A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda
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 recognized 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, labor exploitation, immigrant rights, and race relations with candor 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.
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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
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
Film critic Rickey delivers the definitive biography of French filmmaker Agnès Varda (1928-2019)...Rickey captures Varda's tenacity and pluck, serving up a portrait of an artist determined to succeed on her own terms. This is a must for cinephiles.-- "Publishers Weekly (starred review)"
A richly documented examination of this visionary filmmaker's influential career...[P]roviding colorful anecdotes from friends and luminaries in Varda's orbit...[and] depicting her subject's trailblazing influence and unique cinematic vision embracing creativity, spontaneity, and willingness to tackle provocative issues through an uncompromising body of work.-- "Kirkus Reviews"
Varda mania has fully arrived--and stands to continue with this new biography from Carrie Rickey, a former film critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, who shows how the French New Wave filmmaker's life inspired her deceptively light meditations on the passage of time, women's rights, and more.-- "Art in America"
This definitive biography of trailblazing French New Wave filmmaker Agnès Varda tells the engrossing story of a brilliant artist and fierce feminist who made movies and found success on her own terms.-- "The Millions"
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 "New York Times"
[I]nsightful and comprehensive.--Peter Keough "The Arts Fuse"
An enthralling new biography ... Fervently detailed and briskly narrated.--Richard Brody "The New Yorker"
A Complicated Passion manages, with exceptional art and without ever feeling rushed or perfunctory, to compress into a little more than two hundred pages a very long and very productive artistic life. ... Rickey shows how life and work can be so thoroughly intermingled as to be inseparable.--Geoffrey O'Brien "Book Post"
