Paris Cartes Postales/Tarots

By Sophie Mayer and Lady Vervaine

“Les travellings sont affaires de morale.” – Jean-Luc Godard, 1960

Paris, 1961

Chère Agnès:

You have bought your ticket and crossed over. The other side of the screen – how is it? You stand where I shot Belmondo, rue Première Campagne. I imagine: I can see into the future where you have travelled. Like Cléo, you wander the city. In time. I reflect on your leap into doubt –

Jean-Luc

MAJOR ARCANA: The Crossing (where past and future meet)

This card shows the street corner where Jean-Paul Belmondo’s character dies, watched by an impassive Jean Seberg, in Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle. 45 years later, this death scene is marked only by the newly painted crosswalk. Strangely, Agnès Varda’s exhibition, L’Île et Elle, opens at the Fondation Henri Cartier around the corner.

Paris, 2006

Chèr Jean-Luc:

What can I glean here? The children have left their games at the site of his death. Three, two, one… the film begins, running towards us, in black and white. The signs point to a crossing: from Première Campagne to Daguerre: our place in history. I do not know how this will find you there –

Agnès 

MAJOR ARCANA: Terre et Ciel (the game of time)

Also on rue Première Campagne, a children’s hopscotch game and a woman jumping. The schematic game board is reminiscent of the leader that runs before films and the “real time” signature of Varda’s best-known film Cleo de 5 à 7, in which Paris is gleaned in fragments. Its presence reminds us that we are watching film, forcing us to evaluate the image just as Godard’s use of title cards does.

Paris, 1961

Chère Agnès:

You write to me from the end of cinema. I see it: the leader winding through the projector, clicking like a stone against pavement. Coming down to earth. I appreciate the gravity of your message: doubt remains the only constant – even so it doubts & doubles itself, writes the cinema of the end. Return –

Jean-Luc

MAJOR ARCANA: Mirror Writing (death on reflection)

In Jean Cocteau’s Orphée, Death is a beautiful woman who walks through mirrors made of mercury. The New Wave directors doubted the Surrealists’ shimmer, their investigations of the city’s unconscious. Instead, Varda’s first film Pointe Courte – inaugurating the New Wave – mixed documentary realism with fictional slips of reflection. Godard’s use of title cards and his love of chiastic reversals – mirror phrases that undo themselves through doubt – are reflected in this card.

Paris, 2006

Chèr Jean-Luc:

Doubt brushed my gaze aside. Love is a fear that takes hold of the city. Who will receive it? You flip this card like a pebble between your fingers. Line it up with the others and read the future in them. We will make that crossing: the screen will tear. Can you see the space where your work will show? Love –

Agnès

MAJOR ARCANA: The Stone Heart (love-in-darkness)

In black and white, a story is told. The heart is cinema, a narrative compressed into a single image. The graffiti could have been there for forty-five years, left as a message for future viewers. It is a postcard without an addressee, with the world as its destination.  It is an installation, a moment in time and space uniting Varda’s loving exhibition (executed with the help of her daughter) at the Fondation Cartier and Godard’s fragmented one at the Centre Pompidou.                                     

Paris, 1961

Chère Agnès:

Such questions, like kisses, leave me breathless. You speak of centres and foundations: how did the city become so established? I thought to work in the margins but the centre of the city draws me: I have been tracking the gaudy lights of the Champs Elysée. Can’t. Stop. Moving. Tribute or tribune?

Jean-Luc