Agnès Varda - Uncle yanko (1967)

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Agnès Varda - Uncle yanko (1967)

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Agnès Varda - Uncle yanko (1967)

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Agnès Varda - Uncle yanko (1967)

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Agnès Varda - Uncle yanko (1967)

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"Agnès Varda's Oncle Yanco is a lighthearted tribute to her father's cousin, the painter Jean Varda, a Greek emigree who has settled in San Francisco. Varda goes to visit this vibrant, kindly old man, who everyone calls Yanco, and the resultant film documents their meeting while commenting on the strength of familial ties and the joys of creating a truly alternative and creative lifestyle for oneself. Yanco lives in a floating community at the docks, where people build their own boat-like homes from wreckage and junk, and the mostly younger hippies gather around Yanco as a distinguished center to their makeshift village. Varda's whimsical spirit is perfectly suited to this material, and she approaches it not as a straightforward documentary but as a mix of obviously staged vignettes, re-stagings of "real" events, and documentary footage of her uncle's parties and interactions with his local friends.

In one scene, Yanco sits in front of one of his paintings, explaining his ideas about light, color, and the representation of the world in art. He paints expressionist collage works — though he dislikes the term "collage" and prefers to compare himself to the mosaic painters — that use cloth, beads, and layered, brightly colored paints to create fantastic and glitzy imaginary cities, teetering on the edge between kitsch and innocent beauty. As he speaks, Varda's editing fragments the image, cutting between different versions of this basic setup, with people moving in behind Yanco to carry off one painting and replace it with another, so that throughout the scene he is backed by several of his imaginary city paintings. In other scenes, Varda has some friends or relatives hold up heart-shaped transparencies of various colors in front of the camera, while she and Yanco play out their first meeting over and over again. In between takes, the clapper marks the scene, while Varda also fragments the scene with choppy editing, and even runs it backwards to further accentuate the filmic and artificial nature of this reconstruction. These techniques self-consciously call attention to the fact that Varda's decision to make a film about her uncle inevitably changes the nature of their relationship, and that the filmed version of their first meeting must differ from the original event.

This kind of formal play interests Varda even within the context of a seemingly straightforward documentary, and these small touches in disrupting the cinematic artifice of her encounters with Yanco greatly enhance this fun little film. Of course, Yanco's lively and artistic personality remains the film's centerpiece and raison d'être, and the real joy here is just spending a solid 15 minutes in the company of this slyly witty old man, who's clearly enjoying his niece's antics and the childlike artifice she's constructing around him. In Varda's documentary, the pastel colors of Yanco's paintings wind up bleeding into every frame of the film, both literally, in the sunlit and colorful visuals, and figuratively, in the cheerful spirit and bonhomie that weaves throughout the film.
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Agnès Varda - Uncle yanko (1967)

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Agnès Varda - Uncle yanko (1967)

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