Biography: life and films
The fact that she originally hailed from Belgium notwithstanding, Agnès
Varda is one the great auteurs of French cinema. Not only was she one
of the few women directors of the French New Wave, she also had an immense
influence on the ethos and aesthetics of the movement through her earliest
films. Actively engaged with the social concerns of her day, her films
both bear witness to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and '70s and express
her deeply held feminist convictions. Her work compromises fictional
dramas and documentaries, and often the two are tastefully melded together
to create a style of film that is uniquely her own. Not only is Agnès
Varda an inspired filmmaker, she is also an accomplished photographer.
Her ability to compose striking visuals and her female perspective set her
apart from her Nouvelle Vague contemporaries and make her films refreshingly
different.
Agnès Varda was born in Ixelles, Belgium, on 30th May 1928.
Originally, she was called Arlette, but she changed her name to Agnès
when she was 18. She was one of five children, the daughter of a Greek
engineer and French mother. To escape the German bombing of Belgium
at the start of WWII, the Varda family moved to the French port of Sète
in 1940, and this is where the young Arlette spent most of her teen years.
She then went to Paris to study photography at the École des beaux-arts
and art history at the École du Louvre. She found work as a
photographer at the Théâtre National Populaire (TNP), and this
is how she came to meet Philippe Noiret and Silvia Monfort, who agreed to
take the lead roles in her first film.
La Pointe courte (named after the small French fishing village where
it was filmed) is almost certainly the most important film that Varda directed.
Noiret and Monfort play a couple who are on the point of splitting up, and
their fictional drama overlays what looks like a raw documentary on everyday
life captured
sur-le-vif in the fishing village. Made on a shoestring
budget, and shot on location, it was released in 1954 and had a marked impression
on several directors of the French New Wave era, most notably Alain Resnais,
who edited the film. By the time Varda made her next film,
Cléo de 5 à 7
(1961), the French New Wave had arrived in force. Combining the part
fictional drama, part documentary form of her previous film, Varda serves
up a solemn study in mortality, depicting a young singer wandering around
Paris whilst awaiting the results of a medical examination to confirm whether
or not she has a terminal illness.
In between making her first two films, Agnès Varda met Jacques Demy,
who made his own sensational directing debut in 1961 with
Lola. Together, Varda and Demy
belonged to what is now referred to as the
Left Bank (Rive Gauche)
strand of the French New Wave (as opposed to the
Cahiers du cinéma
strand comprising Truffaut, Godard et al.), which was strongly influenced
by the
Nouveau Roman and had left-leaning political concerns.
Demy and Varda married in 1962 and had a son, Mathieu Demy, who would become
a successful actor and director. Varda also has a daughter, Rosalie,
from a previous relationship.
Le Bonheur (1965) was Agnès
Varda's first colour film, a cheery acknowledgement that the sexual revolution
that was well under way by the mid-1960s. It is a curious film that
appears to champion both marriage and free love, although the apparent dichotomy
is seen to be a false one once its author's feminist point hits home, namely
that it should be up to the
woman, not society, to decide how she
lives her life. This film not only won the Prix Louis-Delluc in 1964,
it also received the Special Prize of the Jury at the 1965 Berlin International
Film Festival. After this, Varda made what is probably her strangest
film.
Les Créatures
(1966). Looking like a totally deranged compendium of excerpts randomly
lifted from Roman Polanski's early films, this odd flight of fancy sees Catherine
Deneuve and Michel Piccoli negotiating some kind of drug-induced dream experience.
With its weird symbolism and surreal digressions,
Les Créatures
is as baffling as it is beguiling.
In 1968, Varda moved to Los Angeles for a couple of years, and it was here
that she made the trashy hippy oddity
Lions Love (1969), as well as
several documentary shorts. Back in France, she reaffirmed her feminist
credentials, first by adding her name to the
Manifesto of the 343,
a declaration (published in Le Nouvel Observateur) by 343 women admitting
to having had an abortion (a criminal offence in France at the time), then
by making a strongly pro-feminist film -
L'Une chante, l'autre pas
(1977). She also founded her own film production company Cine-Tamaris.
In 1979, she was back in Los Angeles, to direct
Murs, murs (1981),
a documentary about murals, and
Documenteur (1981), a film drama starring
her own son, Mathieu Demy.
Varda's next significant film was
Sans toit ni loi (1985),
in which Sandrine Bonnaire (in the role that made her famous) plays a homeless
drifter locked in a downward spiral. With the story told from the perspectives
of several different characters, the film has the feel of an intricate puzzle
and the fact that the pieces do not quite fit together shows how subjective
and imperfect are our impressions of other people. This unusual but
engaging film was rewarded with the Golden Lion at the 1985 Venice Film Festival.
In 1988, Varda hooked up with Jane Birkin to make two fascinating portraits
of the actress,
Jane B. par Agnès V. and
Kung-Fu Master.
Jacques Demy's death in 1990 came as a blow to Agnès Varda, but rather
than quietly grieve the passing of her husband she was inspired to make a
personal tribute to him consisting of three remarkable films.
Jacquot de Nantes (1991)
is one of Varda's warmest films, a dramatised account of Demy's childhood
that is both highly informative and totally enchanting. This was followed
by
Les Demoiselles
ont eu 25 ans (1993), in which Varda returns to the town of Rochefort
and catches up with the contributors to one of Demy's best loved films, and
L'Univers de Jacques
Demy (1995), a wonderfully crafted portrait of the director and his
work. Now that she was in a nostalgic frame of mind, Varda then went
on to mark the centenary of the birth of cinema with
Les Cent et
Une Nuits de Simon Cinéma (1995). Despite its stellar
cast, this eccentric comedy failed to find an audience and was derided by
the critics.
Five years later, Agnès Varda won back her fans and silenced her detractors
with
Les Glaneurs
et la Glaneuse (2000), an irresistible documentary in which the director,
armed with her digital camera, tours France in search of people who make
their living by collecting things. Varda's love of people and her devotion
to her art shines through this idiosyncratic indulgence piece more than any
other film she made, and what it ultimately reveals is an intensely likeable
self-portrait of its author. It makes a worthy companion piece to her
next important work,
Les Plages d'Agnès (2008), an autobiographical
documentary that won the César for the Best Documentary in 2009.
Agnès Varda's immense contribution to cinema has been generously recognised
over the past few decades. She received an honorary César in
2001, and in 2009 she was awarded the Henri-Langlois Prize in honour of her
life's work. That same year, she was made a Commander of the Legion
of Honour. And, in 2015, the Cannes Film Festival paid tribute to her
with an Honorary Golden Palm. She died at her home in Paris on 29th March 2019, after suffering
from cancer. She is buried in Montparnasse cemetery
alongside her husband, Jacques Demy.
© James Travers 2017
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