A Complicated Passion
The Life and Work of Agnès Varda
27 September 2024
Territory Rights — Worldwide.
Description
The first major biography of the French New Wave filmmaker hailed as “one of the Gods of Cinema” by Martin Scorsese
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 recognised 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, labour exploitation, immigrant rights and race relations with candour 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.
Reviews
"An enthralling new biography... Fervently detailed and briskly narrated. " — Richard Brody, The New Yorker
"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. " — Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"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." — Noah Isenberg, film historian and best-selling author of We'll Always Have Casablanca
"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." — Phillip Lopate, editor of the Library of America's American Movie Critics
"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!" — Molly Haskell, film critic and author of Frankly, My Dear
"Carrie Rickey has delivered a highly readable biography that ought to be an enduring stimulus to show and watch Varda’s films." — Henry K. Miller, Sight & Sound
