Via Francigena A rather curious phenomenon can be observed here in Northern France Popping up throughout the predominantly flat and slightly undulating landscape that’s surrounding us At first we didn’t pay too much attention to them but seeing them along the entire walk from Amettes to Bruay-la-Buissière today we started wondering: how come mother nature created these weird anomalies Upon arrival to Bruay-la-Buissière we were offered a surprise visit to one of the former mines in the area and we got a little sneak peak into what life must have been like so many meters underground Back in the day resources were scarse and working conditions far from healthy and indeed our guide explained to us that especially in the past accidents were not uncommon including children as young as 8 years old All just in order for us to be comfortable and have electricity and heat at our disposal It’s a good eye-opener to understand how lucky we are to be living in this age that protects workers and children much more and that safeguards our personal health By far the best part of the day was the fact that we were hosted at the Cité des Electriciens a former mining village that was built between 1856 an 1861 to host the families of the miners working for the Compagnie des mines de Bruay This little village was left abandoned since 1979 when mining activities seized but back in 2008 restoration works started It is now an amazingly beautiful piece of cultural heritage that is worth a visit A truly unique and authentic experience that we will not forget F.A.Q © Associazione Europea delle Vie Francigene | C.F. 91029880340 – P.IVA 02654910344 Powered by ItinerAria Privacy | Cookie Policy  | Legal Notice  © Associazione Europea delle Vie Francigene | C.F Powered by ItinerAria Thanks for visiting The use of software that blocks ads hinders our ability to serve you the content you came here to enjoy We ask that you consider turning off your ad blocker so we can deliver you the best experience possible while you are here The latest film from the Godmother of the French New Wave plays as a capstone to her career and a symbolic passing of the torch to the next generation Like many films about an unlikely on-screen duo The couple in this case is not a romantic couple but an artistic one: Agnès Varda the 89-year-old stalwart of the French New Wave a 34-year-old street artist commonly known as the “French Banksy.” Seen side by side a plump and matronly figure with her trademark red-and-white bowl cut the lanky hipster sporting a signature fedora and sunglasses the film begins by telling us how they did not meet: not on a road (cut to the two artists passing each other by on a country lane); not on the dance floor (cut to the sprightly Varda busting moves at a nightclub); not at a bus stop or a bakery he sought out Varda to share his appreciation for her life’s work—and to explore a collaboration The film that follows is at once the result of and the depiction of that collaborative process It sends Varda and JR on a road trip across France in a photo-booth truck that can spit out massive prints of its subjects like oversized Polaroids Stopping at various villages throughout the French countryside the filmmakers create photographic portraits of the ordinary French citizens they encounter and then blow up the photos to create large-format street murals and public art in the places where they live the mode is a familiar one: like her celebrated documentaries The Gleaners and I and The Beaches of Agnès the new film features Varda prominently as both artist and subject musing on her personal life and artistic legacy at the twilight of her career Faces Places is much more playful and less esoteric than it might sound For all her high-art credentials and penchant for experimentation Varda has never been a ponderous filmmaker and her later films in particular are marked by a disarming and deceptively breezy tone Varda’s latest (and likely last) film moves along briskly and goes down easily amusing sight gags and likable personalities Yet its surface pleasures also point to more profound depths Coming from a New Wave filmmaker approaching 90 years of age Faces Places plays like a capstone to Varda’s career Agnès Varda has long occupied a complex position in the French New Wave the iconoclastic film movement that propelled a new generation of auteurs to the forefront of French cinema beginning in the late 1950s Though sometimes called the Godmother of the New Wave Varda was also in important respects an outlier there is the obvious fact of her gender: in a movement and profession largely dominated by men Varda was the rare woman to find both critical acclaim and lasting success and her films often feature feminist subjects and themes Nor did Varda arrive at her career through the usual route the polemical film journal whose pages launched the careers of Jean-Luc Godard who were all film critics before they picked up a camera Varda had a broader interest in the art world than many of her movie-mad counterparts associating with the “Left Bank” group of filmmakers who also ran in Parisian literary circles Yet even as she stood somewhat outside of the New Wave predated Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Godard’s Breathless by a full four years while pointing the way to a new mode of shoestring-budget filmmaking that those directors would later embrace It is a typically generous judgment on Varda’s part speaking to her openness to finding new artistic collaborators like her former contemporaries in the New Wave for a member of a film movement that famously celebrated the director as singular auteur Varda here places a premium on collaboration and not just with her official co-director Faces Places is in many ways a work of collective art with its subjects participating in the artistic process at every turn animated title scroll celebrating the film’s crowd-sourced funders: a kind of democratic gesture placing the audience on an equal collaborative level as the artists this collaborative impulse becomes ever more clear Varda and JR treat their subjects as equal partners depicting them according to the concerns and circumstances of their own daily lives a run-down coal town in the north of France an elderly coal miner’s daughter who is the only soul still living in old workers’ housing that has been slated for destruction As Varda interviews Jeanine and the town’s other residents—who share nostalgic anecdotes of its bygone industrial heyday and melancholy memories of the scars their fathers brought home from work each day—JR prepares a larger-than-life tribute to Jeanine imprinting a mural of her face on the outside of her home bringing grateful tears to the eyes of the woman whom Varda dubs “la Résistante” for her stubborn devotion to her hometown the scene also conveys a sense of loss and impermanence Varda and JR’s artistic project—to create tangible tactile representations of their subjects in the places they inhabit—is not just a crowd-pleasing or feel-good exercise It is also an attempt to pay tribute to lives and lifestyles that are rapidly receding into the past Faces Places is thus a work of ethnography as much as iconography—a cinematic travelogue that seeks to preserve Not all of the film’s subjects are elderly nor do they all express nostalgia for some bygone era But the film’s choice of locations speaks to Varda’s appreciation of small-town French life while hinting at the dislocations that globalization has brought to such communities a tiny country town where one farmer with a computerized tractor does work that once employed dozens “I consider myself a passenger in the tractor,” he says as he climbs into the machine presses a few buttons on a touch screen and watches it roam up and down his vast agricultural holdings Marx might have had something to say about the alienation of this particular worker; Varda muses in voiceover about the loneliness of his job Underlying all these encounters is Varda’s abiding interest in France’s working classes and a certain nostalgia for the postwar economic model that sustained their way of life The art that she and JR create pays tribute to these workers emphasizing the individuality of each subject with idiosyncratic representations at their otherwise anonymous workplaces The farmer gets a gigantic mural of himself on the face of his barn The day-shift and night-shift workers of a chemical plant are depicted on the factory walls each group reaching out to the other in a gesture of solidarity Varda and JR pay tribute to the dockworkers’ wives imprinting their portraits on a tall stack of shipping containers These murals are undoubtedly impressive spectacles and the filmmakers make full use of their widescreen canvas to convey their immensity Whether they constitute serious art in their own right is another question one that this good-natured film is not eager to ask Faces Places may at times verge on the cutesy relying heavily on its likable personalities and the novelty of seeing a grande dame of world cinema snapping selfies and trading jokes with a hipster street artist Those hoping for a critical examination of the world of graffiti and street art should look elsewhere; they could do worse than Banksy’s 2010 film Exit Through the Gift Shop which offers a self-aware look at how ostensibly “transgressive” art can so easily be copied and commodified However one feels about the merits of JR’s art Varda’s presence give this material a certain gravitas that it would otherwise lack Varda’s mortality casts a shadow over the film’s surface cheeriness rendering the project a swan song for a filmmaker bidding farewell to the faces and places that have shaped her own career Varda and JR stop at the grave of Henri-Cartier Bresson where Varda reminisces about the great photographer’s influence on her early career She also revisits pictures she had taken in the 1950s of Guy Bourdin another French master and former Varda collaborator Varda selects an old black-and-white photograph of Bourdin for JR to plaster on an old stone bunker on a Normandy beach she discovers that the waves have already washed the image off the stone—an accidental reminder from nature of the transience of art Perhaps the film’s most touching gesture comes near the end Varda repeatedly references her failing vision and at one point we see her receive eye surgery JR sits Varda down in his studio for a close-up photo shoot focusing on her eyes The purpose becomes clear soon enough when we see that JR has blown up those images to imprint them on a cargo train — her eyes staring out from the surface of one cargo car One of the onlookers at the station is bemused by the whole thing (“Why put toes on trains?”) but the sight provides one of the film’s loveliest images “This train will go places you’ve never been,” JR tells Varda tired eyes and wrinkled feet recede into the distance There is one more train journey to be made before the film is over: to Rolle where Varda and JR have arranged a rendezvous with Jean-Luc Godard one of the last living filmmakers who made his name during the French New Wave And if Varda is that movement’s lovable grandmother Godard is its aloof elder statesman: a brilliant and innovative artist but also a famously prickly and mercurial presence a semi-recluse who eschews publicity even while continuing to release films well into his 80s As Varda chats with JR on the train en route to see Godard fondly recalling their work together while regretting that they have fallen out of touch She also admits of both his virtues and eccentricities: “He is unpredictable…he is a solitary philosopher,” she tells JR as if pre-emptively apologizing in the case that Godard does not show up It is clear that Varda has a great deal emotionally invested in this encounter perhaps the last chance to see an old friend and to introduce him to a new one The film itself is rife with references to Godard Varda compares the 1960s-era Godard to JR today she shows the younger artist a clip of one of her earliest short films featuring Godard and she re-creates a famous scene from his Band of Outsiders in which a trio of youngsters make a mad dash through the halls of the Louvre it is JR pushing the sprightly Varda on a wheelchair through the museum.) For all Varda’s obvious admiration for Godard and her eagerness to re-connect they find the doors locked and no one at home referencing days of old when Godard used to dine with Varda and her late husband seeing Godard’s no-show as an insulting rebuke and his note as a deliberate attempt to inflict emotional pain a sense that Godard is mocking Varda and denying her entry to his esteemed company cursing Godard like an estranged sibling (“I still like you The Independent's journalism is supported by our readers When you purchase through links on our site The iconic style excites as much now as it did in its heyday 100 years ago. Rachel Ifans takes a road trip back in time I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our Privacy notice Having been bombed heavily during the First World War le nord is a region that really embraced the urge to rebuild and be reborn during the subsequent annees folles (the “mad years” Today, Art Deco still evokes the glamour and optimism of the 1920s sandwiched between two catastrophic wars – a time when You’ve a weak spot for jaw-droppingly beautiful buildings with a socialist heart that have been renovated into art galleries La Piscine is in Roubaix an hour and a half’s drive south of Calais it was built to improve hygiene and health as workers flooded in to fill the textile factories that sprang up here in the 1920s As employees’ houses didn’t have bathrooms factory bosses would buy tickets for them to swim or bathe here regularly The architecture was inspired by a monastery: the bathrooms are the monks’ cells; the garden is the cloister (in red brick rather than marble so it didn’t intimidate the poor); and the pool is the chapel I’m not exaggerating when I say the light in the pool area is divine – the stained-glass windows at either end are heavenly glazed tiles and pool mosaics are perfectly proportioned Perfect for those who succumb easily to death-by-tour-guide this is an Art Deco pool where you can swim dive and admire the architecture all in one go You’ll find La Piscine Roger Salengro just outside a sleepy northern town you feel as though you’re on the deck of an ocean liner in the 1920s surrounded by neat lines of changing-cubicles and smart towers The gleaming painted concrete and the navy painted rails zing against the light blue sky and watery ripples; for swimmers It may not be bang-on Art Deco, but Villa Cavrois is a Modernist masterpiece that was built at the same time as nearby gems from that period it was constructed around 1932 as a private house occupied as a barracks during the Second World War when the French government bought it and renovated it or €15.50 (£13) for a joint ticket that also allows entry to La Piscine Roubaix Stop by to view its gloriously designed exterior and interior you won’t believe how sophisticated it is – at 90 years old it has a functionality that we still aspire to in our mod-con maisons All wires are hidden (swoon) and the house-wide speaker system is like an interwar Alexa There’s a walk-in shower with side jets (from the 1930s) While the seaside resort of Le Touquet Paris-Plage was founded by a Parisian, it was a Brit called Whitley who gave this corner of northern France the identity it has today John Robinson Whitley bought a stretch of land here in 1902 golf and horse racing as part of his vision of a sporting paradise But it was when he opened the town’s first casino that he really played the ace in his pack Casinos didn’t exist in Britain until the end of the Second World War and the lure of gambling proved irresistible to the smart set across the Channel Le Westminster is the only big hotel to remain from Le Touquet’s Roaring Twenties heyday Now part of the Barriere chain of luxury hotels and casinos it’s recently had a hefty interior facelift with plush carpets in a shattered-glass design high-shine lacquered wardrobes in teal and burnt orange complete with Art Deco capitals inset in the concrete facade blue and cream shiny tiles and intricate ironwork Originally a casino, the Palais de Congres is a stunner with a whiter-than-white mezzanine ballroom gambling rooms and bars – although it’s used more for business conferences these days than baccarat It was the place to be seen back in the day and people would parade almost anything outside the front and even the odd plane that had landed on the beach at low tide and been dragged up to town take a stroll along the Avenue de Golf to see an incredible collection of houses It’s where the English used to buy plots among the pine trees on which to build big villas and hold garden parties In the glory years, Le Touquet also had a huge open-air pool on the beach. The tiered seating accommodated 2,500, with an endless programme of diving competitions and fashion shows. They say Edith Piaf learned to swim in the pool – and she didn’t regret it – but all that remains now is the diving-board tower, now part of the Aqualud aqua park (currently closed for renovations) Bethune fits well for a lunch after your dip in the Bruay pool. Pick up a walking-trail leaflet from the tourist office for a feast of rounded windows Don’t miss the main square with its bonkers mix of Art Deco and Regionalist architecture Lille boasts a Unesco World Heritage-listed Art Deco belfry as well as the facade of the old oyster restaurant and the interior of the iconic Patisserie Meert Visit the stunning Vimi war memorial in Givenchy-en-Gohelle double-towered structure that lists the names of more than 11,000 Canadian soldiers killed on the western front there Lens railway station is shaped like a train – and once you’ve seen it you’ll wonder why every station in the world isn’t The Eccentric Quarter in Dunkirk is a final treat before you head to Calais for the Eurotunnel which were designed by Modernist architect Francois Reynaert and seem to vie with each other for eccentricity and quirk Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies {"adUnitPath":"71347885/_main_independent/gallery","autoGallery":true,"disableAds":false,"gallery":[{"data":{"title":"7_JM-ANDRE_06.jpg","description":"Piscine art dà ©co Roger Salengro de Bruay-la-Buissière.","caption":"La Piscine Roger Salengro in Bruay-La-Buissiere La Piscine Roger Salengro in Bruay-La-Buissiere Rachel Ifans takes a road trip back in time Summer starts strong for Transdev: the company will operate France's first hydrogen electric bus line which will connect Auchel to Buay-la-Buissière (Pas-de-Calais) the Group has converted the try in Dublin winning the tramway operation and maintenance contract for 6 years Transdev and the Artois Gohelle transport union officially inaugurated the hydrogen station and presented the Businova electric hydrogen bus on 21 June Transdev will operate the first electric bus line powered on hydrogen in France as a commercial service with 6 buses on the high-level service bus line between Auchel and Bruay-la-Buissière This 13.4 km line will save 530 tons of CO2 per year The transport industry accounts for around 22% of global energy-related CO2 emissions: transitioning to zero-emission (ZE) mobility solutions is a major priority for Transdev and the transport sector Fuel-cells are an onboard means of producing the electricity required to power an electric motor produces the necessary electricity for traction The only emissions produced are water and steam zero CO2 and zero motor noise for over 300 km of autonomy Transdev won the agreement to operate and maintain the Dublin tramway for 6 years Transdev Dublin Light Rail Limited has already operated this network since 2004 and has successfully renewed its agreement over the years The network is comprised of 2 lines serving the Irish capital The red East to West line (The Point-Connolly/Tallaght-Saggart) spans 20 km with 32 stops The green North to South line (Broombridge/Brides Glen) is comprised of 35 stops spread out over 22 km 110,000 passengers are transported on this network everyday (42 million trips in 2018) This strengthens Transdev’s position as world leader operating 23 tramway systems in 8 countries It follows the €330mn contract for phase 1 of the Parramatta tramway (Sydney Australia) that Transdev won in January 2019 Mieux connaître le groupe Caisse des Dépôts Mieux connaître le service Mon Compte Formation Accéder à la plateforme Mon Parcours Handicap En savoir plus sur les comptes et assurances-vie inactifs (CICLADE) En savoir plus sur les consignations et les dépôts spécialisés Le délégué à la protection des données de la Caisse des Dépôts Le service Mécénat de la Caisse des Dépôts La direction des politiques sociales de la Caisse des Dépôts Exercer mes droits sur mes données à caractère personnel What if we told you that a great second-hand boutique has just opened 2h30 from Paris Welcome to the low-cost shopping paradise. At Ding Fring, you can treat yourself without breaking your piggy bank. This second-hand boutique in Hauts-de-France is the second largest in the country. And good news, it’s located 2 h 30 from Paris. You’re likely to do some good business Located in Bruay-la-Buissière in the Hauts-de-France region the 700 m² store is the Ding Fring chain’s second-largest and the region’s largest second-hand store Opened on August 24,clothing prices here are very the basket is divided by four compared with other chains With nearly 10 tons of clothing spread across the various departments there really is something for everyone and every taste So you’re sure to find what you’re looking for When you buy second-hand you’re not just making an economic gesture It’s also a great action to reduce waste and pollution by choosing to give a garment a second life Ding Fring’s main mission is to collect and revalue textiles The store also offers an employment opportunity for people on integration schemes the company has sorted over 12,984 tons of textiles thanks to its 80 boutiques nestled just about everywhere in France the Bruay-la-Buissière store will be your new favorite HQ for finding nuggets 📍295 rue Georges-Charpack 62700 Bruay-la-Buissière