Agnès Varda
“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.”
Upon her death, Martin Scorsese said of Agnès: “I seriously doubt that Agnès Varda ever followed in anyone else's footsteps, in any corner of her life or her art. Every single one of her remarkable handmade pictures, so beautifully balanced between documentary and fiction, is like no one else's — every image, every cut … What a body of work she left behind: movies big and small, playful and tough, generous and solitary, lyrical and unflinching … and alive.”
Widely regarded as the greatest female filmmaker of all time, she made films spanning 65 years, from 1954 to 2019. An art history major who became a photographer who eventually started making films. She edited them at her kitchen table, in a house she lived in for over 50 years. She became enamored with the act of gleaning (collecting leftover crops from farmers' fields after the main harvest) and turned it into an aesthetic, a way of seeing the world. She picked up what the world discarded and created from it: leftover film stock, amateur actors, her own aging body, potatoes shaped like hearts, beaches at low tide, and strangers’ stories. Let’s explore Agnès’ heart and soul together, watching a few of her films along the way.
As always, choose your level of participation:
Besides reading one of Murakami’s “Kafka on the Shore”, here are a few things to listen to, watch, practice, and/or read:
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Article: Word of the Week’s What Does it Mean to be Kafkaesque?
Article: Medium’s How to Write like Raymond Chandler
Excerpt: Thresholds, by John O’Donohue
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The loneliness and isolation of Sophia Coppola's film Lost in Translation. Watch this clip of walking through Kyoto, Murakami’s hometown.
The surreal and sensual of David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive. Watch this montage of the beauty of Mulholland Drive.
The mysticism and mystery of Makoto Shinkai’s film Your Name. Watch the trailer for this anime film masterpiece.
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Schubert’s macabre dialogue between fear and resignation in his famous classical composition “Death and the Maiden.”
The flowing melody and deceptively soulful simplicity of Stan Getz & Charlie Byrd’s 1960’s “Desafinado.”
The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood,” with all its ambiguity, emotional complexity, and detachment.
Japanese Concepts
Mono no aware | “the pathos of things”
That ache you feel watching cherry blossoms fall. The bittersweet awareness that everything beautiful is also fleeting, that the very impermanence of a thing is what makes it piercingly lovely. A longing for what’s already slipping away, even as you hold it.
Hikikomori | “pulling inward, being confined”
The phenomenon of extreme social withdrawal. People who retreat from the world entirely, sometimes for years. The existential impulse behind quitting a job, sitting alone in an empty apartment, descension of all kinds. Isolation as a portal.
Ma | “the space between”
Aesthetically, ma is the pregnant pause, the empty space that gives meaning to what surrounds it. It’s the silence between notes that makes music. The gap in conversation where understanding lives. Waiting, negative space, what’s left unsaid. Stories often happen in what isn’t there.