1967 ‘Oncle Yanco’ Directed by Agnès Varda
While in San Francisco for the promotion of her last film in October 1967, Agnès Varda, tipped by her friend Tom Luddy, gets to know a relative she had never heard of before, Jean Varda, nicknamed "Yanco". This hitherto unknown uncle lives on a boat in Sausalito, is a painter, has adopted a hippie lifestyle and loves life. The meeting is a very happy one.
Tío Yanco, Tio Yanco, Wujek Yanco, Ο θείος Γιάνκο, Yanco Amca
GOD this is so charming! Wish I’d seen this and acquainted myself with Varda’s style before watching Faces Places. Big fan of any cute, warm film that has a filmmaker turning the camera on their own family, and a big fan of Varda breaking the documentary veneer to get involved and show her doing multiple takes of small moments to let us watch how they naturally change. What I would’ve given to sail Greece with Uncle Yanco :)
I love Agnes Varda's penchant for impatience. Rather than settle for being a document about finding her long-lost Uncle Yanco, Varda throws dozens of ideas into this twenty minute short. She comments on the facile, fabricated nature of documentaries, on talking-head soundbites, on capitalism and the struggle to escape it in America, on portraits of artists, on friendship and the construction of non-traditional families, on genealogy. So much comes at me that it's impossible to process it all in one viewing. Its density attracts me, makes me want to watch again and again to gather all the pieces I've missed.
"we can't live without color. for me, color is ecstasy and everything but ecstasy is vanity."
one time i was talking about my great-grandmother to someone i was meeting for the first time and she asked if she could write down something i said in her journal. it felt totally unprompted & sincere, not like she was trying to take something from me or use it for herself, but just that she wanted to have it written down, recorded, cementing something in my words with her handwriting. that’s what agnès’ work always feels like for me. capturing a person in the own words. meeting them & allowing everyone else to meet them too. just the greatest gift to cinema — to always be open to the stories others will tell us.
i hope agnès knew that she was the world's greatest gift to cinema, and cinema's greatest gift to the world
“for me, color is ecstasy.”
oh to be a hippie in the 1960s living in aquatic suburbia and smoking cigarettes with uncle Yanco
