Similarly, a mimeographed call, from 1976, for women to play demonstrators in a reënactment of a 1972 protest—in support of a teen-ager put on trial for having an abortion—thrums with artistic energy that’s continuous with the movie that resulted, “One Sings, the Other Doesn’t.” The exhibit also features six photographs by Michèle Laurent from the location shoot, in Paris streets, of a 1967 short by Varda, intended for the compilation film “Far from Vietnam,” which its producer, Chris Marker, saw fit to exclude from the finished compilation and which is believed lost. The six images show a young woman in a chic dress and white boots who, as she passes through the streets of Paris, is confronted with Vietnam in various forms—newspaper headlines about the war, a political newsletter pasted to a wall, even a Vietnamese restaurant—and who, in the last photo, is arrested by two police officers. With these works, Varda made herself into a figure of history in the present tense, an embodiment of the modern cinema—and of women’s cinema, which she had hypothesized, in a 1978 clip included in the exhibit’s concluding assemblage, as “marginal and subversive.” By moving even further to the margins, she put herself at the center of the times; by subverting the ordinary practices of cinema, she refashioned them.
Author: Richard Brody
Published at: 2025-07-15 22:56:23
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