Agnès Varda (born Arlette Varda; 30 May 1928 – 29 March 2019) was a Belgian-born French filmmaker, artist, and photographer.
Varda's work employed location shooting in an era when the limitations of sound technology made it easier and more common to film indoors, with constructed sets and painted backdrops of landscapes, rather than outdoors, on location. Her use of non-professional actors was also unconventional for 1950s French cinema. Varda's feature film debut was La Pointe Courte (1955), followed by Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), one of her most notable narrative films, Vagabond (1985), and Kung Fu Master (1988). Varda was also known for her work as a documentarian, with such works as Black Panthers (1968), The Gleaners and I (2000), The Beaches of Agnès (2008), Faces Places (2017), and her final film, Varda by Agnès (2019).
Filmmaker Martin Scorsese described Varda as "one of the Gods of Cinema". Among several other accolades, Varda received an Honorary Palme d'Or at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, becoming the first female filmmaker to win the award, a Golden Lion for Vagabond at the 1985 Venice Film Festival, a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for Faces Places. In 2001, she was honored with an Honorary César. In 2017, she became the first female director to win an Academy Honorary Award.
Varda was born Arlette Varda on 30 May 1928 in Ixelles, Brussels, Belgium, to Christiane (née Pasquet) and Eugène Jean Varda, an engineer. Her mother was from Sète, France, and her father was a member of a family of Greek refugees from Asia Minor in the Ottoman Empire. She was the third of five children. Varda legally changed her first name to Agnès at age 18.
She left Belgium with her family in 1940 for Sète, where she spent her teenage years and during World War II, she lived there on a boat with her family. Here started her life-long friendship with the sculptor Valentine Schlegel.
Varda studied art history at the École du Louvre and photography at the École des Beaux-Arts, before working as a photographer at the Théâtre National Populaire in Paris. Varda attended the Lycée et collège Victor-Duruy, and received a bachelor's degree in literature and psychology from the Sorbonne. She called her relocation to Paris "truly excruciating", saying it gave her "a frightful memory of my arrival in this grey, inhumane, sad city." She did not get along with her fellow students and called classes at the Sorbonne "stupid, antiquated, abstract, [and] scandalously unsuited for the lofty needs one had at that age."
Varda intended to become a museum curator, and studied art history at the École du Louvre, but decided to study photography at the Vaugirard School of Photography instead. She began her career as a still photographer before becoming one of the major voices of the Left Bank Cinema and the French New Wave. She maintained a fluid interrelationship between photographic and cinematic forms: "I take photographs or I make films. Or I put films in the photos, or photos in the films."
Varda discussed her beginnings with the medium of still photography: "I started earning a living from photography straight away, taking trivial photographs of families and weddings to make money. But I immediately wanted to make what I called 'compositions.' And it was with these that I had the impression I was doing something where I was asking questions with composition, form and meaning." In 1951, her friend Jean Vilar opened the Théâtre National Populaire and hired Varda as its official photographer. Before accepting her position there, she worked as a stage photographer for the Theatre Festival of Avignon. She worked at the Théâtre National Populaire for ten years from 1951 to 1961, during which time her reputation grew and she eventually obtained photo-journalist jobs throughout Europe.
Varda's still photography sometimes inspired her subsequent motion pictures. She recounted: "When I made my first film, La Pointe Courte—without experience, without having been an assistant before, without having gone to film school—I took photographs of everything I wanted to film, photographs that are almost models for the shots. And I started making films with the sole experience of photography, that's to say, where to place the camera, at what distance, with which lens and what lights?"
She later recalled another example:I made a film in 1982 called Ulysse, which is based on another photograph I took in 1954, one I'd made with the same bellows camera, and I started Ulysse with the words, 'I used to see the image upside down.' There's an image of a goat on the ground, like a fallen constellation, and that was the origin of the photograph. With those cameras, you'd frame the image upside down, so I saw Brassaï through the camera with his head at the bottom of the image.
In 2010, Varda joined the gallery Nathalie Obadia.
Varda's filmmaking career predates the French New Wave, but contains many elements specific to that movement. While working as a photographer, Varda became interested in making a film, although she stated that she knew little about the medium and had only seen around 20 films by the age of 25. She later said that she wrote her first screenplay "just the way a person writes his first book. When I'd finished writing it, I thought to myself: 'I'd like to shoot that script,' and so some friends and I formed a cooperative to make it." She found the filmmaking process difficult because it did not allow the same freedom as writing a novel; she said her approach was instinctive and feminine. In an interview with The Believer, Varda said that she wanted to make films that related to her time (in reference to La Pointe Courte), rather than focusing on traditions or classical standards.
Alternatively, taking a less mythologized approach, Varda can be seen as emerging as part of a very diverse and neglected galaxy of makers in France's postwar media ecosystem. This late-1940s and 1950s generation, deliberately obscured by the rhetorically assertive New Wave filmmakers of the 1960s, typically made commissioned short films, proto-essay films, and media of all kinds designed to foster media literacy among an engaged viewing citizenry. Key makers include Nicole Vèdres, Yannick Bellon, Chris Marker and Georges Franju. As Tim Palmer argues, re-placing Varda back among her actual postwar peers contextualizes how around "Varda's arrival we find pivotal craft idioms across mixed media: probing but non-hagiographic social engagements with shared memory, people and their places; commissioned texts that query and frequently challenge their own nominal goals; shorts and medium films that thrive in their subversive and sometimes experimental non-feature format."
Varda liked photography but was interested in moving into film. After spending a few days filming 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, Varda decided to shoot a feature film of her own, leaving the artistic direction in the hands of her partner Valentine Schlegel. Thus, in 1955, Varda's first film, La Pointe Courte, about an unhappy couple working through their relationship in a small fishing town, was released. The film is a stylistic precursor to the French New Wave. At the time, Varda was influenced by the philosophy of Gaston Bachelard, under whom she had once studied at the Sorbonne. "She was particularly interested in his theory of 'l'imagination des matières,' in which certain personality traits were found to correspond to concrete elements in a kind of psychoanalysis of the material world." This idea finds expression in La Pointe Courte as the characters' personality traits clash, shown through the opposition of objects such as wood and steel. To further her interest in character abstraction, Varda used two professional actors, Silvia Monfort and Philippe Noiret, combined with the residents of La Pointe Courte, to provide a realistic element that lends itself to a documentary aesthetic inspired by neorealism. Varda continued to use this combination of fictional and documentary elements in her films.