'Varda By Agnes': A Charming Reflection On Life And Art [NYFF Review]

Agnes Varda sadly passed away earlier this year at age 90, and this year’s New York Festival is not only dedicated to her but includes one of her films in the main slate. “Varda By Agnes” represents something few artists are lucky enough to have – the last word on one’s own career. Cobbled together from personal lectures, clips from her films, and some new material, “Varda By Agnes” summarizes the filmmaker’s sixty-plus years making art and reflects on her ideas and experiences in a playful, engaging manner.

Most of the lecture scenes take place in a Parisian opera house, and as Varda goes through her career and explains the governing ideas behind certain works, she’s clearly heartened that the crowd is so young. This could be because, as Varda explains in her discussion of “The Gleaners and I,” she was one of the first established filmmakers to explore the radical intimacy afforded by lightweight digital cameras, a style that once seemed revelatory and has now become commonplace. Varda constantly innovated throughout her career, but her innovations rarely called attention to herself and were always rooted in her strong interpersonal vision, which she articulates in three words, “inspiration, creation, and sharing.”

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Some of the highlights include Varda explaining how in “Cleo From 5 to 7” she tried to portray the subjectivity of time, a reflection on the tracking shots embodying the themes of “Vagabond” by returning to the setting with that film’s star Sandrine Bonnaire, and how she hoped to express a joyful brand of feminism in “One Sings, the Other Doesn’t.” The film is at its most emotional when Varda discusses the life and death of her husband Jacques Demy. As Demy was dying, she gave also him a cinematic epitaph, in the form of “Jacquot de Nantes,” a film dramatizing his boyhood. She recounts an exchange with him where he cast doubt on the film, saying that she couldn’t stop time with a film, to which she replied that her film was accompanying time, a perfect distillation of the bittersweet pleasures of “Varda by Agnes.”

As she reached the last decades of her life, Varda not only kept working but explored entirely new disciplines, transforming her work as a filmmaker into gallery art. This transformation could be entirely literal, as when she created cinematic cottages constructed of her past films. It’s a powerful evocation of the materiality of film to see the daring splashes of color in “Le Bonheur” translated into wallpaper for a new generation to walk through. Varda’s late-career work, both in galleries and the film “Faces Places,” is marked by an infectious love of art’s power to bring people together. Even if “Varda by Agnes” sometimes betrays its roots as a lecture, it’s a touching and memorable reflection on the life and art from a true legend of cinema, one whose ideas are as relevant as ever. [A-]

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