agnès varda: a gleaner of images maider gomez inchauspe
Seville’s European Cinema Festival has been renewed and become innovative under the direction of Jose Luis Cienfuegos and his team. From now on the Seville festival will be offering the chance to see interesting, powerful fiction and non-fiction films produced in Europe and which are not usually shown in commercial cinemas. The clearest example of this is the section being offered to the film-maker Agnès Varda this year.
Agnès Varda was born in Belgium in 1928 but went to Paris to study and it was there that discovered photography and theatre. To show the sea to a friend who was terminally ill, she made a short film using footage taken in the fishing village of Sète. After that experience, cinema got a real hold of her. She went back to the small village of Sète and filmed La Pointe Courte in 1956; the film is considered to be a predecessor to Nouvelle Vague.
Varda’s films develop many themes in fiction and in non-fiction. However, her point of view is never that of a documentary maker. Agnès Varda really commits herself in her films (for example with regards to human rights in Black Panthers). She is also a pioneering feminist film-maker. And, because of that, she long ago decided not to take part in festivals which only programme women’s films. She does not believe in limited proposals and is no fan of films and cinema which are based on limited precepts. From her point of view, and although it may seem contradictory and it certainly has been controversial in the feminist movement, offering opinions and attitudes which include more than feminism in itself is a great help to the movement.
Among with many other left-wing creators (Chris Marker, Marguerite Duras, Jean Cayrol, her husband Jaques Demy ...), she was part of the Nouveau Roman group. Varda’s films have always moved between the two main cinema tendencies of the 20th Century. She has always combined Cinema Vérité documentary aesthetics and Nouvelle Vague’s beliefs with regards to fiction and images in her work. In fact, that is Agnès Varda’s work’s main characteristic. In 2000 she filmed the wonderful Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, proving that her age and scarce resources were not going to get in her way. Using a home camera, and without needing to do any Dogma-style marketing campaign, the film shows us that there are still gleaners in our society, just as there were in the Middle Ages. As in most of Varda’s work, cinema and film tricks keep on coming out throughout the film, making it clear that she, as a film-maker, is also a gleaner.
Agnès Varda was born in Belgium in 1928 but went to Paris to study and it was there that discovered photography and theatre. To show the sea to a friend who was terminally ill, she made a short film using footage taken in the fishing village of Sète. After that experience, cinema got a real hold of her. She went back to the small village of Sète and filmed La Pointe Courte in 1956; the film is considered to be a predecessor to Nouvelle Vague.
Varda’s films develop many themes in fiction and in non-fiction. However, her point of view is never that of a documentary maker. Agnès Varda really commits herself in her films (for example with regards to human rights in Black Panthers). She is also a pioneering feminist film-maker. And, because of that, she long ago decided not to take part in festivals which only programme women’s films. She does not believe in limited proposals and is no fan of films and cinema which are based on limited precepts. From her point of view, and although it may seem contradictory and it certainly has been controversial in the feminist movement, offering opinions and attitudes which include more than feminism in itself is a great help to the movement.
Among with many other left-wing creators (Chris Marker, Marguerite Duras, Jean Cayrol, her husband Jaques Demy ...), she was part of the Nouveau Roman group. Varda’s films have always moved between the two main cinema tendencies of the 20th Century. She has always combined Cinema Vérité documentary aesthetics and Nouvelle Vague’s beliefs with regards to fiction and images in her work. In fact, that is Agnès Varda’s work’s main characteristic. In 2000 she filmed the wonderful Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, proving that her age and scarce resources were not going to get in her way. Using a home camera, and without needing to do any Dogma-style marketing campaign, the film shows us that there are still gleaners in our society, just as there were in the Middle Ages. As in most of Varda’s work, cinema and film tricks keep on coming out throughout the film, making it clear that she, as a film-maker, is also a gleaner.
