Agnès Varda

Uncle Yanco

Uncle Yanco

In her effervescent first California film, Agnès Varda delves into her own family history. The short documentary Uncle Yanco features Varda tracking down a Greek emigrant relative she’s never met, discovering an artist and kindred soul leading a bohemian life in Sausalito.

Uncle Yanco was restored by the Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata in association with Ciné-Tamaris and The Film Foundation. Restoration funding provided by the Annenberg Foundation, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and The Film Foundation.

Film Info

  • France, United States
  • 1968
  • 19 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.37:1
  • English, French

Available In

Collector's Set

The Complete Films of Agnès Varda

The Complete Films of Agnès Varda

Blu-ray Box Set

15 Discs

$174.96

Collector's Set

Eclipse Series 43: Agnès Varda in California

Agnès Varda in California

DVD Box Set

3 Discs

$31.46

Uncle Yanco
Cast
Jean “Yanco” Varda
Himself
Credits
Director
Agnès Varda
Written by
Agnès Varda
Assistant
Tom Luddy
Camera
David Myers
Camera
Didier Tarot
Sound
Paul Oppenheim
Sound
Jacques Maumont
Edited by
Jean Hamon
Music by
Richard Lawrence
Music by
Yannis Spanos
Music by
Tomaso Albinoni

Current

Agnès Varda on Coming to California
Agnès Varda on Coming to California
The incredible Agnès Varda, now eighty-seven years old, stopped by the Criterion Collection office this past April to talk to us about the amazing, sometimes surreal experience of moving to California from France in the late 1960s and and again in t…
The Heart of Documentary

The Complete Films of Agnès Varda

The Heart of Documentary

Suffused with a palpable love for her subjects, Agnès Varda’s nonfiction work investigates the complex interrelations between self and community, public and private.

By So Mayer

Eclipse Series 43: Agnès Varda in California
Eclipse Series 43: Agnès Varda in California

The films Agnès Varda made while living on the West Coast of the United States are some of the most searching and challenging of her stellar career.

By Michael Koresky

Agnès Varda Is Everywhere!
Agnès Varda Is Everywhere!

Agnès Varda keeps popping up in the most unexpected places.

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Agnès Varda

Writer, Director

Agnès Varda
Agnès Varda

The only female director of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda has been called both the movement’s mother and its grandmother. The fact that some have felt the need to assign her a specifically feminine role, and the confusion over how to characterize that role, speak to just how unique her place in this hallowed cinematic movement—defined by such decidedly masculine artists as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut—is. Varda not only made films during the nouvelle vague, she helped inspire it. Her self-funded debut, the fiction-documentary hybrid 1956’s La Pointe Courte is often considered the unofficial first New Wave film; when she made it, she had no professional cinema training (her early work included painting, sculpting, and photojournalism). Though not widely seen, the film got her commissions to make several documentaries in the late fifties. In 1962, she released the seminal nouvelle vague film Cléo from 5 to 7; a bold character study that avoids psychologizing, it announced her official arrival. Over the coming decades, Varda became a force in art cinema, conceiving many of her films as political and feminist statements, and using a radical objectivity to create her unforgettable characters. She describes her style as cinécriture (writing on film), and it can be seen in formally audacious fictions like Le bonheur and Vagabond as well as more ragged and revealing autobiographical documentaries like The Gleaners and I and The Beaches of Agnès.