Daguerréotypes

In 1975 Agnès Varda had a two-year-old son and did not want to work far from home, so she ran a power cable from her house at 86 rue Daguerre and filmed only what it would reach — about eighty metres of a Paris street in the fourteenth arrondissement. The result is one of the great documentaries about work, and one of the most quietly radical things she made.

The subjects are the shopkeepers: the couple at the bakery, the butcher and his wife, the tailor, the driving instructor, and — the film's centre of gravity — the elderly perfumer Monsieur Chardon Bleu and his wife, who stands in the doorway and rarely speaks. Varda films the daily gestures of the trade at length, then stages an interruption in the form of a travelling magician performing in the local café, and cuts between the two until the ordinary starts to look like conjuring.

She described the film as a portrait of her neighbours and of her own confinement at the same time, and its feminism is entirely embedded in the observation: the wives are in every shot, doing half the work, saying almost nothing. Restored and reissued in the Varda retrospectives of the last decade, it now reads as the direct ancestor of The Gleaners and I — the same curiosity, thirty years earlier, on one street.