Agnès Varda
Filmmaker revered as the godmother of the New Wave who brought a feminist eye to the movement
AGNÈS VARDA, who has died aged 90, was a self-taught filmmaker who, in her first movie, anticipated the style and content of the French New Wave by five years. The film, made in 1954, was La Pointe Courte. It was shot on location using non-professional actors and had a complex editing structure involving two separate stories told in parallel. In many respects it foreshadowed Alain Resnais’s first feature film, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). Resnais edited Agnès Varda’s film and encouraged her to find out more about the medium to which she had taken so instinctively.
Remarkably, she claimed not to have seen more than a score of films before she was 25. When editing her material, Resnais dropped hints that this bit resembled Visconti, another bit was like Antonioni. She had no idea what he meant but began to attend the Cinémathèque Française to keep up with him.
Like Resnais, she was never in the mainstream of the New Wave. The leading practitioners, Jean-luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut, were all products of the film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. They were film buffs and film critics before they became filmmakers.
Agnès Varda, on the other hand, belonged to a more traditional culture. Her schooling at the Sorbonne was in literature; her early career was as a stills photographer. Initially this was held against her by the Cahiers clique, who felt that cinema was a visual medium based on movement rather than carefully composed illustrations of literary texts. In reality, however, she rapidly evolved a style of her own that made such charges irrelevant.
Along with Resnais, Chris Marker, Henri Colpi and other directors who made their first films about this time, Agnès Varda was more politically orientated than the Cahiers clan. She was Left-wing by persuasion and this group of directors, in so far as they had any common ground, were generally regarded as the “left bank” wing of the New Wave. But Resnais reckoned that they had nothing in common but a love of cats.
Agnès Varda was a feminist by instinct more than ideological conviction, bringing to the New Wave a woman’s perspective found in no other films of this time. When she made a film about a model who may or may not have terminal cancer in Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961), the accent was on life, on the joys that she might never know, on the world she had taken for granted. One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977) and Vagabond (1985) were equally powerful affirmations of what it means to be a woman.
Yet she combined a sympathy with feminist causes with traditional domestic values. She was happily married for 28 years to fellow filmmaker Jacques Demy (director of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), and after his death in 1990 she made a trilogy of films celebrating his life and work that are among the most moving to have emerged from the New Wave.
She was born Arlette Varda at Ixelles, a suburb of Brussels, on May 30 1928; her father was an engineer with Greek roots. During the war she grew up on a boat in Sète, a small port in the south of France which was her mother’s home town and where she attended local schools. She completed her education at the Lycée Victor-duruy in Paris and at the Sorbonne.
She planned first to become a museum curator, to which end she attended the École du Louvre, but changed her mind and enrolled at the Vaugirard school of photography. In 1951, the actor Jean Vilar, who also hailed from Sète, hired her as official photographer to his new theatrical group known as the Théâtre National Populaire (TNP), a post she held for 10 years.
As the TNP became better known so did her work, and she began to receive photojournalistic assignments throughout Europe. This encouraged her to consider the film medium, for which she wrote the script that eventually became La Pointe Courte. Realising that the cinema, as then organised, was inimical to personal expression, she set up a co-operative to make the film.
Stylistically, it drew more on literature than on cinema, in particular William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, which was also written in the form of two separate but thematically linked stories running parallel. In Agnès Varda’s film, the two stories involve the breakdown of a marriage and the struggle of fishermen to secure a living wage in the face of exploitation by middle men. Agnès Varda had not then seen Visconti’s La Terra Trema (1948) or Antonioni’s Cronaca di un Amore (1950), yet her film, as Resnais observed, had elements of both.
It was also, this time consciously, influenced by Brecht’s so-called alienation effect – a device to discourage audiences from identifying with the characters and the story, the better to reflect on the political message. Agnès Varda achieved this by using non-professionals, who did not sound convincing as actors, and local “ham” actors, whose over-acting sounded equally unpersuasive. La Pointe Courte does not invite audiences to become involved with the story but to think about it and its social and political implications.
Commercially it was a disaster, driving Agnès Varda for the next seven years to accept commissioned documentary shorts. These included Ô Saisons, ô Châteaux (1957), about the castles of the Loire, Du Coté de la Côte (1958), a satire on the Riviera, and L’opéra Mouffe (1958), a study of those who live in Paris’s Rue Mouffetard, as seen through the eyes of a pregnant woman.
Not until 1961 was she able to secure backing for a second feature. Cléo from 5 to 7 proved a big hit. Told in near-real time (it lasts 90 minutes), it is about a woman awaiting the results of a clinical test to determine whether she has cancer. In those two hours, she rediscovers Paris, love and the joy of living. But has it come too late? Audiences felt Agnès Varda had touched a universal nerve.
After a trip to Cuba in 1963 that resulted in Salut les Cubains, made up of 4,000 stills of Castro’s revolution, she made another feature, Le Bonheur (1965). This proved the most controversial of her career, the story of a young carpenter who takes a mistress and is surprised that it drives his wife to suicide but carries on as if nothing had happened. Catholics disapproved, but feminists objected, too, on the grounds that it played into the hands of male chauvinists. Champions, however, defended it for its visual beauty, likening Varda’s film to the work of Jean Renoir and even of his painter father, Auguste.
Her black and white feature Les Créatures (1966) was generally regarded as pretentious, though, and her contribution to the 1967 anti-war portmanteau movie Far from Vietnam was edited out.
When her husband, Jacques Demy, went to Hollywood to make Model Shop in 1967, she accompanied him, making two documentaries, Uncle Yanco and The Black Panthers (1968), and an independent feature, Lion’s Love (1969), about a female director who goes to Hollywood to make a movie. It starred Shirley Clarke, an independent American director, and was regarded as partly a record of Agnès Varda’s own experiences.
Further documentaries followed, including a full-length television film about the shopkeepers in the area where she lived in Paris, Daguerréotypes (1975). In the next 20 years she made only two more features, One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977), the story of two women’s lives over a period of 10 years, and Vagabond (1985), a bracing account of the last days of a young girl who chooses to live rough and die unknown and unmourned. Featuring the actress Sandrine Bonnaire, it was Agnès Varda’s most powerful picture, capturing the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
With her husband’s death in 1990, her career entered a new phase celebrating his life. Jacquot de Nantes (1991) mixed dramatic recreations with home movies, some of which were filmed when he was suffering from Aids-related complications.
It was followed in 1993 by Les Demoiselles ont 25 ans, a film made 25 years after her husband’s Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, recalling the making of that film and including extended clips from it. Lending Varda’s film special poignancy was the fact that of the two real-life sisters who appeared in Demy’s film, only Catherine Deneuve was still alive; Françoise Dorléac had died in a car crash. Then, in 1995, Agnès Varda made a third tribute to her late husband in The World of Jacques Demy.
She stayed busy, completing a run of funny, freewheeling documentaries. The Gleaners and I (2000) saw her testing digital technology, albeit haphazardly: at one point she admits to having left the lens cap on during filming. The Beaches of Agnès (2008), a playful reappraisal of her life and art, was followed by the television sequel From Here to There in 2011, and the sprightly, Oscarnominated Faces Places (2017), in which she roamed the countryside with a young photographer, reflecting on the changing landscape and her failing eyesight.
It felt valedictory, but in a typically upbeat, matter-of-fact way. Asked by her fellow traveller why she was unafraid of death, Agnès Varda’s response was simple: “Because that’ll be that.”
She married Jacques Demy in 1962. She is survived by their son, the actor and director Mathieu Demy, and by her daughter, the producer Rosalie Varda, from a previous relationship with the actor and director Antoine Bourseiller.