Big Italian card by Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2017. Photo: publicity still for Visages Villages / Faces Places (Agnès Varda, J.R., 2017). Sadly, Visages Villages did not win the Oscar for Best Documentary, but Agnès Varda (1928) was the most fabulously dressed person on the Oscars red carpet, "arriving on the scene sporting Gucci Mini Jardin de Rose pyjama-style pants and matching cardigan". The Slate editor went wild: "Add a pair of white sneakers, rose-colored glasses, and her usual two-tone hair, and you have yourself a bona fide trendsetter. I, for one, would not be caught dead tomorrow wearing anything else."
Chinese postcard. Corinne Marchand in Cléo de 5 à 7 / Cléo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962).
Chinese postcard. Scene from Jacquot de Nantes (Agnès Varda, 1991).
Chinese postcard. Still of JR in Visages villages (Agnès Varda, 2017).
Italian card by Cineteca Bologna for the section 'Documenti e documentari in anteprima Italiana' of Il Cinema Ritrovato XXXIII Edizione, 2019. Agnès Varda on the set of Varda par Agnès (Agnès Varda, 2019).
The starting point of the Nouvelle Vague
Agnès Varda was born Arlette Varda in 1928 in Ixelles, Belgium. She was the daughter of Christiane (Pasquet) and Eugène Jean Varda, an engineer. Her father was from a family of Greek refugees from Asia Minor. Her mother was French, from Sète. She legally changed her first name from Arlette to Agnès when she turned 18.
After studying photography, she became the official stills photographer for Jean Vilar's Théâtre National Populaire in Paris. She thus knew Philippe Noiret and Silvia Monfort, the main actors of her first film, La Pointe-Courte (1955). Varda liked photography but was interested in moving into film. She had filmed a few days in the small French fishing town of Sète, in the old fisherman's quarter of La Pointe Courte, for a terminally ill friend who could no longer visit on his own. After that, Varda decided to shoot a feature film of her own, leaving the artistic direction in the hands of her friend Valentine Schlegel.
The film follows the story of a couple who go to a small French fishing village to try to solve the problems of their deteriorating marriage. The director said she was inspired to create a film based on two different stories alternating with each other, from reading an American novel with a similar structure, 'Wild Palms' by William Faulkner. Varda made the film for roughly $14,000. All of the money went towards renting equipment and buying and processing film stock. None of the actors or crew members was paid. The film was edited by Varda's friend, filmmaker Alain Resnais. The film was immediately praised by Cahiers du Cinéma. Later critics considered the film to be the starting point of the Nouvelle Vague, the French New Wave film movement. Varda herself: "I was only 30. I had seen very few films, which, in a way, gave me both the naivety and the daring to do what I did."
La Pointe-Courte was a financial failure, and Varda made only short films for the next seven years. L'opéra-mouffe (1958), a film about the Rue Mouffetard street market, won an award at the 1958 Brussels Experimental Film Festival. Her next feature film, Cléo de 5 à 7 / Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), follows a pop singer (Corinne Marchand) through two extraordinary hours in which she awaits the results of a recent biopsy. The film is superficially about a woman coming to terms with her mortality, a common trope for Varda. On a deeper level, Cléo from 5 to 7 confronts the traditionally objectified woman by giving Cléo her own vision. She cannot be constructed through the gaze of others. The film was entered into the 1962 Cannes Film Festival. In 2019, Cléo from 5 to 7 was voted the second-greatest film directed by a woman (behind only Jane Campion's The Piano) in a BBC poll of 368 film experts from 84 countries.
Another highlight was the drama Le Bonheur / Happiness (1965) starring Jean-Claude Drouot. The film won two awards at the 15th Berlin International Film Festival, including the Jury Grand Prix. In 1967, she collaborated with Claude Lelouch, Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker on the documentary Far from Vietnam (1967), one of the first films to take a critical look at the Vietnam War. In 1969, she made the American experimental art film Lions Love (1969), which features Viva, Gerome Ragni and James Rado from 'Hair', NYC underground filmmaker Shirley Clarke, Andy Warhol and Jim Morrison.
French postcard by Bibliothéque nationale de France, 2003, no. CP 0344. Photo: Agnes Varda. Caption: Gérard Philipe and Jean Vilar, Suresnes, 1951.
Poster for Agnes Varda's film Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962), starring Corine Marchand. Filmhouse, Edinburgh, 2010. Photo: Paul van Yperen.
French postcard by Ciné-tamaris, 2013. Photo: Hélène Jeanbrau Ciné-tamaris. Catherine Deneuve, Jacques Demy and Françoise Dorléac on the set of Les Demoiselles de Rochefort / The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy, 1967). Caption: Rehearsal of a scene from the film, summer 1966. The office of the Mayor of Rochefort, in Place Colbert, was used as the setting for the twins' apartment.
French poster postcard by MK2 for Cine-Tamaris and Films A2. Poster: Yves Prince. Photo: Zoltan Jancso. Sandrine Bonnaire in Sans toit ni loi / Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985).
French postcard by tënk. Photo: Ciné-Tamaris. Agnès Varda in a publicity shot for Les glaneurs et la glaneuse / The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda, 2000). The postcard refers to the exhibition Viva Varda at the Cinémathèque française (11 October 2023 - 28 January 2024).
Idiosyncratic visual compositions and personal, often ironic commentary
Despite Agnès Varda's successes, like the feature film Sans toit ni loi / Vagabond (1985), financing her projects often remained a struggle. From this necessity, Varda developed an experimental virtue and turned increasingly to documentary filmmaking, which she combined with a deliberately subjective ‘cinécriture’. Her auteur documentaries broke with the sobriety of classical documentary film through idiosyncratic visual compositions and personal, often ironic commentary. Daguerréotypes / Daguerreotypes – People from My Street (1975) portrays the small-scale trade on her Rue Daguerre in Paris. Les glaneurs et la glaneuse / The Gleaners and I (2000) juxtaposes Varda’s own, age-spotted hands with potatoes that have grown into heart shapes.
Varda explicitly positioned herself on the side of those portrayed, whilst at the same time making her own position visible. Technically, she made use of the capabilities of compact digital cameras (a P200) to shoot in a more personal style and with a small team. In 1987, she made an unusual film portrait of Jane Birkin, Jane B. par Agnes V. / Jane Birkin, Jane B… like Birkin (1988), and in 1991, she adapted Jacques Demy’s biography into a film, Jacquot de Nantes (1991), as a tribute to him.
From 2003 onwards, she became actively involved in exhibitions as an installation artist; at the Venice Biennale, she made a self-deprecating appearance in a potato costume with Patatutopia. For Visages villages / Faces Places (2017), she travelled through French villages in a photo van with JR to make ‘ordinary’ people – from the postman to the goat’s cheese maker to the factory worker – visible in larger-than-life portraits on building façades, in a declared effort to ‘make people bigger’.
Varda continued to work as a director until shortly before her death. In 2019, her documentary Varda par Agnès was screened out of competition at the Berlinale, where Varda was also awarded the Berlinale Camera, the festival’s honorary prize. She had already received the Honorary Oscar for her life’s work in 2017. Agnès Varda died of cancer in Paris in March 2019 at the age of 90. She was laid to rest at the Cimetière Montparnasse in Paris.
A few months after Varda’s death, a photograph showing her during the filming of her feature film debut, La Pointe Courte (1955), served as the template for the official festival poster of the 72nd Cannes International Film Festival. Agnès Varda was married to Jacques Demy from 1962 till his death in 1990. She had a daughter, Rosalie Varda, with French comedian Antoine Bourseiller, and a son, Matthieu Demy, with Jacques Demy. Her bowl-shaped bob haircut was her trademark.
French postcard by Languedoc-Roussillon Cinéma for their project 'Un site web autour du film d'Agnès Varda Sans toit ni loi (1985)'. Sandrine Bonnaire and Agnes Varda on the set of Sans toit ni loi (Agnes Varda, 1985).
Romanian postcard by Casa Filmului Acin. Photo: Jane Birkin in Jane B. par Agnès V. (Agnès Varda, 1987).
Chinese postcard. Photo: publicity shot for Les glaneurs et la glaneuse / The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda, 2000).
Agnès Varda. Wall Art at the Cineteca di Bologna. Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna, 2019. Photo: Paul van Yperen.
Rosalie Varda at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2019. Introducing her mother's last film, Agnès par Varda. Bologna, Italia, 2019. Photo: Paul van Yperen.
Sources: Wikipedia (German, French and English) and IMDb.
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