Thursday, March 14 at 7pm
Visiting Filmmaker: Agnes Varda The Beaches of Agnes
dir. Agnes Varda, France, 2008, digital video, b/w & color, 100 min., French w/ English subtitles
Agnes Varda in Person A reflection on art, life and the movies, The Beaches of Agnes is a magnificent new film from the great Agnes Varda, director of Cleo from 5 to 7 and The Gleaners and I, a richly cinematic self portrait that touches on everything from the feminist movement and the Black Panthers to the films of husband Jacques Demy and the birth of the French New Wave. When one thinks of the major figures of postwar cinema, the name Agnès Varda immediately springs to mind. Her body of work in both fiction and documentary is defined by a wealth of innovation and imagination. Irrepressible and inquiring, she is a force of nature, and even at eighty shows no signs of slowing down. Her new film is a reminder that there are few artists capable of such eloquence in cinema. Varda takes beaches as her point of departure. Though she was not born near the ocean, she would travel to the seaside every Easter and summer during her childhood, and her memories of these trips act as a springboard for the film’s meditation on her early life. She recalls her wartime exile to the coastal village of Sète as a period of endless fun and life jackets. While a young adult, Varda began her career as a photographer before raising a family with her husband, Jacques Demy (best known for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) and eventually turning to filmmaking. Returning to Sète over a decade after the end of the war, she used the locale and its fishermen as the backdrop for her remarkable first feature film, La Pointe Courte. Varda weaves photographs, vintage footage, film clips, and present-day sequences into a memorable voyage through her life, during which she confronts the joy of creation and the pain of personal loss, death and aging. It is a singular trip played out against the exciting context of the postwar explosion of cultural expression in France. She knew everyone: her colleagues in the French New Wave, the Black Panthers in California and even Jim Morrison, who would visit when in Paris. Idiosyncratic, engaging and deeply moving, The Beaches of Agnes is a journey through an extraordinary artistic life.
The Beaches of Agnes
Friday, March 15 at 8pm
Exhumed
Diabolical Double Feature Formed in 1997, Exhumed Films was created to provide a theatrical venue for a much beloved art form that had all but disappeared in the 1990s and is in further decline in the early 21st Century: the cult horror movie.