Daguerréotypes

Spending most of her days at home following the birth of her son but curious as ever about the people and places that surrounded her, Agnès Varda found inspiration for Daguerréotypes just outside her door: on Paris’s rue Daguerre, where she had lived and worked since the 1950s. The director turns her camera on the business owners whose shops are the street’s lifeblood: bakers, tailors, butchers, perfumers, music-store clerks, driving instructors, and others, who, between the everyday rituals of their work, talk of their lives, relationships, and dreams. Blending her photographer’s eye for still portraiture with her filmmaker’s gift for finding visual rhymes and resonances between images, Varda reveals the rich social fabric of an entire world—all without leaving her block.