When world-class writers get to the last fifth or so of their career trajectory, after having put in four or more decades building their monuments, they often give themselves permission to write a memoir, a summing up, an attempt to gaze back and figure out how life and art have fought and entangled and rhymed over the lifetime. As they should. Filmmakers rarely do this, and it's a pity - what we wouldn't have done for an autumnal self-examination from Luis Bunuel (we got a book, but not a film) or Orson Welles, and consider how lucky we'd be today if Jacques Rivette or Werner Herzog decided to venture backwards this way, inspecting the weave of creativity, history, personal tumult and movie love.

French New Waver Chris Marker, for one, has been doing this all along, albeit rather impersonally, as has his rive gauche compatriot Agnes Varda, whose last notable films, from The Gleaners & I (2000) to cinevardaphoto (2004) to The Beaches of Agnes (2008), have all been gray-panther ruminations about her life. But Varda has always been interested in the commingling of life and cinema that so obsessed the French New Wave, and she always made "personal" documentaries amid her features and fictions. The one major woman filmmaker at work in the Wave, Varda has long been a sturdy, generous, and astute female sensibility in a messy film culture usually overtaken with masculine whim.

We're all better off for having had Varda present and busy on the cultural stage, even if we don't know it - her brand of savvy, feminist, maternal humanity could not have helped season and sweeten the discourse, which she has engaged in as a short-film dynamo, photographer and installation artist as well. Symptomatically, her 1976 film Daguerreotypes, new to DVD, made almost as a doodle between a rash of shorts and the 1977 hit One Sings, the Other Doesn't, this movie has no larger or more headier agenda than to explore the livelihoods along her block in Paris. The Rue Daguerre, named after 19th-century photographic pioneer Louis Daguerre, is one of those aging Old World city blocks which, in the '60s if not today, is chockablock with tiny, particular businesses that haven't changed in decades, occupying tiny low-rent storefronts in centuries-old buildings, manned by one or two family members, and patiently watching the traffic through the cluttered windows and waiting for customers to wander in requiring a certain, tiny something. There is a clock repairman, a baguette bakery, an accordion salesman, a cut-to-order butcher, and, most notably for Varda, a parfumeur. This last shop captures her imagination - a Dickensian hovel crammed to the ceiling with ancient boxes of buttons and bottles of brilliantine, and occupied exclusively by an octogenarian perfume-maker, pouring his own fresh formula of lavender water out of laboratory beakers as per customer's request, and his nearly mute, sullen, and mysteriously odd wife, whom Varda cannot resist filming.

Nobody on the Rue Daguerre is comfortable with Varda's camera, and either its presence is simply tolerated with sidelong glances or the subjects' discomfort is used as a style trope; Varda occasionally has the shopkeepers and craftsmen stare directly into the camera, alone or in elaborate tableau vivants. She never tries to become "invisible," or separate herself from the people in her movie - she makes her presence known, because to do otherwise is a ruse, a prevarication. You can tell Varda is hypnotized by craft, focusing on the meat trimming, perfume mixing, hair cutting, breadmaking, etc., as if they revealed a secret side of humanity. Which they actually do, in a sense - some of the crafts exercised in the film were already vanishing as specific neighborhood practices, and the culture Varda sidles alongside here is already giving way to the supermarketization of modern consumer life, in which the personality and human touch of the individual shopkeeper has long been bulldozed by the mass force of corporate commerce.

What transpires in Daguerreotypes is not always fascinating - Varda is embracing the ordinary much of the time, and none of her neighbors have particularly remarkable stories. Interestingly, as they are briefly interviewed about where they're from and how the came to live on her street, it becomes apparent that they're all provincials, all of them born in some rural backwater before making their way to the 14th arrondissement. As Varda puts it, the street's "pavement smells of soil." Unfortunately, Varda detours for a large chunk of the film toward the local performance of a hammy magician, sometimes cutting between his tricks and the real-life craft techniques they visually echo, but also simply watching his act, which is singularly unrevealing.

Still, Varda's position is unique and beguiling - she alone heroically conjoined being an inquisitive movie voice and being a devoted mother and wife, to fellow New Waver Jacques Demy, who died in 1990, and with whom she shared her best years of making movies and growing a family. It all happened on the Rue Daguerre, and that's Varda and Demy's daughter Rosalie shopping for a perfume gift. For Varda filming and living were two eyes on the same face, which places her with Marker and Jean-Luc Godard amid the art film era's wisest innovators of the medium.

For more information about Daguerreotypes, visit Cinema Guild.

by Michael Atkinson