God Respects Us When We Work, but Loves Us When We Dance
A sun-dappled afternoon in Los Angeles’s Griffith Park is the scene of the 1967 Easter Sunday Love-In, a peace-and-free-love event that finds its ecstatic energy transposed to filmmaker Les Blank’s handheld camera, which sways and spins frenetically with the attendees. Blank worked in an arguably similar mode as Varda, with both artists uniquely obsessed by the eclectic subcultures with which they found themselves surrounded.

Model Shop
After the back-to-back successes of his French-language musicals The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), Varda’s husband Jacques Demy (1931–1990) was beckoned to Hollywood by a sweetheart deal from Columbia Pictures to make his first English-language feature. By way of leads Gary Lockwood and Anouk Aimée, Model Shop quietly encapsulates the death knell of the hippie movement. Said Demy of his trip to the Southland in a later interview: “I came here for a vacation, not to make a movie. But I fell in love with L.A. … [it] has the perfect proportions for film.”