Agnes Varda

Agnes Varda

Agnes Varda was a feminist Belgian filmmaker. She died March 29, 2019. She was married to Jacques Demy, "who died of AIDS-related complications in 1990."

Mini-Bio

Excerpt from profile at the Criterion Collection:

In the early fifties, Varda joined a group lobbying the wife of the Communist Party’s leader to challenge the party’s opposition to legal contraception. Twenty years later, she was one of the celebrities who signed the notorious April 5, 1971, “Manifesto of the 343,” in which the signatories declared that they had each had an illegal abortion.

Russia, China and Cuba

Excerpt from 4Columns:

"Varda traveled widely as a young woman—to Russia, China, Cuba. Salut les Cubains (1963) is a thinking-aloud about the last of those countries, from which, she says, “I brought back jumbled images. To order them, I made this homage.” That word homage may suggest the obsequious hagiographies often produced about Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. After all, as the voice-over declares, in the popular imagination “Cuba was a cigar-shaped island for men.” She subtly undermines that macho vision. “Beards are now everywhere,” she points out—sported by rebels, artists, government officials—but they’re most evident in a sugary form: the beard-like cotton candy that islanders like to devour.

Salut les Cubains is made up entirely of still photographs that home in on things most outsiders (or insiders, for that matter) wouldn’t spot: the tightness with which a young female student grips her pencil, the hand that men place on the shoulders of their women partners as they peer at exhibition images of the revolution. The photographs, sometimes edited into flip-book-style sequences, are often kinetic and joyful; revolution, for Varda as for Emma Goldman, is less about tub-thumping oratory and five-year-plans as it is about rhythm and exuberance, about transforming drudgery into dance.

There’s no formal analysis or totalizing theory in Salut les Cubains; Varda prefers notes, phrases, lyrical observations. She deploys two voices, male and female, to create a feeling of conversation and dialogue rather than professorial disquisition. She also offers snapshots of Cubans—among them novelist Alejo Carpentier, a museum cleaner, filmmaker Sara Gomez, architect Selma Diaz, singer Benny More—to support her proposition: any radical society needs polyphony and art (and art as polyphony) if it hopes to stay healthy.

[...]

"The mysteries of a marriage, especially between artists, are central to Elsa la rose (1966), Varda’s riveting exploration of the relationship between the French surrealist and Communist Party member Louis Aragon and Russian-born poet and translator Elsa Triolet.