Ninety minutes in near real time as a singer waits for the result of a medical test, from a tarot reading to a park bench (1962)
Cléo from 5 to 7 (Cléo de 5 à 7) — the film runs roughly as long as the wait it depicts
Film · European
Agnès Varda
1928–2019 · Belgian-born French
French New Wave — the Left Bank group; documentary and film-essay
Agnès Varda made her first feature in 1954, five years before Truffaut and Godard, and is universally called the grandmother or godmother of the French New Wave. A photographer by training, she moved freely between fiction, documentary and gallery installation for six decades, coining the word "cinécriture" for the way she wrote with images. She received an honorary Palme d'Or in 2015 and an honorary Oscar in 2017.
How to spot them
- ▸The only woman among the New Wave directors, and part of the Left Bank group with Alain Resnais and Chris Marker
- ▸A photographer first: still compositions, real locations, and a documentarist's curiosity even in fiction
- ▸The two-tone bowl haircut, white at the fringe and dark at the crown, in her later years
- ▸Married to Jacques Demy, director of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
- ▸'Cinécriture' — her own term for writing a film with camera, editing and sound rather than a script
Key films
A fishing village near Sète, shot in 1954 and often called the first film of the French New Wave; Alain Resnais edited it (1955)
La Pointe Courte — her debut, made before the Cahiers critics had directed anything
A young drifter found frozen in a ditch, her last weeks reconstructed in a series of tracking shots that move steadily right to left (1985)
Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi) — Sandrine Bonnaire; it won the Golden Lion at Venice
A carpenter, his wife, his mistress and a field of sunflowers, in unbearably sunny colour (1965)
Le Bonheur — it won the Silver Bear at Berlin
A documentary about people who pick over harvested fields, markets and bins for what is left behind, shot by the director on a small digital camera (2000)
The Gleaners and I (Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse) — she films her own ageing hands alongside her subjects
A self-portrait made for the director's eightieth birthday, built from mirrors set up on a beach (2008)
The Beaches of Agnès (Les Plages d'Agnès)
A road trip through rural France in a van, pasting giant photographic portraits onto barns, shipping containers and a bunker, co-directed with a street artist known by two initials (2017)
Faces Places (Visages Villages), with JR — nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature
Key ideas
- Cinécriture: the whole film — framing, editing, sound, movement — is the writing, not the screenplay alone
- The boundary between documentary and fiction is porous; real people and invented ones can share a film
- Gleaning as a metaphor for filmmaking: picking up what others have discarded
Quick-fire facts
- •Born Arlette Varda in Ixelles, Brussels, in 1928, to a Greek father and a French mother; she changed her name to Agnès at 18
- •She trained as a photographer and was official photographer to Jean Vilar's Théâtre National Populaire
- •Married the director Jacques Demy in 1962; after his death she made Jacquot de Nantes (1991) about his childhood
- •Her Californian period produced Lions Love (1969) and the documentary Black Panthers
- •In 2015 she became the first woman to receive an honorary Palme d'Or at Cannes
- •She received an Honorary Award from the Academy at the 2017 Governors Awards
- •Faces Places brought her a competitive Oscar nomination at the age of 89
- •Her last film, Varda by Agnès, premiered at Berlin weeks before her death in Paris in March 2019, aged 90
Drill it — 8 cards
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Sources
- Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — Agnès Varda — Governors Awards
- Festival de Cannes — Agnès Varda — Festival de Cannes profile