AGNES VARDA, mother of the nouvelle vague

it doesn't make sense in regards to Varda

agreed, she was everywhere the past few years -- they even had a life-size standee of her greeting folks at the MOMI in Queens.

a few of her films are still pretty obscure, some very deservedly so (like the one she made on the 100th anniversary of cinema). but the great ones are pretty well recognized as such and widely seen.

it's easy to be cynical about varda's meme-ification of late, what with her becoming a sort of virtual den mother to lots of female artist intragammers and so on, or at least they treated her as such. but i try not to be, because every bit of attention she got was well-deserved, her work deserves wide exposure, and it's important for young people to have someone like her to look up to and by which to claim a heritage.

also she was, like, literally everywhere -- travelling constantly, making appearances in paris (of course), london, new york, los angeles.... AFAICT she seldom ended up cancelling visits, even in her late 80s. not so shabby.

speaking of female french filmmakers, clare denis is making a ton of appearances in NY next week/end, and then is showing up in chicago as well.

life-size standee

she was like 5'1" or something--maybe even shorter in her old age. so my friends and i towered over said standee. i think her size had something to do w/ the way she was often treated, somewhat condescendingly that is, although she sometimes leaned into that "eccentric little granny" thing in recent years.

vagabond is all-time btw.

late to the party and stating the obvious but on friday I watched Cleo & La Pointe Courte - I was struck by how Varda beat Bergman to the Persona punch by 11 years with that one profile shot. the Resnais connection is less striking I guess since he edited it, and I'm assuming nicked quite a bit from the experience for Hiroshima and Marienbad.

I watched Beaches of Agnes and it has got to be one of the most exciting and successful memoir films I can recall. Some of her work doesn't click w/ me but this did. I feel like a schmuck for waiting over a decade to watch it.

NYT:

It was also during (the California) period that she befriended Jim Morrison, the frontman of the Doors, who visited her and Mr. Demy in France; according to Stephen Davis’s “Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend” (2004), she was one of only five mourners at Mr. Morrison’s funeral in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris in 1971. That same year she became one of the 343 women to sign the “Manifesto of the 343,” a French petition acknowledging that they had had abortions and thus making themselves vulnerable to prosecution.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/obituaries/agnes-varda-dead.html

AO Scott counters, a little, Alfred's evaluation of "late Varda as brand":

By putting herself — body, voice and mind — in the frame as she made her way across beaches and marketplaces, Varda insisted that filmmaking could be a kind of companionship, a communal act of looking, wondering and feeling. What makes “The Gleaners and I” and her last feature, “Faces Places” (co-directed with the artist J.R.) so moving is that they create a bond between director and viewer that feels very much like friendship.

I don’t mean this to sound soft or sentimental, or to create a misleading impression of niceness. Friends can be difficult. Friendship is demanding. It is also transformative, and if Varda was among the most welcoming of directors, she was also among the most rigorous and radical. Her movies are intensely personal, which is another way of saying that they are profoundly democratic. That’s the history that needs to be written.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/movies/agns-varda-appreciation.html

I rewatched Le Bonheur last night, and, boy, I undersold its radicalness. I forgot how ambiguously she treats what happens to the spurned wife.

I'd count 'Varda by Agnes' as a feature too, though, and it's a very nice final look back.

For the French speakers ARTE recently broadcast two hours of her "film class" at the Cinématheque. Along with the full 8- episode series of Bertrand Tavernier's "Voyage à travers le cinéma français" ( also 2019 ) it's essential viewing.

I think that film class is 'Varda by Agnes'?

Yes, you're right!

wow

Madonna was touched by the story of Cléo [a story of a women waiting for a cancer diagnosis], and she asked a woman to adapt the screenplay for her. It was OK with me. But her mother had cancer and died, and she quit the project. If I had remade it in the US at the time, I thought it should be a black woman being afraid of Aids – in those years, Aids was such a terrible threat. I would have loved to make it with Whitney Houston.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/mar/29/agnes-varda-last-interview-i-fought-for-radical-cinema-all-my-life

There's a clip of Varda and Madge appearing together on a French talk show and discussing the by then abandoned remake on the Criterion box set edition of Cleo, but that Whitney thing is new-ish and amazing.

I had forgotten about Bonnaire getting old Aunt Lydie drunk in the last half hour, a delight.

*the last half hour of Vagabond, that is.

La Pointe Course was a good first film, although ultimately a little schematic. Le Bonheur and One Sings, the Other Doesn’t were both fantastic I thought

Le Bonheur was an interesting critique of male psychology. Its use of color was striking and had the effect of making the evanescence of happiness in the story more poignant

apparently on its release in 1977, Amy Taubin found One Sings, the Other Doesn’t insufficiently radical, but she completely revised her opinion in an essay for Criterion this year

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6399-one-sings-the-other-doesn-t-bodies-and-selves

*La Pointe Courte*

One Sings is didactic but endearing enough to more than make up for its message movie tendencies

the songs, oy

lol

Calling this film didactic is just lazy. I mean how many people knew or cared to know what this film talks about at the time it was made.

watching it again Vagabond still seems really moving

Need to watch that again. Saw it when it first came up and was worried about how it was going to work but seems like many obvious pitfalls were avoided.

Calling this film didactic is just lazy. I mean how many people knew or cared to know what this film talks about at the time it was made.

― xyzzzz__, Saturday, September 14, 2019 2:52 AM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

I like it a lot, but it's exactly what you said, a movie of its time

don't think xyzzzz___ was saying it was a movie of its time though

what was revelatory in 1977 comes off as stiff, but OSATOD more than makes up for it

The issues in that film are all around us so no it's not a film of its time.

I appreciate “The Gleaners and I” more seeing it again. I don’t find interviews and voice-over exposition in general all that interesting, but in this film they seem perfect

a natural subject matter for her, as a 'gleaner of gleaners'

“…and then there is my hand up close. I mean, this is my project: to film with one hand my other hand. To enter into the horror of it. I find it extraordinary. I feel as if I am an animal, worse, I am an animal I don’t know.

And here’s Rembrandt’s self-portrait, but it’s just the same in fact. Always a self-portrait.”

Cinévardaphoto is a nice trio of short films

Beaches of Agnes is really great, it is both nostalgic and forward thinking and is so beautiful, it's one of my favorite films of hers

I remembered a moment from beaches of agnes the other day, when she's on the boardwalk at the card sale, she finds a flyer for Documenteur and says "Oh! my favorite"

she had such a generosity of spirit

the reminiscences of her many lives in Beaches of Agnes reminds me of all of the Varda films I still haven't seen

saw JR’s The Chronicles of San Francisco and revisited some of Agnes Varda’s documentaries recently, then this week rewatched Faces Places and was even more taken with it than I was the first time. I like the quote above about her films forming a bond with the viewer that feels like friendship

Varda tries to unmask JR’s identity, or at least get him to take off his sunglasses, even pressing his grandmother

“prepared to sit right inside their own hearts”. I liked the whole exploration about how much of ourselves we are willing to give to another

Did she do any lesser feature than Lions Love? Ragni, Rado and Viva seem like the 3 most annoying bohos in '68 LA.

Lions Love is fantastic.

― aaaaaaaauuuuuuuuu (melting robot) (WilliamC), Monday, January 23, 2017

'splain!

lol, I have no memory of the film now. Obviously it make a strong impression at the time though!

Don’t think I made it to the end of that one

Did she do any lesser feature than /Lions Love/? Ragni, Rado and Viva seem like the 3 most annoying bohos in '68 LA.

It's SET then, over a mere week, but I'm sure they cheated some. There was a billboard for The Odd Couple visible in one car scene that read "2 Academy Award Nominations," which had to be shot in early '69.

Ohhh gotcha

Shirley Clarke otoh is magnetic, but she doesn't have enough scenes.

yeah iirc we're stuck with those fucking hippies for most of it

Uniquely irritating in a way that ruins the movie for me, just like Stranger Than Paradise

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dySwfrzAEeI&feature=youtu.be