On the documentary films of Agnes Varda and what they reveal about how she understood the camera.

Varda made documentary films throughout her career alongside her fiction features, and the documentaries reveal something about her practice that the fiction films can obscure: she understood the camera as a relationship rather than a recording device.

Daguerréotypes (1976) is a film about the shopkeepers of the Rue Daguerre, the street she lived on in Paris. Varda filmed the street and its inhabitants over a period of months with a camera connected by a long cable to a generator in her house — she couldn't move the camera more than ninety meters from her door. This constraint is not a limitation but a formal argument: this is her street, these are her neighbors, and the camera's range is the range of her belonging.

The Gleaners and I (2000) uses a small digital camera that Varda holds at arm's length, filming herself filming, turning the camera on her own aging body with the same quality of attention she gives to the gleaners she's documenting.

Varda's films argue consistently that the documentary filmmaker is in the film. Her contribution to the formal vocabulary of documentary is the refusal to disappear behind the camera.