A Complicated Passion
The Life and Work of Agnès Varda
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Over the course of her sixty-five-year career, the longest of any female filmmaker, Agnès Varda (1928-2019) wrote and directed some of the most acclaimed films of her era, from her tour de force Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), a classic of modernist cinema, to the beloved documentary The Gleaners and I (2000) four decades later. She helped to define the French New Wave, inspired an entire generation of filmmakers, and was recognized with major awards at the Cannes, Berlin, and Venice Film Festivals, as well as an honorary Oscar at the Academy Awards. In this lively biography, former Philadelphia Inquirer film critic Carrie Rickey explores the "complicated passions" that informed Varda's charmed life and indelible work. Rickey traces Varda's three remarkable careers--as still photographer, as filmmaker, and as installation artist. She explains how Varda was a pioneer in blurring the lines between documentary and fiction, using the latest digital technology and carving a path for women in the movie industry. She demonstrates how Varda was years ahead of her time in addressing sexism, abortion, labor exploitation, immigrant rights, and race relations with candor and incisiveness. She makes clear Varda's impact on contemporary figures like Ava DuVernay, Greta Gerwig, Barry Jenkins, the Safdie brothers, and Martin Scorsese, who called her one of the Gods of cinema. And she delves into Varda's incredibly rich social life with figures such as Harrison Ford, Jean-Luc Godard, Jim Morrison, Susan Sontag, and Andy Warhol, and her nearly forty-year marriage to the celebrated director Jacques Demy. A Complicated Passion is the vibrant biography that Varda, regarded by many as the greatest female filmmaker of all time, has long deserved.
About this Author
Born in Los Angeles, Carrie Rickey is an award-winning film critic, art critic, and film historian. She was the film critic at the Philadelphia Inquirer for twenty-five years and has also written for Artforum, Art in America, Film Comment, the New York Times, the Village Voice, and Politico. She has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Philadelphia.
Reviews
"I devoured A Complicated Passion happily and so, I suspect, will you. It sent me rushing to the Criterion Channel to rewatch Varda's movies."
"An enthralling new biography ... Fervently detailed and briskly narrated."
"[A] compact, complete, and highly enjoyable book ... A Complicated Passion [is] the first--and much-needed--full-length biography of Varda in English."
"[A] biography that portrays the artist at once ahead of her time and brimming with uncontainable creative energy. ... Ms. Rickey's book often reads as briskly as a fast-paced thriller. Her captivating portrayal of Varda is enriched by the back stories of the director's friendships with Jane Birkin and Jim Morrison as well as her loving, complex marriage to Jacques Demy ... A Complicated Passion [is] both intellectually satisfying and inspiring."
"A terrific biography. ... It's one of the best books ever written about the intersection between a director's personal life and their work, as Rickey traces how Varda's relationships and struggles in the film industry informed--and were informed by--the movies she made. ... A Complicated Passion is as inspiring and revelatory as the work of its subject."
"Carrie Rickey has delivered a highly readable biography that ought to be an enduring stimulus to show and watch Varda's films."
"[T]he first major biographical work dedicated to her life and craft. Like Varda herself, A Complicated Passion is short and to the point. Considering that Varda spent practically her whole, long life in a state of creation, Rickey's biography is surprisingly just under 300 pages but still manages to fit in everything a newcomer would want to learn, as well as everything a die-hard fan might not yet know ... With A Complicated Passion, she gives Varda the remembrance she deserves."
"This definitive biography of trailblazing French New Wave filmmaker Agnès Varda tells the engrossing story of a brilliant artist and fierce feminist who made movies and found success on her own terms."
"Varda mania has fully arrived--and stands to continue with this new biography from Carrie Rickey, a former film critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, who shows how the French New Wave filmmaker's life inspired her deceptively light meditations on the passage of time, women's rights, and more."
"[I]nsightful and comprehensive."
"A Complicated Passion manages, with exceptional art and without ever feeling rushed or perfunctory, to compress into a little more than two hundred pages a very long and very productive artistic life. ... Rickey shows how life and work can be so thoroughly intermingled as to be inseparable."
"Supremely entertaining. ... Rickey's fine biography is more than just a catalog of gossip. It's also a proper acknowledgement of cinematic greatness."
"Film critic Rickey delivers the definitive biography of French filmmaker Agnès Varda (1928-2019)...Rickey captures Varda's tenacity and pluck, serving up a portrait of an artist determined to succeed on her own terms. This is a must for cinephiles."
"A richly documented examination of this visionary filmmaker's influential career...[P]roviding colorful anecdotes from friends and luminaries in Varda's orbit...[and] depicting her subject's trailblazing influence and unique cinematic vision embracing creativity, spontaneity, and willingness to tackle provocative issues through an uncompromising body of work."
"Agnès Varda possessed an almost superhuman degree of talent and hustle, and as Carrie Rickey vividly shows in A Complicated Passion, she would need it all to make her way in a man's world. Rickey's portrait is an enthralling blend of personal and contextual history, stylistic analysis, penetrating insights into the films, a humming awareness of the electric combination of Varda and her husband, director Jacques Demy--all during the most exciting and innovative period of French cinema. This is biography and film scholarship at their combined best--the irresistible story of an indomitable woman!"
"A landmark achievement, this deeply engrossing biography of Agnès Varda, the first ever in the English language, fills a major gap in film history, chronicling the life and career of one of world cinema's most gifted writer-directors. Carrie Rickey's brisk, jaunty style lends itself perfectly to her peripatetic and multitalented subject."
"Finally, the definitive biography of a filmmaker whose place in the cinematic pantheon keeps ascending. Carrie Rickey's writing is vivid and colorful, her judgments judicious and astute, her research impeccable, and she captures Agnès Varda's spirit, her achievement, her uniqueness in the very act of analyzing her. One could not ask for a smarter or more engaging take on the subject."
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