Women Directors on the Edge of Hollywood: Agnès Varda/Shirley Clarke in and beyond Lions Love (1969)

This chapter explores the cultural history around Agnès Varda’s English-language film Lions Love (… and Lies) (1969). Partially an auto-fiction inspired by Varda’s own troubled experience with the Hollywood film industry, the film follows New York filmmaker Shirley Clarke as she stays in Los Angeles to negotiate a studio contract. I propose a reading of Lions Love that centers how Varda’s and Clarke’s individual experiences meet and unfold amidst the social, political, and industrial movements in the late 1960s. In part through casting, the film uses self-reflexivity as social critique to expose the structural exclusion facing women directors in the 1960s, even as the women’s liberation movement and other countercultural forces were underway. This study integrates production cultures, film history, and women’s studies, examining Lions Love alongside published interviews and autobiographies to re/construct Varda’s and Clarke’s experiences in-between Hollywood, the French New Wave, and the New American Cinema movement