The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures presents Enter the VardaVerse

March 2 – April 8, 2023 
Enter the VardaVerse: Women’s Liberation Through Film, 1971–1977  

Beginning in 1971, when Varda joined hundreds of women in signing the Manifeste des 343 , a French petition started by women who obtained illegal abortions, and running through 1977, when Varda’s One Sings, The Other Doesn’t beautifully showcased an intense female friendship through the lens of the women’s movement, this series looks to radical works made by women in Belgium, Canada, Cuba, France, West Germany, Italy, Lebanon, the former People’s Republic of the Congo, and the United States to more deeply understand Varda’s films through a symbolic dialogue with her international contemporaries. Within this collection are stories of labor struggles, body politics, sex work, liberation movements, spirituality and religion, and sexuality, which, when considered together, form a snapshot of a fertile era for independent productions by and for women, just one locus of which is Varda’s vibrant, activist oeuvre.

Jan 13 ⁠–⁠ Feb 25, 2023
Enter the VardaVerse: Los Angeles Countercultures 1968-1981

Though filmmaker Agnès Varda (1928-2019) made some of her first films in France, she followed her husband Jacques Demy to Hollywood in the late 1960s and adopted California as a second home. To complement the museum’s exhibit Director’s Inspiration: Agnès Varda, the Academy Museum’s screening series Enter the VardaVerse: Los Angeles Countercultures 1968-1981 spotlights her three Los Angeles films and places them in dialogue with other films created in L.A. during this same period. Featuring 17 films, the screening series runs between Jan 13 – Feb 25, 2023.

As the grandmother of the French New Wave—her 1955 film La Pointe Courte is unofficially considered the first of the movement—filmmaker Agnès Varda’s importance and influence on cinema history within and beyond her native France cannot be overstated. Working vigorously and spiritedly until her death at age 90 in 2019, Varda directed some two dozen features and almost as many short films, adapting her style to fit her ever-evolving curiosities and interests over her seven-decade career. Though she made her first four narrative films in France, she followed her beloved husband Jacques Demy to Hollywood in the late 1960s and adopted California as a second home, making three feature films and three shorts there within a 12-year period.  

Her time in the Golden State was clearly inspired by the countercultural scenes that evolved from the bevy of artists, musicians, and New Hollywood filmmakers that comprised the zeitgeist of this fertile period in visual art in Southern California. To showcase her influence and suggest her inspirations, this program—which spotlights her Los Angeles films Lions Love (…and Lies) (1969), Mur murs (1981), and Documenteur (1981)—places these three works in dialogue with various short- and long-form films created in Los Angeles during this same period that showcase the vibe of a very specific time and place through the lens of the creatives, visionaries, iconoclasts, and outsiders who make the City of Angels so uniquely vibrant.