Skip to main content

'Greatest of the great' - Agnès Varda: the eternally youthful soul of world cinema

Arguably the greatest film-maker of the French New Wave, Varda – who has died – continued making her distinctive brand of wise, personal, accessible cinema into her late 80s

For me, Agnès Varda was the greatest of that great and long-lived generation of the French New Wave. She was a master of personal cinema and essay cinema, drama, satire, documentary and romance, and her work had a distinctive richness and wisdom. Her debut feature, La Pointe Courte (1954), is a study in contemporary relationships with a poetic poise that surpasses Hiroshima Mon Amour (whose director, Alain Resnais worked on Pointe Courte as editor). Her early masterpiece Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961) is news that stays news: a thrillingly urgent, intensely sexy and melancholy despatch from the epicentre of the 60s Parisian zeitgeist, which is far more interesting and conceptually supple than Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless.

Related: Agnès Varda: ‘I am still alive, I am still curious. I am not a piece of rotting flesh’

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2U1RW6N
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Degrees of separation: what connects Seinfeld to Steve Bannon?

From the US sitcom to the far-right rabble rouser, we go down the rabbit hole, thanks to the arrival of Jerry’s show on Netflix Seinfeld All 180 episodes of the 90s’ most misanthropic sitcom have arrived on Netflix, but not everyone is happy. Some viewers have complained that the new transfer puts Jerry Seinfeld ’s show in a different aspect ratio: from an older square format to widescreen … yada-yada … now the picture crops out some sight gags and just seems slightly bizarro . Motion impossible: fallout It’s not the first time modern technology has caused problems. HD TVs can make even visually stunning films look like cheap soap operas, through motion smoothing – a process to reduce blurring (good for on-screen sport). But Tom Cruise was there to save the day: in a slightly awkward 2018 video , he explained how to adjust TV settings to undo this flat fiasco. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3mr722c
Post a Comment
Read more