Varda by Agnes (12A)
Directed By Agnes Varda. 115 mins
In this age of Marvels, I've grown accustomed to sitting impatiently waiting for "something after the end credits." For the final film by Agnes Varda, you sit impatiently through the opening credits waiting for a film. They are an interminable set of thanks and acknowledgements, and when the film does finally start it's just an illustrated lecture. Filmed before a variety of different audiences, the ninety-year-old Varda gives a rambling and discursive overview of a career making films feature and short, documentaries, taking photographs and creating art installations.
Its obvious shortcoming is that she's told us almost all of this already in the eighty-year-old Varda's The Beaches of Agnes, a much more playful and inventive (and shorter) attempt to film her own obituary. Somewhere along the way she became some kind of cinema institution, a winner of honorary awards, a free-spirited rebel that is deemed to be "a good thing," though very few people actually watch the films. At one point she talks about Cleo From 5 to 7 being perhaps her most famous film. But when she asks how many people have seen it about half the hands go up.
I tried to see why she might be seen as special but though I could see the innovation and the desire to go off the beaten the path, I failed to see the inspiration in this. For dedicated fans only.
Directed By Agnes Varda. 115 mins
In this age of Marvels, I've grown accustomed to sitting impatiently waiting for "something after the end credits." For the final film by Agnes Varda, you sit impatiently through the opening credits waiting for a film. They are an interminable set of thanks and acknowledgements, and when the film does finally start it's just an illustrated lecture. Filmed before a variety of different audiences, the ninety-year-old Varda gives a rambling and discursive overview of a career making films feature and short, documentaries, taking photographs and creating art installations.
Its obvious shortcoming is that she's told us almost all of this already in the eighty-year-old Varda's The Beaches of Agnes, a much more playful and inventive (and shorter) attempt to film her own obituary. Somewhere along the way she became some kind of cinema institution, a winner of honorary awards, a free-spirited rebel that is deemed to be "a good thing," though very few people actually watch the films. At one point she talks about Cleo From 5 to 7 being perhaps her most famous film. But when she asks how many people have seen it about half the hands go up.
I tried to see why she might be seen as special but though I could see the innovation and the desire to go off the beaten the path, I failed to see the inspiration in this. For dedicated fans only.
