CineVardaUtopia, Part Three

Agnès Varda is having her moment. At the age of 89, she received an Academy Award nomination this year for Faces Places, the documentary she co-directed with photographer JR. She was selected to participate in the prestigious Norton Lectures at Harvard University. And she is the subject of a new book, CineVardaUtopia, published by Reverse Shot and Museum of the Moving Image. As co-editors Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert state in their introduction to the book (which is based on a Reverse Shot Symposium): “Agnès Varda’s every film, long or short, fiction or non-, takes us by surprise. She greatly influenced the style and ethos of the French New Wave, and is today arguably its most vibrant remaining figure. She was making documentary-fiction hybrid films before there was ever such a category. She makes films of emotional resonance and personal exploration, often about society’s outcast and marginalized, imbued with an aesthetic rigor.”

This is the third part of the retrospective.