A Retrospective on the Legacy of Agnès Varda
written BY fiona FORTUnATO
Agnès Varda was born in Belgium to a family of Greek origin and would go on to become one of the greatest icons of French cinema. Her legacy extends from photography and cinema, to academic scholarship and feminism. Not only was she the first woman to receive an honorary Palme D’Or award from the Cannes Film Festival for lifetime achievement, she was also the first woman to receive an honorary Oscar for her career in directing. With an artistic vision that was inspired by surrealism and literature, she has been placed within the movement of the French New Wave as well as French auteurism. Her narrative approach to many existential themes ,in addition to her editing choices, lends to the description of her as that of an auteurist, since she used her camera as her pen.
With a background in photography, Varda was able to expertly capture complexities and emotion within a scene by stressing attention to minute details and recurring themes. Along with her impressive body of work including films, she also produced diptychs and animation through the use of photography and postcards like in her 1963 stop motion film Salut Les Cubains!
Her extensive body of work spanned seven decades, with her first film, La Pointe Courte, predating French new wave in 1955, and her last film Varda par Agnès released in 2019, the year of her death. The movement typically attributed to her, The New Wave, took place from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, but as it developed, an adjacent French film community emerged, referred to as the Left Bank filmmakers. The community included Agnès Varda, Jacques Demy (her husband and fellow director), Alain Resnais and Chris Marker. Their film style involved portable equipment and the emphasis upon an almost documentary style of viewing a story unfold.
Dedicated to a spirit of human connection as well as “genius loci”, or the spirit of an individual place, each of her films is aesthetically entirely a world of its own. La Pointe Courte for example, used the documentary aesthetic of filmmaking. The shooting involved actual villagers from the village of La Pointe Courte in France in addition to the use of hired actors. The film depicts a couple navigating their relationship in a small fishing town. This blending of fictional and documentary aspects functioned as a precursor to the later French New Wave films that were beginning to grow out of the neorealist movement.
While she is known for her feature films like Cléo de Cinq à Sept (1962), Le Bonheur (1965), or Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse (2000), her oeuvre of work contains many short films highlighting her activist sentiments. In 1968 she documented the Black Panthers and their demonstrations in Oakland, California after the arrest of one of the party’s founders, Huey P. Newton. Varda’s legacy as an activist has been flexible in terms of its applicability to modern circumstances. For this reason, a sustainable approach has been made by the scholars who teach Varda—especially since her conceptions of feminism were bound by a binary restriction more closely resembling traditional conceptions of sex and gender.
This is not by any means to say that her contributions to feminism were not substantial. In 1975, she made a short film titled Response de Femmes: Notre Corps, Notre Sexe. Within the short seven minute film female women and children look into the camera confidently, addressing the viewer with statements uniting womanhood and destigmatizing the naked female body as something more than to be merely sexualized. The mutual alliance between these women contains a fierceness and softness simultaneously, where they state phrases like, “I am unique, but I am all women” and “I am a woman. Women must be reinvented.” She acknowledged the experience of womanhood as something both entirely subjective while remaining universal.
Later in her career, her visual involvement in her work increased. This physical presence defied the assumption that young age and desirability alone were the main motivations making women worth being viewed in media spaces. Even late in her career, this self-representation called back to her early work as an auteurist, where agency is not only expressed through the manner in which the story is told, but through the assertiveness of reminding audiences of the relevance of women’s visibility on screen.
Agnès Varda will remain relevant to cinephiles and scholars for as long as her legacy is acknowledged for being as adaptable and resilient as she was. The sustainability and fluidity of her legacy is in part due to the fact that regardless of her subject in any given project, she highlighted the deep importance of taking the time to look at another. Even though she was from a different era from our own, her foresight in the evolution of digital film and media allowed her to grow with the times in the manner in which she addressed what she viewed as human disconnectedness. She endeavored to fix this disconnect by inviting viewers to partake and analyze the beauty in all things, even those appearing at first glance to be mundane.
