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Tag Archives: French New Wave

10 Reasons to Remember Agnès Varda (1928-2019)

30 Saturday Mar 2019

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Career, Director, Documentaries, French New Wave, Jacques Demy, Photographer

Agnès Varda (30 May 1928 – 29 March 2019)

Often regarded as both grandmother and mother of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda originally intended to become a museum curator. Instead she decided to focus on photography, and soon established a successful career as the official photographer at the Théâtre National Populaire in Villeurbanne. She was always fascinated by images, both still and moving, and their composition, a fascination that prompted her to make her first movie without any experience or training whatsoever. It was a bold move, and one that was an immediate critical success, it’s blend of documentary and fictional elements helping Varda to explore the lives of ordinary people, a facet of her movie making style that she would return to many times throughout her career. However, lauded as it was, La Pointe Courte failed to achieve any financial success, and though Varda remained at the Théâtre National Populaire with her reputation intact, she made only short documentaries in the seven years between her first movie and her second.

If anything though, that second movie, Cléo from 5 to 7, ostensibly about a woman facing up to the fact of her own mortality as she awaits the results of a biopsy, was the movie that cemented Varda’s  reputation as a movie maker, with its deeper understanding of the objectification of women, an issue that Varda would also return to in her career. This led to her being regarded as a feminist auteur, but Varda always insisted that she made her movies not with any defined political or feminist agenda, but under her own terms and just “not… like a man”. She continued to make the movies that interested her first and foremost, and eventually, in 1977, founded her own production company, Cine-Tamaris, to ensure that she had control over how her movies were shot and edited. Varda worked mostly in the documentary genre, where she maintained her appreciation for the trials and problems of ordinary people while continuing to experiment with form and format. She made inventive and often challenging movies that offered different and differing perpsectives on a variety of subjects, from the Black Panthers to her husband Jacques Demy, to murals found in Los Angeles and the North Vietnamese Army during the time of the Vietnam war.

Varda’s idiosyncratic approach to her movies was always the best thing about them, and this usually meant that her projects offered unexpected surprises, whether she was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Cinémathèque Française, or her eightieth birthday by revisiting places from her youth. In the last decade she began to be recognised for her impressive body of work, and she received, amongst others, a lifetime achievement award from the Cannes Film Festival, as well becoming the first female director to be given both an honorary Palme d’or and an Academy Honorary Award. And in 2018 she became the oldest person to be nominated for an Oscar for Faces Places (beating fellow nominee James Ivory by eight days). But perhaps it’s her response to the nomination that sums up Varda best: “There is nothing to be proud of, but happy. Happy because we make films to love. We make films so that you love the film.”

1 – La Pointe Courte (1955)

2 – Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)

3 – Le Bonheur (1965)

4 – One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977)

5 – Vagabond (1985)

6 – Jane B. for Agnès V. (1988)

7 – Jacquot de Nantes (1991)

8 – The Gleaners and I (2000)

9 – The Beaches of Agnès (2008)

10 – Faces Places (2017)

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10 Reasons to Remember Jacques Rivette (1928-2016)

29 Friday Jan 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Career, Director, French New Wave, Jacques Rivette, Movies

Jacques Rivette (1 March 1928 – 29 January 2016)

Jacques Rivette

Idiosyncratic, pioneering, challenging, fascinating, obscurist – François Truffaut once said of Jacques Rivette that the French New Wave began “thanks to Rivette”, and while that may be true, the fact is that Rivette had an uneasy relationship with the French movie industry, and despite an extraordinary talent as a director, never achieved the success of his contemporaries, well-known names such as Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer and Jean-Luc Godard. He made long (sometimes very long) movies – Out 1 (1971) runs to nearly thirteen hours in its original version – and constructed them in such a way that audience attention was of supreme importance; complex story structures and innovative story-telling techniques made his movies look and sound unique.

Despite a career that began in 1949 with the short, Aux quatre coins, Rivette faced challenges that would have kept many directors from continuing their careers at all. While he made a steady stream of movies over the ensuing years, he encountered so many obstacles and setbacks that his perseverance is a testament to both his personal tenacity and his talent (in particular, a four-picture deal made in 1976 was never completed due to the poor reception of the first two movies). He wasn’t an instinctively commercial moviemaker, but he was influential in his own way, and his movies reflect an approach and an attitude about the boundaries attached to modern movies that should be applauded rather than dismissed. Watch any of his movies and you’ll find the work of a true artist, a moviemaker whose intelligence, wit and liveliness shone through with a clear-sighted consistency – even if he was doing his best to baffle his audiences at the same time.

Paris Belongs to Us

1 – Paris Belongs to Us (1961)

2 – The Nun (1966)

3 – L’amour fou (1969)

4 – Out 1 (1971)

5 – Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)

6 – Le Pont du Nord (1981)

7 – Merry-Go-Round (1981)

8 – Gang of Four (1989)

9 – La belle noiseuse (1991)

10 – The Story of Marie and Julien (2003)

The Story of Marie and Julien

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For One Week Only: Women Directors – 4. Agnès Varda & the Sixties

14 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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60's, Agnès Varda, Avant garde, Cinécriture, Cléo from 5 to 7, Daisies, Experimental movies, Far from Vietnam, For One Week Only, French New Wave, Jim Morrison, Joyce Wieland, Le Bonheur, Left Bank, Les créatures, Lions Love, Mai Zetterling, Portrait of Jason, Reason Over Passion, Shirley Clarke, Stephanie Rothman, The Connection, Věra Chytilová, Women directors

Introduction

With the Fifties seeing a gradual rise in the number of female movie directors, the Sixties saw that slow expansion get bigger and bigger as more and more women took up the challenge of making movies that were at least as interesting or entertaining as their male counterparts (if they could be financially successful as well would be a great help too). Following in the footsteps of women such as Maya Deren, female experimental movie directors continued to flourish, but this independence didn’t seem to spread to more mainstream movie making. Only one female director of note emerged in the Sixties, and she forged a career for herself that is still going strong today.

Agnès Varda (1928-)

Agnes Varda

Although she’s regarded as a French movie director, Varda was actually born in Belgium. She moved to France in 1940 to live with her mother’s family, and studied art history and photography. Growing up she saw very few movies, but always viewed this as an advantage, so that when she came to make her first movie in 1957, La Pointe Courte, she did so with a naïvete that allowed her to do things she might otherwise have felt she couldn’t do.

Varda made a number of short movies before her next movie, Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961), made audiences and critics alike sit up and take notice. A sensitively handled drama about a woman (Corinne Marchand) who is waiting for the results of a biopsy, the movie deconstructs the way in which its heroine is seen by everyone around her, and how she deals with the possibility of her imminent mortality. If you’re new to the French New Wave of the early Sixties, then this is as good a movie to start out with, and shows Varda already has a distinct narrative style.

Cleo from 5 to 7

Her abilities as a director were further recognised with the release of her third feature, Le Bonheur (1965). A beautifully crafted rural drama, it’s about a young, happily married man who looks for even more “happiness” with another woman. Though the focus is on the young man, Varda doesn’t downplay the female characters, or make their roles of lesser importance. Instead she emphasises their strength and resilience, and reinforces the idea that neither of them is dependent on the young man’s attention. (1965 was also the year that Varda hired a young actor named Gérard Depardieu for a project called Christmas Carole; it was his first screen role, but alas the movie was never finished due to lack of funding.)

Les créatures (1966) followed, a puzzle box of a movie where the basic storyline of a mute woman’s husband who writes a novel that reflects the lives of the villagers, but in doing so, allows the distinction between fiction and reality to become irrevocably blurred, allowed Varda to play tricks on the viewer throughout. But she’s just being mischievous, and none more so than by casting Catherine Deneuve as the mute wife, using the actress’s physical presence to reinforce the character’s self-reliance and determination.

Les creatures

She contributed a section to the documentary Far from Vietnam (1967), along with the likes of Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard, before making a fascinating though not entirely focused semi-documentary road trip through Los Angeles called Lions Love (1969). Varda had originally wanted Jim Morrison to appear in the movie but he declined (though he can still be seen as a member of the theatre audience in the opening scene). Interestingly enough, Varda attracted several well-known celebrities to appear as themselves, including fellow directors Peter Bogdanovich and Shirley Clarke. There’s no story as such, and what narrative there is is firmly non-linear, making this particular road trip/odyssey one that relies on its visual style to get its message across.

Varda was referred to as “the ancestor of the New Wave” when she was just thirty, but her literary influences and use of location shooting and non-professional actors marks her out as a member of the Left Bank cinema movement instead. She herself describes her style of movie making as cinécriture (writing on film), and she builds her finished product in the editing suite where she finds a movie’s motifs and its rhythm. She is a fiercely intelligent director whose international acclaim in the Sixties helped give other women directors a boost toward realising their own careers.

The 60’s

With the Sixties, female directors who had begun their careers in the Fifties continued to make challenging, independent movies outside the foundering Hollywood studio system. Shirley Clarke made her most well-known movies in the Sixties, The Connection (1962), about a group of junkies waiting in a room for their next fix to arrive, and Portrait of Jason (1967), a documentary about Aaron Payne (alias Jason Holliday) and his experiences of being black and gay in Sixties America. Both movies were well-received in critical circles but lacked for a wider audience. They were movies that held up a mirror to American society at the time, and are all the more powerful for the way they dissect the way said society actively marginalised some of its more vulnerable citizens.

The Canadian artist Joyce Wieland turned her hand to making movies in the Sixties. She made experimental, avant garde shorts on a variety of eclectic themes, and with titles such as Barbara’s Blindness (1965), Handtinting (1967), and Rat Life and Diet in North America (1968). She made her first feature movie in 1969, Reason Over Passion, a prosaic yet highly abstract voyage of discovery through the Canadian psyche as presided over by then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Wieland’s movies were distinctive by the way in which she manipulated the film stock to provide a connection to the artistic style she had developed elsewhere in her work, and to make it feel more organic.

Joyce Wieland

Outside of experimental movie making, female directors tackling more conventional narratives were very thin on the ground. Swedish actress Mai Zetterling made her first feature, Loving Couples, in 1964, and packed it full of controversial elements, from a lesbian kiss to two gay men getting “married” in a church, and a close up of a real birth. She made three more features in the latter half of the decade and each showed a confident hand at the tiller.

In the world of low-budget exploitation features, Stephanie Rothman went from being an executive producer for Roger Corman to co-directing Blood Bath (1966) with Jack Hill, and then flying solo with It’s a Bikini World (1967). She added a strong feminist perspective to her movies, and did her best to mitigate the crassness of the movies she worked on. She was aware of the necessity for female nudity in these low-budget movies but focused on the visual presentation to make these scenes less repulsive and more transgressive.

After making several shorts, Czech director Věra Chytilová won international acclaim for her movie Daisies (1966), a funny, liberating attack on the formal traditions of Czech movie making, and a fascinating glimpse into the minds of two wilful young girls whose attitude to Life is to tear it down and damn the consequences – along as they’re having a good time doing it. It’s an invigorating experience, and eschews the rigid formalism of other Czech movies of the time. Chytilová’s career would pick up again in the Seventies, but Daisies was a statement of intent if ever there was one.

Daisies

And there was another statement of intent waiting just around the corner in 1970…

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10 Reasons to Remember Alain Resnais (1922-2014)

03 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Alain Resnais, Documentaries, French New Wave, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad, Life of Riley, Night and Fog

Alain Resnais (3 June 1922 – 1 March 2014)

Alain Resnais

The career of Alain Resnais, which spanned over six decades, was a tribute to his ability to take complex notions of time and memory and make intricate, yet accessible movies around those same notions. Watching Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961) – two of his most well-known movies – one is immediately struck by the way he bends narrative strands to sometimes hallucinatory effect.

Resnais was working in film long before then, though, making short features and documentaries (two of which are now believed lost). He was also an editor, only leaving that aspect of filmmaking behind when he became a director. His breakthrough was the quietly devastating Holocaust documentary Night and Fog (1955). Shot in black and white and letting the graphic images speak for themselves, Night and Fog is still a difficult watch even today.

In the Sixties, he was linked to the French New Wave but didn’t regard his work as part of that movement, preferring to work with authors such as Marguerite Duras and Jacques Sternberg, and refine his aptitude for movies about the passing of time and our relationship to it. He could be both stringent and playful, and always thought-provoking. Although his later projects didn’t achieve the kind of box office results his first few features did, they were still critically well-received, even when he moved towards making movies that explored the relation between cinema and other cultural forms such as music and theatre. His last movie, Life of Riley, an adaptation of a play by Alan Ayckbourn, will be released later this month.

A true original, with a distinct cinematic aesthetic, Resnais will be sorely missed. And here are ten reasons why.

Night and Fog

1 – Night and Fog (1955)

2 – Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)

3 – Last Year in Marienbad (1961)

4 – Muriel, or the Time of Return (1963)

5 – Je t’aime je t’aime (1968)

6 – Providence (1977)

7 – My American Uncle (1980)

8 – Love Unto Death (1984)

9 – Smoking/No Smoking (1993)

10 – Private Fears in Public Places (2006)

Private Fears in Public Places

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