Agnès Varda, a pioneer of the French New Wave, has been making radical films for over half a century. Many of these are considered by scholars, filmmakers, and audiences alike, as audacious, seminal, and unforgettable. This volume considers her production as a whole, revisiting overlooked films like Mur, Murs/Documenteur (1980–81), and connecting her cinema to recent installation work. This study demonstrates how Varda has resisted norms of representation and diktats of production. It also shows how she has elaborated a personal repertoire of images, characters, and settings, which all provide insight on their cultural and political contexts. The book thus offers new readings of this director's multifaceted rêveries, arguing that her work should be seen as an aesthetically influential and ethically-driven production where cinema is both a political and collaborative practice, and a synesthetic art form.
The first introduction in English devoted wholly to Varda and aimed at a general and student audience. Places Varda's major films in the context of her whole oeuvre and follows the development of important themes across her work.
Both a precursor to and a critical member of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda weaves documentary and fiction into tapestries that portray distinctive places and complex human beings. Critics and aficionados have celebrated Varda's independence and originality since the New Wave touchstone Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) brought her a level of international acclaim she has yet to relinquish. Film historian Kelley Conway traces Varda's works from her 1954 debut La Pointe Courte through a varied career that includes nonfiction and fiction shorts and features, installation art, and the triumphant 2008 documentary The Beaches of Agnès . Drawing on Varda's archives and conversations with the filmmaker, Conway focuses on the concrete details of how Varda makes films: a project's emergence, its development and the shifting forms of its screenplay, the search for financing, and the execution from casting through editing and exhibition. In the process, she departs from film history's traditional view of the French New Wave and reveals one artist's nontraditional trajectory through independent filmmaking. The result is an intimate consideration that reveals the artistic consistencies and bold changes in the career of one of the world's most exuberant and intriguing directors.
Comprehensive analysis of 220 hours of outtakes that impels us to reexamine our assumptions about a crucial Holocaust documentary. Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 magnum opus, Shoah, is a canonical documentary on the Holocaust—and in film history. Over the course of twelve years, Lanzmann gathered 230 hours of location filming and interviews with survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators, which he condensed into a 9½-hour film. The unused footage was scattered and inaccessible for years before it was restored and digitized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In An Archive of the Catastrophe, Jennifer Cazenave presents the first comprehensive study of this collection. She argues that the outtakes pose a major challenge to the representational and theoretical paradigms produced by the documentary, while offering new meanings of Shoah and of Holocaust testimony writ large. They lend fresh insight into issues raised by the film, including questions of resistance, rescue, refugees, and, above all, gender—Lanzmann’s twenty hours of interviews with women make up a mere ten minutes of the finished documentary. As a rare instance of outtakes preserved during the predigital era of cinema, this unused footage challenges us to establish a new critical framework for understanding how documentaries are constructed and reshapes the way we view this key Holocaust film. “Cazenave’s immense work of scholarship and reflection offers an intimate and exacting account of the way Lanzmann’s approach to the project shifted and changed over the years of its creation. Never before has there been a more insightful study of the evolution of his thinking. I believe that any scholar who has worked on this film will agree.” — Stuart Liebman, editor of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: Key Essays “This monumental book will profoundly change our understanding of Shoah and Lanzmann’s highly influential shaping of the Holocaust narrative. Cazenave reveals that the significance of Shoah is not only found in what is in it, but, perhaps more importantly, what was omitted from it.” — Aaron Kerner, author of Film and the Holocaust: New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries, and Experimental Films
These essays discuss not just when, but also how and why, Varda's renewed artistic forms have ignited with such creative force, and have been so inspiring an influence. The volume concludes with two remarkable interviews: one with Varda herself, and another with Corinne Marchand.
"Proceeding chronologically, from the beginning of Varda's career in the 1950s to the present, this book focuses on moments where Varda's invocation of different artistic traditions within film opens onto complex commentary on broader aesthetic, theoretical, feminist, and political discussions. I reinterpret some of her best known films, but also focus attention on other less familiar works that merit further consideration. I reassess individual works with the goal of interrogating Varda's visual dialogues to reconstruct the cultural politics of the periods in which they were made. This process of reading new strands of meaning across Varda's oeuvre relies on a richly interdisciplinary approach. The result is a new cultural history of Varda and her work that makes clear how she actively engaged and subtly broadened some of the most advanced aesthetic and political discourse of her day. Many of Varda's sophisticated commentaries on controversial issues of her time have receded from view in the biographical frameworks in which her work often has been considered. The range of her engagement in her work with cinema, art history, photography, and visual culture has not been fully recognized. This decontextualization of Varda's work has been compounded by the frequent emphasis on her exceptionality within her fields of practice. In contrast, I view Varda's work as a projection of cultural history that illuminates multiple disciplines, including art history, cinema studies, visual culture, and modern French history"--Provided by publisher.
"In all film there is the desire to capture the motion of life, to refuse immobility," Agnes Varda has noted. But to capture the reality of human experience, cinema must fasten on stillness and inaction as much as motion. Slow Movies investigates movies by acclaimed international directors who in the past three decades have challenged mainstream cinema's reliance on motion and action. More than other realist art cinema, slow movies by Lisandro Alonso, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Pedro Costa, Jia Zhang-ke, Abbas Kiarostami, Cristian Mungiu, Alexander Sokurov, Bela Tarr, Gus Van Sant and others radically adhere to space-times in which emotion is repressed along with motion; editing and dialogue yield to stasis and contemplation; action surrenders to emptiness if not death.
From New Yorker film critic Richard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard presents a "serious-minded and meticulously detailed . . . account of the lifelong artistic journey" of one of the most influential filmmakers of our age (The New York Times). When Jean-Luc Godard wed the ideals of filmmaking to the realities of autobiography and current events, he changed the nature of cinema. Unlike any earlier films, Godard's work shifts fluidly from fiction to documentary, from criticism to art. The man himself also projects shifting images—cultural hero, fierce loner, shrewd businessman. Hailed by filmmakers as a—if not the—key influence on cinema, Godard has entered the modern canon, a figure as mysterious as he is indispensable. In Everything Is Cinema, critic Richard Brody has amassed hundreds of interviews to demystify the elusive director and his work. Paying as much attention to Godard's technical inventions as to the political forces of the postwar world, Brody traces an arc from the director's early critical writing, through his popular success with Breathless, to the grand vision of his later years. He vividly depicts Godard's wealthy conservative family, his fluid politics, and his tumultuous dealings with women and fellow New Wave filmmakers. Everything Is Cinema confirms Godard's greatness and shows decisively that his films have left their mark on screens everywhere.
