Agnes Varda between Film, Photography, and Art

by Rebecca J. DeRoo

Overview

Agnès Varda is a prolific film director, photographer, and artist whose cinematic career spans more than six decades. Today she is best known as the innovative “mother” of the French New Wave film movement of the 1950s and '60s and for her multimedia art exhibitions. Varying her use of different media, she is a figure who defies easy categorization. In this extensively researched book, Rebecca J. DeRoo demonstrates how Varda draws upon the histories of art, photography, and film to complicate the overt narratives in her works and to advance contemporary cultural politics. Based on interviews with Varda and unparalleled access to Varda's archives, this interdisciplinary study constructs new frameworks for understanding one of the most versatile talents in twentieth and twenty-first century culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520279407
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	10/17/2017
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Rebecca J. DeRoo is Associate Professor in the Department of Performing Arts and Visual Culture at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the author of The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art, recipient of the 2007 Laurence Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies. She cocurated the retrospective Agnès Varda: (Self-)Portraits, Facts and Fiction at the George Eastman Museum (2016).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Reinterpreting Varda: The Mother of the New Wave Reframes Its Histories
2. Complicating Neorealism and the New Wave: La Pointe Courte
3. Filmic and Feminist Strategies: Questioning Ideals of Happiness in Le Bonheur
4. Reconsidering Contradictions: Feminist Politics and the Musical Genre in L’une chante, l’autre pas
5. The Limits of Documentary: Identity and Urban Transformation in Daguerréotypes
6. Melancholy and Merchandise: Documenting and Displaying Widowhood in L’île et elle
7. Varda Now: Autobiography, Memory, and Retrospective

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Quietly visionary in the way it deconstructs and reconstructs readings of Varda, DeRoo’s book enacts its own kind of cinematic labour, offering interpretive space for an understanding of Varda as a deeply politicised, strategically canny and immensely generous interlocutor with the people and the places that she filmed."
 

French Screen Studies

"Debunking the image of an apolitical Varda and reframing her place in the history of French film, DeRoo demonstrates convincingly that the aesthetic and the political are inseparably enmeshed. . . .This deftly argued and engagingly written book is a must for researchers interested in Varda and in French cinema more widely. Making a brilliant contribution to the burgeoning field of intermediality studies, it will also prove a most welcome tool for teaching purposes."
 

French Studies: A Quarterly Review

"DeRoo’s work is a welcome and significant contribution to scholarship on a still too-neglected filmmaker and has much to offer those wanting an introduction to Varda and key issues animating critical reception of her films. The book is a well-researched, accessible, and timely addition to expanding scholarship on Varda as a pioneering and dynamic French filmmaker whose multifaceted oeuvre is central to ongoing and urgent debates about feminist film practice, filmmaking as an intermedia art form, and the ethics and aesthetics of documentary practice."

H-France

"DeRoo’s book provides a yet untold counter-reading of Varda’s works. Her interpretations are acutely attentive, acknowledging the many sites of emotional, generic, aesthetic, and political complexity that arise as a result of Varda’s use of multimedia."

Women in French Studies

"Rebecca DeRoo’s Agnès Varda between Film, Photography, and Art, which takes as its central problem the intermediality and intertextuality of Varda’s work in the context of history, society, and feminism, is, then, to be greeted with great interest."

Journal for Cinema and Media Studies

DeRoo’s nuanced approach yields altogether new understandings of key works in Varda’s oeuvre. . .the readings in Agnès Varda: Between Film, Photography, and Art reveal both the breadth and depth of Varda’s artistic sophistication and political acumen.”

ASAP/Journal

"Debunking the image of an apolitical Varda and reframing her place in the history of French film, DeRoo demonstrates convincingly that the aesthetic and the political are inseparably enmeshed. . . .This deftly argued and engagingly written book is a must for researchers interested in Varda and in French cinema more widely. Making a brilliant contribution to the burgeoning field of intermediality studies, it will also prove a most welcome tool for teaching purposes."
-- "French Studies: A Quarterly Review"

"Quietly visionary in the way it deconstructs and reconstructs readings of Varda, DeRoo's book enacts its own kind of cinematic labour, offering interpretive space for an understanding of Varda as a deeply politicised, strategically canny and immensely generous interlocutor with the people and the places that she filmed."
-- "French Screen Studies"

"DeRoo's book provides a yet untold counter-reading of Varda's works. Her interpretations are acutely attentive, acknowledging the many sites of emotional, generic, aesthetic, and political complexity that arise as a result of Varda's use of multimedia."-- "Women in French Studies"

"DeRoo's nuanced approach yields altogether new understandings of key works in Varda's oeuvre. . .the readings in Agnès Varda: Between Film, Photography, and Art reveal both the breadth and depth of Varda's artistic sophistication and political acumen."
-- "ASAP/Journal"

"Rebecca DeRoo's Agnès Varda between Film, Photography, and Art, which takes as its central problem the intermediality and intertextuality of Varda's work in the context of history, society, and feminism, is, then, to be greeted with great interest."-- "Journal for Cinema and Media Studies"

"DeRoo's work is a welcome and significant contribution to scholarship on a still too-neglected filmmaker and has much to offer those wanting an introduction to Varda and key issues animating critical reception of her films. The book is a well-researched, accessible, and timely addition to expanding scholarship on Varda as a pioneering and dynamic French filmmaker whose multifaceted oeuvre is central to ongoing and urgent debates about feminist film practice, filmmaking as an intermedia art form, and the ethics and aesthetics of documentary practice."-- "H-France"

From the Publisher