Agnès Varda

Abstract

Both a precursor to and a critical member of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda weaves documentary and fiction into tapestries that portray distinctive places and complex human beings. Critics and aficionados have celebrated Varda's independence and originality since the New Wave touchstone Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) brought her a level of international acclaim she has yet to relinquish. The book traces Varda's works from her 1954 debut La Pointe Courte through a varied career that includes nonfiction and fiction shorts and features, installation art, and the triumphant 2008 documentary The Beaches of Agnès. Drawing on Varda's archives and conversations with the filmmaker, the book focuses on the concrete details of how Varda makes films: a project's emergence, its development and the shifting forms of its screenplay, the search for financing, and the execution from casting through editing and exhibition. In the process, it explores the artistic consistencies and bold changes in Varda's career and reveals how one woman charted a nontraditional trajectory through independent filmmaking. The result is a book that reveals the artistic consistencies and bold changes in the career of one of the world's most exuberant and intriguing directors.

Mother and Lover Equals Other: Varda's Mortal Critique of the Feminine as Annex to the Masculine Subject

“…2 Yet, famously, Varda considers herself more of a woman who makes films than a specifically feminist filmmaker, a stance that has led Kelley Conway to approach the director's work as that of a woman making films in France, rather than through a lens of feminist politics. 3 This self-definition as a female creator rather than a feminist one has ramifications for the ways in which Varda's films are interpreted. However, scholars have appraised Varda's productions 4 Additionally, in an interview discussing L'une chante, l'autre pas, Varda herself cites de…”

Editorial: the first wave

“…Academic publishing continues to produce new books on these figures at an alarming rate. In the last five years alone, there has been a major new work on the New Wave as a cinematic phenomenon (Tweedie 2013) and a raft of significant new books on Truffaut (Andrew and Gillain 2013;Gouslan 2016;Solecki 2015), Godard (Conley and Kline 2014;Morgan 2013;Williams 2016;Witt 2013), Rohmer (Anderst 2014;de Baecque and Herpe 2014;Handyside 2013;Leigh 2012) and Varda (Bénézet 2014;Conway 2015;Neroni 2016). In addition, several directors associated with the New Wave have had beautifully produced collectors' edition box sets of DVDs/Blu-ray Discs of their complete or partial filmographies released : Godard Politique (Gaumont, 2012), Tout(e) Varda (ARTE, 2012), Éric Rohmer Intégrale (Potemkine, 2013) and Planète Chris Marker (ARTE, 2013).…”