Agnès Varda
Agnès Varda 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, followed by Cléo from 5 to 7, one of her most notable narrative films, Vagabond, and Kung Fu Master. Varda was also known for her work as a documentarian with such works as Black Panthers, The Gleaners and I, The Beaches of Agnès, Faces Places, and her final film, Varda by Agnès.
Director 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 director to win the award, a Golden Lion for Vagabond at the 1985 Venice Film Festival, an Academy Honorary Award, and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for Faces Places, becoming the oldest person to be nominated for a competitive Oscar. In 2017, she became the first female director to win an honorary Oscar.
Early life and education
Varda was born Arlette Varda on 30 May 1928 in Ixelles, Brussels, Belgium, to Christiane 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, scandalously unsuited for the lofty needs one had at that age."
Photography career
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 Courtewithout experience, without having been an assistant before, without having gone to film schoolI 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.
Filmmaking career
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, rather than focusing on traditions or classical standards.''La Pointe Courte'' (1955)
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 friend 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.The film was edited by Varda's friend and fellow "Left Bank" filmmaker Alain Resnais, who was reluctant to work on it because it was "so nearly the film he wanted to make himself"; Resnais's 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour would later feature a similar structure. Resnais and Varda remained lifelong friends, though Resnais said they had nothing in common "apart from cats". The film was immediately praised by Cahiers du Cinéma: André Bazin said, "There is a total freedom to the style, which produces the impression, so rare in the cinema, that we are in the presence of a work that obeys only the dreams and desires of its auteur with no other external obligations." François Truffaut called it "an experimental work, ambitious, honest and intelligent." Varda said that the film "hit like a cannonball because I was a young woman, since before that, in order to become a director you had to spend years as an assistant." But the film was a financial failure, and Varda made only short films for the next seven years.
Varda is considered the grandmother and mother of the French New Wave. La Pointe Courte is unofficially but widely considered the first film of the movement. It was the first of many she made that focus on issues ordinary people face. Late in her life, she said that she was not interested in accounts of people in power but "much more interested in the rebels, the people who fight for their own life".
''Cléo from 5 to 7'' (1961)
After La Pointe Courte, Varda made several documentary short films; two were commissioned by the French tourist office. These include one of Varda's favorites of her own works, L'opéra-mouffe, a film about the Rue Mouffetard street market which won an award at the 1958 Brussels Experimental Film Festival.Cléo from 5 to 7 follows a pop singer through two extraordinary hours in which she awaits the results of a recent biopsy. The film is superficially about a woman coming to terms with her mortality, a common trope for Varda. On a deeper level, Cléo from 5 to 7 confronts the traditionally objectified woman by giving Cléo her own vision. She cannot be constructed through the gaze of others, which is often represented through a motif of reflections and Cléo's ability to strip her body of "to-be-looked-at" attributes. Stylistically, Cléo from 5 to 7 mixes documentary and fiction, as had La Pointe Courte. The film represents diegetic action said to occur between 5 and 7 p.m., although its run-time is 89 minutes.