The photographer who made the first French New Wave film and never stopped — a Left Bank director whose sixty-year career ran from La Pointe Courte to an honorary Oscar, the first given to a woman director.
Agnès Varda made what is widely counted as the first film of the French New Wave — La Pointe Courte, in 1955, before Truffaut or Godard reached a feature — and kept working for another sixty-four years. Trained as a photographer, she led the movement's Left Bank wing, wrote her films as she shot them in a method she called cinécriture, and moved freely between fiction and documentary.[1]
From a studio on the rue Daguerre she directed Cléo from 5 to 7, Vagabond, The Gleaners and I, and Faces Places, married the director Jacques Demy, and outlived nearly everyone she had started with. In 2017 the Academy gave her an honorary Oscar, the first awarded to a woman director; she died in Paris in 2019, still releasing films.
She was born Arlette Varda on 30 May 1928 in Ixelles, on the edge of Brussels, and changed her first name to Agnès at eighteen. In Paris she studied art history at the École du Louvre and photography at the École des Beaux-Arts, and from 1951 to 1961 worked as the official photographer for Jean Vilar's Théâtre National Populaire. She came to cinema from the still image rather than from the cinema clubs — by her own account she had seen only a handful of films when she made her first.[2]
At twenty-six, with almost no film experience, Varda directed La Pointe Courte in the fishing quarter of Sète, on the Mediterranean coast where she had spent part of the war. The film cuts between a couple working through their marriage and a near-documentary portrait of the village and its fishermen. The young Alain Resnais edited it.[2]
Its loose structure, location shooting, and refusal of studio polish arrived four years before the movement broke, and critics have counted it ever since as the New Wave's first film — made by someone outside the Cahiers du cinéma circle that would soon take the credit. It gave Varda a claim the rest of the movement could not: she was there first.[1]
Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) is the film most people reach her through. It follows a pop singer across two hours of a Paris afternoon, close to real time, as she waits for the results of a cancer test — moving from the Right Bank to a park on the Left, from vanity toward attention to the world. Godard and Anna Karina appear in a silent comic short screened inside it. The film made Varda a name beyond France and stands with Breathless and The 400 Blows among the movement's landmarks.[3]
Varda belonged to the New Wave's Left Bank wing — Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Jacques Demy — older than the Cahiers directors, formed in photography, journalism, and the theatre, drawn to essayistic and literary films. In 1962 she married Demy, the group's romantic, whose Umbrellas of Cherbourg would be sung from beginning to end. They stayed together until his death in 1990.[1]
Her own films of the period kept crossing between registers: Le Bonheur (1965), a bright and unsettling study of a happy adulterer; Daguerréotypes (1976), a documentary of the shopkeepers on her own rue Daguerre; One Sings, the Other Doesn't (1977), which followed two women across the decade of the French abortion-rights fight. In 1977 she founded her production company, Ciné-Tamaris, at the same address.[2]
Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi, 1985) reconstructs the last weeks of a young drifter found frozen in a ditch, told backward through the people who met her. It won the Golden Lion at Venice and is often called her strongest fiction film. After Demy died in 1990 she filmed his childhood in Jacquot de Nantes, and increasingly turned to first-person documentary.[2]
Shooting on early digital cameras, she made The Gleaners and I (2000), on the people who live off what others discard, and The Beaches of Agnès (2008), a self-portrait built from the shorelines of her life. Faces Places (2017), a road film made with the photographer JR, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary when she was 89.[2]
Late recognition arrived in full: an honorary Palme d'or at Cannes in 2015, and in 2017 an Academy Honorary Award — the first ever given to a woman director. Her final film, Varda by Agnès (2019), was a filmed lecture on her own method, cinécriture, delivered as a summing-up.[4]
Agnès Varda died of cancer at home in Paris on 29 March 2019, at 90, still working. She was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery, on the Left Bank whose cinema she had helped begin.[4]
Varda came to film from a stills camera and kept using one for seventy years. She trained in photography at the École des Beaux-Arts and at the Vaugirard photography school, and from 1951 she was the official photographer of the Théâtre National Populaire, Jean Vilar's company at the Palais de Chaillot.[2]
She held the post for about ten years, photographing rehearsals, productions and actors including the young Gérard Philipe and Maria Casarès. It was a working job with a company that wanted serious theatre in front of ordinary audiences, and the politics of that stayed with her.[4]
She had seen very few films when she made her first one. By her own account she had watched perhaps twenty in her life, which is why La Pointe Courte obeys almost none of the conventions: she did not know what they were.[4]
In 1975 Varda had a small son and did not want to leave him for a shoot, so she made a film that could not physically travel far from her front door.
She ran an electrical cable from the flat at 86 rue Daguerre to power the camera and lights. The cable was ninety metres long, and that became the film. She shot only what lay inside a ninety-metre radius of her own doorstep: the baker, the butcher, the ironmonger, the hairdresser, and the couple in the perfume shop who barely spoke.[4]
Daguerréotypes is a portrait of one short stretch of a Paris street and the shopkeepers who had stood in the same doorways for decades. The constraint was domestic and the result is one of the most exact things anyone has filmed about ordinary work.[4]
Varda and Jacques Demy went to Los Angeles in 1967, when Demy was making a film for Columbia, and stayed on and off until 1970.[2]
She used the time. Black Panthers, made in 1968, is a half-hour documentary shot in Oakland around the rallies to free Huey Newton, and it takes the party seriously on its own terms at a moment when American television was not doing so. French television commissioned it and then declined to broadcast it.[4]
She also made Lions Love, a loose feature about three people sharing a Hollywood house, and Uncle Yanco, about finding a Greek relative living on a houseboat in Sausalito. The California films are the least seen part of her work and among the freest.[2]
From about 2003 Varda worked as much in galleries as in cinemas, and called herself an old film-maker turned young visual artist.
She showed Patatutopia at the Venice Biennale in 2003, in the Utopia Station section rather than the French pavilion: a three-screen projection of sprouting, decaying potatoes, at which she greeted visitors dressed as one. The potatoes had come out of The Gleaners and I, where she had filmed heart-shaped ones left behind after harvest.[4]
She built cabins out of strips of her own films, so that the light coming through the walls of the shelter is the print of Le Bonheur or of The Creatures. It is a literal version of what the late work was doing anyway: taking material she already had and finding another use for it.
Born Arlette Varda on 30 May in Ixelles, Belgium.
Official photographer for Jean Vilar's Théâtre National Populaire in Paris.
Becomes the official photographer of Jean Vilar's Théâtre National Populaire, a post she holds for about ten years.
Directs La Pointe Courte, edited by Alain Resnais — widely counted the first French New Wave film.
Cléo from 5 to 7 makes her name; marries Jacques Demy.
Le Bonheur, Daguerréotypes, and One Sings, the Other Doesn't; founds Ciné-Tamaris on the rue Daguerre.
Makes Black Panthers in Oakland. French television commissions it and then declines to broadcast it.
Makes Lions Love and Uncle Yanco during the California years with Jacques Demy.
Makes Daguerréotypes entirely within a ninety-metre radius of her front door, the length of the cable powering the camera.
Vagabond wins the Golden Lion at Venice.
Films Demy's childhood in Jacquot de Nantes, a year after his death.
The Gleaners and I and The Beaches of Agnès mark her turn to first-person documentary.
Shows Patatutopia in the Utopia Station section of the Venice Biennale, and greets visitors dressed as a potato.
Faces Places is nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar; she receives an Academy Honorary Award, the first for a woman director.
Releases Varda by Agnès; dies of cancer in Paris on 29 March, at 90; buried in Montparnasse Cemetery.
Film
Agnès Varda's second feature follows a pop singer through ninety near-real-time minutes of a Paris afternoon as she waits for a medical result that may be cancer. Corinne Marchand's Cléo begins the film as a superstitious beauty watched by everyone and ends it seeing the city — and herself — clearly. A landmark of the Left Bank New Wave and one of the founding films of the female gaze, it is the film most viewers reach Varda through.
Married to · 1962–1990
Married in 1962 and together until Demy's death in 1990. Two filmmakers of the movement's Left Bank wing; after he died she reconstructed his childhood in Jacquot de Nantes (1991) and tended his work for the rest of her life.
Film movement · c. 1958–1968
Her debut feature La Pointe Courte (1955) is widely counted as the first New Wave film, made before the Cahiers directors reached features. She led the movement's Left Bank wing — older, drawn from photography and the other arts, more essayistic — alongside Resnais, Marker, and Demy. No end year: she kept making films into 2019.
A Belgian-French filmmaker (1928–2019) regarded as a founder of the French New Wave and the leading figure of its Left Bank wing. A trained photographer, she directed fiction and documentary across more than sixty years and in 2017 became the first woman director to receive an honorary Academy Award.
Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), Le Bonheur (1965), One Sings, the Other Doesn't (1977), Vagabond (1985), The Gleaners and I (2000), The Beaches of Agnès (2008), and Faces Places (2017). Her debut, La Pointe Courte (1955), is often called the first New Wave film.
It is widely counted as such. Varda made it in 1955, four years before the movement's breakthrough, and its location shooting and loose structure anticipated what the Cahiers du cinéma directors would do later — though Varda herself came from outside that circle.
Yes. She married the director Jacques Demy — known for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg — in 1962, and they remained together until his death in 1990. After he died she reconstructed his childhood in the film Jacquot de Nantes (1991).
She died of cancer at home in Paris on 29 March 2019, aged 90, still making films. She is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery.
A documentary Varda made in 1975 about the shopkeepers of her own street. She had a small son and did not want to leave him, so she ran a cable from her flat at 86 rue Daguerre to power the camera. The cable was ninety metres long, and she filmed only what lay within that radius of her doorstep.
Yes, and she stayed one for seventy years. She trained at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Vaugirard photography school, and from 1951 was the official photographer of Jean Vilar's Théâtre National Populaire for about ten years. By her own account she had seen perhaps twenty films in her life when she directed her first.
Black Panthers, a half-hour documentary shot in Oakland in 1968 around the rallies to free Huey Newton, which French television commissioned and then refused to broadcast. Also Lions Love, about three people sharing a Hollywood house, and Uncle Yanco, about a Greek relative on a houseboat in Sausalito.
A great deal of it from about 2003, when she began calling herself an old film-maker turned young visual artist. She showed Patatutopia at the Venice Biennale that year, in the Utopia Station section: a three-screen projection of sprouting potatoes, at which she greeted visitors dressed as one. She also built cabins whose walls are strips of her own films.
Associated with · 1955
Her debut feature La Pointe Courte (1955) is widely counted as the first New Wave film, made before the Cahiers directors reached features. She led the movement's Left Bank wing — older, drawn from photography and the other arts, more essayistic — alongside Resnais, Marker, and Demy. No end year: she kept making films into 2019.
Married to · 1962–1990
Married in 1962 and together until Demy's death in 1990. Two filmmakers of the movement's Left Bank wing; after he died she reconstructed his childhood in Jacquot de Nantes (1991) and tended his work for the rest of her life.
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