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…

Jumping ahead a bit in the schedule to post about Mur Murs (1980), a time capsule that still resonates with insight about urban multiculturalism, popular art, and as always with Varda, individual perspectives on the city and on life. The roller skates are, as the kids say, an entire mood in this documentary. They are everywhere, and…

Watching this film feels like putting together a puzzle that has a few extra pieces thrown into the mix. There’s no way to make all of them fit together at once, but it’s instructive to try, in turn, setting different pieces to work with and against one another. Max Nelson sums up the basic plot in this review and situates Les…