The Alchemy of Artifice: Uncle Yanco

At their best, films are alchemical. Filmmakers use the tools at their disposal to transform a feeling, a thought, or an experience into something new. Try as some might, the human experience doesn’t translate one to one with film. Which is great! Filmmaking shouldn’t approximate life. A film ought to transform its catalyzing inspiration into a spectacle of celluloid bliss.

More than most filmmakers, Agnès Varda saw a film’s potential in this. Varda was inspired by the peculiar conjuring that comes from the loss inherent to the medium, to the extent that she would acknowledge it in the text of her films. Metacinema, an audience's awareness of watching a film, can put an unnecessary distance between the art and the viewer. Putting the craft front and center has the potential to pull the viewer out of the immersive potential of a film. In the case of Varda’s 1968 short film, Uncle Yanco, she finds a balance between revealing how the artifice of filmmaking can expose the inherent falseness in the medium and how this falseness may reveal something deeper to the film.

Over the course of the short film, Varda documents meeting her uncle, Yanco—who goes by Uncle Yanco—an eccentric, beatnik artist living in the floating suburbs of Sausalito. The short documents a day in his life, capturing, in brief interviews, his philosophical musings on politics, death, art, and being Greek. Each new scene is captured with the charm and wittiness that Varda had all but perfected in her career: playful editing that finds rhythm in emotion, a prioritization of frames bursting with competing colors, and an earnestness in the transparency of the medium. It’s in an early scene that the viewer becomes hip to just how transparent this depiction is. In the scene, Varda “meets” Yanco for the “first time.” The viewer is told, from narration spoken by Varda, that the following scene will reenact the “avuncular meeting,” between the two, or, as she titles it, “How Uncle Yanco Met His Niece Agnès.” The film isn’t actually a documentary of the two meeting but instead a fictionalized document meant to transform those moments through staged reenactments.

In the scene, two children run to the front door of Yanco’s bright, multi-colored, floating home, yelling out for him. Yanco emerges, curious about what the children are yelling about (the viewer knows this is a performance). At that moment, a friend of Varda’s approaches and shares that Yanco’s niece is present and wants to meet him. Yanco feigns excitement and calls out to Varda, asking if she is who he thinks she is. There is a quick cut to Varda walking quickly down the dock to Yanco’s home and as she enters a new frame ready to embrace Yanco, the scene restarts. This is a disorienting cut and the viewer sees Varda back at the beginning of the dock, her purple outfit in harmony with the oversaturated pallets of Yanco’s flamboyant home—it’s a retake. Again, Yanco asks if she is Eugène Varda’s daughter, and she says she is.

Once, twice, and three more times the scene resets, and each time the performance changes a bit. The audience understands what’s happening now, whether or not they understand why. Yanco asks the same questions with a shifting curiosity with each delivery. Varda struts down the dock each time. After the end of the third take, the scene restarts again, though this time with a slate in frame—a paper mache slate that looks as though it were recently made off camera by the children—meant to reveal even further the artifice of what’s happening. It’s showing the filmmaking. When the slate claps there is a single frame inserted with a translucent, highlighter yellow “X” cutting through the frame, which almost resembles an action graphic from a comic book. This single frame introduces artifice in a new way: as a layer meant to communicate something intentional to the audience. It mimics, or rather shows in a kinetic way, the excitement of filmmaking. Rather than create a distance between the film and the viewer in revealing the craft, it shares the feeling of not just the meeting of this person, but the fun of making with him, sharing in the art the two find so much joy in.

After a series of resets, Varda and Yanco finally embrace. Triumphant horns begin to play. The shot resets and they embrace once more, and the horns restart. Varda intentionally displays this artificiality to convey her awareness of how the medium of film and the deliberate arrangement of a scene are inherently separate from the 'magic' of the actual moment. Though it is with the addition of this playful awareness that something new emerges. After the two embrace and the horns play, there is a cut to a shot of a vinyl cut-out of a heart being lifted towards the sun. Then in another cut, this same vinyl heart is held in front of the two, casting a bright crimson glow as they hug again. How better to approach that indescribable feeling of immediate kinship the two feel than to view them through the filter of a heart—a childlike cutout, which embraces the imperfection of a rendering and simultaneously the sophisticated whimsy of creating.

Later in the short, Yanco, while musing on life and death, quotes Jean Cocteu: “You can’t explain it. You feel it.” It rings true to the conceit of what Varda is striving to create. Life and all its myriad tenderness, passion, and playfulness becomes an extension of her craft. An argument can be made that the making of this short puts a distance between Varda and Yanco, creating an artificiality in their union. On the surface that might be the case, but it's the awareness on Varda and Yanco's part that subverts this idea. They're able to manipulate their circumstances to make art of their union. It's in this subversion that Yanco has the opportunity to present himself to the viewer and Varda in the way he hopes to be seen. It’s here that the film materializes: it is both a means by which to extract truth from its participants and simultaneously communicate through invention. A filmmaker can’t quite explain what it feels like to exist, love, and encounter one another, but they can share something that aspires to transcend these moments and invent something new—with the viewer.