“I felt I needed to invent my cinema. With La Pointe Courte, I just jumped in, in the most radical fashion.” Anticipating the style and attitude of the French New Wave by a number of years, Agnès Varda’s directorial debut remains as fresh and as original as the day it was made. La Pointe Courte […]
Shot in Paris during the height of the Sixties, Varda’s second film Cléo from 5 to 7 tells the story of Cléo, a pop singer who passes her time drifting through different locations and conversations while awaiting the results of a vital and potentially life-changing medical examination. A forerunner to the French New Wave, Cléo from […]
During the dawn of the digital age in the late 1990s and early 2000s, The Gleaners and Iemerged as one of the first true masterpieces to evolve from the new and (at the time) relatively unexplored format. Taken from the old pastime of gleaning (collecting leftover crops from fields after they have been harvested), Varda’s […]
“I’ve had friends who’ve been very important in my life. In L’Une chante, l’autre pas I’ve told their story as if it were a novel.” After a hiatus from making feature films to focus on having a family, Varda’s return to filmmaking was largely inspired by her involvement in the French Women’s Movement of the 1970s, which […]
Scalarama Liverpool marks 50 years since 1968 to see what impact that revolutionary year had on the world and what can we learn from the past to deal with the current state of affairs. We'll be launching the BLACK POWER strand of this programme with an event at the Black-E looking at the legacy of […]
Cleo, a singer living in Paris, awaits the test results of a biopsy – she meets friends, makes friends, wanders the city and attempts to deal with the limbo-like state of waiting. Writer/Director Agnès Varda vividly captures the atmosphere of Paris in the 1960s, unfolding the narrative in real time to create a nimble, spirited […]