Viva Varda: The Films of Agnèse Varda

Reviews & Features

Daguerréotypes

Daguerréotypes
29 Jul, 1:15 PM

Varda has made the 14th arrondissement her home since the 1950s, and shortly after the birth of her son she was seeking a subject she could shoot “less than 50 yards from my door.” The result is both a living photo album and a commentary on what has become a vanishing world.

Review by Jenny Jediny  /  Comment

One Sings, the Other Doesn’t

One Sings, the Other Doesn’t
28 Jul, 1:27 PM

Agnès Varda – One Sings, the Other Doesn’t was conceived as a film aimed at the widest audience possible, one that would celebrate the gains that the feminist movement brought to women in the seventies. The downside to this is that the film, while not without its charm, is probably the least rewarding of her features. Varda’s formalism, her taste for experimentation and structural complexities, have been smoothed out in favour of a straightforward narrative (carried by a lot of voiceover from Varda herself and the two leads) that charts the contrasting fortunes of two women: Pauline, a young singer from a bourgeois background; and Suzanne, a slightly older woman of peasant stock.

Review by Ian Johnston  /  Comment

Lions Love

Lions Love
27 Jul, 12:58 PM

Agnès Varda – Using the contemporaneous events of the Warhol and Kennedy shootings and the duality of Los Angeles as both a factory pumping out nostalgic fantasy and a site of great social and political upheaval, Varda’s film is able to suggest the centrality of this conflict at a number of levels simultaneously: in Warhol’s pop-artworld, Viva’s hippie Shangri-la, and in Varda’s own engagé filmmaking practice.

Review by Leo Goldsmith  /  Comments (1)

Black Panthers

Black Panthers
26 Jul, 11:31 AM

Agnès Varda – Agnès Varda may not have been around for May ‘68 in Paris, but she made a point of being present for August ‘68 in Oakland. Her short film Black Panthers is a fairly straightforward record of that equally contentious moment, and it offers documentation and a little insight into the collective movement surrounding the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, focusing especially on the “Free Huey” campaign in the lead-up to the murder trial of Party co-founder Huey P. Newton.

Review by Leo Goldsmith  /  Comment

Uncle Yanco

Uncle Yanco
23 Jul, 12:12 PM

Uncle Yanco is the first of the films Varda would make in California, and it’s also the most obviously personal, in that it records her first encounter with her uncle Jean, a painter living on a houseboat in the “aquatic suburbia” of Sausalito, just across the bay from San Francisco.

Review by Evan Kindley  /  Comment

Les Créatures

Les Créatures
22 Jul, 9:43 AM

Agnès Varda – Les Créatures is a work of misdirection—and this is the saving grace of the film, which otherwise threatens to topple over into pretension. It’s a mistake to view this science-fiction plot as the centre of the film; it’s only one element in a diverse mix that veers back and forth between documentary record, offbeat slapstick, and psychological drama.

Review by Ian Johnston  /  Comment

Le Bonheur

Le Bonheur
21 Jul, 11:35 AM

In 1965, Varda spoke of a dual inspiration for Le Bonheur: Impressionist painting and amateur family snapshots. In Impressionism there was, for Varda, “a vibration of color that seems to me to correspond to a certain idea of happiness,” and in the film she consciously evokes the movement’s colors and settings. At the same time, she “wanted to share the emotions I feel when looking at amateur photos, the delicate impressions made by family photos. You see people, a group of them, sitting around a table, under a tree; they hold up their glasses and smile, looking into the camera lens. When you see the photo, you say to yourself: that’s happiness. It’s just an impression. When you look more closely, you’re suddenly troubled. All these people, it’s impossible – there are fifteen people in this photo, old people, women, children – it’s impossible that they were all happy at the same time… Or else, what is happiness, since they all look so happy? The appearance of happiness is also happiness.”

Review by Ian Johnston  /  Comments (1)

Cléo from 5 to 7

Cléo from 5 to 7
20 Jul, 1:20 PM

Agnès Varda – Cléo de 5 à 7 is obsessed with time, both with the “real time” countdown appearing periodically as onscreen text, and the omnipresence of mortality, as Cléo awaits the results of a medical examination. Just as it is aware of time ticking away, Agnès Varda’s film worships the present, leaving a lasting impression of not merely how precious minutes, a month, a decade can be, but how consciousness of the present can help carve out a path to happiness.

Review by Jenny Jediny  /  Comment

Lost Highway

Lost Highway
16 Jul, 12:17 AM

David Lynch’s 1990s – To dismiss Lost Highway as merely complicated is to ignore the complexity of the film, the layers of perception and understanding that Lynch works with, and depth of emotions on display. Terrifying, confounding, and sublimely beautiful, Lost Highway is not a film that defies analysis but rather one that demands it.

Review by David Carter  /  Comments (4)

Premonitions Following an Evil Deed

Premonitions Following an Evil Deed
15 Jul, 8:07 AM

David Lynch’s 1990s – The premonition of the title refers not only to the diffuse sense of dread visible on the suburban housewife’s face in the second shot, but also to Lynch’s return to a more artisanal mode of cinema in his feature filmmaking. In this light, the Panasonic PD-150 that Lynch used to film Inland Empire seems closer in some ways to the Lumières’ cinematograph than many of the cameras that came in between. It is in some ways as though, with Premonitions, Lynch is trying to invent cinematic narration from scratch, as if the previous hundred years of cinema never happened.

Review by Leo Goldsmith  /  Comments (3)

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