Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"DeRoo’s work is a welcome and significant contribution to scholarship on a still too-neglected filmmaker and has much to offer those wanting an introduction to Varda and key issues animating critical reception of her films. The book is a well-researched, accessible, and timely addition to expanding scholarship on Varda as a pioneering and dynamic French filmmaker whose multifaceted oeuvre is central to ongoing and urgent debates about feminist film practice, filmmaking as an intermedia art form, and the ethics and aesthetics of documentary practice." * H-France *
“DeRoo’s nuanced approach yields altogether new understandings of key works in Varda’s oeuvre. . .the readings in
Agnès Varda: Between Film, Photography, and Art reveal both the breadth and depth of Varda’s artistic sophistication and political acumen.”
* ASAP/Journal *
"DeRoo’s book provides a yet untold counter-reading of Varda’s works. Her interpretations are acutely attentive, acknowledging the many sites of emotional, generic, aesthetic, and political complexity that arise as a result of Varda’s use of multimedia." * Women in French Studies *
"Rebecca DeRoo’s
Agnès Varda between Film, Photography, and Art, which takes as its central problem the intermediality and intertextuality of Varda’s work in the context of history, society, and feminism, is, then, to be greeted with great interest." * Journal for Cinema and Media Studies *
"Quietly visionary in the way it deconstructs and reconstructs readings of Varda, DeRoo’s book enacts its own kind of cinematic labour, offering interpretive space for an understanding of Varda as a deeply politicised, strategically canny and immensely generous interlocutor with the people and the places that she filmed."
* French Screen Studies *
"Debunking the image of an apolitical Varda and reframing her place in the history of French film, DeRoo demonstrates convincingly that the aesthetic and the political are inseparably enmeshed. . . .This deftly argued and engagingly written book is a must for researchers interested in Varda and in French cinema more widely. Making a brilliant contribution to the burgeoning field of intermediality studies, it will also prove a most welcome tool for teaching purposes."
* French Studies: A Quarterly Review *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
1. Reinterpreting Varda: The Mother of the New Wave Reframes Its Histories
2. Complicating Neorealism and the New Wave: La Pointe Courte
3. Filmic and Feminist Strategies: Questioning Ideals of Happiness in Le Bonheur
4. Reconsidering Contradictions: Feminist Politics and the Musical Genre in L’une chante, l’autre pas
5. The Limits of Documentary: Identity and Urban Transformation in Daguerréotypes
6. Melancholy and Merchandise: Documenting and Displaying Widowhood in L’île et elle
7. Varda Now: Autobiography, Memory, and Retrospective
Notes
Bibliography
Index
