Network Agnès Varda

Essayisms, Feminisms, Modernisms

29th International Bremen Film Conference – 7 to 10 May 2025

Agnès Varda (1928–2019) was not only highly creative but also very productive: her extensive oeuvre comprises film, photography and installation art, spanning more than six decades during which she continued to reinvent herself. During her career, she acted as a trailblazer of modern film by adding her own experimental twist to the creative vocabulary of the language of cinema, situating her work somewhere between the realism of documentaries and the fictionality of film poems. From about 2000, she discovered her passion for small digital cameras and – already in her 70s – embarked on a third career as an installation artist.

Network:
The notion of the network arises somewhat organically from Varda’s oeuvre, which is characterized by cooperation and relationality with others. “Network Agnès Varda” aims to look beyond the author and her work, to instead focus on the social fabric surrounding Varda, and the (historical) discourses and practices in which she was embedded. “Network Agnès Varda” thus specifically interrogates the correlations between her oeuvre and the work of others.

Essayisms:
Varda’s unique approach – her cinécriture, or “cine-writing” – is concerned with collecting and reflecting themes, images and stories. Associations, coincidences and detours are therefore much more characteristic of her films than conclusive screenplays.

Modernisms:
Varda was one of the first directors in Europe to translate modernist stylistic devices taken from art and literature onto the silver screen. The aim of her films is not identification; instead, they maintain somewhat of a distance, shatter illusions, and offer a glimpse behind the scenes. Many draw attention to their own artificiality.

Feminisms:
Since her international breakthrough hit CLÉO DE 5 À 7 (1961), in which the protagonist emancipates herself from being a passive object of the male gaze to becoming an actively observing flâneuse (Mouton, 2000), Varda has evidently combined her modernist affinities with a feminist perspective. With her fondness for modernism, she tells stories of female solidarity and links these with activist discourses around bodily self-determination and reflections on gender performativity.