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“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes. If we opened me up, we’d find beaches,” spoke French filmmaker Agnes Varda in her 2008 autobiographical film, The Beaches of Agnes. Varda was one of the vanguards of French New Wave cinema of the 1950s and 60s and the director of such films as Cleo from 5 to 7, Vagabond, Le Bonheur, and Faces Places. Critic Roger Ebert, in his Great Movies entry for Cleo, cites Agnes Varda as “sometimes [being] referred to as the godmother of the French New Wave [film movement]. Varda is its very soul.” Agnes Varda pushed barriers, not only as one of the most prominent female directors of the 19th and 20th centuries but also stylistically and in the content of the films she made.
Early Career
Varda was born in 1928 in Belgium, the daughter of Greek immigrants. She relocated to Sète, France, her mother’s hometown, where she lived on a boat during World War II. After graduating from the Sorbonne with a degree in literature and psychology, she studied art history at the École du Louvre in preparation to become a museum curator. However, Varda soon decided to instead study photography, using photography more artfully and pondering composition.
From her beginnings in photography, Varda soon became interested in making a feature-length film. She saw photography and filmmaking as interconnecting, saying of her first feature, “I took photographs of everything I wanted to film, photographs that are almost models for the shots. And I started making films with the sole experience of photography.” In this way her origins differ from fellow filmmakers of the French New Wave. Directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette all started as critics and film theorizers at popular French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. Varda on the other hand remarked that she had only seen around twenty movies by the age of twenty-five. This allowed her to make her films more personal and topical to the times, rather than focusing on traditions or classical standards. Martin Scorsese, famed director of Goodfellas, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull, affirmed that “[he] seriously [doubts] that Agnès Varda ever followed in anyone else’s footsteps, in any corner of her life or her art. Every single one of her remarkable handmade pictures is like no one else’s.”
Notable Films
Agnes Varda wrote and directed her first feature-length film in 1958, La Pointe Courte, about a quarreling couple in a small fishing village. This movie was praised by the critics at Cahiers du Cinéma, but failed at the box-office, causing Varda to return to only short films for the next seven years. She would go on to make 23 more features and 22 short films. Aside from narrative films, she also made many documentaries. These include The Gleaners and I, which follows various scavengers across France, Faces Places, which follows Varda herself and street artist JR while they travel across the French countryside and paint portraits of the people they meet, and the aforementioned autobiographical The Beaches of Agnes. Of these documentaries, The Gleaners and I was voted by film critics as the 8th best documentary of all time in a 2014 Sight & Sound poll.
Varda's Uniqueness
The marks of Varda’s work are her humanism and creative framing devices. For Varda’s humanism, take Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) and Black Panthers (1968), a short documentary, as examples. The titular Cleo is a young French pop singer in the film and spends much of her time shopping. Under the creative control of another, Cleo might be played as shallow or materialistic, but the orchestrations of the plot, the performance of Corinne Marchand, and vitally the direction of Varda all hint at Cleo’s deep fear of death and questioning of her life below the surface. In Black Panthers, Varda has close to no extra framing for the documentary. She lets Oakland members of the Black Panther party define themselves and their platform during their campaign to free Huey Newton at a time when FBI director J. Edgar Hoover saw the Black Panthers as the greatest threat to national security.
So far as framing devices, take two other films, Vagabond (1985) and Le Bonheur (1965). Vagabond begins with drifter Mona’s death. The rest of the story is told as an unnamed investigator talks to various people Mona has interacted with on the road, who all give their opinions on Mona before the movie flashes back to the given person and Mona’s interactions. The plot is more about Mona’s drifting and her lifestyle devoid of any attachments, but through this framing device, it also becomes about objectification and the male gaze of the men she meets along the way. Le Bonheur is about infidelity from the perspective of a man cheating who also has a wife and family (There are spoilers for the rest of this paragraph). The entire course of the movie the man talks about how he can be happy both with his wife and children and his new mistress. When he tells his wife this, she takes it well, but when he wakes up he finds his wife has drowned himself. After not too long the mistress moves in with the family, almost replacing the wife like she never existed. All of this is accentuated by beautiful colors and languid trips to the woods with the family. The man sees the death of his wife as little more than an unfortunate incident. In this way, it is condemning infidelity as satire, with the movie’s tone almost all cheerful, though punctuated by one darker occurrence. Jenny Charmarette, a film professor, called Le Bonheur “a horror movie wrapped up in sunflowers.” Both of these cinematic methods work to deepen the themes and the experience of their respective movies.
Legacy
When Agnes Varda died in March 2019, she had won lifetime achievements awards at the Oscars, the Cannes film festival, and was made a Grand Officier de la Légion d'Honneur as well as winning many awards for her individual films. She received tributes from directors Edgar Wright (Baby Driver, Shaun of the Dead), calling Varda “a icon [sic] of independent cinema before it even had that name,” Ava DuVernay (Selma, 13th), Barry Jenkins (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk), and Martin Scorsese (Goodfellas, Wolf of Wall Street), citing Varda as one of the “Gods of Cinema.”