On the experience of a Letterboxd deep dive into a director's filmography and what it reveals.

I spent three weeks watching and logging everything Agnès Varda ever directed. This included her theatrical features, her documentary shorts, her television films, her installations described in text, and her final film Varda by Agnès which she finished at ninety and which is, in a genuine sense, a film about everything she ever made.

The Letterboxd experience of this kind of project is interesting because the diary format makes the chronology visible. You can see the development of a sensibility in real time. You can see which films are in dialogue with which other films. You can see the director returning to obsessions and resolving them or abandoning them or finding that they've resolved themselves.

What the deep dive revealed about Varda that a best-of list would not: the documentaries from the 1960s and 1970s, particularly Daguerréotypes (1976), are the missing context for the later autobiographical work. The intimacy of The Gleaners and I was not a late-career development. It was a method she had been practicing for thirty years.

Letterboxd's diary format is the right tool for this kind of project, and it's the tool that most distinguishes cinephile culture in the digital age from what came before.