Already, 11 years ago prepared the beloved French film director and artist Agnès Varda his cinematic farewell with the autobiographical ”Agnès the beaches”. She åttioårskrisade (!), the sight started to get worse, the strength waiting.
Read an interview with Agnès Varda in conjunction with the premiere of ”Agnès beaches”
the Beaches in her life – those who were in the youth southern france Sète, in California, where she lived as a young filmmaker, or around the summer house on the spectacular island of Noirmoutier on the Atlantic coast – merged and gained form the foundation for an imaginative staging of her life and career.
Here are the most that have been important for her to filmmaking; the French new wave, the feminist movement, fantasifullheten, the colors, the family, and not least the love in the filming of the spouse Jacques Demy.
”Agnes beaches” was rather a comeback than a farewell. French films seemingly outslitliga grande dame of Be got a new audience. Last year, it was an honorary Oscar (the first female director in history), and an oscar Nomination in connection with the irresistible ”Faces places” as she did with the artist JR.
Even if you thought that Agnès Varda was one of the few who would actually survive all of us, so she was still away last week and is mourned by an entire world of european cinema from Paris to Los Angeles. Instagram is full of famous names who post fanciful portrait of her or selfies taken at the meetings.
With premiäraktuella ”Varda by Agnès” finally, it is au revoir for real. A colourful farewell to, of course, from one of the filmvärldens most intensely living directors. Here are countless cinematic karriärnedslag during the trip, but nothing feels stressful. Than we stand with her in the bakery, on the market street Rue Mouffetard which a young, pregnant Be portrayed in the barren black-and-white short film ”L’opera Mouffe” (1958).
Than we get to hang with the medelåldersnojiga style icon Jane Birkin as Varda films in the impressionist and konstinspirerade vänfilmen ”Jane B par Agnès V” (1988). There are just two examples of the extent of her visual and always deeply personal cinematic universe. It’s like a much longer movie is invikt in the two hours that parting lasts.
But the ”Varda by Agnès also contains a nice deepening of the artistic processes that have guided her since her debut in the mid 50’s. Be develops, among other things, their thoughts on ”cinécriture”, an idea of script writing, which also involves personal style, that is to say, aesthetic choices when it comes to lights, colors, shapes and music.
She talks about how she was inspired by the philosopher Gaston Bachelard and his love for the triptych as a form (recurring in many works, both films and installations. This is also the meeting with the stjärncuratorn Hans Ulrich Obrist, which led to her first major art installation, ”Patatutopia” at the venice biennale in 2003, a work that among other things consisted of heart-shaped potatoes.
”Varda by Agnès” is a perfect way to reconnect with or rediscover Be that influenced generations of filmmakers and, in spite of everything received eternal life through his films. Maybe meet her for the first time. It is hardly too late.
See more. Three films by directors that are inspired by Varda: ”Me and you and everyone we know” by Miranda July (2011), ”Tiny furniture” by Lena Dunham (2010), ”Lady bird” by Greta Gerwig (2018).