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Written by Heather McIntosh
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Monday, 05 October 2009 |
I was privileged enough on 7th September to attend the preview screening of Agnès Varda’s latest film, Les plages d’Agnès/The Beaches of Agnès, held at the independent cinema, Curzon Soho, London candida treatment. Viewing a film from a director as prestigious and well-renowned as Agnès Varda is an exciting prospect in itself, so when I was informed that there was also to be a Question & Answer session after the film with the so-called ‘grandmother’ of the 1960s French New Wave movement, I really did feel like all my Christmases had come at once. One of the first questions Varda was asked after the screening was what she now considers herself to be, having worked as a photographer, filmmaker, and artist. Her reply needed not even a moment of consideration: “I have been making films for 55 years now,” she recalled, “so I am a filmmaker.”
The five decades that Agnès Varda’s filmmaking has spanned is certainly an undeniably impressive feat, but what really resonates with the above statement is the simple and unquestionable claim that she is, in every sense of the word, a filmmaker. In her films – more so than in almost any other director’s – it is indisputably clear that filmmaking is not something that Agnès Varda just does, it’s something that she is; it sculpts her just as she has sculpted it. Her life has been lived for and through the cinema, the medium and the very notion of herself now completely inextricable from the other. And it is with regards to Varda’s complex and intimate relationship with film that there is no better culmination than her latest autobiographical, quasi-documentary, The Beaches of Agnès.
Varda has previously stated that she is “always very precisely implicated in [her] films, not through narcissism but through honesty in [her] approach.” Nowhere is this more honesty apparent than in The Beaches of Agnès. She declares at the very beginning of the film that if you were to open her up, you would find beaches, and it is from this initial point that Varda does just that, using the medium of film – and indeed, the visual metaphor of many mirrors – to lay herself out for all to see. Just as she claims, this approach never comes across as narcissistic, but rather touchingly and endearingly honest, with an emotional immediacy that makes you feel privileged to laugh or feel melancholy alongside her. Starting at the beginning of her life, she takes us through her journey chronologically, using a mixture of documentary footage, fiction film, photography, and fictional reconstructions to depict her life’s events. Varda physically walks backwards while facing the camera, leading the audience directly into her past. |
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Written by Justin Barber
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Wednesday, 04 February 2009 |
The Yes Men Fix the World is “part screwball comedy about the apocalypse, part call to arms,” according to its press kit. It’s a collection of the group’s most recent missions, strung together by overarching themes and a comedic structural device: Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno roaming a post-industrial American wasteland with nothing but their thrift store suits and limited Web design skills to sustain them. The film boasts a disarming DIY quality--by necessity as much as design--and the only underwater ballet you’ll see in a political documentary. The Yes Men themselves are charmingly watchable and succeed in extracting humor from the bleakest of places. |
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Written by Tracy Jones
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Thursday, 05 June 2008 |
David Logsdon's Faubourg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans is a test to what children don't learn about black history in schools. A 60-minute documentary about the living history of New Orleans, Faubourg Treme explores the town from which its title is taken, a culture rich area that outskirts the French Quarter. Thus far the film has been well received, writer Lolis Eric Elie, saying, "Sold out runs in New York and San Francisco. There have also been a lot of tearful eyes in our audiences. People are touched by the story and its implicit message that New Orleans must be saved." |
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Written by Tracy Jones
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Thursday, 22 May 2008 |
Two sisters, Lola and Edna live the coastal life. They catch fish and dead seamen floating in the ocean. Together, they are visually a ball and a bat. Although it's never clear which sister is Lola or Edna, you could guess that the ball looks like an Edna and the bat is a Lola or vice versa. |
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Written by Tracy Jones
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Friday, 16 May 2008 |
Peter Galison and Robb Moss' Secrecy is a documentary that, as its title implies, explores the theory that institutional secrecy in America corrupts and keeps society suspended in fear. The branches of the US government are, according to the constitution, supposed to share power. Secrecy exposes an incompetent system that's at war with itself. Government policy is to gather and conceal sensitive information that poses a threat to national security, but what happens when various branches of government refuse to share classified information between themselves? |
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