Paris, three young actors – Gérard Dépardieu, Hélène Viard, Francis Merle – and Agnès Varda’s cinécriture: the perfect ingredients for making a film. Considered too controversial even for auteur cinema of the mid-1960s, only a few screen tests remain of the film, which arepresented today in a restored version. The play on words of the title transforms its meaning of an English Christmas tale into Christmas Carole. In addition to being in line with Varda’s use of alienation techniques, it immediately shifts the perspective from Dickens’ didactic story to a contemporary moral fable in which the lights and shopping frenzy trigger the reflections of a young ‘situationist’ raisonneur,played by a formidable Dépardieu, on consumer society. On the cusp of 1968 and driven by ideals, young people born at the end of World War II reject the god of money, praise free love and women’s freedom. Shortly afterwards, the unstoppable Varda took off for the US, where she continued her investigation into contemporary conflicts combining documentary and fiction, with films such as Black Panthers, 1968, and Lions, Love… (and Lies), 1969.

Anna Masecchia

With her 16mm camera in hand, the optical prosthesis of a 20th-century flâneuse, Agnès Varda filmed 42nd Street in 1967, shooting a crowdof passersby to the beat of The Doors. Pier Paolo Pasolini is with her, getting lost in the lights, bodies, faces and chaos of a crowded and multicultural New York. Opening in soft focus and closing on Pasolini’s blurred face, the images shot in a direct style and without audio are merged with a dense dialogue between the two artists and intellectuals, which was recorded later. Prompted by Varda, Pasolini reflects on the relationship between reality and fiction, the Christian figurative tradition and the function of audiovisual language in contemporary society. All of which is enhanced by the audio-visual décalage that simultaneously reveals the camera as a device while emphasising the real and political information of the images, which emerges from the background and comes into the foreground. In a matter of minutes,Varda’s art captures Pasolini talking about himself and the essence of cinema as a whole, which for both is an expression of reality itself.

Anna Masecchia

“Earth and sky and a horse… what more could a man want?” proclaims Joel McCrea, in a rare example of first-person voiceover in a western – before Fregonese, in one of his essential American films, shatters that dream with wit, wisdom and warmth.
This deconstruction of the myth of freedom in the Old West begins when Chuck Conner (McCrea), a good-natured and gentle cowboy on his way to California, stops by to visit an old pal who dies in an accident that same night, leaving Chuck with four children to care for. Chuck has to hide his new family’s existence when he is hired by a rancher with a hatred for children – and whose feud with the neighbouring cattle owner complicates Chuck’s guardianship.
The film belongs to a small cycle of westerns in which the cowboy’s time in the blissful presence of children chimes with the end of the frontier and the beginning of settlement (3 Godfathers, Bad Bascomb). But Fregonese gives this familiar theme an extra depth, as well as a twist: by showing the children to be as infatuated by the myth of the wanderer as the cowboy is himself. It’s up to the cowboy, in what amounts to an act of self-sacrifice, to bring the children to their senses by rejecting the only way of life he knows. McCrea does this in a glowingly natural manner and plays the role with a rustic grace.
One of the very last scripts penned by the veteran, albeit undistinguished, western writer Harold Shumate, the B-movie yarn is transformed by Fregonese into a contemplation on the individual and society. Be it a pacy action scene or a tender comedy situation, his refined direction maintains a lyrical quality throughout. Despite the sappy story, Fregonese’s typically dark fascination with fate resurfaces in a surprising way: the trained rodeo horse that bucks every time a shot is fired is both a source of comedy and tragedy.
Fate is not what you are; it is what you ride on. The myth of the Old West is destroyed, but another – the myth of civilisation – is subtly established. Fregonese’s world is inconceivable without a myth of some kind or another.

Ehsan Khoshbakht