"I am a woman," began director Agnès Varda in an interview with Indiewire, "working with her intuition and trying to be intelligent. It's like a stream of feelings, intuition, and joy of discovering things. Finding beauty where it's maybe not. Seeing."
This keen intuition and curiosity defined Varda's 60-plus years of filmmaking, and placed her among the most important directors of the 20th century.
Born in Belgium in 1929, Varda died in Paris on Friday just short of her 91st birthday. While her films, which are typically in the French language, have remained somewhat obscure for American audiences, she is frequently described as being the "godmother of the French New Wave," a movement that broke with the Hollywood studio system and would eventually exemplify the theory of the director as the primary author of a movie. Varda's 1955 debut, La Pointe Courte, was so cheaply made that she couldn't even pay the cast and crew; its low-budget, experimental style predated similar giants of the movement, like Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960) and Alain Resnais' Hiroshima mon amour (1959). Modern directors as varied as Barry Jenkins and Edgar Wright have cited her as an inspiration.
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With more than 40 feature-length films and shorts — a notably prolific career for a woman filmmaker in the 20th century — Varda is impossible to put in a box. Her work ranged from the fiction film Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), a strange and beautiful work that grapples with the looming threat of mortality, to documentary films like The Gleaners and I (2000), in which Varda explores harvest and waste in various forms. But regardless of if she was working in a narrative or documentary style, all of Varda's work feels deeply emotional and personal; to have seen one of her movies, you feel, is to have seen her.
To those that did have the privilege of meeting Varda in person, such qualities were reportedly only more defined. Wonderfully approachable, Varda exuded spirit and joy, the kind that would spark her to make delightful statements like, "I've always loved polka dots. Ah, oui. It is a joyful shape, the polka dot. It is alive." But one cannot appreciate happiness without also having met its opposite. In recent years, Varda spoke of grappling with the emotions that come with a long memory: "I'm inside my memories the same way I'm inside my everyday life," she told The A.V. Club. "I am sometimes melancholy, which is not the same. Sometimes I feel sad, but this is not nostalgia, because I don't want time to come back."
When addressing her own mortality, a frequent topic in her work, last fall, Varda emphasized to The Guardian that she was not afraid of dying. She even looked forward to it, she said, "because then that will be that." It was the sort of contented and humorous statement Varda's fans had come to expect.
To celebrate her life, here is a short primer on how to acquaint yourself with the director's magnificent body of work.
1. Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)
Where to watch: Kanopy (subscriptions available for free with your library card at participating libraries)
Varda's second film, Cléo from 5 to 7, is also one of her best. The feature follows a singer (Corinne Marchand) over the course of several hours as she awaits the results of a biopsy. Although Cléo frequently gets folded into the French New Wave, it also exposes Varda's particular, individual style; as critic Roger Ebert wrote, "While many early New Wave films had a jaunty boldness of style, Varda in this film shows a sensibility to subtly developing emotions." Sharp-eyed cinephiles will recognize a cameo by none other than Varda's friend, a dashing young Jean-Luc Godard.
2. Black Panthers (1968)
Where to watch: Amazon
In 1968, Varda shot footage at a protest in Oakland following the arrest of Huey Newton. Her resulting short film, Black Panthers, includes interviews with Newton himself and demonstrates Varda's sharp interest in politics. The content at the time was so inflammatory that a French television network refused to show it, with Varda saying censors feared the movie would "reawaken" the anger of the May '68 French student protests.
3. The Gleaners and I (2000)
Where to watch: Kanopy, Amazon
Although much of Varda's work plays with elements of memoir, The Gleaners and I is a particularly autobiographical work. In it, Varda wields a digital camera to capture the lives of French harvesters — both of crops, but also of refuse. From dumpster-divers to oyster pickers, Varda explores what it means to collect what others have chosen to leave behind and, of course, in doing so she becomes a gleaner of images and moments. Varda, though, saw it the other way around, telling journalists at the film's New York premiere "I'm something of a leftover myself." The New York Times critic to record the comment was right in his amendment to her statement: "This was a charming bit of modesty. She's a treasure."
4. Faces Places (2017)
Where to watch: Netflix, Kanopy
At the age of 89, Varda joined forces with French visual artist JR for one of the most heartwarming road movies ever made. Traveling the French countryside, Varda recorded JR's work, which involves taking and then displaying larger-than-life portraits of his subjects. But the film is more than a catalog of an artist's process; it is also a record of her encounters with JR's subjects. While frequently tender — in one particularly memorable scene, JR and Varda visit the Louvre to recreate a moment in Godard's Band of Outsiders, with JR pushing Varda in a wheelchair — the film also carries Varda's sadness. It is an emotionally complicated documentary, in this regard, and one that moved me to tears. It urgently needs to be seen.
