Self-Indexing and Shifting Spectators in Varda’s VAGABOND

Adapted from a lecture given at the Filmmuseum Pottsdam, July 6, 2016.

It’s unfortunate that Agnès Varda only began to assume the status of a major filmmaker after her husband died and she became known as the custodian of Jacques Demy’s precious legacy. Prior to that, she was mainly known, affectionately but somewhat condescendingly, as a sort of mascot of the French New Wave whose public profile remained almost as superficial as that of her eponymous heroine in Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962). And the troubling, ironic sting at the end of La Bonheur (1965) tended to be either misunderstood or ignored. Thanks to the diversity of her films, stylistic and otherwise, she was easy to overlook due to her reluctance to brand herself, unlike her male colleagues.

One fascinating trait that Varda shared with her late husband, however, was the compulsion to become a tireless indexer and cross-referencer of her own work. But instead of bringing back her fictional characters in subsequent films, as Demy did, she more often brought back her locations and her interview subjects. And she went far beyond Demy in becoming her own explicator and analyst, in effect telling her audience what to look for and even how to find it. Read more

Filming {Othello}

The last completed essay film of Orson Welles, and the last of his features to be released during his lifetime (1979), this wonderfully candid, rarely screened account of the making of his first wholly independent feature offers a perfect introduction to that movie and to Welles’s second manner of moviemaking that was necessary once he parted company with the studios and mainstream media. Significantly, the only part of Othello we see and hear in its original form is from the opening sequence; everything elseusually shown silently with Welles’s narrationinvolves an intricate reediting of the original material. Whether he’s addressing us beside his moviola, delivering new versions of Shakespearean speeches, chatting with his old Irish friends and collaborators Micheal MacLiammoir (his Iago) and Hilton Edwards, or speaking to college students, Welles is at his spellbinding best. (JR) Read more

The Tempest

Derek Jarman’s rarely seen, highly personalized 1979 version of the Shakespeare play, in an assortment of period styles; Caliban is an Edwardian butler, the settings are crumbling abbeys and mansions, and Elizabeth Welch is on hand to sing Stormy Weather. (JR) Read more