The Sustainable Legacy of Agnès Varda - by Colleen Kennedy-Karpat & Feride Çiçekoglu (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Drawing especially on the encounters and relationships that defined her exceptional career, The Sustainable Legacy of Agnès Varda outlines a sustainable legacy for the celebrated director and visual artist. Over nine chapters, it unpacks how creation, connection, and environment form the core of Varda's artistry, which centers foremost on relationships with her family, with other artists, even with passersby she would meet in her travels around the world.

Also celebrating her feminist legacy, the chapters cover a wide range, from the classic Cléo from 5 to 7(1962) to documentaries The Beaches of Agnès(2008) and Faces Places(2017) as well as selected art installations. The book's final section is dedicated to teaching Varda's work; here, ten scholars from around the world consider how Varda's art and feminist pedagogies offer unique ways to bring crucial concepts into the classroom. By seeking a sustainable praxis to discuss and teach Varda's work, and by making pedagogical concerns an explicit part of this approach, this book argues that Varda's insights about the nature of creative work will inspire new generations of viewers and audiences.

Review Quotes

The Sustainable Legacy of Agnès Varda constitutes a magnificent critical tribute to the work of a filmmaker who turned cinema into an art of encountering. Arguing that her legacy extends beyond her filmography, through an ethical and political vision of art worth examining, the contributors of this book remained faithful to the memory of a woman and an artist committed to her time.

Inquisitive moving-image artist par excellence, Agnès Varda receives here an expansive and multifaceted treatment, one that matches the range and generosity of her own work. These essays revise and open out our understanding of a cinema that both depicts and embodies sustenance.

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'... This collection is an indispensable tool for Varda teachers, scholars, and fans, and it delightfully fulfils the task of sustaining and renewing Varda's legacy.
French Studies

About the Author

Colleen Kennedy-Karpat teaches film and media studies at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey.

Feride Çiçekoglu is Director of Graduate Programs in Film and Television at Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey.