Still Awesome, is what I’m sayin’.

About a week ago I heard, in the background of my day, a NPR interview with the photographer, Art Shay, who took these famous naked pictures of Simone de Beauvoir.

I cannot find the interview now. There may be better articles than this out there, but I could not find one readily. I also could not find one that did not dilute the debate about whether the magazine fails to honor an influential theorist for her works or succeeds in honoring, as a part of her work, her courageous and unselfconscious sexual freedom, by commenting on “how nice her ass does look.”

Does this mean that if her ass was wrinkled and frumpy the truth about the gesture would be easier to come by?

KW

A character is like a mirror that walks on the road.
-Agnes Varda, 2004.

Agnes Varda was the only female director in the French New Wave cinema movement of Godard, Chabrol and Truffaut fame. For over 50 years, she has probably been making some of the most stunning film you’ve never heard of.

Unfortunately, many of her films are still pretty hard to get to, but there are two accessible films that will give you a nice picture of Varda as a film author.

First, Cleo from 5 to 7. It’s Paris, 1961 gorgeous and reflects the decreasingly superficial musings of a female pop star in the two hours she waits for a cancer diagnosis. In this clip, Cleo wanders the streets of Paris, into a cafe where she plays her own song, hoping to be recognized. Enjoy the long tracking shots and the first person perspective angles which serve nicely to build the tension of Cleo’s sense of drama and isolation.

Next, The Gleaners and I. Here, Varda examines the notion of gleaning — to glean is to gather information bit by bit. Originally a French verb, glener, the gleners referred to the people who would follow the reapers to gather grain the reapers machinery missed (a job typically left to women).

By the time she is making this film, Varda has lost her husband, the esteemed filmmaker Jacques Demy. She is both joyful and solemn when she inserts herself into her film about people who live on the excess cast off by society. Inevitably, this leads her to the themes of rot and decay not least of all her own.

You’ll enjoy Varda’s talent for metaphor and insight as she documents present day scavengers living off income gleaned from recycling the copper in discarded appliances or, in the case of one man, subsisting entirely on the remnants of greens and fruits left behind when the stalls of abundant, French farmers markets have packed up for the day.

Varda does lots of interesting meditation on making use of what might be discarded. Here, she collects a clock without hands, there she thinks the thought of the filmmaker as gleaner.

Don’t miss it.

Jean-Francois Millet’s painting The Gleaners was an inspiration to Varda for her 2002 film, The Gleaners and I.