Varda's documentary film about a typical Paris street in 1975 - a world as it once was

 The late Agnes Varda is well known and remembered for her pioneering work in documentary film, in particular documentaries that also stand as personal essays in film about different aspects, eras, and interests in her life. One of the lesser-known of her documentary essays is Daugerreotypes (1975), which is film-essay about the street, rue Daugerre, in Paris 14th, on which Varda and her family lived in the 70s; it's a neighborhood far from the tourist attractions and the Right Bank hotels and restaurants - just a typical working-class street of its time, with apartments on the upper floors and retail businesses, for the most part, on street level. AV notes that all of the shops she visited in this film were w/in a few hundred feet of her own dwelling. So we see Paris as it was then, a city built upon thousands of small retail businesses; in this one stretch we see such places as a shop selling perfumes and lotions (and not in a kitsch/tourist/new age manner - just items that the elderly proprietor concocts), a small beauty salon, a tailor, a butcher, an accordion instructor (!), a driving school, and others. For our perspective 45 years later, it's obvious that no such neighborhood shops exist in Paris today (w/ the exception, probably, of the "convenience store" run then and today by immigrant entrepreneurs). For ex., in the perfume shop - how many people could possibly stop in during a business day? 10? 5? - and to buy what: a tiny jar of lotion for a few "centimes"? How could these people and their businesses survive? And I guess that they don't, really, but many of the proprietuers - almost tall of whom, we learn, moved to Paris as they set out on career and marriage, from small towns in the distant countryside - were probably helped by generous government support for the ill and elderly (just guessing there). Varga made a short follow-up film 30 years later, which I'll probably watch, but we can be pretty sure of what she'll see and show us: A street with upscale shops and offices and lots of car traffic. Today AV's film stands as a time capsule, giving us a glimpse into a world as it once was.