In the distant past of April 2020, Chris and I dove deep into an episode of our podcast Cinema Dual on the films of French filmmaker Agnès Varda. Though technically not my first experience with Varda, that week of watching Varda’s movies was eye-opening, to such an extent that when Criterion announced they were going to release a Blu Ray box set of her complete filmography, I jumped at the chance to catch up on everything I had missed. Each post will cover 1 of the 15 discs in the set.

When Agnès Varda is referred to as the “Mother of French New Wave” it doesn’t come  from her association with filmmakers like Jean Luc Godard and François Truffaut; it’s more from the realization that some of the filmmaking techniques they were “innovating” could already be found in Varda’s work. In contrast to her contemporaries, Varda moved into filmmaking from her career as a photographer, and because of interest and circumstance more or less learned on the job. Fortunately those compositional skills gave her a head start on establishing a voice in the medium from the beginning.
Continue reading “Varda by Jon – Part 2: Early Varda”