CineVardaUtopia: The Films of Agnès Varda, Part Two

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.”