The Sustainable Legacy of Agnès Varda: Feminist Practice and Pedagogy. Edited by Colleen Kennedy-Karpat and Feride Çiçekoğlu

Abstract

Agnès Varda (1928–2019) made fifty-four films and installation works over the seven decades of her prolific career, from her first film in 1955, La Pointe courte, to Varda par Agnès in 2019, and for several decades she was the only French auteur to identify unequivocally as a feminist. Since the 2000s, Varda’s position has shifted significantly both in terms of her placement now firmly within the canon of the new wave and French auteurism, and within academic scholarship and on teaching programs, where she is now a staple presence. This book, compiled from the proceedings of a conference on ‘Agnès Varda’s Sustaining Legacy’ that was due to be held in Istanbul in 2020, but moved online, marks another turning point in how Varda’s work is perceived, taught, and engaged with critically. The book is divided into four sections: ‘Creation’, ‘Connections’, ‘Environments’, and ‘Teaching Varda’. The final section, on pedagogy, invites participants to reflect on their experiences in the classroom and is a welcome addition to Varda studies. It provides both an essential toolkit for anyone considering putting Varda on their syllabus and fascinating insights into the dynamics of different pedagogical settings — ranging variously from film practice to theory, from digital environments to onsite teaching, from school to university, from the UK to the US, to Australia, from ‘Abu Dhabi to Seoul’, as Seung-hoon Jeong writes. Varda veteran Sandy Flitterman-Lewis reminds us that Varda herself placed extraordinary value on encountering and learning from others, so it is fitting that her films are so utterly teachable, as the contributors to this volume confirm, and that the section on teaching is the most substantial, with ten essays, occupying over half of the book. Throughout the volume, the overall ­question — how to sustain joy in Varda’s legacy — is met with nuanced and perceptive analysis. The collection offers new perspectives, not least through critique, for example in Jennifer Stob’s illuminating essay on Varda’s formalist feminism, in which she argues that Varda both ‘reveals the patriarchal structure that collapses representational space and the feminine’, and ‘confirms and reproduces its formalist myth’ (p. 20). Negar Taymoorzadeh’s interview with Ali Rafie, Iranian theatre director and actor in L’Une chante l’autre pas and Plaisir d’amour en Iran (1977 and 1976), probes the orientalist tendencies of Varda’s gaze as well as raising questions about her working ethics. New connections are also forged, for example through Ruken Doğu Erdede’s analysis of Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000) using the framework of Ursula Le Guin’s ‘carrier bag theory’. Existing but under-explored connections are brought to light, as in Zizi Li’s essay on the relationship between Varda and American filmmaker Shirley Clarke, who appeared in Lions Love… and Lies (1969). Whilst readers expecting the environmental issues usually associated with ‘sustainability’ might be puzzled by the title, this collection is nonetheless an indispensable tool for Varda teachers, scholars, and fans, and it delightfully fulfils the task of sustaining and renewing Varda’s legacy.