Agnès Varda’s Late Style: Autobiography and Melancholy of Ageing Alborz MAHBOOBKHAH Abstract: This article examines the distinctive trajectory of late-career creativity in Agnès Varda’s films, situating her final works within a broader inquiry into ageing, autobiography, and self-reflexivity in the French New Wave generation. Departing from canonical models of “old age style” characterized by serenity and mastery, Varda forged a unique, ironic mode of “gay melancholy” over her final two decades. Through a close analysis of key works—The Gleaners and I (2000), The Beaches of Agnès (2008), Faces Places (2017), and Varda by Agnès (2019)—the article argues that Varda developed an innovative grammar of ageing, an allegorical and autobiographical aesthetic that formally inscribes the experience of time. Central to this is her methodology of “gleaning,” a practice that fuses the salvaging of marginal objects and images with the recycling of her own filmic and personal past. Utilizing digital intimacy and digressive narrative, Varda transforms the melancholic gaze into a generative practice, balancing mourning and vitality, absence and presence. Through gestures of collecting, reusing, and reanimating fragments—whether objects, film clips, or memories—she creates a cinematic practice that unites the ageing body with the image, and everyday life with artistic form. Her work thus offers a sovereign, provisional model of late creativity, one that personally inhabits history and transforms autobiography into a cinematic form. This model stands in contrast to the more impersonal and cinema-historical late projects of a Keywords: Agnès Varda, ageing and cinema, French New Wave, autobiography, gay melancholy, allegory DOI: 10.24193/ekphrasis.34.2 |
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