Agnes Varda’s “Faces Places” wins Golden Eye at Cannes
Varda and JR meet some charming personalities on their travels, but none of them can compare to the film’s central duo. JR is clearly a gifted and thoughtful creator, but he meets his match in Varda, whose firecracker mind is as sharp as ever. She displays none of the frailties so stereotyped for people her age (beyond an aversion to stairs — and who can blame her). Likewise, JR falls prey to none of the prejudice or impatience that youngsters are often portrayed as expressing towards their elders.
From Here to There. Varda travels across the globe meeting with a variety of artists working in diverse media to discuss their inspirations, processes, and lives.
Among others, she visits with fellow filmmakers Carlos Reygadas in Mexico and Manoel de Oliveira in Portugal. She visits experimental director Chris Marker who declines to be on camera but Varda is given access to his workspace shedding as much light on his life and work than an interview might. She visits artists Miguel Barcelo and Annette Messager, sculptor Christian Boltanski, and designer Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Agnes Varda: From Here to There is a fascinating series not only because of the access she has to other artists but also because of her genuine curiosity about them and her clearly apparent and infectious joy in discovering new works of art. Part travelogue, part treatise on art and part Varda biography, Agnes Varda: From Here to There is an essential documentary for any art or film collection.
Agnes Varda paints a portrait of a woman (Jane Birkin), this time in a marvelously Expressionistic way. JANE B. abandons the bio-pic format, favoring instead a freewheeling mix of gorgeous fantasy sequences. (Youtube)
I felt very honored to be part of the French group invited to bring their experiences from different backgrounds to the young People’s Republic. I was determined to do the best job possible as a photographer. There was so much to discover—everything.
The movie combines comedy, Hong Kong action, and serious drama with scenes involving Peking Opera. Director Tsui Hark described the film as a satire on the “Chinese ignorance of democracy.” [1] The film was nominated for six awards at the Hong Kong Film Awards including Best Actress.
Opening of “Once Upon time in China” (directed by Tsui Hark)
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Tsui Hark Hong Kong filmmaker/producer. was born on Feb 15.
Born in Vietnam, moved to Hong Kong at the age of fourteen. Studied film at the University of Texas at Austin.
Here is a review of “the Beaches of Agnes” from Hammer to Nail.
Now, as an octogenarian, she’s taken her project of introspection even further, making a feature-length video about her own life, her own art, her outlook on the world as she’s grown older, her relationships, childhood, memories. It’s the kind of film a less charitable critic might call indulgent; yet why shouldn’t a filmmaker write her own life story on the screen rather than the page? As with any autobiography, the author’s passions and blind spots are all there for us to see, and despite the expected amount of immodesty coursing through it, “The Beaches of Agnès” is a mostly enchanting troll down memory lane. (Indiewire)
Have you missed this film by Agnes Varda?
This is the first four minutes of Agnes Varda’s full-length documentary “The Gleaners and I” (2000). Inspired by Realist painter Jean-François Millet’s famous painting “The Gleaners [Les Glaneuses].
Sandrine Bonnaire international breakthrough came in 1986 when she played the title role in Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond), directed by Agnès Varda, for which part she won her second César Award.
Last year, Sandrine Bonnaire has directed a documentary about her autistic sister.
It is surely a first — an international movie star (Sandrine Bonnaire) making a patient, respectful, thoroughly unnarcissistic documentary about her own handicapped sister, and stumping for policy change as she considers painful mysteries about family and the passage of time in the process. “Her Name Is Sabine” (2007) is a simple, unpretentious piece of work — Bonnaire spends an enormous amount of time simply observing the managed-care home where Sabine, nearing 40, lives now with a handful of other adults with varying modes and manifestations of autism. Slowly, Sabine’s history is dripped in — as a child, teen and young adult, she was different, “off,” but lucid, literate, energetic and capable of playing Chopin. She went without diagnosis for decades. As her siblings — ten of them — grew up one by one and left home, Sabine, robbed of stimulus, began to deteriorate; a series of hospital stays and hired nurses followed, and then a five-year long institutional stay in which Sabine grew violent and was tamped down by straitjackets and antipsychotic drugs. The filmmaker glosses over it, but Sabine, perhaps now permanently debilitated, was eventually rescued to a new facility that her famous sister had to raise money for herself, using her fame as an actress and celebrity. (Michael Atkins- read more here.)
L’Ile et Elle fills two floors of Jean Nouvel’s spectacular Fondation Cartier with a kaleidoscope of colour and sound inspired by the windswept island of Noirmoutier off the west coast of France. As always with Varda, the exhibition makes overlapping references to her own career, family and friends.
Top from Cinevardaphoto, bottom Huey.
This riveting documentary, “Black Panthers – Huey!”, directed by French filmmaker Agnès Varda transports you to the pivotal Free Huey rally held on February 17th, 1968 (Newton’s birthday), at Oakland Auditorium in Alameda, California. Newton, the charismatic young college student who, along with Bobby Seale, created the Black Panther Party, had been jailed for allegedly killing a police officer. His arrest–widely believed at the time to be a setup–galvanized Party support throughout the nation and led to a boom in Party membership, bringing a new level of public attention to the Panthers’ cause.
Varda’s documentary work echoing, at various moments, the digressive cine-essays of Marker, the critical examinations of Godard, and the autobiographical experimentation of Akerman. But beyond these comparisons, it reveals a consistent yet absolutely unique voice spanning a 40-year period of photography and nonfiction filmmaking.
Varda continually returns to the impenetrable surface of the photographic image. Both “Ydessa” and “Ulysses” discover a subject’s complexity under layers of meaning, intended or unintended, initially obscured by the visceral impact of aesthetic beauty and fascination. (via Indiewire)
