Women Film Directors Series One & Series
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Women Film Directors Series One & Series Two Fall 2017-Spring 2018 Women Film Directors Fall 2017 Agnès Varda b. 1928 Cleo from 5 to 7 1962 Agnès Varda From The Criterion Collection website: https://www.criterion.com/explore/178-agnes-varda The only female director of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda has been called both the movement’s mother and its grandmother. The fact that some have felt the need to assign her a specifically feminine role, and the confusion over how to characterize that role, speak to just how unique her place in this hallowed cinematic movement—defined by such decidedly masculine artists as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut—is. Varda not only made films during the nouvelle vague, she helped inspire it. Her self-funded debut, the fiction-documentary hybrid 1956’s La Pointe Courte is often considered the unofficial first New Wave film; when she made it, she had no professional cinema training (her early work included painting, sculpting, and photojournalism). Though not widely seen, the film got her commissions to make several documentaries in the late fifties. In 1962, she released the seminal nouvelle vague film Cléo from 5 to 7; a bold character study that avoids psychologizing, it announced her official arrival. Over the coming decades, Varda became a force in art cinema, conceiving many of her films as political and feminist statements, and using a radical objectivity to create her unforgettable characters. She describes her style as cinécriture(writing on film), and it can be seen in formally audacious fictions like Le bonheur and Vagabond as well as more ragged and revealing autobiographical documentaries like The Gleaners and I and The Beaches of Agnès. Visages, Villages review – Agnès Varda, people person, creates a self- referential marvel Jordan Hoffman 19 May 2017 Article sourced from The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/may/19/visages-villages-review-agnes-varda-jr- documentary-cannes-2017 Working for the first time with a co-director, French artist JR, the veteran documentary maker makes a near-perfect study of ‘faces and places’ “Chance has always been my best assistant,” Agnès Varda tells her first-ever co-director, the French photographer, installation artist and human whimsy machine known as JR. Varda, who turns 89 in just a few days, befriended the young art scene celeb in the last few years, though both are coy about how it happened. “It wasn’t at a disco,” they each recall in voiceover, as we watch a false reenactment; he jerking his gangly body in his sunglasses and fedora, she, with her two-toned hairdo, grooving and smirking. Eventually this film will partially unmask their camera-ready personas, but not until after they get on the road. Visages, Villages is a movie about itself: the subjects are so warm and wonderful it’s a wise move. Varda and JR travel to small French towns in his van, which is decorated like an enormous camera. Inside is a photo-booth and large format prints spit out the side. Is there actually an assistant dropping the images out? Yes, probably, but while this movie is about the process of making art, it doesn’t want to destroy the magic entirely. The pair travel and take pictures, and paste gigantic portraits on the sides of old houses and city walls. The people – ex-miners, waitresses, factory workers, spouses of dockworkers – reflect upon seeing themselves, but also just speak their mind about other topics. It can be funny, it can be melancholy. All that Varda and JR seem to care about is that it is honest. Watching great artists at work is always a treat, but in the wrong hands can feel like a public television short. No one familiar with Varda (whose previous work includes Cléo From 5 to 7, Vagabond and The Gleaners and I) need worry about depth. The woman known for her “great eye” has sight problems, and we watch her undergo her regular eye injections. She and JR visualise this by creating a life-sized eye test chart. People hold giant letters on an outdoor staircase. With both of these artists, it always comes back to people. While they are clearly kindred spirits, that doesn’t mean they don’t bicker. JR needles her a bit (“your wrinkles have muscles!”) and Varda’s deadpan glances to the camera rival Jack Benny’s. We meet JR’s 100-year-old grandmother; we watch Varda try to recreate a photo she took of a young man in her youth. (Nature isn’t having it, the image is literally washed away.) There’s a tangent about whether goat farmers should remove their animals’ horns. (Clearly the answer is no.) The pair sing 70s hits in the van, shop for fish, visit Henri Cartier-Bresson’s grave and Jean-Luc Godard’s home (he was a friend years ago, not so much any more.) Godard stands up the crew and comes off as a real jerk as a result, but JR (whose ubiquitous sunglasses are very much a reminder of the great Swiss director) suggests that it may be for the betterment of the film. If there’s a message in Visages, Villages (both to us, and from Varda to her young friend) is that one does not need to be a tortured and nasty person to make great art. She is living and still-working proof. Marker, Resnais, Varda: Remembering the Left Bank Group Robert Farmer September 2009 Article sourced from Senses of Cinema: http://sensesofcinema.com/2009/feature-articles/marker-resnais-varda-remembering- the-left-bank-group/ 1. A Brief History of the Left Bank Group The Left Bank Group are one of the most unjustly overlooked groups in the history of European cinema. Perhaps this is due to the fact that their films tended to be politically, æsthetically and intellectually demanding; perhaps it is because they have been seen, unjustly, as being a highly literary, as opposed to cinematic, group; or perhaps it is simply because their existence as French filmmakers in the late 1950s and early 1960s was chronologically concurrent with, and thus overshadowed by, the most famous of all movements (or moments) in the past fifty years of cinema, the French New Wave. Whatever the reason, it remains the case that although innumerable books have been written about the French New Wave1, there are no volumes in English at all dedicated to the Left Bank Group2. Nevertheless, the group has been discussed since the 1960s, when the ‘Left Bank’ term was first used to describe their work. From whence the term ‘Left Bank’ came is the subject of about as much uncertainty as which filmmakers rightly belong to the group. James Monaco names Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy as belonging to the group, and suggests that it was Jean-Luc Godard who first suggested the term, “Left Bank New Wave”. The Harvard Film Archive and Chris Darke claim the critic Richard Roud first coined the term, and cite Marker, Resnais and Varda as being the most important of the Left Bank directors. Sandy Flitterman- Lewis claims that it was Claire Clouzot who named the group, and who included alongside Marker, Resnais and Varda the “American expatriate in Paris”, William Klein. Alongside the principal three directors, Richard Neupert adds both Demy and Henri Colpi to the list, and, although Neupert does not discuss the origin of the term Left Bank Group, he notes that their existence as a distinct group was noticed as early as 1960 when Raymond Lefevre named them the, “Nouvelle vague 2”. Ginette Vincendeau briefly mentions the Left Bank directors in her Companion to French Cinema, and again cites Marker, Resnais and Varda as comprising the group. It is only Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell who do not name Marker when discussing the group, including instead Georges Franju alongside Resnais and Varda. Clearly, it is not of paramount importance who first coined the term Left Bank Group, but it is important to establish that despite the lack of monographs and collections on the subject, the Left Bank Group is, and has been for nearly fifty years, a definitely acknowledged, if not widely studied group of filmmakers, with Resnais, Marker and Varda at its core, and with Colpi, Demy, Franju and Klein as directors on the periphery of the group. Just as the most important of the French New Wave directors (Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette) were all associated through their work as film critics for Cahiers du Cinéma, and by some instances of collaboration it could be argued that the Left Bank directors formed just as strong a group, especially since they worked together more frequently than their Cahiers contemporaries. The most well-known collaborations are between Marker and Resnais, who together made Le Statues meurent 1 Some of the key works about the French New Wave that spring to mind include Richard Neupert, A History of the French New Wave Cinema (Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), Michel Marie, translated by Richard Neupert, The French New Wave, An Artistic School (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), Genevieve Sellier, translated by Kristin Ross, Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), Dorota Ostrowska, Reading the French New Wave: Critics, Writers and Art Cinema in France (London: Wallflower Press, 2007) and Naomi Greene, The French New Wave: A New Look (London: Wallflower Press, 2007). 2 Much has been written about the individual directors over the years, some of the best studies available being in the French Film Directors series published by Manchester University Press.