AGNÈS VARDA

Ahead of the curve…

After studying philosophy and art, and with no filmmaking experience, Varda, in 1955, directed the first feature of the nouvelle vague – way before Truffaut or Godard picked up a camera. La Pointe Courte, shot on a micro-budget, starred Philippe Noiret and Silvia Monfort as a couple struggling to fix their relationship. But – shooting entirely on location and using local people – it’s equally about the world around them.

Varda has often said a filmmaker should exercise “as much freedom as a novelist”. Her films are individualistic, even idiosyncratic; none of them slot into recognisable genres or predictable narrative patterns. There’s a feminist angle to her work, but it’s never doctrinaire; her politics are evident but she never thrusts them on us. Writing, producing and directing, her films are unmistakably her own, disdaining boundaries.

Whether in her fiction films or in her rhapsodic non-fiction essays, strong awareness of place and milieu has always informed Varda’s work. She reacts with a photographer’s eye and a warm curiosity. “I try to use my imagination,” she says, “to always build something.”

Jacquot De Nantes was Varda’s loving tribute to her husband, director Jacques Demy, after his 1990 death. Other films of hers have extended this warmth to their subjects. In The Gleaners And I, she enters the world of those who use the leftovers others have discarded, happily joining them in their scavenging. As a filmmaker, too, she’s a recycler, picking up on disregarded elements of the life around her – such as the fated heroine of Vagabond.

My films never made money,” Varda observes, “but they’re loved.” Working from the off with her own firm, Ciné-Tamaris, on modest budgets and with no outside constraints, she aimed to make films “that stay in people’s minds as meaning something”. “In the margins where I am,” she adds, “I feel like a princess.” Now 90, she’s still working; her latest film, Faces Places, opens in the UK this month (see review, TF276). PK