The Complete Varda 20 – Some Widows of Noirmoutier

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Varda’s 20th feature is as unusual as her stitched-together 19th. Created as an installation piece and converted into a television special, Some Widows of Noirmoutier is a straightforward yet profoundly moving documentary. In this episode, Matt and Travis discuss this oft-overlooked Varda feature, along with her blossoming visual artist identity and the broader work Varda undertook in the third and final phase of her shifting career.

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The Complete Varda 19 – Cinévardaphoto

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Matt and Travis encounter an unusually constructed film: Cinévardaphoto, a set of three shorts stitched together to create a feature that could be shown in theaters and distributed on DVD. The first two of these films, Ulysse and Salut les Cubains, were previously created in the 1980s and 1960s, respectively. We covered these films in episodes 3 and 10, so here we focus on Ydessa. A profile of Ydessa Hendeles and her Teddy Bear exhibit that Varda encountered on a visit to Germany, the film is an interesting mix of profile and Varda’s own complex perspective on the work and the person. I’m not going to lie, we get a little silly here, but I hope you enjoy anyway.

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The Complete Varda 18 – The Gleaners and I

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The Complete Varda 18 – The Gleaners and I

Matt and Travis move into the 21st century with Varda’s pivotal The Gleaners and I. A massive success upon release in France, Varda’s first digital feature created a media frenzy and helped reenergize the aging filmmaker, catapulting her into the final two decades of her work that produced an extraordinarily productive run of films and art installations. We discuss the film’s merging of digital aesthetics and philosophy with a broader tradition of repurposing discarded food and artifacts, along with the rediscovery of Varda’s significance and reappraisal of her filmography which began in the late 90s and early 2000s.

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The Complete Varda 17 – One Hundred and One Nights of Simon Cinema

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Matt and Travis welcome friend of the pod William Remmers to the show to discuss Varda’s final narrative fictional feature, One Hundred and One Nights of Simon Cinema. Created in celebration of the French’s conveniently defined 100th birthday of film, Varda’s movie features an astonishing number of international stars and film references of every kind you can imagine. We discuss the film’s unmistakable imprint of the unique sensibilities of Varda along with the historical significance of the film paired with its modest idiosyncrasies.

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The Complete Varda 16 – The World of Jacques Demy

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Varda completed her trilogy of tributes to her husband with the most straightforward of the three: a documentary covering Demy’s career and his impact on cinema. As expected, however, Varda at her most straightforward is still a little off-kilter, so there are as many pleasurable detours as there are dry facts and clips in this loving documentary. We discuss the film’s balance of Varda and Demy and close out this miniseries with some thoughts on the couple and Varda’s relationship with her husband’s art.

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The Complete Varda 15 – The Young Girls Turn 25

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Varda's The Young Girls Turn 25 (1993) – Establishing Shot

On this episode, we cover an unusual entry in the Complete catalog: not just a bonus feature, but a bonus feature created for someone else’s movie. Varda revisits her husband’s 1967 film The Young Girls of Rochefort on the 25th anniversary of the film’s release, returning to the seaside town where it was filmed for a celebration of the masterpiece that took over its streets in the 1960s. We discuss both this tribute film and Demy’s work that inspired it, covering the confectionary joy of the original and Varda’s unique perspective and style lent to her husband’s legacy.

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The Complete Varda 14 – Jacquot de Nantes

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Created in the final months of husband Jacques Demy’s life, Varda’s fourteenth feature is one of her most emotionally resonant and visually sumptuous works. On this episode, Matt and Travis discuss the film’s multi-faceted structure as a fictional recreation of Demy’s childhood, a documentary portrait of Demy as an aging and sick adult, and a visual essay on the ways in which Demy’s childhood directly informed his work as one of the most aesthetically dynamic French filmmakers of his generation.

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The Complete Varda 13 – Kung Fu Master

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On the thirteenth episode, Matt and Travis tackle the second half of Varda’s diptych with Jane Birkin. After taking a look at our own unease with the subject matter of this controversial fictional film based on a short story Birkin wrote, we discuss the film’s other themes such as the AIDS epidemic, growing older, and 1980s video games.

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The Complete Varda 12 – Jane B. par Agnès V.

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On the twelfth episode, Matt and Travis welcome longtime Friend of the Show Ericca Long back to discuss Varda’s idiosyncratic portrait of actress, model and icon Jane Birkin. Along with many tangential topics including modern arcades, getting older, and the musical genius of Steely Dan, we discuss the film’s unique blurring of document and fiction and Varda’s insightful use of the many tools at her disposal to present a multifaceted presentation of someone her audience likely believed they already knew everything about.

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  • Ericca doesn’t have links but wanted to include her deepest thanks to the show and say RIP forever to JB and AV!

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The Complete Varda 11 – Vagabond

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Vagabond: Freedom and Dirt | Current | The Criterion Collection

On the eleventh episode, Matt and Travis welcome Alex Kittle to discuss Vagabond, one of Varda’s most successful and praised films. Alex is a projectionist at the Brattle Theater, one of the greatest and most important repertory theaters in America, in Cambridge, MA. She’s also an accomplished artist as Pan and Scan on Etsy, Ko-Fi, and Behance among other places, with a focus on film and other pop-culture related content. On the episode, we discuss Varda’s empathic portrayal of a woman who has intentionally placed herself on the margins of society and the way this portrait challenges our own personal relationship to the basic social contract we’ve constructed.

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