Varda by Agnes

“Three words are important to me,” the late French director Agnès Varda explains in her final film. “Inspiration, creation, sharing.” This is Varda’s pedagogy, inseparable from her filmography: a sixty-year, multi-genre oeuvre of radical vision and collaged homage. The retrospective Varda by Agnès arrives a decade after docu-memoir The Beaches of Agnes, which cheekily roll-calls the all-male French New Wave before asking, “Et toi, la Varda?” Her genius needs no defending. But each of Varda’s films is an answer, a gesture, a gift: Voilà.  –Michaela Dwyer