Published in 2015
208 pages
Kelley Conway is a professor of communication arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Chanteuse in the City: The Realist Singer in French Film.
What is this book about?
Both a precursor to and a critical member of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda weaves documentary and fiction into tapestries that portray distinctive places and complex human beings. Critics and aficionados have celebrated Varda’s independence and originality since the New Wave touchstone Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) brought her a level of international acclaim she has yet to relinquish.
Film historian Kelley Conway traces Varda’s works from her 1954 debut La Pointe Courte through a varied career that includes nonfiction and fiction shorts and features, installation art, and the triumphant 2008 documentary The Beaches of Agnès. Drawing on Varda’s archives and conversations with the filmmaker, Conway focuses on the concrete details of how Varda makes films: a project’s emergence, its development and the shifting forms of its screenplay, the search for financing, and the execution from casting through editing and exhibition. In the process, she explores the artistic consistencies and bold changes in Varda’s career and reveals how one woman charted a nontraditional trajectory through independent filmmaking.
