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.
Chris Marker was an enigmatic person and artist who would rather have his work speak for itself. Camera shy, he created a larger-than-life cardboard cat named Guillaume to hide behind. Varda and Marker met in 1954, as Marker was a friend of Alain Resnais, who at the time was editing Varda’s first feature La Pointe Courte. It was because they knew each other for so long that Marker allowed Varda to enter his private workspace with her camera. In the film, Marker remains shy and unsure about Varda’s idea of shooting his studio: “Why are you filming my mess? You are going to dishonor me.” To which Varda replies, with her usual enthusiasm, “I find it beautiful that one is surrounded by what he does!” It is wonderful to see the workplace of great minds. We do not see Marker, but we hear his voice — and what a treat it is to hear him, speaking of how he hates waiting in lines, and how happy he is to be able to read a poem by Apollinaire while doing so, because he has poetry saved on his phone. Varda’s camera follows her eye, jumping from one detail to another, discovering a new treasure in every corner. We feel as if we are right by her shoulder.

In Chris Marker's Atelier.mkv

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https://nitro.download/view/6FA0C8E7F3E41C9/In_Chris_Marker’s_Atelier.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English (hardcoded)

The post Agnès Varda – In Chris Marker’s Studio (2011) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
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.

	
Les.dites.cariatides.1984.1080p.BluRay.x264.mkv

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https://nitro.download/view/3E8313FDC26FD23/Les.dites.cariatides.1984.1080p.BluRay.x264.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Agnès Varda – Les dites cariatides AKA The So-called Caryatids (1984) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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

Review:-
Quote:
Agnès Varda is the coolest lady, the warmest soul, and one of my very favourite artists. It’s a downright blessing to get to spend so much time with her, traveling vicariously, appreciating art and other artists.

Many standout moments, almost too many to mention, like her dancing Second Life with Chris Marker or the potato costume she wore (which doesn’t go unnoticed)! My favourite part, which perhaps illustrates Varda best, is when she herself is being interviewed and is quickly more interested in the interviewer than talking about herself.

Joyfully, there is so much Varda here, in addition to the great many others she visits and brings into the project. Her deep fascination with everyone, (every cat), and everything highlights what a unique personality she is, and From Here to There is a five-episode celebration of that.

A travel doc series in anyone else’s hands, but with Varda, of course, it’s much more profound, exciting, and generous, venturing closer to personal cinema.

Merci, Agnès!

Agnes.de.ci.de.la.Varda.2011.S01E01.576p.BDRip.AC3.x264-trand.mkv

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https://nitro.download/view/E8D0AF3984B47A4/Agnes.de.ci.de.la.Varda.2011.S01E01.576p.BDRip.AC3.x264-trand.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/BD4C08F00A87B26/Agnes.de.ci.de.la.Varda.2011.S01E02.576p.BDRip.AC3.x264-trand.mkv https://nitro.download/view/95DAEF220011701/Agnes.de.ci.de.la.Varda.2011.S01E03.576p.BDRip.AC3.x264-trand.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/6F36307B15EC293/Agnes.de.ci.de.la.Varda.2011.S01E04.576p.BDRip.AC3.x264-trand.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/C50F3112F6A2709/Agnes.de.ci.de.la.Varda.2011.S01E05.576p.BDRip.AC3.x264-trand.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English, Portuguese

The post Agnès Varda – Agnès de ci de là Varda AKA Agnès Varda: From Here to There (2011) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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.

Pier.Paolo.Pasolini-Agnes.Varda-New.York-1967.2022.WEB.1080p.mkv

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https://nitro.download/view/1C196DDDAC5417C/Pier.Paolo.Pasolini-Agnes.Varda-New.York-1967.2022.WEB.1080p.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English (hardcoded)

The post Agnès Varda – Pier Paolo Pasolini – Agnès Varda – New York – 1967 (2022) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
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.

Agnes Varda - (1981) Mural Murals.mkv

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Runtime: 	1 h 22 min
Size: 	1.28 GiB
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https://nitro.download/view/052416C19A050B9/Agnes_Varda_-_(1981)_Mural_Murals.mkv

Language(s):French, English
Subtitles:English

The post Agnès Varda – Mur murs AKA Mural Murals (1981) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
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.

Both films were made during Varda’s second sojourn to L.A. from 1979 to 1981. This time, Varda was separated from Jacques Demy, filming Mur murs for French television, and trying in vain to put together financing for an ultimately abandoned film called Maria and the Naked Man. She was charmed by L.A. with its glittering façades and population of dreamers, but felt isolated by its sprawling highway system that encouraged segregation and discouraged community. Feeling adrift and alone after the completion of Mur murs, Varda picked up her camera and, in a sense, turned it on herself to make Documenteur. The autobiographical impulse has always been present in Varda’s filmmaking, but until her recent films it has always been expressed obliquely. Up until 1981 she had made documentaries about her neighborhood, her family, her friends, her political heroes, and her political beliefs. Documenteur is the first Varda film that can be said to be about Varda herself; and yet it is not about her, exactly. It is about a woman named Emilie, separated from her husband in Los Angeles, accompanied by her precocious and inquisitive son Martin (played by Varda’s own son, Mathieu Demy).√Ǭ† But Varda deflects true autobiography by casting not herself but her editor, Sabine Mamou, as Emilie, and making the character not a filmmaker but an assistant to one (represented in the film only by her voice).

If Documenteur feels like a documentary about a fictionalized Varda, it also, at times, feels like a documentary without a subject. Not much happens to Emilie in the film, at least not externally. She takes in some old furniture, giving it new life in a new home (an early glimpse of Varda the gleaner); she does some laundry; she struggles with her son as he learns to sleep alone in his own room; and she types and types and types, apparently working on an endlessly revised script for her boss. Internally, though, Emilie roils with emotion, and this is expressed in the voiceover narration, if one can call it that: it seems more apt to label it an audible, stream-of-consciousness internal monologue. It is poetic and amusingly punning at times, maddeningly close to a private game of word association or list-making at others, but its droning tones are often a good match for the onscreen images of inaction. The overall effect of the sound and the images is to create a convincing portrait of a woman who is, physically and emotionally, just plain stuck.

Documenteur didn’t get a very good reception upon its initial U.S. release as the bottom half of a double bill with Mur murs. After the exuberance of the earlier film, nearly any other is bound to pale in comparison, and Varda’s dour and uncharacteristically ramshackle elegy of marital separation is no exception. Far from the riot of color and movement of Mur murs, the images in Documenteur do not seek to engage the viewer, and the voiceover and dialogue might actually turn some audience members off entirely. Janet Maslin, writing about the film in the New York Times, noted that the voices are so flat that the film sounds badly dubbed, which, in many scenes, it quite plainly is. Furthermore, the dubbed voices are curiously lifeless, as if recorded in an airless room. While this is surely just an artifact of the film’s production and not an intentional choice by Varda to distance and disengage the viewer (though distanciation and disengagement are precisely the effects it has), Varda includes a clever reference to voiceover recording and dubbing in a scene where Emilie is asked to record some voiceover for a film in the absence of the filmmaker for whom she works. Emilie reads aloud a bit of narration (which happens to be from Mur murs, further linking the two films), and when it is played back, the voice on the tape is that of someone else. When she expresses surprise at the sound of the voice, the sound man replies, “You never recognize your own voice.”

Because of its technical limitations, alienating manner, and dissimilarity with the rest of Varda’s work, Documenteur will never be considered one of her best or most characteristic works, but it commands more attention and respect than the “for completists only” kinds of films that pepper other directors’ filmographies. For me, it has even become something of a favorite among Varda’s work precisely because it is so surprisingly different from most of her other films. It is such an introspective film — really, the “emotion picture” subtitle is not a conceit but an accurate description — and it is the rare film that attempts (and mostly succeeds) to express the often oppressive sadness and vulnerability that comes with the end of a relationship. After Varda’s overtly and politically feminist films of the 1970s that immediately preceded Documenteur, it might seem incongruous to make a film about the despondency of a woman without a man. Yet if there is anything characteristic of Agnès Varda, it is her unwillingness to play it safe and to do what is expected of her. By Matt Bailey ©2010 NotComing.com

Agnes Varda - (1981) Documenteur.mkv

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Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 4 min
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https://nitro.download/view/A0B02BEAE311A52/Agnes_Varda_-_(1981)_Documenteur.mkv

Language(s):French, English
Subtitles:English

The post Agnès Varda – Documenteur (1981) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
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.”

Thanks to historians of that movement, and especially to Sandy Flitterman-Lewis’s study of Varda in her book To Desire Differently, Varda’s role as a pioneer—if not the “mother” or “grandmother”—of the new wave is now better known, and not just for the fact that she was the only woman director in it. The production of La Pointe Courte by Varda’s own tiny company, Ciné-Tamaris, completely outside the film industry and on a budget a tenth the size of that of the average French film (the money came mostly from a family inheritance and loans from friends; she had no professional training and would not get an official French film industry membership card until much later), Varda’s authorial control over both scriptwriting and directing, the exclusive use of location shooting, the mixing of professional and nonprofessional actors—all of this was groundbreaking in early 1950s France. For these reasons and others, La Pointe Courte was a precursor of the films that Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard would start making five years later, and of those of Alain Resnais, who worked as editor on Varda’s film and whose generosity in that capacity and as a mentor she has gratefully acknowledged. Seeing La Pointe Courte again in 2007, after Varda’s extraordinary documentary The Gleaners and I (2000), also confirms how prophetic this first feature was, heralding—beyond the new wave—some of the most exciting developments in French postwar cinema, as well as in Varda’s own career. She would go on to make numerous documentaries and feature films, including the groundbreaking Cléo from 5 to 7 in 1961 and Vagabond in 1985.

Back in the early 1950s, after studying philosophy and art in Paris, and working as a photographer, the young Varda decided to make a film set in la Pointe Courte. The area is a neighborhood of Sète, a city located in an unusual, marshy region between sea and lagoon—the étang de Thau—on the western Mediterranean coast. The story was simple: a young Parisian couple spend a few days in la Pointe Courte (where the husband grew up) in order to decide whether to stay together or not. Varda knew the area well—she lived in Sète in her adolescence—and this autobiographical dimension is another aspect of the film that places it within the new-wave ethos. But even beyond this personal involvement and the conditions of the film’s production, La Pointe Courte anticipates the new wave in its dialectical meshing of documentary and fiction, of neorealist aesthetics and high culture. On the documentary side is the overwhelming presence of the neighborhood, its inhabitants (whom Varda also credits for the script), its everyday life and rituals. On the high-culture side are the actors who play the central couple, Silvia Monfort and Philippe Noiret. Both were then with the prestigious Théâtre national populaire, where Varda worked as a photographer, and their performances bear signs of this milieu: they declaim their lines in a cryptic, detached fashion that deliberately contrasts with the villagers’ ordinary and accented speech. Accusations of stilted acting made at the time are misplaced, as Varda explicitly asked them “not to act or express feelings” and “to say their dialogue as if they were reading it.” (Moreover, because of her low budget, Varda had to shoot the film silent, and all voices were postsynchronized, the villagers dubbed by southern actors, which, Varda reports, annoyed them. She retained a good relationship with them, however, and has shown the film to the locals every ten years since its making.) Linking the two disparate worlds is a complex narrative structure that, as Flitterman-Lewis discusses, was borrowed from William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms.

The materiality of the existential world of la Pointe Courte is present right from the credits, shot over the close-up grain of a piece of wood—revealed to be a section of a tree trunk when the camera moves away in a long tracking shot that leads us into the village. There follow several forward and lateral tracking shots (prefiguring Varda’s Vagabond) of the windswept, straight streets of the neighborhood and its low-lying fishing houses and shacks. One can almost feel the wind, the mistral that howls up the Mediterranean coast, making the washing dance frenetically on the line. The camera pauses to show the interior of a house where a woman feeds her many children, starting a theme that will run through the film.

Varda documents these people’s lives, their eating, gossiping, quarreling, courting, working, seemingly at random, although she subtly weaves in several narrative threads. In particular we follow a young man, Raphaël, in his troubled relationship with fishing inspectors and the police, and in his courtship of Anna, initially prohibited by her father but eventually successful; we see them embrace in the last scene. Women gossip while hanging the washing, men repair the nets and go fishing in the lagoon, women and children help them pack the shellfish to be sold. Varda’s ethnographic approach is clearly prompted by her fascination with a place that seems to exist outside of time, a premodern space connected to contemporary France only by the railway line. While the fishermen’s activities cannot but recall Luchino Visconti’s La terra trema (1948), the amazing bric-a-brac in people’s backyards evokes Eugène Atget’s photographs of vanishing trades and habitats in late nineteenth-century Paris, pictures of which Varda the photographer would no doubt have been aware. The fishermen’s homes are poor, and in a heartbreaking (yet unsentimental) scene a sick boy, who later dies, is lying in a wooden box. The penultimate scene takes place at the joutes, an odd, popular local sport in which men decked out like Venetian gondoliers try to knock each other off their boats and into the water with long poles, as in a medieval tournament (now the joutes are a major tourist attraction).

Yet Varda’s attitude is neither passéiste nor condescending. With respect and admiration, she charts the fishermen’s struggle with officialdom over environmental health issues. Her ethnographic gaze is also highly self-reflexive, another trait adopted by other new-wave filmmakers. In her book Varda par Agnès, she talks of how she was initially surprised that the villagers saw her as an “intellectual,” since she’d lived among them. Yet the film in several ways signals her cultural identity with the Parisian intelligentsia, and as a result her inevitable distance from what she is filming. The opening sequence introduces two health inspectors, seen poking around someone’s backyard and then roundly sent on their way by the garrulous Uncle Jules, a key local character. The health inspectors set up the introduction of the Noiret character as another, this time sympathetic, outsider, who, like Varda, grew up in the area; he waits for his wife at the railway station. Throughout the film, Varda emphasizes the couple’s estrangement from their surroundings. Their clothes, speech, and actorly aura already separate them from the villagers, but Varda also uses mise-en-scène to mark their “otherness,” frequently having them enter and exit the frame diagonally, as if to underline the fact that the village precedes them and will outlive them—culminating in the final dance sequence, where we see, from a high angle, the couple slice through the local dancing crowd on their way to the station. In striking compositions, Varda makes them pose against flat landscapes, glittering expanses of water, or unusual objects (a pole, a discarded basket, a disused boat). Anticipating Bergman’s Persona (1966), she sometimes films their faces in extreme close-up, at an angle to each other, and at one point Monfort speaks directly to the camera.

The couple’s desultory exchanges on the fragility of love indeed seem trivial in comparison with the real-life dramas of the villagers. The couple’s problem is theater, the villagers’ real life. As one of the local women says, “They speak too much to be happy.” Yet La Pointe Courte blurs any facile dichotomy between “false” and “real.” The couple slowly respond to their surroundings, as in the end she decides to stay with him. Conversely, Varda turns the real locations into aesthetic compositions that stem from her training in art and photography. She delights in contrasts—between light and dark, wood and metal, life and death (fish and cats)—and parallels such as between the Parisian and the local young couples. Varda admits she based one scene in the film on the briefly glimpsed image of a woman’s hand against a white sheet while that woman was hanging out her washing. As in Cléo from 5 to 7, landscape and objects “speak” to the characters, and as in The Gleaners and I, Varda turns animals (cats in particular), wood, and everyday implements into so many artistic objets trouvés.

In mixing a quasi-neorealist approach with high Parisian culture (photography, literature, drama), Varda, with La Pointe Courte, forged a new filmic aesthetic that would have major resonance in both her work and the rest of French cinema. Although its critical reception was mostly respectful, La Pointe Courte was not properly distributed, and Varda might have given up the cinema altogether if she had not been commissioned to make documentaries. She returned to fiction film only seven years later, with Cléo from 5 to 7. In the meantime, La Pointe Courte was obliterated by the tidal wave of Le beau Serge, Les cousins, The 400 Blows, Hiroshima mon amour, and Breathless. Yet it anticipated them all, and in retrospect its modernity is breathtaking. With hindsight, too, Varda’s unflinching yet compassionate look at the flotsam and jetsam of the contemporary world in The Gleaners and I follows in a direct line from her very first foray into cinematic experimentation, and her 2006 art installation L’île et elle, about the island of Noirmoutiers, shows the perennial importance of the seaside in her life and work. In many ways, then, La Pointe Courte was a rich matrix for Varda’s work to come. But she was right to claim no prior influence: when she made it in 1954 it was truly unique, and it remains so today. – Ginette Vincendeau

1.53GB | 1h 20m | 790×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/9687B365BCE1B7B/Agnes_Varda_-_(1955)_La_Pointe-Courte.mkv
or
https://fikper.com/NixkjEuEN3/Agnes_Varda_-_(1955)_La_Pointe-Courte.mkv.html

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Agnès Varda – La Pointe-Courte (1955) first appeared on Cinema of the World.