Jonathan Romney
Glean Spirit
A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda
By Carrie Rickey
W W Norton 297pp £22.99
When Agnès Varda was introduced as ‘Director. Screenwriter. Legend’ at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival, she promptly objected: ‘I’m not a religion. I’m still alive.’ It was a futile protest. Varda had become the object of widespread veneration. You could buy any number of T-shirts emblazoned with her likeness, whether in the form of a photograph or a cartoon depicting a Mrs Pepperpot-type sporting a silver-and-aubergine pudding-bowl coiffure and an expression of bemused curiosity. But Varda’s extraordinary career – her longevity, the range of her achievements, her political seriousness, her talent for self-reinvention – renders that sense of reverence understandable. The American film critic Carrie Rickey, in the introduction to A Complicated Passion, remembers seeing Varda’s 1962 feature Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) as a student and discovering that women too could make films: ‘tears spritzed from my eyes’.
The woman born Arlette Varda in Brussels in 1928 was fiercely independent, as signalled by her decision to change her first name on her nineteenth birthday. Having learned to mend nets during her family’s wartime stay in Sète, she travelled to Corsica and worked on a fishing boat; the sea would feature in several of her works, notably the autobiographical documentary The Beaches of Agnès (2008). Varda became an accomplished photographer, then turned to cinema, although she had seen very few films. Her first feature film, La Pointe Courte (1955), a low-budget narrative-documentary hybrid, had to be classified as an ‘amateur’ work because she had not gained recognition from the Centre National du Cinema, which regulated filmmaking in France, as a commercial director. Thereafter, Varda would practise her own protean version of amateurism.
La Pointe Courte pre-empted the advent of the French New Wave by a few years, but Varda’s importance has often been neglected. She was responsible for several resounding, female-focused French films: Cléo from 5 to 7 pretty much rewrote the rules on representing female subjectivity on screen; One Sings, the
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Paul Gauguin kept house with a teenage ‘wife’ in French Polynesia, islands whose culture he is often accused of ransacking for his art.
@StephenSmithWDS asks if Gauguin is still worth looking at.
Stephen Smith - Art of Rebellion
Stephen Smith: Art of Rebellion - Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux
literaryreview.co.uk
‘I have fond memories of discussing Lorca and the state of Andalusian theatre with Antonio Banderas as Lauren Bacall sat on the dressing-room couch.’
@henryhitchings on Simon Russell Beale.
Henry Hitchings - The Play’s the Thing
Henry Hitchings: The Play’s the Thing - A Piece of Work: Playing Shakespeare & Other Stories by Simon Russell Beale
literaryreview.co.uk
We are saddened to hear of the death of Fredric Jameson.
Here, from 1983, is Terry Eagleton’s review of The Political Unconscious.
Terry Eagleton - Supermarket of the Mind
Terry Eagleton: Supermarket of the Mind - The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson
literaryreview.co.uk