- dir. AGNÈS VARDA
- year 2009
- country FRANCE
- run-time 110MIN
- rating 18
Tickets: £6/£4.50conc.
Doors 7:30PM
Film 8:00PM
Deptford Cinema presents a retrospective on the French artist Agnès Varda.
"The only female director of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda has been called both the movement’s mother and its grandmother. The fact that some have felt the need to assign her a specifically feminine role, and the confusion over how to characterize that role, speak to just how unique her place in this hallowed cinematic movement—defined by such decidedly masculine artists as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut—is. Varda not only made films during the nouvelle vague, she helped inspire it. Her self-funded debut, the fiction-documentary hybrid 1956’s La Pointe Courte is often considered the unofficial first New Wave film; when she made it, she had no professional cinema training (her early work included painting, sculpting, and photojournalism). Though not widely seen, the film got her commissions to make several documentaries in the late fifties. In 1962, she released the seminal nouvelle vague film Cléo from 5 to 7; a bold character study that avoids psychologizing, it announced her official arrival. Over the coming decades, Varda became a force in art cinema, conceiving many of her films as political and feminist statements, and using a radical objectivity to create her unforgettable characters. She describes her style as cinécriture(writing on film), and it can be seen in formally audacious fictions like Le bonheur and Vagabond as well as more ragged and revealing autobiographical documentaries like The Gleaners and I and The Beaches of Agnès." -The Criterion Collection
“I am alive, and I remember.” Agnès Varda tells Agnès Varda.
Far from indulging in self-celebration, Varda draws a humorous and engaging autobiographical essay, a curated anthology of thoughts, photos, theatrical tableaux, film archive and video.
“The remarkable Agnès Varda, at the age of 81, has sketched a witty and engaging cine-autobiography, or rather assembled the materials for an autobiography and made a filmed record of her thoughts on how to shape them. What results is an elegant, eccentric and distinctively literary meditation on the Proustian themes of memory and self, and a reminder of her own previous discussions of film-making as cinécriture [...] Varda’s film is also intriguingly evasive; it conceals as much as it reveals. Her poignant set pieces, reconstructing and reimagining the past, are not exactly intended to encourage an unstoppable emotional flow [...].”
“The Beaches of Agnes is a risk. The risk was, “Can I find fluidity in a bunch of puzzle-like pieces?” The risk was that people would say, “Oh, my God, this is a flea market…” So it took me nine months of editing and a lot of good thoughts to really find what I needed. It came from the freedom I gave myself to bring a Picasso painting, to show something that I liked, to exploit the fact that when it started to rain, we’d use the rain. When I met crazy people, I grabbed the people. I was always enjoying what I was doing in the moment.”