In no particular order, I will be blogging about my top 10 cultural hits of March 2019 over the next week.
NOTE: I had hoped this would be a daily blog but my schedule won’t allow it. Thanks so much for reading! When I get to 100, we will have a party.
1. Agnès Varda and the Jefferson County, Washington Rural Library
When Agnès Varda died last week, I immediately went to my streaming video offers to find my favorite film of hers, Cléo from 5 to 7. I could not find it. Then I remembered I just had received the current newsletter from my local library and the newsletter announced that as a card-carrying member of the library I had FREE access to the streaming platform, Kanopy. Not only was the Varda film there but a specific category tribute to her titled “Remembering Agnès Varda” was as well. If you are lucky enough to have access to Kanopy you will see other film categories such as, “Popular World Cinema”, “The Criterion Collection”, “Directed by Women”, and “Directorial Debuts.”
It is a bold statement to say Varda was the greatest director of the French New Wave but I’m here to tell you she was . . . IS! In his excellent and detailed look at her work, acerbic and smart Guardian film critic, Peter Bradshaw agrees. If you don’t know about Varga, especially if you are a woman, treat yourself to her films.
I’m partial to Cléo from 5 to 7 because it transports me to Paris in the 1960s and as Bradshaw states, “(The film) . . . is news that stays news: a thrillingly urgent, intensely sexy and melancholy despatch from the epicenter of the 60s Parisian zeitgeist, which is far more interesting and conceptually supple than Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless.”
The photos I’ve featured are from The Gentlewoman. Here’s a blog I wrote about this fabulous mag: The Splendor of Artistic Female Sovereignty
Here’s Bradshaw’s full piece on Varga: Varda French New Wave
