Daguerréotypes

Creams, lotions, hair dye, socks, handkerchiefs, big white underpants—Agnès Varda’s camera glides lovingly over the dusty stock in the shop window of Au Chardon Bleu in the Rue Daguerre in Paris. This is where her fascination for the street in which she had already lived for many years was born. It's a street with a butcher, a baker and a grocer, a place where you can buy accordions, have your hair curled and take driving lessons. And in the evening, the community center provides the venue for performances by Mystag the fire-eater, who pierces his assistant with daggers as skillfully as he hypnotizes Yves the hairdresser.

Varda wouldn’t be Varda without her avid interest in this utterly ordinary everyday life, as she goes out in search of the people behind the small businesses. In front of her disarming camera, they express their love for their profession, and talk about their birthplace, their family and their dreams. The legendary filmmaker has edited their testimonies and her sensitive observations with humor and associative skills to create a blueprint of a specific time and place, a village within a city in the early 1970s, just before the digital revolution.