Agnès Varda

One Hundred and One Nights

One Hundred and One Nights

A celebration of cinema’s centennial, One Hundred and One Nights finds Agnès Varda at her most playful. It is also perhaps her unlikeliest project: a star-studded comic fantasy with an extravagant sense of style and an adoring but slightly off-kilter perspective on the magic of filmmaking. French New Wave icon Michel Piccoli is a mysterious aging impresario named Simon Cinéma who has hired a young film student, Camille (Julie Gayet), to simply sit with him at his mansion and talk about movies. Skeptical yet increasingly enchanted, Camille bears witness to cinema itself coming to life, allowing Varda to wittily integrate a mind-boggling parade of appearances by screen legends (Catherine Deneuve, Marcello Mastroianni, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anouk Aimée, Robert De Niro, and many others), and attest to the vigorous health of the movies at the close of the twentieth century.

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Film Info

  • France
  • 1995
  • 104 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.66:1
  • French

Available In

Collector's Set

The Complete Films of Agnès Varda

The Complete Films of Agnès Varda

Blu-ray Box Set

15 Discs

$174.96

One Hundred and One Nights
Cast
Michel Piccoli
Simon Cinéma
Marcello Mastroianni
Italian friend
Henri Garcin
Firmin
Julie Gayet
Camille
Mathieu Demy
Mica
Emmanuel Salinger
Vincent
Anouk Aimée
Herself
Fanny Ardant
Herself
Jean-Paul Belmondo
Professor Bébel
Romane Bohringer
Herself
Sandrine Bonnaire
Vagabond
Jean-Claude Brialy
Tour guide
Patrick Bruel
Himself
Alain Delon
Himself
Catherine Deneuve
Herself
Robert De Niro
Himself
Gérard Depardieu
Himself
Harrison Ford
Himself
Gina Lollobrigida
Elizabeth Taylor
Jeanne Moreau
Ex-wife no. 1
Hanna Schygulla
Ex-wife no. 2
Credits
Director
Agnès Varda
Screenplay by
Agnès Varda
Cinematography by
Éric Gautier
Sound
Henri Morelle
Sound
Jean-Pierre Duret
Edited by
Hugues Darmois
Music by
Maurice Jarre
Music by
Michel Legrand
Music by
Nino Rota
Music by
Michel Colombier
Set design by
Cyr Boitard
Set design by
Cédric Simoneau
Costumes by
Rosalie Varda
First assistant
Didier Rouget

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Agnès Varda

Writer, Director

Agnès Varda
Agnès Varda

The only female director of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda has been called both the movement’s mother and its grandmother. The fact that some have felt the need to assign her a specifically feminine role, and the confusion over how to characterize that role, speak to just how unique her place in this hallowed cinematic movement—defined by such decidedly masculine artists as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut—is. Varda not only made films during the nouvelle vague, she helped inspire it. Her self-funded debut, the fiction-documentary hybrid 1956’s La Pointe Courte is often considered the unofficial first New Wave film; when she made it, she had no professional cinema training (her early work included painting, sculpting, and photojournalism). Though not widely seen, the film got her commissions to make several documentaries in the late fifties. In 1962, she released the seminal nouvelle vague film Cléo from 5 to 7; a bold character study that avoids psychologizing, it announced her official arrival. Over the coming decades, Varda became a force in art cinema, conceiving many of her films as political and feminist statements, and using a radical objectivity to create her unforgettable characters. She describes her style as cinécriture (writing on film), and it can be seen in formally audacious fictions like Le bonheur and Vagabond as well as more ragged and revealing autobiographical documentaries like The Gleaners and I and The Beaches of Agnès.

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