Agnès Varda

In Chris Marker’s Studio by Agnès Varda is a rare and beautiful moment in cinema where two friends — who happen to be pioneering, legendary filmmakers from the French New Wave — meet in real life and in a virtual world. In the film, which was shot at two points between 2009-2011, Agnès Varda visits Chris Marker in his studio, a few years before his passing. She admires his magnificent mess, snooping around for details that reveal “the hidden side of Marker’s work”: a labyrinth of wires and computer equipment, a collection of images, magazines, and books, and — of course — cats. The film takes on a wonderful surrealist turn when Varda creates an avatar to meet Marker’s avatar in the online virtual world of Second Life.Read More »

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Commissioned by French television, this is a short documentary on the neo-classical statues found throughout Paris, predominantly on the walls of buildings, holding up windows, roofs etc. (the title translates as ‘the so-called Caryatides’). As one might expect from Varda, the film is strongly feminist, as she draws out wider symbolic and social implications from these images of women holding up huge weights, both then and now, but it is playfully so. The film becomes much sadder when she talks about Baudelaire, whose Paris these ladies grace; his poetry, success, notoriety; his subsequent physical decline, loss of voice and death. These statues are now so familiar that they are barely noticed, but in mapping the mental geography of a city, foreign viewers will be ravished by this Rameau-soundtracked exploration of a forgotten Paris.Read More »

Synopsis
Agnès Varda travels around the world to meet friends, artists, and filmmakers for an expansive view of the global contemporary art scene.Read More »

Anna Masecchia wrote:
With her 16mm camera in hand, the optical prosthesis of a 20th-century flâneuse, Agnès Varda filmed 42nd Street in 1967, shooting a crowdof passersby to the beat of The Doors. Pier Paolo Pasolini is with her, getting lost in the lights, bodies, faces and chaos of a crowded and multicultural New York. Opening in soft focus and closing on Pasolini’s blurred face, the images shot in a direct style and without audio are merged with a dense dialogue between the two artists and intellectuals, which was recorded later. Prompted by Varda, Pasolini reflects on the relationship between reality and fiction, the Christian figurative tradition and the function of audiovisual language in contemporary society. All of which is enhanced by the audio-visual décalage that simultaneously reveals the camera as a device while emphasising the real and political information of the images, which emerges from the background and comes into the foreground. In a matter of minutes,Varda’s art captures Pasolini talking about himself and the essence of cinema as a whole, which for both is an expression of reality itself.Read More »

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After returning to Los Angeles from France in 1979, Agnès Varda created this kaleidoscopic documentary about the striking murals that decorate the city. Bursting with color and vitality, Mur Murs is as much an invigorating study of community and diversity as it is an essential catalog of unusual public art.Read More »

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Documenteur, Agnès Varda’s companion piece and follow-up to her documentary Mur murs, shares with it a filming location and a similarly punning title (a menteur is a liar, in French). But the similarities end there: while Mur murs is a more or less straightforward film that purports to document the murals, the artists who created them, and the effect the pictures have on the neighborhoods surrounding them, Documenteur, which includes shots of some of those same murals and has scenes set in those same neighborhoods, is, by its own admission, “an emotion picture.” Neither pure fictional feature film nor documentary, it’s perhaps best described as a documentary with a fictionalized main character.Read More »

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La Pointe Courte: How Agnès Varda “Invented” the New Wave

In September 1997, I saw Agnès Varda introduce a brand-new 35 mm print of her first feature film, La Pointe Courte (made in 1954), to an admiring audience at Yale University. More astonishing than the luminous black-and-white images was Varda’s claim that she had seen virtually no other films before making it (after racking her brain, she could come up with only Citizen Kane). Whether Varda’s assertion was true or the whim of an artist who does not wish to acknowledge any influence, La Pointe Courte is a stunningly beautiful and accomplished first film. It has also, deservedly, achieved a cult status in film history as, in the words of historian Georges Sadoul, “truly the first film of the nouvelle vague.”Read More »

An unpredictable documentary from a fascinating storyteller, Agnès Varda’s next film sheds light on her experience as a director, bringing a personal insight to what she calls “cine-writing,” traveling from Rue Daguerre in Paris to Los Angeles and Beijing.Read More »

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1963’s Salut les cubains is a collaboration with Yves Montand that compiles Varda’s photojournalism from Cuba, ten years after the revolution, into a celebratory ode to the island, its people and culture, and the still-very-young socialist state. The images are striking from a historical standpoint, although they don’t hint quite yet at the more poetic direction toward which Varda’s work will evolve. Her photo-montage style recalls both Soviet revolutionary film and the Cuban documentaries of Santiago Álvarez, whose career was just beginning at this time. Moments are poignant, such as seeing Cuban director Sara Gomez cutting up around the ICAIC studios shortly before her death. But Salut les cubains’ dominant impression is one of boundless energy and the nation’s great hope in trying to forge a new way of life.Read More »