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 is herstory; as the most prominent woman […]

“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 filmed a short surrealist rom-com, Le Lion Volatil, around the iconic […]

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 her tarot reading. The elderly seer soothes […]

The Gift of Collaboration: A Roundtable on Agnès Varda

Filmmakers Alexandra Hidalgo, Sofia Bohdanowicz and Caroline Leone and actress Indra De Bruyn discuss their shared love of the works of Agnès Varda—including La Pointe Courte, Le Bonheur, Cléo de 5 à 7, Vagabond, The Gleaners and I and The Beaches of Agnès—and the lessons they have learned from her craft. Alexandra: The first Agnès […]