Happy Birthday Agnès
Commemorating the great French director Agnès Varda on the day of her birth. A program of four short films.
The screening will take place the 30th of May at Bubblan, Fiskhamnsgatan 41B Kajskjul 46, Göteborg.
The screening will start at 6:30 pm and the venue will open at 5.30 pm. We will have a short break between film 2 och 3. The first pair of films is roughly 40 minutes long and the second one is around 50 minutes.
We will serve some food for reasonable price and play film music to get us In The Mood For Cinema (pun intended).
The number of seats is limited so be sure to book by sending an email to: kuf.kontakt@gmail.com; Entrance fee is 60 SEK.
Here you can find the Facebook event.
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As the Cannes Film Festival unfolds, No Home Movies looks back at one of film history’s greatest director whom during her career has been repeatedly ill-treated by the aforementioned film festival, which otherwise is often keen to leave plenty of room for French directors, many of whom have left very little impact on film history compared to Varda. Although rewarded in 2015 with the honorary Palme d’Or, her next-to-last film Faces Places (2017), an “unassuming masterpiece”1 and an extremely well received documentary, was presented out of competition. A fate often shared by other talented women directors such as Claire Denis and Lucrecia Martel, whose films are among the most crucial of contemporary world cinema. If things are starting to turn around these days, we need to keep in mind that the reappraisal of Varda in these last years can and should be accounted as an important part of this change of tides.
In this newsletter I intend to briefly present our screenings without delving too deep into Varda’s brilliantly idiosyncratic oeuvre, since I would much rather recommend the many talented writers and film curators who have written about Varda so thoroughly.
Following the philosophy of No Home Movies we decided to focus on some of Varda’s less seen short pieces, which have occupied the big screen more seldom than her features because of the general difficulty that theaters encounter when it comes to present those different type of film forms. Obviously, there are so many incredible features across Varda’s career that we would have loved to show you (from Cléo from 5 to 7, Vagaband, Le bonheur etc). But we want to focus on those small gems which are as important and crucial in the understanding of Varda’s brilliancy as her most famous films are.
The films we are presenting in their screening order are L’Opera-Mouffe (1958), Du côté de la côte (1958), Uncle Yanco (1967) and Black Panthers (1968).
This selection of short films intends to investigate Varda’s artistry as a filmmaker in the early years of her film career, starting in Paris, where she in the 50s met the young group of pioneer filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague, a movement of which she was part, and that she very much anticipated with her debut feature Le Pointe Courte (1955) but never got credit for! Indeed “Varda’s role as pioneer (as opposed to the patronising ‘mother’ or ‘grandmother’ label with which she is often tagged) of the New Wave was unjustly ignored both at the time and for decades afterwards, as attention focused on the male ‘Young Turks’”2. One of film history most extraordinary debut (from a filmmaker with little knowledge of film, but with a solid art and photography background), is a modernist construct which shows Varda cinematic eye and her ability of composing poetic images.
L’Opera-Mouffe (1958) would be Varda’s first film set in Paris where she portraits an emotional symphony of the rue Mouffetard as she also explore her own anxieties about motherhood. Even more than Le Point Courte, L’Opera-Mouffe constructs and juxtaposes images as if they were art pieces and blends them with documentary material in a self-aware and playful manner.
Varda’s visual verve reaches new heights in Du côté de la côte (1958), where the colorful and sun-drenched riviera is portrayed.
This exquisite piece takes the form of a travelogue and is accompanied by Varda’s voice-over. It explores these shores through means of lyrical montage, beautiful images and compositions, and at the same time it manages to switch the attention from a simple representation of a touristic destination to a more complex reflection about time and space and the persons who inhabit them. A keen intention to “reveal another perspective - as [Varda] would continue to do throughout her career”3
The second pair of films (Uncle Yanco & Black Panthers) that we are screening are from the time in Varda’s career when she moved to California in the 60s, “which turned out to be one of the most creatively invigorating locations of Varda’s life”. One being both an “experimental evocation of a place and time as a portrait of a person”4 and the other a documentary which observes with great attention, respect and humbleness the Black Panther Party. It highlight the struggle for self-identification and against police brutality by putting the organization as a whole at the center of the film.
This brief introduction to some of Varda’s short films allows us to reflect upon the director’s unique ability to always explore new ways to express her cinematic style. As Rosenbaum so intelligently writes “Varda wasn’t really or exactly an auteur, at least not in the boys’-club meaning of that term as it’s most commonly used. But not being an auteur gave her a kind of freedom and a form of elasticity denied to most auteurs. […] The fact that Varda wasn’t really a cinephile, unlike her equally cross-referencing husband Jacques Demy, may have played a part in her not behaving like an auteur and approaching each project like a resourceful dilettante, starting from scratch”. Indeed it is this way of approaching cinema that makes Varda such an unique voice in film history, always moved by a deep curiosity towards the world and the desire of make a humble representation of it. To cite Martin Scorsese, one of the most outspoken Varda fan: ”I seriously doubt that Agnès Varda ever followed in anyone else’s footsteps, in any corner of her life or her art … which were one in the same. She charted and walked her own path each step of the way, she and her camera. Every single one of her remarkable handmade pictures, so beautifully balanced between documentary and fiction, is like no one else’s — every image, every cut … What a body of work she left behind: movies big and small, playful and tough, generous and solitary, lyrical and unflinching … and alive”.
I look forward to see you on the 30th May, Varda’s birthday, to commemorate the great film director together!
My last readings recommendations are:
the Sight & Sound special on Varda: Seven facets of Agnès Varda
a selection of articles from the feminist film journal Another Gaze:
an episode of the Film Comment podcast: Filmmakers on Varda
Also a great number of episodes on Varda from the Film at Lincoln Center Podcast
There is a great amount of intelligent writing on the Criterion web page: like this short piece from David Boardwell on the groundbreaking Vagabond, to be seen alongside Kristin Thompson essay on the editing in the film.
But the greatest pleasure of all is to listen to Varda herself, so I encourage you to go and find as much as you can out there!
Amy Taubin on Film Comment
https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/seven-facets-agnes-varda
https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/seven-facets-agnes-varda
Michael Koresky in the Criterion Collection booklet of the Agnes Varda Box.
Koresky