The Criterion Collection
Essays
May 15, 2000 — Vagabond has been called Agnès Varda’s Ulysses, and with good reason. The comparison with James Joyce’s era-defining epic novel extends well beyond a recognizable similarity between the two artists. Both writer and filmmaker occupy vanguard positions in the history of...
Essays
Jan 21, 2008 — While Agnès Varda was prescient in picking up on the new social phenomenon of France’s young female drifters, she also anticipated the culture of extreme individualism that has come to dominate Western society since the 1980s.
Short Takes
Mar 19, 2012 — Some people have called us “film school in a box,” but this is the real deal. The essential film school introductory textbook, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s Film Art: An Introduction, is coming out in its tenth edition in the summer,...
On the Channel
Jul 31, 2019 — From her early, New Wave–defining films to the quicksilver documentaries she made in the twenty-first century, Agnès Varda led a long and remarkable career devoted to experimentation with film form. A perfect illustration of the complexity and restless inventiveness of...
Mar 5, 2009 — Starting this Sunday, March 8, the Harvard Film Archive will devote a week of programming to the groundbreaking work of Agnès Varda with the series Ciné-Varda. The “grandmother of the New Wave” will appear in person at a handful of...
Dec 1, 2006 — We left St-Michel feeling uplifted and took a nice stroll south, past the Closerie des Lilas, the restaurant made famous by Hemingway, and through the Luxembourg gardens, where a film crew was laying dolly tracks and fitting counterweights on a...
Feb 19, 2026 — Though in many ways the quintessential company man, the director brought an intimate understanding of the margins of American society to the films he made for Warner Bros. in the 1930s.
Features
Sep 25, 2023 — There was a period under the Nixon administration when the collective American psyche, as seen on film, seemed almost convulsed by its fixation on the motor vehicle. Every other week a moviegoer might see a film that could broadly be...
On the Channel
Dec 28, 2022 — We’re getting real in January with a spotlight on cinema verité, a movement that revolutionized documentary filmmaking.
On the Channel
Feb 25, 2021 — Channel Calendars Giddy up, movie lovers! This month on the Channel, our Black Westerns series leads the charge, highlighting films that have challenged the myths of the Old West to tell the stories of African Americans on the frontier. And...