Authentic and bold till the very end

“The grandmother of the French New Wave! I found it funny, because I was 30 years old! Truffaut made The 400 Blows and Godard made Breathless, but I had done that five years before with [1955’s] La Pointe Courte, my first film. When I was younger, people were inventing a new way of writing – James Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner. And I thought we had to find a structure for cinema. I fought for a radical cinema, and I continued all my life” said Agnès Varda in her last interview for The Guardian. 

In her six-decade career, Agnès Varda (1928 - 2019) made 54 short and feature films and documentaries and each of them pushes the boundaries of the technical and narrative structure. Varda was one of those who constantly created and did not make any compromises. Her entire cinematography is built on the radical, on curiosity, where women are the ones who take control of public space – like in Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962), Vagabond (1985), documenting political activism in Salut les Cubains (1964), Black Panthers (1968), Women Reply (1975), One Sings, the Other Doesn't (1977), documenting and enjoying the unlimited possibilities of casual encounters in The Gleaners & I (2000), Faces, Places (2017)… Shared cinema is the basis of her filmmaking - Varda is a kind of facilitator of women stories shaped by the everyday and society. 

In the early fifties she worked as a professional photographer and in 1955 she directed her debut La Pointe Courte. She was part of the political and experimental group Left Bank Cinema, with Alain Resnais and Chris Marker among others, and emphasized an interdisciplinary approach to film art. Early films, including La Pointe Courte, feature nonprofessional actors, realistic locations, stylized elliptical dialogues and nonlinear narrative.

Inspired by the cubist revolution and starting with texts that question the invisible politics of private life, especially Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, Varda emphasizes her criticism in a very subtle way. She played with stereotypical images of women in commercials and magazines. One of the specifics of the film language is the inclusion of all those who in, then masculine French cinema, are objectified or excluded. The struggle for reproductive rights, planned parenthood, marital crises, protests, the streets of Paris, urban spaces, stories of the homeless and their daily lives through experimenting in techniques is what will eventually become her career stamp - the individualistic documentarism. In her work there is an intense subjective involvement of the director himself and she acknowledges the existence of the Other (the viewer or the film subject). Varda used to express emotions through her own film practice called cinécriture. “The well-written film is well shot, the actors are well chosen as well as the locations. The cuts, the movements, the shots, the rhythm of the shooting and the editing are chosen and considered in the way the writer chooses the depth or meaning of his sentences, the form of the words, the paragraphs, the chapters that guide the story or change the rhythm. In writing, this is called style. In the film, the style is cinécriture”, points Varda. 

Vagabond (1985) won the Golden Lion in Venice and the FIPRESCI Award, as well as the French Caesar Award for Best Actress for Sandrine Bonnaire. Her most successful work is her stylistic and thematic progress, a work that challenges the boundaries of documentary and fiction and provoking a reaction in the viewers to reconsider their social responsibility. She was the first woman to receive the honorary Oscar in 2015.

For the last ten years she was filming poetic autobiographical films-essays where she documented her farewell to the world, like The Beaches of Agnès (2008), through Faces, Places (2017), created together with the French muralist JR. This collaboration started as a photographic project documenting the French villages which turned into a kind of anthem for wonderful meetings and friendships. With the last one, Varda by Agnès, which had its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in 2019, showed that she had the last word in both art and life.