Wednesday Minute
No. 39 | February 24, 2010

Women Behind the Camera II

Our theme this week
Women directors of notable films from 2009

Featured this week
Monday         —   Anne Fontaine
Tuesday         —   Betty Thomas

Featured last week
Monday         —   Lone Scherfig
Tuesday         —   Nora Ephron
Wednesday    —   Claire Denis
Thursday        —   Anne Fletcher
Friday            —   Kathryn Bigelow

Agnès Varda

The essentials
Notable 2009 film:  The Beaches of Agnès; won César Award, Best Documentary; nominated for DGA Award.

Agnès Varda is a Belgian-born French director still making films in her 80s.  She started in the mid-1950s and has been associated with the French New Wave and Rive Gauche movements.  She’s won multiple honors for her work, including an Honorary César, the Golden Lion at Venice, and rank of Commandeur of the French Legion of Honor.  Recurrent themes in her work are feminism and political activism.  Her most noted work includes the films Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), about a singer who wanders Paris as she awaits the results of a biopsy; Vagabond (1985), another film about a wanderer, a young woman traveling through French wine country one winter; and The Gleaners and I (2000), a documentary about gleaners, people who collect leftover crops from farm fields.

The Beaches of Agnès is a film memoir of a sort.  Varda says that when she looks within a person, she sees landscapes, and in this film looking at her life, the landscape is the beach—a beach like none other, filled with mirrors, circus acts, and a re-created production office.  Varda draws on films, photographs, and recollections to create a unique remembrance, and vision, of the people, places, and ideas of her life.

Beyond the final credits
Agnès Varda was married for three decades to another leading French filmmaker, Jacques Demy (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964), until his death in 1990, of AIDS.  Varda’s documentary Jacquot de Nantes (1991) is an account of Demy’s childhood and his lifelong love of theater and cinema.

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The Beaches of Agnès (2009)
Agnès Varda, director
Trailer

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Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)
Agnès Varda, director
Varda’s homage to the silents, ”Les Fiancés Du Pont Macdonald”
Featuring Jean-Luc Godard, Anna Karina, and Jean-Claude Brialy

Damned sunglasses!

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Quote of Note
“Time is the best author.  It always writes the perfect ending.”
—Calvero (Charlie Chaplin), Limelight (1952)

…58…59…60.