AGNES VARDA, mother of the nouvelle vague

@ ward i don't have a region free player :(

announced as her swan song

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6198-varda-by-agn-shttps://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6198-varda-by-agn-s

Don't scare me, thread.

we're not gonna lock it just cuz she's 90

Like Aaliyah (and Ryan Adams?) said: "Age ain't nuthin' but a number, Morbs."

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6198-varda-by-agn-s

the link

The new one is a delight. A bit slight, mostly just Varda talking about herself for two hours, but who doesn't want that? Made me want to rewatch all her films and make my own.

RIP

☹️☹️☹️

should have lived forever. Glad she managed to make a film THIS YEAR.

Cleo de 5 a 7 probably the greatest nouvelle vague movie ever.

RIP

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-47745841

Infinite respect for working until the very end

at least she lived to become a meme on instagram?

v sad news

i saw vagabond for the first time last year and it is pretty incredible

i saw her talk at screenings at least twice, and she seemed both warm and thoroughly unsentimental. (See the cemetery scene with JR.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps2KO3pmgb0

My little obit.

nice.

Faces Places was pretty corny, but the bizarre Godard scene (including and especially Varda's reaction) kinda saved it for me.

JR is a no no as a collaborator although now she has gone maybe I think maybe the fault is with me - she was so good at seeing something in everyone and all the places she visited.

Carolee, Barbara and now Agnès. Three women who only got the recognition they deserved in the last few years of their life and who were making work til the end. Programmers and funding bodies must take note and give women retrospectives (and money!) before the end of their lives.

— Another Gaze: A Feminist Film Journal (@anothergaze) March 29, 2019

^ this tweet is all the usual rhetoric (the larger point is true enough) but it doesn't make sense in regards to Varda. She realised her vision early on (no 'lost' years) just kept making film after film and doc after doc, working till the end. There have been solid retros of her work in London for as long as I've known French film and she has never been upstaged by her husband at all or had her work brushed aside. The 'Grandmother' thing rankles tho'.

Only Godard left now isn't it? Its all so sad to see this amazing generation of filmmakers go.

Happiness which is top 3 Varda - is playing on MUBI

Not in the US, but they are showing three others.

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