Agnès Varda is easily among the greatest of filmmakers, and a photographer talented enough that she’d have certainly been well known even had she not turned her eye to moving images. Yet she always seems to get second billing to many of her contemporaries, owing perhaps to her somewhat less prolific output, but more likely to her status as a woman in the overwhelmingly masculine club that is (still) the world of filmmaking. When she transitioned from photography to cinema, she had little in the way of formal training or even an extensive background as a movie-goer to inform her work. And it has always shown, for her films have never looked or played out quite like the work of anyone else, even if she was nominally classified with the New Wavers in her early career.
In her later career she concentrated more on documentaries, which seemed a natural transition: her fiction films had never seemed far from a gorgeously realized reality, after all. Her non-fiction films are as much essays as documentaries, and for her latest she has turned her camera on what is surely one of her most fascinating subjects: herself. Her filmed autobiography is less about telling the story of her life than it is about making images out of her memories, and revisiting the places and people and pictures that all poured themselves into her art. She came away from this year’s César Awards with the documentary prize, proving that even a half century into her career, she is still more than capable of producing vital work.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street.
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The sixth iteration of the DC Shorts Film Festival brings together a hundred shorts, all of which will be shown in competition over the weekend, in screenings of ten each. Alternate groupings of the films will screen through the early part of next week, ending with a showcase of the best films of the festival a week from tonight.
Opens today and runs through next Thursday with screenings at E Street and at the U.S. Navy Memorial’s Burke Theater. See the DC Shorts website for a full schedule and to purchase tickets.
