Four films, spanning the breadth of Agnes Varda’s career, will be screened in the Spazju Kreattiv Cinema over the next few weeks.
French New Wave cinema owes a great debt to Varda, the Belgian-born film-maker whose work helped to define the movement. This month, Spazju Kreattiv will be celebrating Varda’s contribution to cinema with screenings of four films, including her latest, Faces, Places, which marked her return to film-making in 2018.
Born in Brussels in 1928, Varda and her family moved to Sète, France, her mother’s home town, when she was in her teens. She studied psychology and literature at the Sorbonne and was vocal about her distaste for both the academic experience and the city of Paris itself. Varga went on to study photography and made a living in commercial photography for more than a decade.
Her experience with photography would significantly influence her film-making process and, by the time she made her first, La Pointe Courte, in 1954, Varda knew how to apply photographic technique to create her own style of storytelling.
Varda’s experimentation with film happened around the same time that French New Wave cinema was gaining ground. This movement focused on the experimental use of film and its recognition as an artform in its own right.
Spazju Kreattiv is showing four of Varda’s films. Cleo from 5 to 7 was made in 1962 and features a female protagonist who echoes the complexity and resilience common to many of Varda’s characters as she waits for medical test results and grapples with her own mortality.
The 1985 Vagabond explores the suffering and sacrifice of the human condition as it documents the journey of Mona, a homeless drifter whose life is recalled through the flashbacks of people who met her.
The 1977 title One Sings, The Other Doesn’t, charts the course of a friendship between two women in 1970s France. It explores the struggle to secure women’s rights during this period. Varda herself was involved in the successful effort to legalise abortion and free access to contraceptives in France in 1971.
Then there is also Varda’s latest, Faces, Places, in which she teams up with French photographer JR and travels to rural towns across France, getting to know communities and creating large-scale portraits in JR’s photo-booth-truck. This film won the Golden Eye Award at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.
For more information on the film schedule and to book tickets visit www.kreattivita.org.