Word: varda
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Directed by Agnés Varda, a 34-year-old photographer whose first film (La Pointe Courte) established her as "the Founding Mother of the new French cinema," Cleo tells the story of 90 moribund minutes in the life of a featherbrained Parisian canary (Corinne Marchand) who has just begun to peck the plum of show-business success. As the story starts, the singer is nerving herself to ask a doctor whether or not she has a cancer. Pale with dread, she visits a fortuneteller first and asks the old crone what is in the cards for her. Death...
Critics agreed that the collages were gay and witty. Nearly everybody agreed that they were decorative and colorful. Many of them are done in Varda's favorite shade of violent pink. Varda charges a flat rate of $75 a collage. "Soixante-quinze [75]," he says, "just like the French guns in the World War." So far he has sold eight pictures...
...Varda used to work on gesso (a smooth-surfaced, white mixture of rabbit glue and whiting solution) and with mosaics. He turned to collage because gesso and mosaics are too bulky, too expensive to transport, the ingredients are too dear-and Varda can snip out a collage in less time than it takes him to dream up a mosaic. "While the vision is full upon me," he says, "I can finish a whole painting [collage...
This production capacity and Varda's color theory (each picture should be remembered for one color) interlace. "I can work fast in collage," he says, "because I know that I am going to do a yellow painting. I work knee-deep in papers. When I find the right yellow, I can go to work like a puma...
...Painter Varda also includes just enough of some subsidiary color in each collage to "perfume or accent" the dominant color. "This perfume," says Varda, "makes the painting sing." Sometimes he gets effects of transparency by dabbing nuances of background color on foreground subjects. As long as the effect is stimulating and gay, Varda says: Damn the blotches...