Essential Viewing: the Films of Agnès Varda

The reason why it is essential to sing the praises and recommend the films of Agnès Varda — even when there’s no anniversary or birthday or award to celebrate or death to mourn — is that her work is consistently exceptional yet criminally underseen. Varda has her fair share of admirers and retrospectives, but I’m not sure she has enough new viewers, fresh eyes and ears and bodies to communicate with.

There’s her first film, La Pointe Courte, an odd and expansive piece of cinema that seems to reconstruct time as it moves through it with the precarious marriage of a young couple entered in step with the daily trials of a rural village. And her most recent film: Agnès Varda: From Here to There, a series of shorts that follow Varda on her travels and personal investigations as a filmmaker, photographer, and, one could even say, illusionist. There are the classics: Cléo from 5 to 7, Le Bonheur, and Vagabond. Her documentary features, The Gleaners and I and The Beaches of Agnès, which is autobiography and memoir but no less playful and imaginative than her work with Jane Birkin—Jane B. for Agnes V., an experiment in biographical documentary and staged fiction, and Kung-Fu master!, in which Birkin becomes attracted to a 14 year-old boy played by Varda’s son. There’s much more that I haven’t mentioned, and yet still a rather small, specific set of films, each with their own set of inventive approaches united by Varda’s ability to give as much life to unreality as reality.

Still from Cleo from 5 to 7 (1961).

Varda is also a self-described feminist who indeed has made, and, at age 88, continues to make, films that deal in various feminisms. Cléo from 5 to 7 takes on woman’s health and autonomy, and is often cited as a seminal feminist film. And her feminism isn’t only informed by her own white, French middle class circumstances. While living in L.A., she made a short documentary, Black Panthers, which followed the arrest of Huey Newton. The documentary is notable for its willingness to listen both to the testimony of Black Panther Party members and to the society they were trying to change. Varda envelops the camera in their world, and rather than positioning the Panthers as aggressors or outsiders, she centers them and allows their movements—both physical and political—to inform her own. She would later say:

The Black Panthers were the first to say, “We want to make the rules, the theory.” And that’s what made me aware of the woman situation. A lot of good men had been thinking for us. Marx did. Engels did…. Yet maybe we need to get through Marx, for Marx doesn’t give the keys and answers for us women…

What Varda has offered is not just a firm place in women’s history—La Pointe Courte is widely recognized as the first narrative film to break away from classical French cinema and as a precursor to the male-saturated French New Wave—but also an unmatchable body of work that bears endless surprises, creative and personal inspiration, and emotional generosity. These are films that manage to think and play in the same frame, that do not preach, pontificate, or bombard, but again, listen and ask questions. They are films that delight in visual and linguistic patterns and repetitions and that pursue the unexpected rather than try to steamroll over it. I was delighted to find out that it is in the editing room where Varda finds that her films take on meaning—she’s a gestural, hands-on filmmaker.

Photograph from Black Panthers (1968).

Varda experiments without alienating those for whom narrative is comforting. The Beaches of Agnès follows no known template, but still manages to welcome you into its terms, using documentary, archival film, photography, painting, and staged scenarios to express not only facts, but, more importantly, the feelings of Varda’s life. Cinévardaphoto, which brings together three short films that heavily or even exclusively incorporate photo stills, is a journey in thought and expression that asks you to pay attention to oddities and curiosities as if the world depended on them—and you do, and it does. It’s not surprising that, like Kanye West, one of Varda’s biggest influences is Picasso.

Varda’s work not only changed my idea of what cinema could be, but also how it could come to be. She didn’t go to film school, did not spend time training on film crews, and had not seen that many films until after she began making her own. This is to say, Varda was making films without fear that she was not as equipped, well-versed, or established as the men working around her. She is within a legacy that has initiated Ava DuVernay, who worked as a publicist before writing and directing I Will Follow, and Amy Semeitz, the writer and director of Sun Don’t Shine (and now co-writer and director of the TV series The Girlfriend Experience), who worked odd jobs for years while she made short films.

Go see these films. They can be streamed on sites like Fandor, Hulu, and Netflix, and found in video stores and online. They are films that were made without permission, by their own rules, and with their own theory, and are all the better for it.

Header image: Still from The Beaches of Agnès (2008), via Tumblr.