Faces Places is quite a moving film, and it speaks to a particular cultural mindset that knits art into the fabric of public life. Experiencing and talking about art are a regular part of these people’s lives.
The movie focuses on building a powerful portrait of France, with many stories inside them. JR and Varda travel the country, bringing the Inside Outside van with them and talking to people in small hamlets and tiny villages as they seek out good subjects — both human and architectural — for their work.
JR’s is a humanist artistic mission; he gets ordinary people to partake in his work, which inevitably delights them. This movie, which has the French title “Visages Villages,” opens with scenes set in various places where, Varda and JR explain in voice-over, they did not meet.
Cinema has always been a medium that worships the top dog with only drops of recognition trickling down to the anonymous armies whose assists are integral. Directors are more often than not content to bask in their perceived roles as superhuman magicians. Faces Places is a subtly self-reflexive documentary that swims against this tide, inviting audiences to see that filmmaking is a process of having conversations with people, and enveloping each individual and their private creativity within the wider collaborative process. Art is a form of social work or, rather, it can be with the right people at the helm.
Reference
Comments