The Cinematic World of Late Legendary French New Wave Pioneer Agnès Varda

Description

“I’ve made a wide variety of films in my life. So I need to tell you what led me to do this work
for so many years. Three words are important to me: Inspiration, creation, sharing. ‘Inspiration’ is why you make a film. The motivations, ideas, circumstances and happenstance that spark a desire and you set to work to make a film. ‘Creation’ is how you make the film. What means do you use? What structure? Alone or not alone? In colour or not in colour? Creation is a job. The third word is ‘Sharing’. You don’t make films to watch them alone, you make films to show them.” – Agnès Varda in ‘Varda by Agnès’, 2018.

Agnès Varda (30 May 1928 – 29 March 2019) was a Belgian-born French film director, photographer and artist. Her work was pioneering for, and central to, the development of the influential French New Wave film movement of the 1950s and 1960s. An institution of French cinema but a fierce opponent of any kind of institutional thinking, Varda’s oeuvre eschews convention and prescribed approaches to drama.

In Varda by Agnès, her final feature documentary, the visionary visual storyteller sheds light – more associatively than chronologically – on her experience as a director, bringing a personal insight to what she calls “cine-writing”: all the elements Varda thinks one has to think of, or choose, or use, to make a film. Together with some of her fellow travellers, Varda takes the audience on a journey through her world of unorthodox images.

Photo courtesy Ciné-Tamaris.