VARDA

December 20 – January 6

Film at Lincoln Center announces the complete schedule for Varda, a career-spanning retrospective of Agnès Varda (December 20 – January 6), presented in partnership with Janus Films. The trailblazing filmmaker’s final work, Varda by Agnès, opens theatrically at FLC on November 22.

In 1955, Agnès Varda kickstarted the French New Wave with her debut feature La Pointe Courte, and for the next six decades she remained at the cutting edge of international cinema, continuing to innovate, experiment, and explore right up until her death earlier this year at age 90. An eternal free spirit, Varda used the camera as an extension of herself, synthesizing the things that captured her restless imagination—the worlds of outcasts and outsiders, the California counterculture and the feminist movement, beaches and heart-shaped potatoes—into a singular style that she called “cinécriture” (“cinematic writing”). Moving between narrative and documentary (and hybrids of the two), film and video, photography and installation works, she remained, at each step of her career, inimitably herself: playful, probing, empathetic, wise, and inexhaustibly curious about the world whirling around her. Film at Lincoln Center is honored to present a comprehensive, career-spanning retrospective of the luminous filmmaker’s vast canon.

Highlights include New Wave treasures Cléo from 5 to 7 and Le bonheur; Varda’s inquiries into those on society’s outskirts in Vagabond (NYFF23), The Gleaners and I (NYFF38), and the 2017 Oscar nominee Faces Places (NYFF55); nonfiction portraits of activism in Black Panthers and Women Reply: Our Bodies, Our Sex; and free screenings of the five-part miniseries Agnès Varda: From Here to There, which features Varda visiting filmmaker friends around the world including Carlos Reygadas, Alexander Sokurov, and Manoel de Oliveira. Varda’s daughter and producing partner, Rosalie Varda, will join audiences in person for select screenings.

The Film at Lincoln Center retrospective kicks off a nationwide tour; variations of the program will screen at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley, CA), SFMOMA (San Francisco, CA), Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago, IL), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN), the Brattle Theater (Boston, MA), SIFF Cinema (Seattle, WA), Sie Film Center (Denver, CO), NW Film Center (Portland, OR), MFA Houston (Houston, TX), The Cinematheque (Vancouver, BC), the Speed Art Museum (Louisville, KY), Bryn Mawr Film Institute (Bryn Mawr, PA), and the tour will conclude at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures (Los Angeles, CA).

Organized by Florence Almozini and Tyler Wilson in partnership with Janus Films.

Tickets for Varda are on sale now and are $15; $12 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $10 for Film at Lincoln Center members. See more and save with the 3+ film discount package or Varda all-access pass.

Acknowledgments:

Rosalie Varda; Emily Woodburne, Brian Belovarac, and Ben Crossley-Marra, Janus Films

FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS

All screenings take place at the Walter Reade Theater (165 W 65th St) unless otherwise noted.

Free screenings!

Agnès Varda: From Here to There / Agnès de ci de là Varda 

Agnès Varda, France, 2012, 225m (each ep is 45m) 

French with English subtitles

In this vibrant five-part miniseries, Varda travels around the globe for a freewheeling assemblage of people, places, art, and happenings. Each of these deceptively off-the-cuff encounters speaks to Varda’s keen fascination with life’s surprises, questions, and possibilities.

Episode 1

Varda traverses Berlin and her late husband Jacques Demy’s Nantes, visits Chris Marker’s studio for a virtual hangout, steps in front of Manoel de Oliveira’s camera, and discovers a rainstorm inside a shack.

Friday, December 20, 1:00pm

Episode 2

In Brazil, Varda catches up with filmmaker Glauber Rocha’s family, while a René Magritte exhibit brings her to Brussels. Later, she bonds with a journalist in Stockholm, talks potatoes with Swiss art curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist, and takes in Miquel Barceló’s textural paintings.

Saturday, December 21, 1:00pm

Episode 3

Along the Rhine, Varda stops off in Basel and Cologne, and shatters some mirrors for a project. A tour of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg occasions a chat with elusive filmmaker Alexander Sokurov, and back in Paris, Varda has lunch with artists Christian Boltanski and Annette Messager.

Sunday, December 22, 12:30pm

Episode 4

Varda surveys the eclectic installations of the Lyon Biennale, then heads to the south of France to reunite with fishermen she’d filmed decades earlier. She also gazes into the void with painter Pierre Soulages and watches Jean-Louis Trintignant perform poetry.

Monday, December 23, 2:00pm

Episode 5

In her concluding voyages, Varda discovers old friends and new murals in Los Angeles, meets up with filmmaker Carlos Reygadas between retrospectives in Mexico City, and contemplates mortality at a Rogier van der Weyden exhibit in Frankfurt.

Tuesday, December 24, 1:00pm

The Beaches of Agnès / Les plages d’Agnès

Agnès Varda, France, 2008, 110m

English and French with English subtitles

As she neared her 80th birthday, Varda was thinking of beaches: the fishing boats of her childhood in Sète, her walks with Jacques Demy on the shores of Noirmoutier, her late-sixties sojourn to the California coast. Following this thread, she collaged a poignant work of cinematic memoir. The Beaches of Agnès offers a remarkable glimpse of the history Varda lived through, spanning World War II, the Cuban Revolution, and the rise of the feminist movement in France; and it’s equally meditative on the films and art that spoke to her throughout her life. But as she travels back in time, Varda is most moved by remembering long-lost friends, and wonders how much a photograph can protect their memories from the washing of the tide.

Tuesday, December 24, 4:15pm

Sunday, December 29, 6:00pm

Sunday, January 5, 6:00pm (Introduction by Rosalie Varda)

Le bonheur

Agnès Varda, France, 1965, 80m

French with English subtitles

The sun-drenched idyll of Le bonheur, Varda’s third feature, flowers into a chillier tale of infidelity. A carpenter named François (Jean-Claude Drouot) lives in Edenic bliss with his picture-perfect wife and children (Drouot’s real-life family), but when he strikes up an acquaintance with a charming postal clerk (Marie-France Boyer), he begins to test the limits of his domestic stability. As he does, Le bonheur’s impressionist tableaux, lusciously photographed by Claude Beausoleil and Jean Rabier, takes on razor-sharp edges, all while a chasm widens between François’s self-involvement and its casualties. This barbed masterpiece—a complement to the crescendoing feminist movement in the mid-’60s—exemplifies Varda at her boldest.

Friday, December 20, 8:30pm

Thursday, December 26, 3:00pm

Saturday, January 4, 9:00pm (Introduction by Rosalie Varda)

Cinévardaphoto

Agnès Varda, France, 2004, 96m

English and French with English subtitles

Cinévardaphoto is made up of three short films connected by the theme of photography, the medium that gave Varda her start and spurred the meditations on memory that would define her career. First, she roams a Toronto-based curator’s exhibition of thousands of teddy bears and excavates the historical and personal roots of her quest. Then, Varda revisits models from one of her earliest photographs, probing the differences between their recollections of the same encounter. Finally, in her images of Cuba in the 1960s, Varda lenses artists, political icons, and everyday people, charting a country’s cultural journey through revolution. All three discrete films dovetail at the intersection of reality and image, and strive to capture life at the center.

Tuesday, December 24, 8:00pm

Sunday, December 29, 8:30pm

Saturday, January 4, 2:00pm

Cléo from 5 to 7 / Cléo de 5 à 7

Agnès Varda, France/Italy, 1962, 89m

French with English subtitles

Following her 1955 debut feature La Pointe Courte and several short films, Varda made this singular account of a pop singer’s sudden confrontation with cancer, starring Corinne Marchand and featuring a wonderful cameo from the late Michel Legrand, who also composed the film’s score. Both a spirited depiction of Paris in the ’60s and a substantive take on the female psyche, Cléo from 5 to 7 is one of the cornerstones of the French New Wave, enduring for its intelligent perspective on the strong, unpredictable emotions that arise when facing one’s mortality.

Friday, December 20, 6:30pm

Wednesday, December 25, 8:30pm

Saturday, December 28, 4:30pm

Saturday, January 4, 7:00pm (Introduction by Rosalie Varda)

Daguerréotypes

Agnès Varda, West Germany/France, 1976, 80m

French with English subtitles

Having resolved to make a film while “stuck at the house” with her two-year-old son, Mathieu, Varda “stretched a cord from the meter in my house” and recorded as far as the cable could reach. “I would find something to film there,” she insisted, “and no further.” The result is an affable, curious portrait of her neighbors and acquaintances on Rue Daguerre, where she’d been living for decades—both one of her warmest, most quietly affecting movies and a slightly embittered reflection on “a woman’s creativity… smothered by the home.” A butcher; a baker; a laundress; an accordionist; a trembling, elderly perfumer who sells buttons on the side: the cast of Daguerréotypes becomes a kind of makeshift family, one formed as much by need as by choice.

Saturday, December 21, 2:15pm

Tuesday, December 31, 4:00pm

Documenteur

Agnès Varda, France/USA, 1981, 65m

English and French with English subtitles

In 1979, 10 years after her first California sojourn and during a period of separation from her beloved husband, Jacques Demy, Varda returned to L.A. for what would turn out to be a decidedly more minor-key stay. Documenteur, like several of Varda’s movies, follows an essentially fictional character (played here by Varda’s editor Sabine Mamou) through a more or less real environment. Yet unlike most of Varda’s movies, it’s a frank and often painful reflection on estrangement, loneliness, and loss. Certain settings and subjects from her L.A.-set documentary Mur Murs recur here (the two films were paired for their initial U.S. runs), but Documenteur was, per its title, more of “an emotion picture”—a revealing dispatch from a wounded heart. An NYFF19 selection.

Monday, December 23, 5:00pm

Friday, January 3, 7:00pm

Faces Places / Visages villages

Agnès Varda & JR, France, 2017, 89m

The 88-year-old Agnès Varda teamed up with the 33-year-old visual artist JR for this tour of rural France that follows in the footsteps of Varda’s groundbreaking documentary The Gleaners and I as it celebrates artisanal production, workers’ solidarity, and the photographic arts in the face of mortality. Varda and JR wielded cameras themselves, but they were also documented in their travels by multiple image and sound recordists. Out of all this often spontaneous movement, Varda and her editor Maxime Pozzi-Garcia created an unassuming, Oscar-nominated masterpiece that is vivid, lyrical, and inspiring. An NYFF55 selection.

Tuesday, December 24, 2:15pm

Monday, December 30, 8:30pm

Wednesday, January 1, 8:45pm

The Gleaners and I / Les glaneurs et la glaneuse

Agnès Varda, France, 2000, 82m

French with English subtitles

“In times past,” Varda tells us at the start of this wondrous, humane reflection on the art of scavenging, “only women gleaned.” Urban dumpster divers; rural potato pickers; shoreline oyster collectors; a chef who picks his own stock; Rogier van der Weyden’s The Last Judgment; a brickmason who constructs eerie sculptures out of discarded dolls; Louis Pons’s collages; Étienne-Jules Marey, the inventor of “chronophotography”; vineyard grape pickers; the unfamiliar crevices of Varda’s own hand. The Gleaners and I is a catalog of subjects candid, unsettling, touching, and sublime, gathered and arranged into a curious, playful, very Varda whole. “On this type of gleaning—of images, impressions, emotions—there is,” Varda insists midway through the movie, “no legislation.” An NYFF38 selection.

Monday, December 23, 6:30pm

Sunday, December 29, 4:00pm

Wednesday, January 1, 5:00pm

The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later / Les glaneurs et la glaneuse… deux ans après

Agnès Varda, France, 2002, 60m

French with English subtitles

Deeply humbled by the reception to her compassionate 2000 documentary The Gleaners and I, Varda returned to it two years later with this companion piece. She reconnects with several of the film’s subjects: from the potato farmers she first sought out as modern equivalents of the “gleaners” in Jean-François Millet’s paintings, to the marginalized Parisians foraging to survive by salvaging food and supplies from the city’s surplus of waste. As these people share highlights of the intervening years—some have found love, some have found minor celebrity status—Varda’s seemingly introspective exercise reveals itself as a moving work of humanism.

Monday, December 23, 8:30pm

Friday, January 3, 2:00pm

Jacquot de Nantes

Agnès Varda, France, 1991, 118m

French with English subtitles

In Jacquot de Nantes, Varda recreates her husband Jacques Demy’s coming-of-age in the west of France, its events taken directly from Demy’s own childhood recollections, written down while he was growing weaker from AIDS-related illness. Varda honors the sharp emotional detail that reawakened her husband’s memories: his tender family life, based around his father’s garage; an early love of puppet shows that blossomed into serious cinephilia; the onset of World War II that ruptured his town and catalyzed his loss of innocence. Demy would pass away only 10 days after she wrapped shooting on this story of artistic awakening. Cued by bursts of vivid color amid nostalgic black-and-white, and interweaving close-ups of Demy in the present, Jacquot immortalizes Demy’s photographic vitality. An NYFF29 selection.

Sunday, December 22, 1:45pm

Saturday, December 28, 9:00pm

Tuesday, December 31, 6:00pm

Jane B. Par Agnès V.

Agnès Varda, France, 1988, 97m

French with English subtitles

“It’s as if I was going to film your self-portrait,” explains Varda to Jane Birkin in this extraordinarily complex, kaleidoscopic consideration of the actress as a woman, wife, mother, muse, and icon. Footage of the “real” Birkin—lounging at home in a T-shirt, stripped of makeup, and discussing her desire to be filmed “as if I were transparent, anonymous, like everyone else”—is interspersed with the Birkin of Varda’s (and our) fantasies, in everything from re-creations of Renaissance portraiture to a heist thriller to a black-and-white Laurel & Hardy–esque short. The result is a thrillingly discursive reflection on the fascinating, multifaceted Birkin as well as on the sacred collaboration between actor and director.

Saturday, December 21, 8:30pm

Thursday, January 2, 8:45pm

Kung-Fu Master! / Le petit amour

Agnès Varda, France, 1988, 80m

English and French with English subtitles

In one of her finest, most vulnerable performances, Jane Birkin is a 40-year-old divorcée who falls in love with her daughter’s 14-year-old, video-game-obsessed classmate, played by Mathieu Demy, son of Varda and filmmaker Jacques Demy. This eyebrow-raising premise is presented with surprising sympathy and tenderness, a radical challenge to audience identification and an all-too-rare exploration of female subjectivity. Throughout, Varda interweaves snapshots of the AIDS crisis, adding a pointed sociopolitical subtext to this one-of-a-kind romance. Based on an original story by Birkin, Kung-Fu Master! is a true family affair, featuring appearances from the actress’s daughters (Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon), parents, and brother.

Saturday, December 21, 6:30pm

Wednesday, January 1, 7:00pm

Monday, January 6, 9:15pm (Introduction by Rosalie Varda)

Lions Love (… and Lies) 

Agnès Varda, France/USA, 1969, 110m

“It’s your story—you do it!” Lions Love (… and Lies) , made in the late sixties during Varda’s first sojourn in California, was one of the director’s boldest, goofiest reckonings with the American counterculture. Warhol superstar Viva floats into a precarious ménage à trois with James Rado and Gerome Ragni, the lyricists of the musical Hair. Gleeful, unabashed disrobings; stretches of poolside drifting; visits from Eddie Constantine and Shirley Clarke; the TV announcements of the shootings of Andy Warhol and RFK: Varda captures it all with her usual mischievous humor, occasionally—in an early show of her gifts as a personal essayist—stepping in front of the camera herself. An NYFF7 selection.

Thursday, December 26, 6:30pm

Sunday, January 5, 8:30pm

Mur Murs

Agnès Varda, France/USA, 1981, 80m

English, French, Italian, and Spanish with English subtitles

During the second of her two lengthy trips to L.A., Varda found a quietly brilliant way to depict her outsider’s perspective on the city’s convoluted social, racial, and economic tensions: filming its vast array of outdoor murals. The fiery, colorful public images splashed across the walls in Mur Murs—Afro-futurist vistas, imaginatively re-created historical pageants, visionary scenes from the Day of the Dead—were aesthetic joys and fascinating cultural objects for Varda, but they also occasioned rare opportunities to document their makers. One insists that his loving portrait of three forgotten Hollywood and TV stars is secretly the Holy Trinity; in one of the film’s most memorable scenes, another pair gives a spontaneous musical performance surrounded by grinning skulls and Boschian afterlife scenes. The result is one of Varda’s richest nonfiction films, a graceful synthesis of her gifts as a social critic and her skills as a human observer. An NYFF19 selection.

Monday, December 23, 3:15pm

Thursday, January 2, 5:00pm

One Hundred and One Nights / Les cent et une nuits de Simon Cinéma

Agnès Varda, UK/France, 1995, 101m

French with English subtitles

In this whimsical film historical revue, Varda assembles a troupe of beloved film icons to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the Lumière Brothers’ earliest projections. This centenary is made flesh by the hundred-year-old Simon Cinéma (Michel Piccoli). To jog his fuzzy memory, he hires film student Camille (Julie Gaynet) as a conversation partner. Over the course of one hundred and one days in Monsieur Cinéma’s manor, the spirits of classic films are reanimated by a dizzying supporting cast, including—to name a scant few—Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau, Sandrine Bonnaire, Alain Delon, Hanna Schygulla, Robert De Niro, and Harrison Ford. Through this playful patchwork, Varda salutes the past while ringing in another century of film.

Sunday, December 22, 8:30pm

Monday, January 6, 6:30pm (Q&A with Rosalie Varda moderated by Larry Kardish)

One Sings, the Other Doesn’t / L’une chante l’autre pas

Agnès Varda, France/Belgium/Venezuela/Soviet Union, 1977, 121m

French with English subtitles

The opening night selection of the 1977 New York Film Festival, this feminist musical—with lyrics by the director—charts the sisterhood felt by Pomme (Valérie Mairesse) and Suzanne (Thérèse Liotard) throughout years of changes and fraught relationships with men. “If I put myself on the screen—very natural and feminist—maybe I’d get ten people in the audience,” Varda explained at the time of the film’s release. “Instead, I put two nice young females on the screen, and not too much of my own leftist conscience. By not being too radical but truly feminist, my film has been seen by 350,000 people in France.” An NYFF15 selection.

Saturday, December 21, 4:00pm

Saturday, December 28, 6:30pm

Saturday, January 4, 4:00pm (Screening with Women Reply: Our Bodies, Our Sex; Q&A with Rosalie Varda)

La Pointe Courte

Agnès Varda, France, 1955, 86m

French with English subtitles

Varda was 25 when she shot her enormously influential debut feature, a marital drama and an acute, searching immersion in the daily business of provincial life, set in a small coastal fishing village in Sète, where she partly grew up. It was also the first of Varda’s many attempts at working out what would become one of her career-long goals: to navigate fluidly between the terrain of her characters’ private emotional lives and the topography of (as she later put it) the “geographically and politically specific environments” in which they live. Varda famously claimed to have seen almost no movies before making La Pointe Courte, but the film is in direct conversation, accidentally or not, with many of its neorealist ancestors. It spoke equally well to the future: many critics and scholars now consider it the first proper entry in what would become the Nouvelle Vague.

Friday, December 20, 4:45pm

Friday, January 3, 3:30pm

Vagabond / Sans toit ni loi

Agnès Varda, France, 1985, 105m

English, French, and Arabic with English subtitles

Varda often structured her movies around fictional characters who act as foils for the non-actors who surround them. In Vagabond, one of her most celebrated features, she added another level, filming those non-actors trying—and failing—to figure out the movie’s main character. Mona, played in a career-high performance by Sandrine Bonnaire, has left her posh urban office job for a life on the road. The people with whom she comes into contact—a wealthy academic; a philosophical shepherd; a Tunisian laborer; an aging, giggly countess in need of company—are as fascinating and revealing a cross-section of modern France as Varda has ever assembled. But the movie’s focus is squarely on Mona: a strong-willed young woman for whom freedom is its own costly end.

Sunday, December 22, 6:15pm

Saturday, December 28, 2:15pm

Sunday, January 5, 3:45pm (Introduction by Rosalie Varda)

Varda by Agnès / Varda par Agnès

Agnès Varda, France, 2019, 115m

English and French with English subtitles

When Varda died in early 2019 at age 90, the world lost one of its most inspirational cinematic radicals. Her enduring films were both forthrightly political and gratifyingly mercurial, toggling between fiction and documentary decades before it was more commonplace in art cinema. In Varda by Agnès, which would be her final film, partially constructed of onstage interviews and lectures, interspersed with a wealth of clips and archival footage, Varda guides us through her career, from her movies to her remarkable still photography to her delightful and creative installation work. It’s a fitting farewell to a filmmaker, told in her own words. An NYFF57 selection.

Friday, December 20, 2:15pm

Wednesday, January 1, 2:30pm

The World of Jacques Demy / L’univers de Jacques Demy

Agnès Varda, France/Belgium/Spain, 1995, 91m

English and French with English subtitles

The World of Jacques Demy is a living memorial: a nonlinear, kaleidoscopic celebration of the life and work of Varda’s husband. She sketches out the person through his projects, unearthing memories of his father’s auto garage through The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, puppet shows and Jean Cocteau in Donkey Skin, and his hometown labor strikes in Une chambre en ville. She speaks with his cinema compatriots, such as Catherine Deneuve, composer Michel Legrand, and Harrison Ford (who nearly starred in his film Model Shop); his family, including sister Hélène and children Mathieu and Rosalie; and devotees of his work, who discovered themselves anew in his films. This lovingly structured portrait ultimately shows Demy as Varda knew him, a man of inexhaustible creativity who looked at the world with wonder.

Sunday, December 22, 4:15pm

Tuesday, December 31, 8:30pm

The Young Girls Turn 25 / Les demoiselles ont eu 25 ans

Agnès Varda, France, 1993, 64m

French with English subtitles

In 1967, Agnès Varda’s husband Jacques Demy transformed a seaside town into a candy-colored romantic vision in The Young Girls of Rochefort. Twenty-five years after the film’s release, Varda returned to Rochefort to convene a one-of-a-kind reunion: Catherine Deneuve, Jacques Perrin, composer Michel Legrand, and then-publicist Bertrand Tavernier revisit the streets that they imbued with a dreamy second life. Drawn to the town’s shape-shifting identity, Varda speaks with a wide swath of townspeople—including Rochefort’s now thirty-something child actors, local government, and young fans—about the film world’s reverberations through their regular lives. In the end, she crafts a heartfelt ode to movie magic and a fleeting moment in time, her own behind-the-scenes production footage preserving Demy in his element.

Friday, December 27, 1:30pm

Thursday, January 2, 3:00pm

Shorts Program 1: 1958 (TRT: 61m)

Along the Coast / Du côté de la côte

Agnès Varda, France, 1958, 25m

French with English subtitles

Varda trains her eye on beach vacationers and the resplendent summer colors of the south of France for this wryly existentialist riff on the travelogue, produced for the French Tourism Office.

Diary of a Pregnant Woman / L’opéra-mouffe

Agnès Varda, France, 1958, 16m

French with English subtitles

A playful anxiety arises in Varda’s impressionistic depiction of pregnancy, which free-associates between post-surrealist vignettes and the everyday hubbub of her Parisian neighborhood.

Ô saisons, ô châteaux

Agnès Varda, France, 1958, 20m

French with English subtitles

Varda coaxes French history into the present as she chronicles the castles of the Loire Valley, incorporating colorful choreography and 16th-century poetry. Film restored by Les Films de la Pléiade with the support of the CNC. 

Tuesday, December 24, 6:30pm

Sunday, December 29, 2:30pm

Friday, January 3, 5:30pm

Shorts Program 2: 1961–1968 (TRT: 72m)

Uncle Yanco © Succession Varda

 

The Fiancés of the Bridge Mac Donald / Les fiancés du pont Mac Donald (Méfiez-vous des lunettes noires)

Agnès Varda, France, 1961, 5m

French intertitles with English subtitles

In this silent short featured in Cléo from 5 to 7, a sweet riverside farewell between Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard goes awry when Godard puts on his sunglasses. New Wave mainstays Eddie Constantine and Jean-Claude Brialy fill out the Keatonesque caper.

Elsa la rose

Agnès Varda, France, 1966, 20m

French with English subtitles

Seeking to reconstruct novelist Elsa Triolet and surrealist poet Louis Aragon’s first meeting, Varda embarks on a remarkably nuanced exploration of their 40-year marriage, spanning the workings of memory, history, and the relationship between writers and “muses.”

Uncle Yanco / Oncle Yanco

Agnès Varda, USA/France, 1967, 18m

English and French with English subtitles

The first movie Varda made in America was, surprisingly, of a family reunion. This breezy, sun-dappled portrait of her elderly Greek uncle, a painter who transformed his northern California houseboat into a mecca for L.A.’s young, beautiful, and free-spirited, was Varda’s first prolonged exposure to the West Coast counterculture that would deeply inspire her.

Black Panthers

Agnès Varda, France/USA, 1968, 31m

French with English subtitles

One of Varda’s most transformative encounters during her 1968 L.A. journey was with the Black Panthers at the height of their influence and fame. Her casual, open-air portrait of the group, centered on a bustling “Free Huey” rally in Oakland, is more densely packed with information than many of her other documentaries, but it’s made with no less delicacy, grace, and political urgency.

Thursday, December 26, 5:00pm

Tuesday, December 31, 2:15pm

Thursday, January 2, 7:00pm

Shorts Program 3: 1975–2003 (TRT: 68m)

You’ve Got Beautiful Stairs You Know © Ciné-Tamaris

 

Women Reply: Our Bodies, Our Sex / Réponse de femmes: Notre corps, notre sexe 

Agnès Varda, France, 1975, 8m

French with English subtitles

In 1975, a television station gave seven female filmmakers seven minutes to answer the question “What does it mean to be a woman?” Varda responded with this frank assemblage, examining how women are taking control over their bodies and lives.

The Pleasure of Love in Iran / Plaisir d’amour en Iran

Agnès Varda, France, 1976, 6m

French with English subtitles

A stunning, vaulted mosque inspires poetry as a young couple (Valérie Mairesse and Ali Rafie, familiar faces from Varda’s One Sings, the Other Doesn’t) goes sightseeing in Iran.

The So-called Caryatids / Les dites cariatides

Agnès Varda, France, 1984, 12m

French with English subtitles

Classical sculptures of female figures adorn Parisian architecture, like human support beams—Varda explores the caryatids’ ancient Greek roots while musing on their modern resonance, accented by selections from Baudelaire’s poetry.

7p., cuis., s. de b., … à saisir

Agnès Varda, France, 1984, 28m

French with English subtitles

The empty rooms of an apartment for rent still hold the stories of its previous tenants. Varda collages fragments and atmospherics to reawaken a family’s class and generational conflicts.

You’ve Got Beautiful Stairs, You Know / T’as de beaux escaliers, tu sais

Agnès Varda, France, 1986, 3m

French with English subtitles

The front steps of the Cinémathèque Française spark a journey through cinematic staircases: Varda celebrates the institution’s 50th anniversary with a themed tribute to all that cinema can offer.

Le lion volatil

Agnès Varda, France, 2003, 12m

French with English subtitles

In this Méliès-inspired romance, a fortune-teller’s apprentice (Julie Depardieu) crosses paths with a Catacombs security guard (David Deciron) near the shape-shifting Lion of Belfort statue in Paris.

Thursday, December 26, 8:45pm

Thursday, January 2, 1:30pm

Friday, January 3, 8:30pm

Shorts Program 4: Selected by Rosalie Varda (TRT: 71m)

Black Panthers © Succession Varda

 

Diary of a Pregnant Woman / L’opéra-mouffe

Agnès Varda, France, 1958, 16m

French with English subtitles

A playful anxiety arises in Varda’s impressionistic depiction of pregnancy, which free-associates between post-surrealist vignettes and the everyday hubbub of her Parisian neighborhood.

Black Panthers

Agnès Varda, France/USA, 1968, 31m

French with English subtitles

One of Varda’s most transformative encounters during her 1968 L.A. journey was with the Black Panthers at the height of their influence and fame. Her casual, open-air portrait of the group, centered on a bustling “Free Huey” rally in Oakland, is more densely packed with information than many of her other documentaries, but it’s made with no less delicacy, grace, and political urgency.

Uncle Yanco / Oncle Yanco

Agnès Varda, USA/France, 1967, 18m

English and French with English subtitles

The first movie Varda made in America was, surprisingly, of a family reunion. This breezy, sun-dappled portrait of her elderly Greek uncle, a painter who transformed his northern California houseboat into a mecca for L.A.’s young, beautiful, and free-spirited, was Varda’s first prolonged exposure to the West Coast counterculture that would deeply inspire her.

Women Reply: Our Bodies, Our Sex / Réponse de femmes: Notre corps, notre sexe 

Agnès Varda, France, 1975, 8m

French with English subtitles

In 1975, a television station gave seven female filmmakers seven minutes to answer the question “What does it mean to be a woman?” Varda responded with this frank assemblage, examining how women are taking control over their bodies and lives.

Sunday, January 5, 2:00pm (Introduction by Rosalie Varda)