Agnès Varda: An Irresistible Force

December 20, 2019–February 28, 2020

Vive la Varda! We pay tribute to a founding mother of the French New Wave, who died at age ninety in 2019—an inspiring and vital artist to the end.

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The Beaches of Agnès
Le bonheur
Vagabond
Black Panthers
Cléo from 5 to 7
Varda by Agnès

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Past Films

The Beaches of Agnès
- Friday, February 28 7 PM
Agnès Varda
France, 2008
Digital Restoration

Varda takes a cinematic stroll through her long career—and the history of French film—in this first-person documentary. “For all its melancholy and its profound awareness of mortality, [it is] one of the jolliest, more life-affirming self-portraits in recent cinema” (Sight & Sound).
One Sings, the Other Doesn’t
- Sunday, February 23 4:30 PM
Agnès Varda
France, Belgium, Venezuela, 1977
Digital Restoration

Two very different women search for their place in the world over the course of a decade in Varda’s look at friendship and feminism. “Remains almost unique as a commercial French film concerned with the militant aspects of the women’s movement” (Alison Smith).
Jacquot
- Saturday, February 22 3 PM
Agnès Varda
France, 1991
Digital Restoration
Recommended for ages 12 & up

Inspired by the memories of her husband, director Jacques Demy, Varda crafted this affecting and enlightening portrait of the artist as a young boy in 1940s Nantes. “A one-of-a-kind celebration” (New York Times).
The Gleaners and I
- Saturday, December 28 5 PM
- Friday, February 21 7 PM
Agnès Varda
France, 2000
Digital Restoration
Film to Table dinner follows the December 28 screening

Varda’s rumination on the art of “living off the leftovers of others” visits food scavengers and cultural rebels, and finds inspiration in both past and present, rural and urban, the political and the highly personal. “Beautiful, absorbing, and touching” (Jonathan Rosenbaum).
Lions Love (. . . and Lies)
- Thursday, February 20 7 PM
Agnès Varda
United States, 1969
Digital Restoration

Varda’s experimental feature, shot in Hollywood in 1968 and starring Warhol superstar Viva, is a deliberately decadent riff on fantasy, immaturity, and violence. “More than a time capsule of events and moods—it’s a living aesthetic model for revolutionary times” (Richard Brody).
Mur murs
- Sunday, February 16 5 PM
Agnès Varda
United States, France, 1980
Digital Restoration

Varda’s documentary looks at the murals of Los Angeles as backdrop to and mirror of the city’s many cultures circa 1980.
The Young Girls of Rochefort
- Saturday, February 15 1 PM
Jacques Demy
France, 1967
Digital Restoration
Recommended for ages 12 & up

Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac play twins lifted out of their small-town reveries by a troupe of wandering entertainers, including Gene Kelly. This musical by Varda’s husband, Jacques Demy, is “not merely charming or amusing, but profoundly moving” (Sight & Sound).
The Young Girls Turn 25
- Saturday, February 15 3:30 PM
Agnès Varda
France, 1993
Digital Restoration

Varda’s splendid documentary revisits the town of Rochefort on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the shooting of The Young Girls of Rochefort, and finds evidence of the film’s lasting effects on the townspeople.
Le bonheur
- Saturday, January 18 4 PM
- Friday, February 14 5 PM
Agnès Varda
France, 1965
Varda’s strikingly colorful, lyrical film examines a love triangle within a circular structure, as a carpenter seeks happiness with both his wife and his mistress. “Varda fills her frames with riots of nature and color” (Richard Brody).
Shorts by Agnès Varda, Program 1: Play and Politics
- Saturday, February 8 5 PM
This program also screens Wednesday, January 22, with a lecture by Tom Luddy.

These short films made in the sixties are both political and playful, in keeping with the times. Salut les cubains screens along with two works made in the Bay Area, Uncle Yanco (on Varda’s artist uncle) and Black Panthers (featuring Huey Newton and Kathleen Cleaver).
Cléo from 5 to 7
- Saturday, January 11 6 PM
- Friday, February 7 5 PM
Agnès Varda
France, 1962
Digital Restoration
BAMPFA Student Committee Pick

Shot entirely on location in the streets of Paris, Cléo chronicles two hours of a pop singer’s life. A score by Michel Legrand and cameos by Legrand, Jean-Luc Godard, and Anna Karina flavor this New Wave classic that proves Varda’s theme, “one isn’t born a woman, one becomes one.”
Daguerréotypes
- Sunday, February 2 5 PM
Agnès Varda
France, 1975
Digital Restoration

Varda’s playful and affectionate portrait of her own thoroughly Parisian neighborhood and the shopkeepers who keep it thriving. “Casual anthropology with a strongly humanist bent” (Slant).
La Pointe Courte
- Thursday, January 9 7 PM
- Saturday, February 1 3 PM
Agnès Varda
France, 1955
BAMPFA Collection

Made outside the French film industry on a shoestring budget, Varda’s debut film about two reunited lovers in a Mediterranean fishing port has been called “truly the first film of the nouvelle vague.”
Faces Places
- Friday, January 17 7 PM
- Friday, January 31 5 PM
Agnès Varda, JR
France, 2017
BAMPFA Student Committee Pick

Varda teams up with hipster artist JR on a road trip across rural France, meeting the locals and creating large-scale portraits. One of Varda’s last films, and a first-rate achievement in her brilliant career.
Vagabond
- Sunday, December 29 4:30 PM
- Thursday, January 30 7 PM
Agnès Varda
France, 1985
Digital Restoration

The short life and eventual death of a young female drifter forms the basis of Varda’s chilling look at alienation and idealism. “Like so many of the greatest films, it tells us a very specific story, strong and unadorned, about a very particular person” (Roger Ebert).
Shorts by Agnès Varda, Program 2: Places and Faces
- Sunday, January 26 1:30 PM
This collection of short works finds Varda observing people, spaces, and places from France to Iran, in L’opéra-Mouffe, Du côté de la côte, La réponse de femmes, Plaisir d’amour en Iran, Ulysse, and Les dites cariatides.
Varda by Agnès
- Friday, December 20 7 PM
- Saturday, December 21 1:30 PM
- Thursday, December 26 7 PM
- Friday, January 24 4 PM
Agnès Varda, Didier Rouget
France, 2019
East Bay Advance Screenings

In the last of her prodigious life’s work, the legendary, delightfully irreverent Agnès Varda conducts a personal career retrospective as only she can, with skill, charm, wit, reverie, and wonder. “A master class on filmmaking” (Toronto Star).
In Focus: Shorts by Agnès Varda, Program 1: Play and Politics
- Wednesday, January 22 3:10 PM
This program also screens Saturday, February 8 (without lecture).

These short films made in the sixties are both political and playful, in keeping with the times. Salut les cubains screens along with two works made in the Bay Area, Uncle Yanco (on Varda’s artist uncle) and Black Panthers (featuring Huey Newton and Kathleen Cleaver).

Lecture by Tom Luddy

Agnès Varda: An Irresistible Force

December 20, 2019–February 28, 2020

“In my films I always wanted to make people see deeply. I don’t want to show things, but to give people the desire to see.”—Agnès Varda

In the sixty-four years between her first and final films, Agnès Varda (1928–2019) created an exceptional career as a photographer, filmmaker, and artist. Active until the end of her life at age ninety, Varda was a true force of inspiration who touched many through her poignant films and thoughtful artist talks (she beguiled BAMPFA audiences as a guest in our Afterimage series in 2013). Now, we celebrate Varda’s legacy—her wisdom, her zeal for life, and her ability to look at the world anew.

“In my films I always wanted to make people see deeply. I don’t want to show things, but to give people the desire to see.”—Agnès Varda

An important figure in the development of the French New Wave and the only female director associated with the movement, Varda holds a singular position in film history. Yet she maintained that she became a filmmaker unintentionally. While working as a photographer for the Théâtre National Populaire in Paris, and with little previous knowledge of cinema, she was persuaded by a friend to make her first feature, La Pointe Courte (1955). She went on to direct numerous shorts, essay films, and documentaries that are as impressive as her more widely distributed features. Throughout her career, Varda championed the idea that filmmaking is artisan’s work, equivalent to weaving and hand-sewing, and that production should take place in the atmosphere of an atelier. (In 1977, she created Ciné-Tamaris, her own production company and studio.) Her films draw on her love of the arts—photography and literature in particular. Varda’s ability to make non-ideological films anchored in social reality is part of the strength of her cinema. Her work responds to life in a personal and sophisticated way, reflecting her private and public role as one of France’s most celebrated directors. Vive la Varda!

— Susan Oxtoby, Senior Film Curator

Agnès Varda: An Irresistible Force is copresented with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where the series screens January through March 2020.

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Film Series Sponsor: The Simpson PSB Fund

Agnès Varda: An Irresistible Force is organized by Senior Film Curator Susan Oxtoby and copresented with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Our thanks to Rosalie Varda and Cecilia Rose, Ciné-Tamaris; Mathieu Demy; Emily Woodburne, Brian Belovarac, and Ben Crossley-Marra, Janus Films; Juliette Donadieu, Consulate General of France, San Francisco; and Gina Basso, SFMOMA.

Supporter

Cultural Services of the French Embassy