Agnes Varda, Life as Art (NYC, Feb 2018)
Agnès Varda at FIAF (New York City) on February 28 for a special talk about her 50 years of visionary filmmaking and her very first New York exhibition at Blum & Poe Gallery.
Known for pioneering the French New Wave movement with her 1954 film "La pointe courte", Agnès Varda has been innovative since the very beginning of her prolific career. Over the past 50 years, Varda has created a remarkable body of work united by the concept of the “film essay”. Using her personal history, relationships, and travels as inspiration, Varda makes thought-provoking films that are difficult to categorize in traditional categories.. fiction and nonfiction, poem and prose, documentary and autobiography, cinema and photography.
“Agnès Varda displays a powerful talent for weaving together questions of the individual and the collective, the subjective and the objective, the real and the imaginary, and the beautiful and the dismal,” said Dominique Bluher (Lecturer and Director of M.A. Studies in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, Chicago- 2015).
Hailed as the mother of the French New Wave with a career spanning over six decades, Varda shifted the focus of her practice in 2003 and in her own words, transformed from an “old filmmaker to a young visual artist.” The 88-year-old Belgian-born (in Ixelles!) artist shows no sign of slowing down. Visit her first exhibition in NY at Blum& Poe gallery from Mar 2 until April 15 (http://www.blumandpoe.com/exhibitions/agn%C3%A8s-varda). I am mpatient to discover her new film with the French artist JR ("a film about people produced by the people"). http://www.jr-art.net/
Among her best known works: La Pointe Courte ; Cléo de 5 à 7 ; Daguerréotypes ; Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond) ; Jane B. par Agnès V. ; Jacquot de Nantes ; The Gleaners and I; … In 2015, Varda was the first woman to receive an honorary Palme d'or.
Talk was moderated by Olivier Renaud-Clément.
Video of the event: by FIAF: https://youtu.be/QF3gHV7vSso
Photography credit: Yves Lefebvre
