Agnès Varda Forever
In March 2021, I collaborated with visual artist Jennifer “JJ” Jones to continue her Agnès Varda Forever project. Her project began in the summer of 2020 after she and her son watched a marathon of movies directed by Agnès Varda. Acting on a desire for more people to know about the mother of French New Wave cinema, JJ painted “AGNÈS VARDA FOREVER” in eight-inch tall letters on the utility pole at the end of her street in northeast Portland, Oregon.
We collaborated on the design and production of a poster with this handpainted “AGNÈS VARDA FOREVER” message. Each poster featured removable tabs listing a movie by Varda and a short description. There was no contact information or anything related to our identities on the posters; they were anonymous. JJ hung five hundred copies of the poster in public places all over Portland and beyond. The poster is available to download from our website and we’ve seen documentation of the poster hanging in places ranging from Laredo, Texas to Bogotá, Colombia to New York City.
Once our identities were revealed, Portland’s Clinton Street Theater invited us to create an Agnès Varda film festival in August 2021. During the festival, we organized artist talks to precede screenings of Varda’s films and organized participatory art projects in the theater and surrounding neighborhood.
Early in 2022, Gina Altamura from Holocene (a Portland music and arts venue, nightclub and events space) invited us to collaborate on Fin de Cinema, a recurring live film score series she's curated since 2009. Together with Nora Colie of POW Film Fest, we commissioned Portland-based musicians, EMA (Erika M. Anderson) and Kathy Foster with Rachel Blumberg to write and perform a new soundtrack to Varda's first film, La Pointe Courte, with Anderson composing for the first half of the film and Foster and Blumberg for the second.
The 2023 Agnès Varda Forever Festival was at the Clinton Street Theater every Monday in March. We showed some of our favorite Varda films: Le Bonheur, Daguerréotypes, Mur Murs, and The Beaches of Agnès. In June 2023, “Movies in the Alley” invited us to screen Faces Places for people living in Portland’s Sullivan’s Gulch area. Each attendee had the option to have their portrait made with a Polaroid-type camera and added to a display of the “faces” of the neighborhood.
Hollywood Theatre interview
Willamette Week’s “Best of Portland”
Oregon Public Broadcasting
Portland Monthly
I-5 Cinemabound podcast
Artist stamps
Shirts and tote bags
Project by
Laura Glazer, Jennifer “JJ” Jones
Original commission
Harrell Fletcher, Portland State University Art and Social Practice MFA program
Location
Portland, Oregon
Years
2021—Present
Film Festival location
Clinton Street Theater
Film Festival programmers
Aaron Colter, Laura Glazer, Jennifer “JJ” Jones
POW Film Fest partners
Nora Colie, Tara Johnson-Medinger
Fin de Cinema curator
Gina Altamura
Fin de Cinema artists
Erika M. Anderson, Rachel Blumberg, Kathy Foster
Fin de Cinema venue
Holocene
Movies in the Allery programmer
Marissa Perez
Artist stamp illustrator
Shelbie Loomis
Printers
DocuMart, Independent Publishing Resource Center, Outlet, Seizure Palace Screen Printing
Special thank you
Gina Altamura, Erika M. Anderson, Martine Arenella, Rebekah Bellingham of Vein of Gold, Rachel Blumberg, Christopher Branson, Kristen Gayle Castagna, Clinton Street Theater, Nora Colie, Aaron Colter, Niko Courtelis, John Cox, Christopher Diana-Peebles, Harrell Fletcher, Kathy Foster, Brandi Haile, Mykle Hansen, Polly Hatfield, Hollywood Theatre, Holocene, I-5 Cinemabound Podcast with Rob Patrick and Megan Hattie Stahl, Tara Johnson-Medinger, Ethan Kroll, Claudia Meza, Shelbie Loomis, Portland Monthly, The Portland Stamp Company, Portland State University Art and Social Practice MFA Program, Conner Reed, Jordan Rosenblum, Chance Solem-Pfeifer, Emma Swartz, Mark Swartz, Nico Swartz, Agnès Varda, Rosalie Varda, James Webb, Willamette Week, and Patricia Wolf.