alr

Vagabond
(Sans toit ni loi)

Agnès Varda will NOT be appearing
Screening on Film
Directed by Agnès Varda.
With Sandrine Bonnaire, Macha Méril, Stephane Freiss.
France, 1985, 35mm, color, 104 min.
French with English subtitles.

Vagabond remains Varda’s greatest critical and box office success (it won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and earned its young star a French César award). The film follows, through flashbacks, the last weeks in the life of a leather-jacketed, alienated teenage drifter (Bonnaire) who has been wandering the south of France in the cold autumn, interacting with an array of various locals, sleeping where she can, trying at times to embrace life, and eventually giving up on it. The film’s use of location and its peppering of nonactors among the professional cast give it a documentary feel, though everything has been carefully crafted and set to masterful rhythms and exquisite cinematography. Varda presents a cross-section of provincial French life and demonstrates how deeply at odds it is with the free spirit of her protagonist.

PRECEDED BY

  • L'opéra-mouffe

    Directed by Agnès Varda.
    France, 1958, 35mm, black & white, 17 min.

Music (hence the “Opera” of the title) links these documentary scenes from the vegetable-market on the rue Mouffetarde in Paris. Varda herself was pregnant at the time she made this film, and the images and moods reflect the subjectivity, the peculiarly heightened senses, of her condition as she seeks out symbolic reinforcement in the objects and people around her. The director insisted that this work was neither reportage nor documentary but a special genre she preferred to call “neighborhood cinema.”

Part of film series

Read more

The Left Bank Revisited:
Marker, Resnais, Varda

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

Música de Câmara. The Cinema of Rita Azevedo Gomes

Read more

From the Harvard Film Archive Collection …

Read more

People and their Virtue. Two Films by Wang Bing

Read more

Trenque Lauquen by Laura Citarella

Read more

I Heard It Through the Grapevine with James Baldwin

Read more

Filmmaker, Guest Worker: Zelimir Zilnik’s Expatriates

Read more

Adachi Masao’s Revolution+1

Read more

Out of the Ashes – The US-ROK Security Alliance & the Emergence of South Korean Cinema

Read more

Songs of Love and Loss. Elvira Notari’s Cinematic Realism