Agnès Varda

Les créatures

Les créatures

One of Agnès Varda least-seen films is also one of her most fascinating: an eccentrically imaginative science-fiction fantasia that touches on human nature, free will, and the creative process. Working with major stars for the first time on a feature film, Varda casts Michel Piccoli as a writer and Catherine Deneuve as his silent wife, a couple who relocate to the island of Noirmoutier (a longtime second home for Varda and her husband, Jacques Demy) where strange goings-on hint at a sinister force controlling the minds and actions of the residents. Slipping between “reality” and fiction, genre spectacle and avant-garde experimentation, Les créatures is a beguiling, endlessly inventive exploration of the mysterious alchemy that transforms life into art.

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Film Info

  • France
  • 1966
  • 94 minutes
  • Black and White/Color
  • 2.35:1
  • 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

Les créatures
Cast
Catherine Deneuve
Mylène
Michel Piccoli
Edgar
Eva Dahlbeck
Michele Quellec
Marie-France Mignal
Viviane Quellec
Britta Pettersson
Lucie de Montyon
Ursula Kubler
Vamp
Jeanne Allard
Henriette
Joëlle Gozzi
Suzon
Bernard Lajarrige
Dr. Desteau
Lucien Bodard
Monsieur Ducasse
Pierre Danny
Max Picot
Louis Falavigna
Pierre Roland
Nino Castelnuovo
Jean Modet
Credits
Director
Agnès Varda
Screenplay
Agnès Varda
Produced by
Mag Bodard
Cinematography by
Willy Kurant
Cinematography by
William Lubtchansky
Edited by
Janine Verneau
Music by
Pierre Barbaud
Music by
Henry Purcell
Set design by
Claude Pignot

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A Woman’s Truth

The Complete Films of Agnès Varda

A Woman’s Truth

Over the course of an extraordinary six-decade career, Agnès Varda fused her feminist politics with an original artistic practice that made her a leading figure of the French New Wave.

By Ginette Vincendeau

Essays — Aug 11, 2020

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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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