The full title of this feminist manifesto is Réponse de femmes: Notre corps, notre sexe — and from the start, it should be noted for non-Francophones that the French word sexe, in itself, conflates sex-as-gender and sex-as-genitalia. Varda’s film follows this linguistic lead entirely uncritically; even beyond this highly contestable conflation, its rhetoric comes across like a time capsule from the heart of…

A wonderful companion to Black Panthers for Black History Month, Varda’s photographic study-turned-film Salut les cubains! bridges Varda’s roots in photography with her developing work in moving images. The result is part travelogue, part history lesson about the Caribbean island she compares to a cigar and a crocodile floating in the sea. Aesthetically, Cubains! also makes a strong companion to La…

To mark Black History Month, I want to start February’s posts with a screening of Varda’s short film Black Panthers (1968), which Varda was initially commissioned to make for French television, but was not aired upon completion. The film uses the Free Huey protests in California to illustrate how the Black Panther party aimed to combat institutional racism in…