Agnès Varda—described, by turns, as the mother, grandmother and godmother of the French New Wave—was just 31 when, in June 1959, she was honoured with her first retrospective. Two thousand filmgoers saluted her at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. Jean Douchet, the co-editor of Cahiers du Cinéma, declared the event “a triumph”. Yet, though Varda barely ever stopped working over the next six decades, making dozens of deliciously original short and full-length features, she was rarely talked about in the same breath as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard or even her husband, the Umbrellas of Cherbourg director Jacques Demy.
Now, five years after her death at the age of 90, Varda may well be the most beloved French filmmaker of them all. “She taught us how to see again,” said Emmanuel Macron. Fellow directors—from Martin Scorsese (who called her “one of the gods”) to Greta Gerwig and Chloé Zhao—hail her as a creative exemplar. Box sets and biographies—including, this September, Carrie Rickey’s A Complicated Passion—keep coming. Her photography, especially that taken in revolutionary China and Cuba, is the subject of more and more international shows. An exhibition devoted to her work is currently on at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.
Varda’s best-known films include Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962), in which a young pop singer wanders Paris waiting to learn the result of a stomach cancer biopsy; Vagabond (1985), which takes a part-documentary approach to reconstructing the life of a drifter (Sandrine Bonnaire) whose body is found in a ditch; and The Gleaners and I (2000), a richly associative travelogue across lesser-trodden modern France.
Looking and making were more important to her than obsessing over form or format. She said, “35mm, 16mm, video? All I want to do is make a film. Bring images and sounds to people.” Whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, or some playful hybrid of the two, her work never feels cloistered or as if it’s aimed at cinephiles. She gently chided what she called “the Cahiers boys”: “Their influences were movies,” she laughed; hers were “paintings, books… life”.
‘All I want to do is make a film. Bring images and sounds to people.’
Varda was small, exuberantly coiffured, allergic to the pompous grandiosity of some of her peers. “I play the role of a plump and chatty little old lady,” she admitted. It really was only a role, though. She was an independent filmmaker before “independent” cinema existed: lacking a film-school background or industry credentials, she created her own company, Ciné-Tamaris, for her first feature, La Pointe Courte (1955), which she made on a budget that was around a tenth of most French films at the time. Unable to travel because she was raising her two-year-old son, she came up with Daguerréotypes (1976), an affectionate portrait of the residents of Rue Daguerre, the Parisian street she called home for more than 60 years. All the interviewees lived or worked within 300 feet of her house—the maximum length her cables extended.
“If we opened people, we’d find landscapes,” Varda announced in her last film, Varda by Agnès (2019). A fascination with place—its rhythms, textures, overlooked histories—is present in all her work. Along the Coast (1958) is a meditation on the Côte d’Azur just before mass tourism hit; Mur Murs (1981) is an insightful depiction of Los Angeles that focuses on the city’s murals, many of them by Chicano artists; The Pleasure of Love in Iran (1976) is a poignant short in which a French-Iranian couple stroll through Isfahan while pondering the symmetries between their affair and Persian architecture.
Varda is just one of the Francophone women directors—others include Marguerite Duras and Chantal Akerman—whose reputations have risen in recent years. In 2018, Varda led a protest about the level of women’s representation at the Cannes Film Festival. Although on the left, her politics, like her feminism, were never schematic. “The cubist revolution seemed to me much more important than the Russian one,” she once said.
For me, what makes Varda’s films so miraculous is their curiosity, their lightness of touch, their essayistic openness. She never turned sour. Aged 70, she embraced the technical and aesthetic possibilities of digital film to make the wonderful The Gleaners and I. In her late eighties, she collaborated with the pseudonymous street artist JR on the fathomlessly resonant Faces Places (2017). She likened herself to “a heart-shaped potato—growing again”. Her reputation too, I am sure, will only grow and grow.
