Memory, modernity and the city in Agnès Varda’s Paris films

What does it mean to remember? Benjamin devotes the opening half of his essay on Baudelaire to this question. With reference to Bergson, Benjamin introduces the idea of memory as the ‘spontaneous afterimage’ of modern life (1968: 157). Indeed, memory, for Benjamin, is a peculiarly modern product,
replacing tradition as the means by which the past is retained. Unlike tradition, however, there is a randomness to memory, which makes it unreliable as a mode of transmission. Hence, memory appears on the site of the gradual erosion of tradition, and shock is the mechanism by which this erosion is brought about. The experiences of modernity, primarily those of shock and speed, leave traces which become memory. Varda’s Paris films can, following Freud, be classified as just such memory traces: ‘most powerful and most enduring when the incident which left them behind was one that never entered consciousness’ (Benjamin 1968: 160).

Varda was an avid reader of Baudelaire, and his influence on her work, particularly her Paris films, cannot be underestimated. Jill Forbes (2002) includes four of Varda’s films under the appellation ‘Paris films’: L’Opéra-Mouffe (1958), Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962), Daguerreotypes (1975) and Les dites Cariatides (1984); however,
the appellation can also be extended to include Le Lion volatil (2003), in some ways the most Baudelairean of Varda’s Paris films.