Bloomsbury Handbook to Agnès Varda

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.