Agnes,too.
Poor Jack Kroll. He appears to have adopted the role of the Mr Jones character in Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man": He knows something is happening, but he doesn't know what it is. Varda, in all things, is radiant.
Tim, is that really a line from Bob Dylan? Dylan is one of those artists that male radio guys think belongs to them and there's a "Girls Keep Out" sign on him.
A sign of a mental block perhaps, my favorite Dylan song is "Love Minus Zero" and I have never heard him sing it. After hearing it in Scott Walker's gorgeous baritone, I've been afraid Dyan would spoil it for me. Walker's career has had a similar trajectory to Frank Sinatra. Sinatra was idolized by women and then something happened (his personality, I think) and he ended by being lionized by men. Scott Walker also began that way but after he discovered avant-garde music, men discovered him. I've toyed with writing about Scott Walker but have managed to shirk the responsibility so far.
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