Director Spotlight: Agnès Varda

I came to Agnès Varda late and by accident. A couple of years ago, scanning Netflix for something interesting to watch, I found The Gleaners and I, and determined it was one of my favorite movies in a very long time. Only then did I look her up and learn how famous and influential she is—something I would have already known if I’d formally studied film. What I love about Varda is her playful intellectualism. She doesn’t take herself too seriously—and it shows in her films—yet she treats her film subjects with love and great care. Her protagonists are often women who live interesting, difficult, and complicated lives.

In March, Varda was included in Paste Magazine‘s profile of the 50 best living directors.

I have a bit of a difficult time with French New Wave films; while I can see they are beautiful pieces of art, they don’t always capture me—I can’t quite get inside them. They don’t have the kind of heart I’m looking for in a movie. Varda’s films do—they’re beautiful on the surface (form) and below it (content), and manage to do all of this without a hint of pretension. This is one of the reasons why she is my favorite filmmaker. Here is a sampling of her films.

La Pointe Courte, Varda’s first film and the film attributed to launching the French New Wave, stars Silvia Monfort and Philippe Noiret who bring a stark formalism to the story of their conflicted love in a scenic seaside village. Shot in high contrast black and white, La Pointe Courte is filled with odd visual and sonic edits that lend this film an otherworldly, Carl Dreyer-esque quality though it points to Varda’s future directing tact, namely making films that scrutinize tragic personal relationships with deep compassion and zeal.

Through an arresting use of Paris as both visual centerpiece and reflection of a woman’s inner journey, Varda paints an enduring portrait of a woman’s evolution from a shallow and superstitious child-woman to a person who can feel and express shock and anguish and finally empathy.

This is a simple act of quotidian commerce, the kind of everyday task that Varda will return to again and again in Daguerréotypes as her manner of repetition elevates the mundane to a method of establishing community. We continue to meet other shopkeepers: a butcher, breadmaker, a laundress, and tailor. She shoots her neighbors as an extended family, with richly-hued still portraits subsequently made living through interviews.

”She’s free,” one character says of Mona. ”She scares me because she repels me,” says another. Such blunt statements do not set the film’s tone, but force us to ask whether Mona is a determined free spirit or just a lost soul.

[I]t is at once an illustration of the fine art of foraging and an autobiographical portrait, narrated by its self-described “little old lady, pleasantly plump.” (She’s now 81.) As before, Ms. Varda is picking through the world, close to home and far afield, finding images that please her and give her pause, like her wrinkled hand, the one not holding the camera, that she scrutinizes with rue if no obvious regret. But here the emphasis is on her own life and the images and memories that, with time, have blurred together.