Slideshow
LES CRÉATURES
France, 1966
Directed by Agnès Varda
Starring Catherine Deneuve, Michel Piccoli
In French with English subtitles
Approx. 95 min.
In one of her least-seen and most fascinating films, Varda uses the science fiction genre to explore the inner lives of a writer (Michel Piccoli) and his pregnant wife (Catherine Deneuve) as they travel to a remote island after an accident that's left him scarred physically and mentally and left her mute. The writer’s new novel takes over, with islanders becoming characters, and one of his own “creatures” taking him on in a weird mind-control game resembling chess. “The entire arsenal of the adventure novel is utilised: fights in the woods, mysterious chases, broken coffers, flight, fist-fights, etc. And there is also the full register of notes from a sentimental novel: conjugal love, secret liaisons, vengeance by a former mistress, etc.” – Agnès Varda
Presented with support from The George Fasel Memorial Fund for Classic French Cinema
Preceded by
Pier Pasolini-Agnès Varda-New York–1967
France, 2022
Directed by Agnès Varda
In French with English subtitles
Approx. 4 mins.
Filmed by Varda and Pasolini when they were in Manhattan for the New York Film Festival (to show LES CRÉATURES and THE HAWKS AND THE SPARROWS) this colorful short captures a walk through Times Square as they talk about the spectacle and the squalor of the city.
Pier Pasolini-Agnès Varda-New York–1967 presented with support from The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Fund
Reviews
“LES CRÉATURES is as imaginative as it is playful, as fanciful as it is frank, as intimately personal as it is wide-ranging. It’s a science-fiction film that uses the devices and the conventions of the genre to tell stories of marriage and art, of evil imaginings and evil doings, that would have been hard to tell in a plainer and less elaborately constructed cinematic framework.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker
“A complex and nearly hypnotic study of the way fact is made into fiction. It seems to operate on many levels, but in fact it operates on only one, illustrating how fantasy, reality and style are simultaneously kept suspended in the mind of a creative writer.”
– Roger Ebert
“Pure Méliès.”
– Henri Langlois