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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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Agnes Varda directed this drama which combines formal dramatic structures with the openness of improvisational cinema verite. Independent filmmaker Shirley Clarke plays an avant-garde film director attempting to work with a major studio to finance her next project, in which she hopes to collaborate with James Rado and Jerome Ragni, creators of the musical Hair (who play themselves). She also wants to use Andy Warhol superstar Viva (who also appears as herself) as her leading lady. However, after much give and take between herself and the moneymen, the director learns that the plug has been pulled on her project, pushing her to the brink of suicide.Read More »
Synopsis
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 »
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The intertwined lives of 2 women in 1970’s France, set against the progress of the women’s movement in which Agnes Varda was involved. Pomme and Suzanne meet when Pomme helps Suzanne obtain an abortion after a third pregnancy which she cannot afford. They lose contact but meet again ten years later. Pomme has become an unconventional singer, Suzanne a serious community worker – despite the contrast they remain friends and share in the various dramas of each others’ lives, in the process affirming their different female identities.Read More »
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A couple find their erotic love mirrored perfectly in the architecture and mosaics of Iran.Read More »
Agnes Varda’s Loving Work About Her Husband
Agnes Varda, who made her first feature, “Cleo From 5 to 7,” in 1961, remains one of the most long-lived, productive and difficult to categorize directors associated with France’s New Wave.
Though many of her colleagues have lost their momentum or died, she continues, in part, it seems, because she has never become locked into a particular form or dominant ideology. As the years go by, her focus shifts. She lives in a present that is ever enriched by the accumulating past.
For her that past includes one of the funniest artifacts of the liberated 1960’s, “Lions Love” (1969), about three upwardly mobile flower children on the loose in Hollywood, and “Daguerreotypes” (1975), a fine documentary about her friends and neighbors on a short stretch of the Rue Daguerre in Paris’s 14th Arrondissement. In 1985 there was “Vagabond,” her tough, compassionate fiction film about a young woman’s resolute drift toward destruction. Read More »