Reviews
"DeRoo’s work is a welcome and significant contribution to scholarship on a still too-neglected filmmaker and has much to offer those wanting an introduction to Varda and key issues animating critical reception of her films. The book is a well-researched, accessible, and timely addition to expanding scholarship on Varda as a pioneering and dynamic French filmmaker whose multifaceted oeuvre is central to ongoing and urgent debates about feminist film practice, filmmaking as an intermedia art form, and the ethics and aesthetics of documentary practice."—H-France
"Rebecca DeRoo’s latest publication,
Agnès Varda between Film, Photography, and Art, offers her readers a dazzling study of the filmmaker's cinematographic art. Not only does DeRoo propose a refreshingly new dialogic approach to Varda’s cinematic aesthetics, narrative practice, and sociopolitics, her analyses of individual films are full of insights that also, where appropriate, challenge established readings of Varda’s work. This is truly a gem of a book."—Susan Hayward, Professor of Cinema Studies Emerita, University of Exeter
“With extraordinary access to Agnès Varda’s papers and production materials, Rebecca DeRoo’s study uniquely illuminates what Varda called the 'three lives of Agnès'—as photographer, filmmaker, and visual artist. The author insightfully tracks Varda’s generative semantic slippages across different media and also provides a smart reevaluation of the filmmaker’s restless inventiveness. Essentially reframing Varda’s anomalous place in film history, DeRoo’s refined analysis and detailed references to film, art, and photography history help reveal Varda’s multivalent work, showing the constant purpose and experimentation animating her audiovisual, tactile, and memorial sensibility.” —Ivone Margulies, Professor of Film and Media Studies, Hunter College, CUNY
“In this pathbreaking revisionist study, art and cinema historian Rebecca DeRoo uses multiple political and cultural contexts to reframe the existing dialogue about the work and contributions to cinema history made by the New Wave French film director Agnès Varda. Stressing issues that are aesthetic, theoretical, feminist, and political, DeRoo redirects the biographical narratives that have been favored in the literature on Varda, challenges conventional interpretations of Varda's films, and recasts the reception of Varda’s work over the space of six decades as an index to the cultural and political assumptions of those years. In an era when the boundaries between cinema and other art forms have become increasingly blurred, DeRoo’s approach to Varda’s work is a productive and exemplary intersection between cinema studies and art history.” —Norma Broude, Professor of Art History Emerita, American University
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