Agnes Varda between Film, Photography, and Art

Rebecca J. DeRoo is Assistant Professor in the Department of Performing Arts and Visual Culture at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the author of The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art, recipient of the 2007 Laurence Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies. She co-curated the retrospective, Agnes Varda: (Self-)Portraits, Facts and Fiction, at the George Eastman Museum (2016).

• Acknowledgments1. Reinterpreting Varda: The Mother of the New Wave Reframes Its Histories2. Complicating Neorealism and the New Wave: La Pointe Courte3. Filmic and Feminist Strategies: Questioning Ideals of Happiness in Le Bonheur4. Reconsidering Contradictions: Feminist Politics and the Musical Genre in L’une chante, l’autre pas5. The Limits of Documentary: Identity and Urban Transformation in Daguerréotypes6. Melancholy and Merchandise: Documenting and Displaying Widowhood in L’île et elle7. Varda Now: Autobiography, Memory, and RetrospectiveNotesBibliographyIndex

"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."