![]() ![]() Bernardo Bertolucci, who was North American premiering the 3D version of The Last Emperor (1987) came for a visit, as well as a surprisingly young-looking George Chakiris (who had played Etienne, one of the “carnies” in Demy’s Les Demoiselles de Rochefort/The Young Girls of Rochefort, 1967). One Sunday afternoon, having invited her friends, Varda was “receiving” inside the translucent cabane where you could recognise entire sequences of the film hanging over your head, or making the celluloid wall by your side. (1) As Lion’s Love is being restored, (2) she brought an old print of the film to build a shack ( cabane) in the museum, using every single frame ( The Beaches of Agnès/ Les Plages d’Agnès, 2008 documents the making of a similar cabane from a print of Les Créatures/ The Creatures, 1969). In its playfulness, the film functions like a time capsule, a dimension Varda was well aware of when the curators of LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) contacted her to organise an exhibition of her artwork. Cinematic figures, playing themselves, come and go: Shirley Clarke, who was teaching at UCLA at the time the too-soon-departed Cuban film critic Carlos Clarens (1930-87), at the peak of his curly-haired youthful beauty the iconic Eddie Constantine Peter Bogdanovich risk-taking theatre chain owner Max Laemmle. ![]() A radiant Viva, haloed with her aura of Warholian superstar, shares her heart and body with Gerome Ragni and James Rado, the two stars and authors of the hugely successful rock musical Hair (premiered Off-Broadway in 1967), while news of the assassination of Robert Kennedy appear on television. This was followed by Lions Love (… and Lies) (1969), a joyful valentine to “living in rented houses” and to the alternative lifestyle (sex, drugs, plastic flowers and swimming pools) that flourished in Los Angeles. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, James Forman, Eldridge Cleaver and Ron Dellums. ![]() She likes to say that she and husband Jacques Demy, who had signed a deal with Columbia to make Model Shop (1969) – generally acknowledged as one of the most thoughtful representations of Los Angeles at the time – missed Paris in May 1968, but instead experienced the California counter-culture (flower children and political radicalism).ĭuring a trip in the Bay are, and thanks to Tom Luddy, Varda reconnected with a long-lost member of her Greek family, a hippie painter, and made him the subject of a short film, Oncle Yanco (1967) then she directed Black Panthers – Huey! (1968), about the Free Huey rally held on February 17 in Oakland, that contains precious now-archival footage of Panther leaders such as Bobby Seale, H. She had lived there first in the late 1960s, then in the early 1980s, and wove the many friendships that are celebrated in the party scene shot on Venice Beach in Les Plages d’Agnès ( The Beaches of Agnès, 2008). Bar none the most charismatic, energetic, opinionated and, at 85 years old, the most legendary of the guest artistic curators invited by the Festival, the indomitable Varda, with her signature purple Capuchin monk hairdo, and in the company of her daughter and close collaborator Rosalie Varda, landed in Los Angeles – a city she loves. A glimmer of recognition: this is the actress Corinne Marchand, the heroine of Cléo de 5 à 7 ( Cléo from 5 to 7, 1962), Agnès Varda’s famous mise en abyme of the male gaze (among other things), in a sequence excerpted to make the trailer of the 2013 AFI Fest Presented by Audi. Then the woman stops and gazes back at us. Behind her, some signs in French we must be in Paris. Maybe it’s the elegant physical freedom with which the woman walks, maybe it’s the gaze of various passers-by that is directed at her, covertly or not, and to which she is oblivious (she has more important things to think about). Issue 70 | March 2014 Agnès Varda in CalifornialandĪ blonde walks in the street, sporting fashionable sunglasses the image is in black and white, yet has a very contemporary feel.
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