2017: A Year in Review (Or Haiku)

2017: A Year in Review (Or Haiku)

It’s customary, come December, that we engage in a certain amount of introspection. This past year — being what it was — conducts little clarity. For us, as we’d expect for many of you, many (really, most) high points of 2017 happened in the theatre. Here,...
Editors’ Note: Varda

Editors’ Note: Varda

With five years of cléo under our belts, it seemed only right to take this issue back to our roots, our namesake, and the reason we started this journey at all: Agnès Varda. Our founding editor, Kiva Reardon, discovered Varda in a third-year film class, and the rest...
“Curiosity is a good thing”: An Interview with Agnès Varda

“Curiosity is a good thing”: An Interview with Agnès Varda

For some 50 years, Agnès Varda has worked and lived in the 14th arrondissement in Paris, in a pink-painted atelier on rue Daguerre. (Her love of this milieu is well-known: she documented her fellow inhabitants of the small street in 1976’s Daguerréotypes, and in 2003...
Beyond the Photo Album: Relocating Varda’s Salut les Cubains

Beyond the Photo Album: Relocating Varda’s Salut les Cubains

The English-language critical response to Agnès Varda’s Salut les Cubains, a 1963 photo-montage documentary short exploring post-revolution Cuba, has largely positioned the film as a historical stepping stone on the concurrent paths of Varda’s political engagement and...
On the Body and Becoming: Cléo de 5 à 7

On the Body and Becoming: Cléo de 5 à 7

In Agnès Varda’s 1962 film Cléo de 5 à 7, cancer is mentioned enough that one begins perceiving it as a condition of existence rather than a sickness. Indeed, the film opens with an ominous diagnosis at a fortune teller: Cléo (Corinne Marchand) gets the death card in...