In this art installation, a cabin has been built out of film reels. Inside the cabin are potted sunflowers. They sit on top of wooden pallets. — Une Cabane de Cinema: La serre du Bonheur | 2018

A woman in a red jacket with short white hair stands in front of a gigantic photographic portrait of herself that's been pasted to the brick facade of a house. On the right side of the picture, you can see the scaffolding that was used to paste up the photo, along with two workers. — Faces Places | 2017

Two women in a courtyard hold up either end of a large, 19th-century French painting of gleaners gathering the remains of a harvest under a stormy sky. — The Gleaners and I | 2000

Color still from Agnès Varda's 1988 film “Jane B. par Agnès V.” showing Jane Birkin in period costume in a tableau vivant of Titian's 1538 painting, Venus of Urbino. The main female figure is in the foreground, reclining horizontally across the picture frame. She's on her side, facing the viewer with a direct gaze, propped up against a large pale yellow silk pillow on the left with her hands poised behind her head. She has long brown hair, her elbows are flared out. She is wearing a long, loose, off-white translucent dress with a pale red sachet around the waist. Two women in long period dresses are beyond, focusing on a task, and a dog with mottled white and brown fur and long, soft ears sits at her feet. Its gaze is also trained directly at the viewer. — Jane B. par Agnès V. | 1988

Color photograph of a younger woman with uncombed long brown hair sitting in the center of the frame; there is a reddish dirt field beyond to her right bathed in sunlight, and she is leaning again a dark concrete column on the left; the column and the woman are in shadows and the woman's back is to the sun; her eyes are downturned with pursed brows, lost in thought and looking at a baguette that she is holding in her dirt-stained hands; she is dressed in dark clothing and leaning against an overfull backpackshe is holding a baguette — Vagabond | 1985

A man and a woman dressed for a wedding lean out of a window. Their figures are overshadowed by a huge mural of a man and a woman on the wall of the building the couple are in. The portraits in the mural and detailed and highly realistic. — Mur Murs | 1981

Thérèse Liotard, who has straight dark hair, and Valérie Mairesse, whose red hair is curly, lounge next to one another on a bed in a still from Agnès Varda's 1977 film, "One Sings, the Other Doesn't." They are propped up against pillows with lace covers. Both women are relaxed and happy. Thérèse Liotard, who plays Pauline, is smoking. Valérie Mairesse, who plays Pauline, is visibly pregnant. Her hand rests on her belly. — One Sings, the Other Doesn't | 1977

Three women stand next to one another at a 1968 Black Panther demonstration in Oakland, California in a still from Agnès Varda's 1968 film "Black Panthers." The woman in the center is speaking and gesturing with her hands; she has an afro and is wearing a leather jacket open over a Black Panther tee-shirt. The woman to her left has on a head covering and dark glasses; her arms are crossed in front of her. The woman to her right has an afro and is wearing a blue turtleneck and lightly-tinted glasses; her hands are tucked into the pockets of her tan jacket. Two men are standing behind them and looking back at what looks like a crowd of people in the distance. — Black Panthers | 1968

Very chromatically saturated color photograph of a man with dark hair in a light green button up shirt and pale pale pants leaning over with outstretched arms posed to pick up or embrace a woman with short cropped red hair who is lying in a field of grass foreshortened with the top of her head facing the viewer and her feet off in the distance; she is wearing a saturated blue dress with mustard colored patterning, and several people can be seen beyond them as if watching or witnessing the scene; only the legs of the bystanders is visible. — Le bonheur | 1965

Black and white portrait photograph of an older woman with her full face filing the frame, her soft features and eyes are turned slightly up and she is looking away beyond the viewer; she has a loosely knit dark patterned scarf wrapped around her head so that only the flesh of her face is visible, with small locks of hair framing her forehead; her eyes are in the shadows of her heavy brow and she is lost in thought. — L'Opéra-Mouffe | 1955

In a still from Agnès Varda’s 1955 black-and-white film La Pointe Courte, a young couple is inside the beached remains of an old hull of a ship. The woman balances herself on the sloping bottom. The man has anchored himself against the side wall and is reaching out to her. — La Pointe Courte | 1955

Agnès Varda, "Cléo from 5 to 7" (1962), image courtesy the Criterion Collection

Agnès Varda

1928 - 2019

I can’t see them well, they’re far away. But I can see they’re birdwomen.
Agnès Varda in Face Places (co-directed with JR, 2017)

Biography

Agnès Varda was a French film director, photographer, and visual artist. She was born Arlette Varda in Belgium to a French mother and a Greek father. Shortly before Brussels surrendered to German forces during World War II (May 28, 1940), she and her family fled to France. At first, they lived on a boat in her mother’s hometown of Sète. Before the war ended, they moved to Paris.

When Varda was 18, she changed her name to Agnès. She received a degree in literature and psychology from the Sorbonne, where she studied with Gaston Bachelard, whose ideas, she says, she didn’t always understand. Intending to become a museum curator, she took classes in art history at the École du Louvre. Yet she was not entirely sure of her way forward. She “ran away” to Corsica without telling anyone.” She spent three months working on fishing boats, during which time she decided to become a photographer.

Early career as a photographer

She enrolled at the Vaugirard School of Photography. Almost immediately, she began to earn a living taking pictures of families and special events. Along with plying her trade as a professional photographer, Varda explored its artistic and creative potential. When her friend Jean Vilar opened Théâtre Nationale Populaire, she became its official photographer. She held this position for 10 years, from 1951 to 1961, during which time she received increasing recognition as a photographer.

As she was building her career as a photographer, she made her first film, La Pointe Courte, in 1955. Then 27, Varda describes writing a script seemingly out of nowhere because she “wanted words”. She’d not seen more than ten films at that point in her life. Nor had she studied filmmaking, or, as was customary, served as an assistant in the industry. Yet, defying all expectation, she shot her first film.

“Godmother” of the French New Wave

This film likewise broke many of the rules and conventions of filmmaking. Its structure, based on that of William Faulkner’s novel The Wild Palms, juxtaposes two story lines. The story lines have nothing in common except that they are set in the same place. The first story is presented by professional actors in a self-consciously theatrical mode. The second story, rooted in real life, is presented by locals with no training in acting.

Thus, three years before what is considered by some to be the first French New Wave film, Claude Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge, Varda created an utterly unique film in La Pointe Courte that exemplified many of the characteristics of New Wave cinema: location shooting, de-emphasized plot, autobiographical inflection, long takes, and a general spirit of experimentation. As a result, Varda is variously called the mother, grandmother, and godmother of the French New Wave.

Over the next 64 years, Varda went on to make many more films. Some were fictions and some were documentaries. However, as in La Pointe Courte, there was always an evocation of the “real” in her fictions and a fanciful element in her nonfictions.

Her works are incredibly diverse in their subject matter and approach. However, throughout her career, she was concerned with the lives of women and the disenfranchised, with time and the cultural moment, and with reality and representation.

Agnès Varda’s macular degeneration and post-macular work

Varda was diagnosed with macular degeneration about 15 years before she passed away in 2019 at the age of 90. Her loss of vision corresponded to what she called her “third life,” when, as she used to say, she “changed from an old filmmaker into a young visual artist.”

Her first exhibition as a late-life visual artist, Patatutopia, was in 2003 at the Venice Biennale. A wrinkled potato, laced with sprouts, seems to breathe at the center of a triptych of similar images. Thousands of potatoes had been poured on the ground in front of the video display. Varda, who saw these heart-shaped potatoes as a talismanic representation of herself, dressed up as a potato to greet visitors to the exhibit.

In the following years, Varda developed 40 exhibitions that often involved “recycling” her former work in startlingly inventive ways.

At the same time, with the help of her daughter, Rosalie Varda, she made a number of critically acclaimed autobiographical films while suffering from vision loss. These included The Beaches of Agnès (2008), Faces Places (co-directed with JR, 2017), and Varda by Agnès (2019).