Agnès Varda

“In my films I always wanted to make people see deeply. I don’t want to show things, but to give people the desire to see.”

— Agnès Varda

Agnès Varda, the French New Wave pioneer who for decades beguiled, challenged and charmed moviegoers in films that inspired generations of filmmakers, has died last year. She was 90. With her loss I inevitably think about how important her work has been for our generation of filmmakers, and particularly refocusing her influence on my personal work. Agnès Varda has deeply impacted the way I frame and tell my stories.

For Agnès Varda to tell a story means to focus on observation.

The magnitude of the impact is in the use of the camera, the movements, the travelings. The absence of unnecessary sound effects and the extremely simple composition of the shots, without mention the importance and masterfully use of the “off camera space”. The place Agnès Varda occupied is irreplaceable. She loved images, words and people. I am proud to have started my career as a filmmaker watching, laughing and crying with her movies.

Stanley Kubrick

“If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered. ”

— Stanley Kubrick

Of all the artists who inspire my work Stanley Kubrick is perhaps the most influential. He has influenced not only my work in film and video production but it has also significantly impacted my work as a graphic designer, especially the use of color, composition, structure and sequence development. As Thomas Allen Nelson points out in his book “Kubrick, Inside a Film Artist's Maze”, Kubrick’s reputation as a film maker remains curiously anomalous. His eleven feature films constitute a nea-encyclopedia of cinematic exampla for film critics and theorists fascinated by both the structures of film rhetoric and the complexities of communicating with light and sound to an audience in the dark. Kubrick is for me that reference and inspiration.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the first Kubrick’s color movie is a symphony of pigments. Before creating the evocative visual structures of 2001, however, Kubrick again turned to what he considers the objectifying powers of the world. Kubrick's success in developing a cinematic organization (and a dynamic composition) of images and sounds can be measured in part by how well a fully novelized and explicit script fills out the essential temporal outlines of story and character. Colors dominate the narrative and create a dialogue between thoughts and actions. The red of HAL 9000, the blue of the asteroids, the black of infinity and the masterfully colored film negatives during the trip to the third dimension. Kubrick creates “beyond the infinity” without a loss of thematic integrity or narrative clarity.