Beloit College Tournées Film Festival: Varda by Agnès
Varda by Agnès, the last film by the late great Agnès Varda, is a typically joyous, digressive, and revealing ramble through the director’s work, based on a series of lectures she gave in the last years of her life. Composed of numerous clips from Varda’s films and public appearances, as well as extensive documentation of her gallery installations, the film provides both an introduction to and a summation of the extraordinary achievement of the woman who kicked off the French New Wave with La Pointe Courte, a groundbreaking, independently financed mix of poetic realism and documentary, and continued to make epochal narrative films (Cleo from 5 to 7; One Sings, the Other Doesn’t; Vagabond) and pioneering documentary works that combined a boundless curiosity about the world and a generous art of self-revelation (The Gleaners and I; Faces Places). But as anyone who has ever seen an Agnès Varda movie knows, Varda would not simply be satisfied with retreading her accomplishments: this is a film as open to the future as it is to the past, full of insight and inspiration for young filmmakers, artists, and thinkers, and imbued with Varda’s incomparable swiftness of thought and warmth of feeling.
In French with English subtitles.
