Uncle Yanco (1967)

They call San Francisco "The Holy City", the "City of Love".  I never knew that, but Agnes Varda said this. She praises psychedelic art and compares night in the city to God.

I haven't been to San Francisco in thirty years. It was all right, but it was hard to find parking. I had a friend there who went to work in the tech industry after graduating from MIT. He drove us on some of the roads where the chase scene in Bullitt was filmed.

Agnes Varda goes there to see her Uncle Yanco who she never met, an artist who left France to live in Greece and then fled the military dictatorship that Lyndon Johnson imposed on the country. In the U.S., Yanco sides with the college kids opposing the Vietnam War but he isn't an activist.

I didn't care for Yanco's art. He mentions that it's expensive living there and that San Francisco is less Bohemian than it looks.

And he's not her uncle---he's her father's cousin, her first cousin once removed.

I never travel anywhere. Lately, I've comforted myself with the thought that when you travel abroad, you're going to see people who never go anywhere. You go to Paris to see Parisians in their natural state, people who don't know any better than to eat in sidewalk cafes.

I still have a role to play in world travel. If anyone comes here, they're coming to see provincials like me. To them, I'm a peasant. Even the foreign students are richer than me.

The documentary was full of hippies. I'm guessing they all came from somewhere else.

20 minutes. Available on the Criterion Channel.