Agnes Varda
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Girlblogging: Cléo from 5 to 7
This post is part of a series, Girlblogging. Read the introduction here. In the music video for The Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” (1997), lead singer Richard Ashcroft walks down a blue-gray London street, bumping into passersby, bowling over the girls and pissing off the guys. When you’re famous and beautiful on film, these are things you can get away with. Ashcroft represents a thoroughly contemporary creature—the 20th-century star, who, on a small screen today, looks more or less like the 21st; the detached, ambivalent, self-involved face of the modern urban world; the flâneur with somewhere to go, or something to […]
by Matilda Lin Berke on Sep 12, 2023 -
The Complete Films of Agnes Varda, Batwoman, Star Trek: Discovery: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
Earlier this year I wrote about Criterion’s Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits boxed set and declared it one of the best Blu-ray releases of all time. Less than two months later, the producers at Criterion have already topped themselves with the 15-disc The Complete Films of Agnes Varda collection, a comprehensive look at the work of one of the French New Wave’s grand masters. The set contains 39 features and shorts, arranged not in chronological order but in a series of intelligently curated programs, as though the movies were being shown in a public retrospective; there are discs devoted to […]
by Jim Hemphill on Aug 14, 2020 -
Watch: Agnès Varda’s Rare 2008 Los Angeles Short The Little Story of Gwen from French Brittany
The American Cinematheque has shared a rare 2008 Agnès Varda. A brisk five minutes with lots of nice Los Angeles footage, The Little Story of Gwen from French Brittany gives a biographical sketch of Gwen Deglise, now the American Cinematheque’s head programer. Varda tells her story, with stops along the way to remember Jacques Demy, Chris Marker and Patricia Mazuy’s early LA days.
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 8, 2020 -
NYFF 2019: Bacurau, Varda by Agnès and The Irishman
A number of cinematic styles, narrative modes, and political agendas collide in Bacurau, one of two South American films on NYFF’s Main Slate this year. Urgent, yet vague enough to feel timeless, the film depicts a form of unhinged white supremacy in the outback of northern Brazil. We’re told up top, quite ominously, that Bacurau takes place “a few years from now,” as if to suggest that the wholly irrational racism herein is just around the corner. An angry movie, at once frightening and funny, it’s bound to rattle viewers aesthetically, politically, or both. Bacurau, a fictional town, is already […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Oct 9, 2019 -
“How Could the Film be Interesting if the Director Doesn’t Put Himself or Herself at Risk?”: Agnès Varda, The Beaches Of Agnes
On the sad occasion of Agnes Varda’s passing at the age of 90 today, we’re reposting this spirited and typically inspiring 2009 interview done by Nick Dawson in the lobby of Film Forum when her autobiographical essay film, The Beaches of Agnes, was released here in the States. R.I.P. to one one of the great pioneers of modern cinema. A member of the Nouvelle Vague as well as the Rive Gauche, iconic filmmaker Agnès Varda has built a 50-year career on her refusal to repeat herself or to be pigeon-holed. Born in 1928 of Greek and French parents in Brussels, […]
by Nick Dawson on Mar 29, 2019 -
Onrushing Now
Nick Nolte had walked into a bar. Nolte was a constant in a screenwriting partner’s Malibu hinterlands, hair ever elevated, stalking across a parking lot to Coogie’s for the midafternoon breakfast, resplendent in striped Sulka pajamas and happy dudgeon. This time, it was dark and it was Toronto, across from the Sutton Hotel headquarters of the festival. The upstairs of now long-defunct Bistro 990 on this night in the late 1990s is rich with heightened voices but not shouting. I’m standing near Nolte with a cofounder of Indiewire, Mark Rabinowitz. Our eyes literally grow large just as our ears figuratively […]
by Ray Pride on Jun 11, 2018 -
Critic’s Notebook NYFF: Faces Places, The Rape of Recy Taylor, Last Flag Flying
Seventeen years ago, Agnès Varda filmed her own hand in horror. The blotches, the wrinkles, the bulging blue veins: These may as well be the hands of a stranger. “My hair and my hands keep telling me that the end is near,” she says in her 2000 film The Gleaners & I. Despite the forebodings of death in Gleaners and 2008’s The Beaches of Agnès, Agnès is still with us; what a gift it is to have her still around. Varda, now 89, has partnered with French artist JR to co-direct another freewheeling, full-of-life documentary. Faces Places overflows with the […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Oct 4, 2017 -
TIFF Critic’s Notebook 4: 3/4, Faces Places
Ilian Metev’s deliberately small-scale, extremely precise 3/4 puts a trio of non-actors through fictional paces. The family unit: teen classical pianist Mila (Mila Mihova), preparing for an audition that, if all goes well, will let her continue her studies in Germany; oft-annoying younger brother Niki (Nikolay Mashalov); physicist dad Todor (Todor Veltchev). (Mom is unseen: I’m the umpteenth to note that the title is both a time signature and way of noting that three out of four family members are present.) Mila’s stress over this impending potential pivot point in her life is transferred onto father and son, who react in different ways. Niki […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 11, 2017 -
Cannes Dispatch #2: Faces Places, Claire’s Camera, The Square
At some point the past year, Rive Gauche icon Agnès Varda and French photographer JR went on a road trip through rural France documenting whatever locals they encountered and, lucky for us, decided to make a movie about it. The main activity of their excursion involved producing pieces for JR’s ongoing Inside Out project, wherein he takes portraits of the subjects he happens upon (or lets them enter into his van-cum-photobooth to capture their own images), prints them out at a scale somewhere between life-size and mammoth, and then pastes the images onto a building or transportation vessel that is meaningful […]
by Blake Williams on May 22, 2017 -
TIFF 2015, Critic’s Notebook #4: Unexpected Pleasures from Corneliu Porumboiu, Yermek Tursunov, and Pietro Marcello
There’s a sense of disappointment in the air. At the parties, people have been whispering, maybe this year’s just not a good year. Maybe next year will be better, they forecast in hushed tones. It’s true, many of the much-hyped films were somewhat of a letdown, but the best part of a film festival is when you walk out into a theater with zero expectations and you walk out enamored by what you just saw. There have still been moments like that for me at TIFF this year. A highlight of the fest for me has been Romanian director Corneliu […]
by Whitney Mallett on Sep 20, 2015
