Agnès Varda

Black Panthers

Black Panthers

Agnès Varda turns her camera on an Oakland demonstration against the imprisonment of activist and Black Panthers cofounder Huey P. Newton. In addition to evincing Varda’s fascination with her adopted surroundings and her empathy, this perceptive short is also a powerful political statement.

Black Panthers 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
  • 1970
  • 28 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.37:1
  • English

Available In

Collector's Set

The Complete Films of Agnès Varda

The Complete Films of Agnès Varda

Blu-ray Box Set

15 Discs

$199.96

Collector's Set

Eclipse Series 43: Agnès Varda in California

Agnès Varda in California

DVD Box Set

3 Discs

$35.96

Black Panthers
Credits
Director
Agnès Varda
Written by
Agnès Varda
Camera
David Myers
Camera
Paul Aratow
Camera
John Shofill
Camera
Agnès Varda
Camera assistant
Tom Luddy
Sound
Paul Oppenheim
Sound
James Steward
Editing
Paddy Monk

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

Terence Nance’s Top 10
Terence Nance’s Top 10

Terence Nance was born and raised in Dallas, Texas. His first feature film, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, premiered in the New Frontier section of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

Agnès Varda Is Everywhere!
Agnès Varda Is Everywhere!

Agnès Varda keeps popping up in the most unexpected places.

Explore

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.