Great Directors

Opening this weekend: Great Directors, directed by Angela Ismailos

Synopsis from the film's website:

A deeply personal and intimate look at the art of cinema and the artists who create it, Great Directors is a celebration of films and film-making starring ten of the world’s most acclaimed, provocative, and individualistic living directors, featuring original, in-depth conversations with Bernado Bertolucci, David Lynch, Stephen Frears, Agnes Varda, Ken Loach, Liliana Cavani, Todd Haynes, Catherine Breillat, Richard Linklater and John Sayles. These interviews more than just chronicle Ismailos’ encounters with ten remarkable men and women. Extensively illuminated by clips and historical archives from the subjects’ works, they also reveal the distinctive personalities who created the timeless images that have long inspired Ismailos-and all of us. Intercutting among the filmmakers in a freely associative way, Ismailos explores each director’s artistic evolution; the role of politics and history on their work; their feelings about the other great directors who inspired them (with Bertolucci paying homage to Pasolini, Breillat to Bergman, and Haynes to Fassbinder, etc); and the agony and ecstasy of being an artist in a medium that is, paradoxically, also an industry.

Netflix It: The Gleaners and I

Released in 2000, Agnès Varda's The Gleaners and I explores the practice of gleaning (going through a field after a harvest to pick up what's left behind). We meet gleaners in the traditional sense of the word, as well as their urban counterparts who glean from dumpsters and the rejected produce at open air vegetable markets. Varda also talks to artists who work with found materials, and draws a parallel between traditional gleaners and her work as an artist, gleaning images from here and there. The film was extraordinarily well received.

The DVD also includes The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later, which follows up on the people featured in the original film, as well as showing a bit of the public reaction to the film. Both films are so short that watching both still gets you in at under two and a half hours.

First few minutes of The Gleaners and I (the subtitles are in Spanish, so you'd do better to simply rent the film—this is just a taste):

The Beaches of Agnès

Opening this weekend: The Beaches of Agnès, directed by Agnès Varda

Synopsis from Agnès Varda's website:

En revenant sur les plages qui ont marqué sa vie, Agnès Varda invente une forme d'autodocumentaire. Agnès se met en scène au milieu d'extraits de ses films, d'images et de reportages. Elle nous fait partager avec humour et émotion ses débuts de photographe de théâtre puis de cinéaste novatrice dans les années cinquante, sa vie avec Jacques Demy, son engagement féministe, ses voyages à Cuba, en Chine et aux USA, son parcours de productrice indépendante, sa vie de famille et son amour des plages.
Une femme libre et curieuse !

Translation:

Returning to the beaches that have marked her life, Agnès Varda has invented a form of documentary self-portrait. She films herself, among clips from her films, images and stories. With humor and with emotion, she shares with us her beginnings as a theater photographer and as a rookie director in the 1950s, her life with Jacques Démy, her commitment to feminism, her trips to Cuba, China and the USA, her journey as an independent producer, her family life and her love of beaches. A curious, free woman!

New York Times review here.