Agnès Varda's VAGABOND (1985) presented by Megan O'Grady

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Megan O'Grady presents: VAGABOND (Sans toit ni loi)

a film by Agnès Varda

1985, France, 105m, DCP

Followed by a conversation with writer Megan O’Grady and Carolina A. Miranda

doors/bar 2:30pm

film 3:00pm

On occasion of the release of her new book, How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves, we are thrilled to have celebrated art critic and essayist Megan O’Grady in person to present Agnès Varda’s masterpiece, starring Sandrine Bonnaire as a young female hitchhiker wandering aimlessly through the unearthly winter landscape of southern France.

“Moving became routine, almost habitual: the rhythms of acquisition and disposal, the hope that this, this would be the place, and then another packed suitcase. In college, I had romanticized female drifter characters, women who wandered, who seemed to need nothing and no one. My favorite drifters were Sylvie, the kindly vagrant aunt in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, who sleeps fully dressed on top of the covers, her few possessions in a cardboard box under her bed; Mona, the young hitchhiker of Agnès Varda’s Vagabond (1986) who roams the South of France, pitching her tent wherever she can, blowing her nose into the air through her fingers; and the eponymous lost soul in Barbara Loden’s Rust Belt-set Wanda (1970). At the film’s outset, Wanda has divested herself of everything in her life—­home, husband, children, dignity. [...] These characters are antiheroes, though not quite the symbolic countercultural figures—­ iconic outlaws or rebels without causes—­ that male drifters often are. A woman without a home was narratively compelling in large part because she was a woman, unsheltered and exposed. Sylvie, Mona, and Wanda are unapologetic about their lack of direction, and I adored the almost willful fecklessness that unsettled the people who crossed their paths. It was an attitude, one that dispensed with the sentimental mythologies of home that I found so hard to shake: home as representative of the totality of one’s identity and destiny, home as the reflection of an intentionally lived life, home as the site at which all the conflicting parts of us would be magically reconciled. [...] Or maybe these women represented extremes of something I recognized in my own aimlessness, some internal vagrancy. The films had made it seem cooler, or less sad, to live with a broken compass. But by my late twenties, I saw that I had misread, or miswatched, these characters, who all did, in fact, end up somewhere: Sylvie hopping trains, Wanda in jail, Mona dead in a ditch.” -Megan O’Grady

In French with English subtitles. Special thanks to Thora Siemsen and Brian Belovarac (Janus Films).

Megan O’Grady is a critic and essayist whose writing draws from history, memoir, and the lyric essay. Her magazine and newspaper journalism on contemporary art and literature are often extensions of larger inquiries into representation and identity, explored through immersive reading and looking. The personal and social contexts of art and the way in which it negotiates cultural conversations over time are ongoing preoccupations. A frequent contributor to The New York Times, where she created the Culture Therapist column, her work also appears in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Vogue, where she was once a contributing editor. Her book, How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) considers the influence of books and art on our attention, imagination, and the way we move in the world.

Carolina A. Miranda is a writer in Los Angeles who covers the intersection of design and visual culture with politics and society. Until 2024, she was a columnist at the Los Angeles Times, where she reported on subjects such as museums and race, architecture and the pandemic, and the ways in which communities are rethinking the nature of monuments. She has produced stories for the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, Artnews, Alta Journal and Fresh Air, and is a regular contributor for public radio station KCRW. She was a winner of the 2017 Rabkin Prize in Visual Arts Journalism and a recipient of the 2024 Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant. She is currently at work on a book about culture and authoritarianism in Chile.

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