The Bloomsbury Handbook to Agnès Varda
The Bloomsbury Handbook to Agnès Varda
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Description
Agnès Varda, the Belgian-born French filmmaker, is universally recognised as the “the godmother of the French New Wave”, influencing directors from Jean-Luc Godard to Alain Resnais with her early films, such as La Pointe Courte (1954). A pioneering female auteur, she is also renowned for the way she trained her female and feminist gaze on women as social subjects - including older women, and notably herself. Starting out as a photographer, she worked ceaselessly from the early 1950s until her death at the age of 90 in 2019. Her career-long strand of documentaries, including Black Panthers (1968) and The Gleaners and I (2000), placed her at the centre of the renewed interest in the genre in the 21st century, while the last two decades saw her entering her “third phase”, as an innovative gallery artist. Her extraordinary determination and creativity have inspired filmmakers throughout the world and continued to attract new generations of viewers.
The Bloomsbury Handbook to Agnès Varda represents the richness and diversity of Varda's life and art including landmark films such as Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962), One Sings, The Other Doesn't (1977), and Vagabond, as well as lesser-known works such as Daguerreotypes (1975). The chapters in this book are written by leading experts on Varda, women's cinema, and French film and television, alongside emerging scholars and independent writers. Together, they explore Varda's multidisciplinary practice and its social, historical, and cultural contexts, reflecting contemporary perspectives, including queer-inflected and intersectional feminist explorations of her œuvre.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Thousand Lives of Agnès Varda – Mary Harrod and Ginette Vincendeau
Section I: New Wave Varda
1. Description of a Struggle: Producing and Distributing La Pointe Courte – Bernard Bastide
2. Agnès Varda's 1950s Experimentation – Richard Neupert
3. Cléo de 5 à 7 Then, Now, and Forever – Sandy Flitterman-Lewis
4. Troubled Couples: Le Bonheur in Context – Ginette Vincendeau
Section II: Feminist/Post-Feminist Varda
5. The Poetics of Politics: Varda and Feminist Activism – Alison Smith
6. Two Types of Feminist Cinewriting: Jacqueline Audry and Agnès Varda – Susan Hayward
7. Jane B. par Agnès V.: Autofiction, Docudrama and Mimetic Legacies – Mary Harrod
8. Kung-Fu Master!: Bridging the Generation Gap – Colleen Kennedy-Karpat
9. Ageing and Care in Agnès Varda – Shirley Jordan
10. But I Was Very Angry: Agnès Varda as Feminist Activist and Icon – So Mayer
Section III: Socially-Engaged Varda
11. Framing the Other, Framing the Self: Agnès Varda's Ethnographic Lens – Alison J. Murray Levine
12. Filming Alterity: Salut les Cubains, Black Panthers and Plaisir d'amour en Iran – Samar Abdelrahman, Hélène Charlery and Lauren Du Graf
13. Varda Beyond Borders – Delphine Bénézet
14. Voices from Below: Public Amusements in Varda's Films – Daniel Siegel
15. 86–88 Rue Daguerre: A Lifetime on a Parisian Street – Jennifer Wallace
16. Making Sans toit ni loi: Varda on Her Own Terms – Kelley Conway
17. Varda's Habitats: Imagining in the Feminine – Sarah Cooper
Section IV: Filmmaker, Producer, Multimedia Artist
18. Between Metal and Earth: The 'Noise Music' of Sans toit ni loi – Albertine Fox
19. Adventures of the Eye: Varda's Sequence-images – Martine Beugnet
20. Varda's Multimedia Work – Dominique Bluher
21. Agnès Varda, a Woman Filmmaker on French Public Television – Catherine Gonnard
22. Varda's Bio-cinécriture: From Memory to Commemoration – Belén Vidal
23. Grandma Goes Digital: The Online Reception of Cléo de 5 à 7 – Alexandre Diallo
Annexe 1: Varda Bibliography
Annexe 2: Varda Filmography and Artworks
Annexe 3: List of Contributors
Index
Product details
| Published | 12 Nov 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Hardback |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 496 |
| ISBN | 9781350456648 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 75 bw illus |
| Dimensions | 244 x 169 mm |
| Series | Bloomsbury Handbooks |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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