The Cinema Of Agn S Varda

Agnès Varda, a pioneer of the French New Wave, has been making radical films for over half a century. Many of these are considered by scholars, filmmakers, and audiences alike, as audacious, seminal, and unforgettable. This volume considers her production as a whole, revisiting overlooked films like Mur, Murs/Documenteur (1980–81), and connecting her cinema to recent installation work. This study demonstrates how Varda has resisted norms of representation and diktats of production. It also shows how she has elaborated a personal repertoire of images, characters, and settings, which all provide insight on their cultural and political contexts. The book thus offers new readings of this director's multifaceted rêveries, arguing that her work should be seen as an aesthetically influential and ethically-driven production where cinema is both a political and collaborative practice, and a synesthetic art form.

Collected interviews with the French filmmaker who is sometimes called the "Mother of the New Wave"

Based on interviews with Agnès Varda and unparalleled access to her archives, this extensively researched book demonstrates how Varda draws upon the histories of art, photography, and film to complicate the overt narratives in her works and to advance contemporary cultural politics

Agnès Varda, a pioneer of the French New Wave, has been making radical films for over half a century. Many of these are considered by scholars, filmmakers, and audiences alike, as audacious, seminal, and unforgettable. This volme considers her production as a whole, revisiting overlooked films like Mur, Murs/Documenteur (1980–81), and connecting her cinema to recent installation work. This study demonstrates how Varda has resisted norms of representation and diktats of production. It also shows how she has elaborated a personal repertoire of images, characters, and settings, which all provide insight on their cultural and political contexts. The book thus offers new readings of this director’s multifaceted rêveries, arguing that her work should be seen as an aesthetically influential and ethically-driven production where cinema is both a political and collaborative practice, and a synesthetic art form.

Agnès Varda, one of the major French filmmakers for the last forty years is here celebrated and situated by Alison Smith, by examining both the early films and the later successes, such as Sans Toit ni Loi (1985), Jane B. par Agnès V. (1987) and Jacquot de Nantes (1991). Smith considers Varda’s films in the light of her constant attention to film form, and proposes an integrated analysis of several major themes in her work, through a detailed study of her best-known or most significant films, which are then set in context against her lesser-known, but very extensive, oeuvre. The themes cover such issues as representation of place and community, representation of women and the use of memory, and are linked by a common concern with the process by which Varda transforms reality into constructed films. They owe their form to the combined subjectivity’s of the filmmaker, the subjects filmed, and the audience.

"Proceeding chronologically, from the beginning of Varda's career in the 1950s to the present, this book focuses on moments where Varda's invocation of different artistic traditions within film opens onto complex commentary on broader aesthetic, theoretical, feminist, and political discussions. I reinterpret some of her best known films, but also focus attention on other less familiar works that merit further consideration. I reassess individual works with the goal of interrogating Varda's visual dialogues to reconstruct the cultural politics of the periods in which they were made. This process of reading new strands of meaning across Varda's oeuvre relies on a richly interdisciplinary approach. The result is a new cultural history of Varda and her work that makes clear how she actively engaged and subtly broadened some of the most advanced aesthetic and political discourse of her day. Many of Varda's sophisticated commentaries on controversial issues of her time have receded from view in the biographical frameworks in which her work often has been considered. The range of her engagement in her work with cinema, art history, photography, and visual culture has not been fully recognized. This decontextualization of Varda's work has been compounded by the frequent emphasis on her exceptionality within her fields of practice. In contrast, I view Varda's work as a projection of cultural history that illuminates multiple disciplines, including art history, cinema studies, visual culture, and modern French history."--Provided by publisher.

Explores impact of 3 women filmmakers on French films

Both a precursor to and a critical member of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda weaves documentary and fiction into tapestries that portray distinctive places and complex human beings. Critics and aficionados have celebrated Varda's independence and originality since the New Wave touchstone Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) brought her a level of international acclaim she has yet to relinquish. Film historian Kelley Conway traces Varda's works from her 1954 debut La Pointe Courte through a varied career that includes nonfiction and fiction shorts and features, installation art, and the triumphant 2008 documentary The Beaches of Agnès . Drawing on Varda's archives and conversations with the filmmaker, Conway focuses on the concrete details of how Varda makes films: a project's emergence, its development and the shifting forms of its screenplay, the search for financing, and the execution from casting through editing and exhibition. In the process, she departs from film history's traditional view of the French New Wave and reveals one artist's nontraditional trajectory through independent filmmaking. The result is an intimate consideration that reveals the artistic consistencies and bold changes in the career of one of the world's most exuberant and intriguing directors.