THE BRITISH FILM CRITIC and documentary filmmaker John Grierson famously noted that when a director dies he becomes a photographer. Grierson meant that when a filmmaker runs out of ideas, he takes the easy way out, he falls back on visual beauty. The French filmmaker Agnès Varda, who spent a lifetime turning men’s ideas upside down, reversed that. She started as a photographer, then became a film director, and in her later years ended up an installation artist. Varda refused to yield to linear notions of what a filmmaker’s career should look like and where or when it should end.
Her contribution to film history is not just her status as “the godmother of the French New Wave,” nor her centrality to the history of women auteurs, a history she in a real sense instantiated. It is her persistence, and the high level of the ideas behind her work, that made her one of the cinema’s principal creators and prime artists. Varda started with visual beauty and never let it go.
She began young. She was already an established photographer when she made her first film, La Pointe Courte, a fully independent production, in 1954. Her last film, Varda by Agnès, came out in 2019, the year she died at ninety. In between, she was that rare modernist originator whose spiritual daughters were also her peers. In France, the filmmaking careers of Chantal Akerman, Catherine Breillat, and Claire Denis, all born about twenty years after Varda, would have been impossible without her as model and standard. Marguerite Duras, fourteen years Varda’s senior, didn’t make a transition from writing to film directing until the late 1960s, around the time Akerman began making films. (Does it mean anything that all three women were only five feet tall?)
Varda survived both Duras and Akerman, notably unembittered and aware she was still relevant. “She died while part of the cultural conversation,” as the Irish Times put it in an obituary. Her career had lasted sixty-five years and bridged two centuries, encompassing many developments in the medium and seismic cultural shifts in both France and the US, the two countries in which she worked. Her innate sense of herself as unstoppable allowed her to gently mock tragic female creators who couldn’t navigate these changes with her own sense of ease and her willingness to fight.
For Lions Love (. . . and Lies) (1969), set in Los Angeles, Varda hired the American filmmaker Shirley Clarke to play a composite Agnès-Shirley. In a scene in the movie, Varda had Clarke enact her suicide, supposedly in response to her Hollywood movie failing to get off the ground. On camera, Clarke refused to perform a scene in which she takes her life, so Varda took the part herself, for just that one scene, breaking the fourth wall, swallowing fake Seconals, and lying on the bed in a play-acted death pose. In reality, a film Varda was going to make in Hollywood had fallen through after a Columbia Pictures executive had denied her final cut, then pinched her cheek at the end of a meeting. Varda swatted his hand away and, far from getting depressed about it to the point of suicidal ideation, made Lions Love instead, outside the studio system.
It is significant that Mona’s death in Varda’s Vagabond (1985) is not a suicide but an accident, the outcome of her independence—and her neglect. Varda had, early on, resolved not to be neglected as an artist, no matter what else happened in her life. Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962), Varda’s first feature-length masterpiece and the film for which she is perhaps still best known, ends with Cléo reassured she will be able to survive the threat of cancer that has haunted her for the previous two hours (which the film fits into ninety minutes).
BY THE END, Varda had more fans than ever, and “had assumed the position of subversive grandma,” as Carrie Rickey points out in her compact, complete, and highly enjoyable book A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda, the first—and much-needed—full-length biography of Varda in English. Rickey quotes the actor Jessica Chastain speaking at a Hollywood Oscars ceremony for Varda: as with tragedy and comedy, “the difference between an iconoclast and an icon is time.”
Like her peer in the art world Yayoi Kusama, who also became an installation artist and has, like Varda had, a fixation on polka dots, Varda achieved an iconic status that was meme-able and could be cartoon-like. She gave in to this caricatured version of herself on posters for her late films and in their credits sequences, sometimes dressing as a potato. Potatoes were a frequent subject of her photography, and prominent in The Gleaners and I, her 2000 documentary. Rickey explains how Varda identified with potatoes, seeing herself the “unconventionally shaped and spotted produce abandoned in the field.”
Varda’s late-in-life look was essential to this process and to her ongoing status as an artist in the digital age. In Rickey’s description of the look, Varda’s dress was aubergine, her leggings purple, and her slippers red, like the Pope’s. Except for the skullcap of silver gray at its crown, Varda’s hair and dress almost exactly matched.” By the early 2000s, Varda had become a wise elder, always ready with a witty remark, like John Waters or Paul Schrader in the US today.
How did Varda get there? She was lucky in an important way. She had a successful father, a Greek engineer whose parents had emigrated to Belgium, where Varda was born, and who had become wealthy in the shipping industry before dying while gambling at a roulette table in a Knokke-le-Zoute casino. After his death, already established as a photographer of “skill and style,” Varda convinced her mother to purchase two adjacent buildings for her in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, considered slum-like at the time. Both buildings were run down, one an empty framer’s studio, the other a cheese shop that had gone bust—and for a cheese shop to go bust in Paris tells you something about the neighborhood.
For the equivalent of $55,000 in today’s money, Varda bought the buildings in the rue Daguerre and made them her headquarters for the rest of her life—they still house her company, Ciné-Tamaris. At first she lived there with a sculptor named Valentine Schlegel, who became her lover; eventually Jacques Demy, the director of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), moved in and became her husband. The first thing Varda did when she took possession was plant a beech tree and a maple tree in the courtyard; later she began painting the building pink and accenting it with large purple polka dots and striping the door in mauve. “When you’re a photographer in need of a studio and you find one in the rue Daguerre, that’s a sign, isn’t it?” Varda explained, referring to the inventor of photography for whom the street was named. It’s no wonder Cléo de 5 à 7 begins with a tarot card reading.
It’s important, I think, to start with Cléo. People are often surprised to find out Varda had made films before it, and Varda’s later films can be read as variations on its theme. Lions Love extends to feature-length and reimagines the scenes in Cléo with Michel Legrand and Serge Korber as Cléo’s songwriters—Cléo is a pop singer with hits on the radio and on jukeboxes in cafés. In the later film, Varda puts the hippie creators of the musical Hair (James Rado and Gerome Ragni) in a ménage à trois with the Warhol superstar Viva, playing a version of herself, a New York actress-scenestress new to Hollywood. Fifteen years after that, Vagabond becomes a deglamorized, rural destruction of the city-bound Cléo, character and movie.
The way Varda made all three exemplifies what she called her four principles of filmmaking, which Rickey outlines in her book. One, “you don’t make films to watch them alone”; two, “film quickly with the means at hand”; three, “nothing is banal if you film it with empathy”; and four, “you need a viewpoint to make a film.” Vagabond, for instance, started as a documentary on tree plague before Varda met a cop on location who told her how a homeless young man in the area had recently frozen to death. She couldn’t raise money for the film but shot anyway, with Sandrine Bonnaire in the title role, and it became her biggest post-Cléo hit.
To those four principles we might add two more, which Rickey’s book makes clear: Varda never shot on a soundstage, and she never made adaptations from other sources. She shot on location, and her films, whether they were features or documentary shorts, were originals. It was Varda, along with Jean-Pierre Melville, who showed the New Wave that you did not need credentials to make films. She insisted anyone could do it, with whatever they had on hand.
In addition, she had what Rickey calls “the gift of unselfconsciousness,” the ability to act and speak naturally on-screen, coupled with a related talent, the aptitude to speak well of her films without seeming to brag. When she describes an early short of hers, Ô saisons, ô chateaux (1958), she says she “stumbled into a sublime late fall, all golden, bathed in sunlight. I was taken with the gentleness of the Loire Valley, and the film was instilled with the melancholy of bygone epochs.” She could be describing her late career.
RICKEY’S BOOK INCLUDES an eight-page section of black-and-white photos, showing Varda with Demy, at work and with her children Rosalie and Mathieu, accepting various awards, in her potato costume from the 2003 Venice Biennale, and at the 2018 Women’s March at Cannes, which the festival’s director announced to the press by explaining that “a large group of women were going to do something that affirmed their presence.”
Agnès Varda: Director’s Inspiration is the catalogue for an exhibition of the same name at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, which is on display through January 2025. The show and the book cover Varda’s work as a photographer, filmmaker, and visual artist. The book is generously illustrated with color photos, and includes short essays from critics, filmmakers, and Rosalie, as well as an excellent 2017 interview with Varda by the Gabonese filmmaker Manouchka Kelly Labouba that concentrates on Varda’s time in Los Angeles, from 1966 to 1969 and again in the early 1980s. In those two periods Varda made five films: Lions Love, the short feature Documenteur (1981, one of her most affecting and personal films, though a fiction in which she does not appear), the documentary feature Mur Murs (also 1981, about public art in the city), and the short documentaries Uncle Yanco (1967, on her colorful long-lost uncle, a noted beatnik painter living on a houseboat in Sausalito) and Black Panthers (1968, an important early document of the Black Panther Party in Oakland). The book makes one long for another large art book dedicated solely to Varda’s photography, which would include her pre-LA work in Cuba and China. Along with potatoes, Varda appears to have been the best photographer of hippies.
Varda and Demy lived in Los Angeles because Demy had been invited there to make films. His stay resulted in Model Shop (1969), a rare example of a French take on Hollywood that isn’t mean-spirited (though it’s a little downbeat). The couple lived in Beverly Hills and rented twin white convertibles, a trope from Demy’s French movies, his dream of America. They made great use of their time, meeting everyone from the Doors’ Jim Morrison to Andy Warhol—Varda appeared on the cover of the first issue of Warhol’s Interview magazine. As she had discovered Gérard Depardieu in Paris, Varda also discovered Harrison Ford in Los Angeles. Rickey’s book features dinner parties and get-togethers with Antonioni and Roger Corman, Henry Miller and Mae West. At one point a drunken Morrison face-plants into a plate of birthday cake at a party for Rosalie, a premonition of his death in a bathtub in Paris, where Varda would be the first person called to his apartment to witness his corpse, and a reminder of that scene in Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1991), in which Meg Ryan yells, “Jim Morrison, you have ruined another Thanksgiving!”
Demy had made forays into Hollywood before. During one of them he took a trip with an agent to visit Bodega Bay, where Hitchcock had shot The Birds, and the two men began an affair, the first of two covered in Rickey’s book. Demy revealed this to Varda while she was pregnant with their son, Mathieu, and in 1972 Demy left her to go back to California and live in “a small cottage in Venice” with a twenty-six-year-old Warner Bros. story editor named David Bombyk, who later, like Demy, contracted HIV and died of AIDS.
In America, Varda had immersed herself in the feminist politics of Shulamith Firestone and Kate Millet. “The feminists there were much more radical than those in France,” she noted. Back in Paris, Varda devoted herself to women’s rights and began to pursue her own projects away from Demy. They reconciled but lived separately after Demy got sick—she in her busy studio on the ground floor at rue Daguerre, he in an eighth-floor apartment across the street that Mathieu described as clean, white, marble, and futuristic. After Demy’s death in 1990, Varda became his ardent memorializer. She made several films about him, including Jacquot de Nantes (1991), the best and the only true biopic about a film director, a work of great love and delicacy. In that film, Varda re-creates scenes, in black-and-white, from Demy’s childhood in the Occupied France in which they both grew up, edited with color footage from his last days.
THE COMMONPLACE VIEW OF VARDA as the most understanding wife of all time, the most patient and the most accepting, is perhaps belied by moments in films she made both before and after Demy’s infidelity. The title of her groundbreaking feminist musical One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1976) refers to the film’s two female protagonists, but it could refer to her and Demy, too. He, a maker of triste musicals, sings; she, a documentary photographer, deals in reality. Note that unlike Demy’s musicals, she purposefully gave One Sings, the Other Doesn’t a happy ending.
In Uncle Yanco, her artist uncle speaks of how “between the desire and the painting there is a little bitterness, a passing shadow.” If this shadow existed in her relationship with Demy, it is certainly also apparent in Le Bonheur, her 1965 movie that presents itself as a sunny picnic in the grass but is really “a ripe summer peach with a worm inside,” as Varda described it. By the end, the film is more like a horror film, though an exceptionally subtle one, than the Renoiresque outing scored to Mozart it at first appears to be. Martin Scorsese has said Le Bonheur exposes the alleged happiness of marital fidelity as a lie from a shampoo commercial, but Varda’s dare to herself in making it is that the film could also be a shampoo commercial.
Le Bonheur’s pastoral tone is clear, but the film is impossible to pin down, which is what makes it so chilling. An evocation of bliss, as the critic Amy Taubin described it, it is also a “vengeful act.” It nakedly presents what Chantal Akerman called an extraordinary idea: that “one love is worth the same as another, a person can be replaced by another.” “For me,” Akerman said, “Le Bonheur is the most anti-romantic film there is.” The film’s penultimate scene of betrayal exactly and amazingly duplicates Demy’s revelation of his infidelity seven years later. The wife in Le Bonheur does not survive that; Varda did.
The lingering effects of Le Bonheur’s remorselessness got her in trouble with feminist film theoreticians. The backlash continued for a decade. Varda said of One Sings, the Other Doesn’t that “for once you have a film where women are without guilt, without shame, without dependency, without stupidity, fighting against laws and institutions, getting value and putting value into women’s ventures.” This was not enough for the British “cinefeminist” Claire Johnston, who hated Le Bonheur, calling it “unforgivably cruel,” “reactionary,” and a “retrograde step in women’s cinema” that placed women outside history. Needless to say, this view of Varda and her work has waned.
AGNÈS VARDA HAD NOT SEEN more than twenty-five films when she made La Pointe Courte. She was not a cinephile like the critics from Cahiers du cinéma who made up the bulk of the New Wave. One can only imagine what these young men thought of her, a single mother, when they first met her. She became the godmother of the New Wave even though she was the same age as them, because her first feature came out four years before theirs. In the heady rush of the New Wave’s success in 1959 and 1960, she gained a reputation as a forgotten director, and so early on had to be defended as a precursor. By 1959, Rickey points out, the French critic Jean Douchet noted, in a review of her first retrospective, the injustice of Varda being ignored as a founder of New Wave. It was a strange situation. Varda was getting a retrospective just as the movement she had kick-started into being was getting underway.
Cléo came out in 1962. When it reached the United States that year, Stanley Kauffmann, writing in the New Republic, accused her of being a New Wave imitator. As angry as Claire Johnston, he called the film “a sedulous exercise in what could be called Cleo-realism” (you don’t encounter the word “sedulous” much anymore) and a parody of films by Truffaut, Godard, and Chabrol. “The pat shape of the story,” he wrote, “its very cleverness, the shallowness of its emotional exploration, the heroine’s self-conscious dramatization, make it merely a flashily dressed up conventional tearjerker, a sob sister of the works of Fannie Hurst. The avant-garde trappings disguise nothing; it is Irving Berlin orchestrated by Stravinsky.” Guess he didn’t like it—nor did he know what he was talking about.
Varda herself was harsh on films. The first film she ever saw was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in 1938. “What is certain is that I hated Snow White,” she said as an adult, explaining that “its valorization of the heroine for cleaning the house of the dwarfs without pay” disgusted her. (“A sophisticated critique for a ten-year-old,” writes Rickey.) Demy loved The Sound of Music; Varda did not. “How could you love a stupid, bullshit film like this, with that stupid babysitter who wishes to marry the father? I mean, is it interesting to see someone wash the pants of eleven children to get a man?” she asked. She thought Ingmar Bergman’s marital dramas were also suspect. As late as 2013 she told an interviewer, “It’s fine that they made Gravity, but I really couldn’t care less.” In A Hundred and One Nights (1995), one of her cinema-valorizing movies, Michel Piccoli, playing a man who is supposed to be the living embodiment of cinema, makes an anti-Bergman statement apropos of nothing, “Down with cries, long live whispers,” demonstrating where Varda’s heart lies.
I MUST CONFESS that when I was young, my heart lied with Carrie Rickey, whose brief time as the film critic at the Boston Herald, before she went on to her long and distinguished career as the film critic at the the Philadelphia Inquirer, coincided with my college years and my initial discovery of Varda’s work during a French-cinema class. The professor began the semester with two films: Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien (1974) and Cléo de 5 à 7.
I had never seen a Varda film and was immediately hooked by the way Cléo purports to be in real time, and of course by the Paris of the nouvelle vague and by the silent-film-within-a-film, starring Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard, that Cléo (Corinne Marchand) watches from a projection booth. A whole book could be written about the connections between Godard’s work and Varda’s, and the back-and-forth between them over six decades, that sadly ended in Varda’s Faces Places (2017) in the scene in which Godard refused to see her when she went to visit him at his house in Switzerland. In Cléo, Varda made Godard remove his sunglasses and showed him with a tear rolling down his cheek. In Faces Places he returned the favor, causing her to cry by so coldly ignoring her.
He left a note on the door reminding her of the old times in the first half of the 1960s, when she and Demy had been witnesses at his marriage to Karina. So much in Godard, it now seems to me, comes directly from Varda or is a reaction to something in her work. The garbagemen and their sandwiches in Godard’s Weekend (1967), for instance, now strike me as Vardian, but with Godardian spite and critique added. “She does not scold, she does not virtue signal,” Rickey writes—unlike Godard, who made a career of the former and sometimes slipped into the latter. In Godard’s penultimate movie (so far), Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars (2023), there’s a title card that reads, in part, le bonheur est/était un idée neuve en Europe (“happiness is/was a new idea in Europe”). It’s a quote from the French revolutionary Saint-Just, but seeing it on the screen not long after both Varda’s and Godard’s deaths made me think of Le Bonheur and ideas from Europe that had once been new.
Back to Rickey and Varda. Vagabond came not too long after I first saw Cléo. I believe Rickey was still at the Herald then, though I can no longer recall if she reviewed that movie, or if she did, whether I read her piece. I do know that at the time I considered her the only good newspaper critic in Boston, and I clipped an interview with her from a local weekly and put it on my fridge for inspiration. Wish I still had that—probably no library even has it. After Rickey moved to the paper in Philadelphia in 1986, I read her no more, until now. There was no internet then. I wouldn’t go so far as to call her a “legacy critic,” as Carrie Courogen does in her recent book on Elaine May, Miss May Does Not Exist, a book about another filmmaker we are constantly told people have forgotten about, never got her due, etc. I suppose “legacy critic” was meant as a compliment, but it didn’t read like one.
Rickey’s book on Varda reminded me of when I first saw Varda’s films and when I read all the critics in all the papers in Boston. The return of Rickey, who first encountered Varda as I did, in a college class (though hers was taught by Manny Farber), is most welcome. Her book is moving because Varda’s life was moving, and because its existence made me realize I’d been waiting for it. It brings to mind something Varda said about seeing movies and making films: “When I see a bad film, I think, ‘Films are disgusting!’ When I see a beautiful film, I think, ‘That’s what I must do. I must create a beautiful film!’”
A. S. Hamrah is the author of The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002–2018 (n+1, 2018).