Agnès Varda

Biography: life and films

The fact that she originally hailed from Belgium notwithstanding, Agnès Varda is one the great auteurs of French cinema. Not only was she one of the few women directors of the French New Wave, she also had an immense influence on the ethos and aesthetics of the movement through her earliest films. Actively engaged with the social concerns of her day, her films both bear witness to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and '70s and express her deeply held feminist convictions. Her work compromises fictional dramas and documentaries, and often the two are tastefully melded together to create a style of film that is uniquely her own. Not only is Agnès Varda an inspired filmmaker, she is also an accomplished photographer. Her ability to compose striking visuals and her female perspective set her apart from her Nouvelle Vague contemporaries and make her films refreshingly different.

Agnès Varda was born in Ixelles, Belgium, on 30th May 1928. Originally, she was called Arlette, but she changed her name to Agnès when she was 18. She was one of five children, the daughter of a Greek engineer and French mother. To escape the German bombing of Belgium at the start of WWII, the Varda family moved to the French port of Sète in 1940, and this is where the young Arlette spent most of her teen years. She then went to Paris to study photography at the École des beaux-arts and art history at the École du Louvre. She found work as a photographer at the Théâtre National Populaire (TNP), and this is how she came to meet Philippe Noiret and Silvia Monfort, who agreed to take the lead roles in her first film.

La Pointe courte (named after the small French fishing village where it was filmed) is almost certainly the most important film that Varda directed. Noiret and Monfort play a couple who are on the point of splitting up, and their fictional drama overlays what looks like a raw documentary on everyday life captured sur-le-vif in the fishing village. Made on a shoestring budget, and shot on location, it was released in 1954 and had a marked impression on several directors of the French New Wave era, most notably Alain Resnais, who edited the film. By the time Varda made her next film, Cléo de 5 à 7 (1961), the French New Wave had arrived in force. Combining the part fictional drama, part documentary form of her previous film, Varda serves up a solemn study in mortality, depicting a young singer wandering around Paris whilst awaiting the results of a medical examination to confirm whether or not she has a terminal illness.

In between making her first two films, Agnès Varda met Jacques Demy, who made his own sensational directing debut in 1961 with Lola. Together, Varda and Demy belonged to what is now referred to as the Left Bank (Rive Gauche) strand of the French New Wave (as opposed to the Cahiers du cinéma strand comprising Truffaut, Godard et al.), which was strongly influenced by the Nouveau Roman and had left-leaning political concerns. Demy and Varda married in 1962 and had a son, Mathieu Demy, who would become a successful actor and director. Varda also has a daughter, Rosalie, from a previous relationship.

Le Bonheur (1965) was Agnès Varda's first colour film, a cheery acknowledgement that the sexual revolution that was well under way by the mid-1960s. It is a curious film that appears to champion both marriage and free love, although the apparent dichotomy is seen to be a false one once its author's feminist point hits home, namely that it should be up to the woman, not society, to decide how she lives her life. This film not only won the Prix Louis-Delluc in 1964, it also received the Special Prize of the Jury at the 1965 Berlin International Film Festival. After this, Varda made what is probably her strangest film. Les Créatures (1966). Looking like a totally deranged compendium of excerpts randomly lifted from Roman Polanski's early films, this odd flight of fancy sees Catherine Deneuve and Michel Piccoli negotiating some kind of drug-induced dream experience. With its weird symbolism and surreal digressions, Les Créatures is as baffling as it is beguiling.

In 1968, Varda moved to Los Angeles for a couple of years, and it was here that she made the trashy hippy oddity Lions Love (1969), as well as several documentary shorts. Back in France, she reaffirmed her feminist credentials, first by adding her name to the Manifesto of the 343, a declaration (published in Le Nouvel Observateur) by 343 women admitting to having had an abortion (a criminal offence in France at the time), then by making a strongly pro-feminist film - L'Une chante, l'autre pas (1977). She also founded her own film production company Cine-Tamaris. In 1979, she was back in Los Angeles, to direct Murs, murs (1981), a documentary about murals, and Documenteur (1981), a film drama starring her own son, Mathieu Demy.

Varda's next significant film was Sans toit ni loi (1985), in which Sandrine Bonnaire (in the role that made her famous) plays a homeless drifter locked in a downward spiral. With the story told from the perspectives of several different characters, the film has the feel of an intricate puzzle and the fact that the pieces do not quite fit together shows how subjective and imperfect are our impressions of other people. This unusual but engaging film was rewarded with the Golden Lion at the 1985 Venice Film Festival. In 1988, Varda hooked up with Jane Birkin to make two fascinating portraits of the actress, Jane B. par Agnès V. and Kung-Fu Master.

Jacques Demy's death in 1990 came as a blow to Agnès Varda, but rather than quietly grieve the passing of her husband she was inspired to make a personal tribute to him consisting of three remarkable films. Jacquot de Nantes (1991) is one of Varda's warmest films, a dramatised account of Demy's childhood that is both highly informative and totally enchanting. This was followed by Les Demoiselles ont eu 25 ans (1993), in which Varda returns to the town of Rochefort and catches up with the contributors to one of Demy's best loved films, and L'Univers de Jacques Demy (1995), a wonderfully crafted portrait of the director and his work. Now that she was in a nostalgic frame of mind, Varda then went on to mark the centenary of the birth of cinema with Les Cent et Une Nuits de Simon Cinéma (1995). Despite its stellar cast, this eccentric comedy failed to find an audience and was derided by the critics.

Five years later, Agnès Varda won back her fans and silenced her detractors with Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (2000), an irresistible documentary in which the director, armed with her digital camera, tours France in search of people who make their living by collecting things. Varda's love of people and her devotion to her art shines through this idiosyncratic indulgence piece more than any other film she made, and what it ultimately reveals is an intensely likeable self-portrait of its author. It makes a worthy companion piece to her next important work, Les Plages d'Agnès (2008), an autobiographical documentary that won the César for the Best Documentary in 2009.

Agnès Varda's immense contribution to cinema has been generously recognised over the past few decades. She received an honorary César in 2001, and in 2009 she was awarded the Henri-Langlois Prize in honour of her life's work. That same year, she was made a Commander of the Legion of Honour. And, in 2015, the Cannes Film Festival paid tribute to her with an Honorary Golden Palm. She died at her home in Paris on 29th March 2019, after suffering from cancer. She is buried in Montparnasse cemetery alongside her husband, Jacques Demy.

Filmography

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