What’s a resilient auteur to do when their movie flops? After her 1966 film Les Créatures—now finally available for home viewing in a new Criterion Collection box set—failed to engage critics and audiences alike, Agnès Varda took the proverbial lemons and made lemonade: she later used 35mm release prints of the film to create an installation called Ma Cabane de L’Echec (My Shack of Failure), a rough-hewn hut with translucent walls made out of the salvaged film strips. Speaking of this structure in her 2008 film The Beaches of Agnès, Varda said, “In here, I feel like cinema is the house I live in,” adding in voiceover, “it’s like I’ve always lived there.”
Uncle Yanco (1968), an offbeat portrait of one of her Greek relatives, is a fan favorite; Black Panthers (1970), as timely now as it was on first release, is an outsider’s look at the revolutionary political organization. One I especially love is Ulysse (1982), a self-reflexive essay in which Varda examines her photograph of the same name, a stunning piece that exhibits her compositional mastery. While going through the box set, I revisited Les dites cariatides (1984), originally made for French television, a lyrical tour of the shapely columns scattered around Paris complemented by selections of poetry by Charles Baudelaire, which Varda recites. Whether one is seeing a certain Varda film for the first time—per the Criterion Collection, this marks the U.S. home-video premieres of Les Creatures, Jacquot de Nantes, One Hundred and One Nights, and Les 3 boutons—or revisiting it, the idea of discovery is essential both within Varda’s work and to appreciating it.
