Faces Places(2017)
dir. Agnès Varda & JR
Giant portraits, ordinary people, pure joy.
Where to watch: Free on Kanopy, Tubi; rent Apple TV, AmazonLetterboxd ↗
Agnès Varda, in her late eighties, and the street artist JR road-trip across rural France in a photo-booth truck, printing enormous portraits of the people they meet, such as a goat farmer, miners' families and dockworkers' wives, and pasting them on barns, shipping containers and condemned houses. It is a documentary about what happens when an artist treats an ordinary person's face as the monument. It was nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.
Why it’s here
The film argues that who gets a monument is a political choice, then spends ninety minutes making the people history usually skips into one. What's punk is the DIY mobility and the refusal of the gallery; what's pedagogical is the lesson that attention is a form of respect and art can be a community act. It's also unusually joyful, which is its own kind of resistance.
Where This Film Lives
- Setting
- France
Read Alongside
Books that share a topic, theme, or setting with this film.
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A Moveable Feast
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Broke and brilliant in Paris. It felt like enough.
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Germinal
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They had nothing left to lose. They struck anyway.
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Giovanni's Room
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An American in Paris. He loves a man. He can't let himself.
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The Plague
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A city sealed off by disease. What happens inside.
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A Chair for My Mother
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They save every coin in a jar. For one perfect chair.
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Between the Woods and the Water
Patrick Leigh Fermor
Walking pre-war Europe. The world is about to end.
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Camera Lucida
Roland Barthes
When looking becomes longing.
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