Agnès Varda

  • Agnès Varda – Black Panthers (1968)

    1961-1970Agnès VardaDocumentaryPoliticsUSA

    This classic 1968 documentary highlights the activities of the headquarters of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California as its members fight for the freedom of its imprisoned co-founder Huey P. Newton.Read More »

  • Agnès Varda – Les Cent et une nuits de Simon Cinéma AKA A Hundred and One Nights of Simon Cinema (1995)

    1991-2000Agnès VardaComedyFrance

    Criterion wrote:
    A celebration of cinema’s centennial, One Hundred and One Nights finds Agnès Varda at her most playful. It is also perhaps her unlikeliest project: a star-studded comic fantasy with an extravagant sense of style and an adoring but slightly off-kilter perspective on the magic of filmmaking. French New Wave icon Michel Simon is a mysterious aging impresario named Simon Cinéma who has hired a young film student, Camille (Julie Gayet), to simply sit with him at his mansion and talk about movies. Skeptical yet increasingly enchanted, Camille bears witness to cinema itself coming to life, allowing Varda to wittily integrate a mind-boggling parade of appearances by screen legends (Catherine Deneuve, Marcello Mastroianni, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anouk Aimée, Robert De Niro, and many others), and attest to the vigorous health of the movies at the close of the twentieth century.Read More »

  • Agnès Varda – Les créatures AKA The Creatures (1966)

    1961-1970Agnès VardaArthouseFantasyFrance

    Criterion wrote:
    One of Agnès Varda least-seen films is also one of her most fascinating: an eccentrically imaginative science-fiction fantasia that touches on human nature, free will, and the creative process. Working with major stars for the first time on a feature film, Varda casts Michel Piccoli as a writer and Catherine Deneuve as his silent wife, a couple who relocate to the island of Noirmoutier (a longtime second home for Varda and her husband, Jacques Demy) where strange goings-on hint at a sinister force controlling the minds and actions of the residents. Slipping between “reality” and fiction, genre spectacle and avant-garde experimentation, Les créatures is a beguiling, endlessly inventive exploration of the mysterious alchemy that transforms life into art.Read More »

  • Agnès Varda – Daguerréotypes [+Extras] (1976)

    1971-1980Agnès VardaDocumentaryFrance

    Quote:
    Originally shot in the mid-’70s, Agnès Varda’s vérité documentary Daguerréotypes has aged splendidly, acquiring flavors that would’ve been inconceivable at the time it was made. Back then, Varda hauled her camera around her Paris neighborhood on the Rue Daguerre, intending to capture what went on in the little shops in what was at the time one of the city’s most bustling commercial districts. As Varda explains early on in her voiceover narration, she wasn’t looking for esoterica. She filmed butchers, bakers, tailors, grocers, hairstylists, driving-school instructors… people she saw every day. And her vignettes are short: just a transaction or two, cut together with interviews about the merchants’ pasts, and portrait-style shots of them puttering about their businesses.Read More »

  • JR, Agnès Varda – Visages, villages aka Faces Places (2017)

    2011-2020Agnès VardaDocumentaryFranceJr

    Quote:
    Agnès Varda and JR have things in common: a passion for and the exploration of images in general, and more precisely, for places and for ways of showing, sharing, and exhibiting them. Agnès chose cinema. JR chose to create open air photography galleries. When Agnès and JR met in 2015, they immediately wanted to work together, to shoot a film in France, far from cities, during a trip in JR’s photographic (and magical) truck. Through chance encounters and prepared projects, they reached out to others, listening to them, photographing them, and sometimes putting them on posters. This film also tells the story of Agnès and JR’s friendship, which grew stronger throughout the film shoot, between surprises and teasing, and while laughing about their differences.Read More »

  • Agnès Varda – Oncle Yanco AKA Uncle Yanco (1967) (HD)

    1961-1970Agnès VardaDocumentaryFranceShort Film

    Quote:
    While in San Francisco for the promotion of her last film in October 1967, Agnès Varda, tipped by her friend Tom Luddy, gets to know a relative she had never heard of before, Jean Varda, nicknamed “Yanco”. This hitherto unknown uncle lives on a boat in Sausalito, is a painter, has adopted a hippie lifestyle and loves life. The meeting is a very happy one.Read More »

  • Agnès Varda – La petite histoire de Gwen la bretonne AKA The Little Story of Gwen From French Brittany (2008)

    2001-2010Agnès VardaShort FilmUSA

    Quote:
    Varda shot “The Little Story of Gwen From French Brittany” over several years beginning in 1996. The documentary short follows Varda’s friend Gwen Deglise as the two meet in Paris in 1996 and Deglise then moves to Los Angeles. Deglise is now the head programmer for the American Cinematheque. The short film was sent to American Cinematheque accompanied by a letter from Deglise in which she writes about how her life often crossed paths with Varda’s since their first meeting in 1996. It was during this first encounter where Varda asked Deglise if she could follow her around with a camera as Deglise ventured to Los Angles.Read More »

  • Agnès Varda – Kung-fu master! (1988)

    1981-1990Agnès VardaDramaFranceRomance

    Quote:

    Aesthetically, Agnès Varda’s two 1988 features, Jane B. par Agnes V. and Kung-Fu Master!, are diametrically opposed, but they’re linked by the showcase opportunities that they provide actress, singer, and model Jane Birkin. Kung-Fu Master! is, on its surface at least, a straightforward drama, one that concerns a middle-aged single mother, Mary-Jane (Birkin), finding herself smitten by her adolescent daughter’s classmate, Julien (Mathieu Demy). But like any story about this kind of subject matter, the simplicity of the setup belies the moral and emotional quandary it underpins. Even the midlife crisis suggested by Mary-Jane’s infatuation must be viewed within the context of the pressure that society, not internal doubt, places on women who turn 40.Read More »

  • Agnès Varda – Jane B. par Agnès V. AKA Jane B. for Agnes V. (1988)

    1981-1990Agnès VardaDramaFantasyFrance

    Quote:
    There is a good theory that explains why Agnes Varda’s Jane B. for Agnes V. was never officially distributed in the United States. Apparently, the few distributors that saw it after Varda completed it in 1988 concluded that it was too abstract and therefore too risky to sign. So until recently, it had been screened only a few times at festivals and retrospectives.Read More »

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