Burgon Researches in Paris
One of our French PhD students, Haleigh Burgon, recently travelled to France to conduct research on Agnès Varda. She tells us:
“Thanks to the Jackson Fund Fellowship, I was able to take a quick research trip to Paris last week. I saw the temporary exhibit Le Paris d’Agnès Varda de-ci, de-là, which focused on the development of Agnès Varda’s photographic and cinema career, with an emphasis on her time living on the Rue Daguerre. In the early ‘70’s, after Agnès Varda had a newborn baby, she decided to bring her studio to her home. Each day, she stretched her camera’s extension cord as far as it would go into her neighborhood to capture the beauty of the banal, everyday moments of her neighbors. She photographed many women, children, and people who lived on the margins of Parisian society. This extension cord was often compared to an umbilical cord—that beautiful imagery is central to my dissertation themes.
As my research looks at mother-creators who “widened the hearth” and sought to balance motherhood with their artistic callings, Varda’s film Daguerréotypes is a concrete, beautiful example of this. I loved seeing her beautiful photographs from that time. During my stay, I was also able to spend a couple of days in the BNF library’s INA (National Audiovisual Institute) and comb through the archives of another female filmmaker I’m examining—Alice Guy, the mother of narrative cinema. I’m so grateful for the chance to deepen my work through these experiences.”