Following Agnès Varda’s death and inspired by the importance of collaboration in Varda’s work, we asked eight writers, programmers and scholars to reflect on her work and spirit.
Sandy Flitterman-Lewis is one of the four founding co-editors of Camera Obscura. She is the author of To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema which contains writing on Varda. Kiva Reardon is a programmer at the Toronto International Film Festival and Miami Film Festival and founding editor of Cléo journal. Jenny Chamarette is Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London and has written regularly on Varda, including a chapter in her book Phenomenology and the Future of Film: Rethinking Subjectivity beyond French Cinema. Lauren Elkin is a writer. Her book Flâneuse contains a chapter on Agnès Varda and Cléo from 5 to 7. A.S. Hamrah is the film critic for n+1. His collection of criticism, The Earth Dies Streaming, was published last year. Grace Barber-Plentie is a film writer. She was also one of the founders of Reel Good Film Club, a film club that programmed events dedicated to highlighting diversity in cinema. She participated in several panels to celebrate the release of Faces Places. Samia Labidi is a freelance programmer and cultural event organiser based in Tunis. She is the programmer of Haifa Independent Film Festival and the coordinator of the Palestine Film Meetings, Ramallah. Sheila Heti is the author of eight books of fiction and non-fiction, including the novels Ticknor, Motherhood, and How Should a Person Be? She interviewed Varda in 2009.
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Another Gaze: Do you remember how you first discovered Varda’s work?
Sandy Flitterman-Lewis: When I worked as an Associate Editor at the journal Women and Film, I came across an article about Varda that reminded me of seeing Cleo from 5 to 7 (Cléo de 5 à 7) when I was in France in the mid-‘60s. Some years later, having abandoned my original dissertation topic (a definitive analysis of Godard’s Les Carabiniers), my thesis advisor Bertrand Augst suggested I write about women filmmakers. Germaine Dulac and Marie Epstein came up for the ‘20s and the ‘30s, and I suggested Varda for the ‘60s and the New Wave. I knew I liked her work, but I really didn’t know why. It was an amazing adventure, a series of discoveries that I encountered as I wrote the thesis. And then, when making the thesis into a book, I really felt close to Varda and her work: my analyses expanded as I was liberated from dissertation constraints.
Kiva Reardon: I discovered Varda through my professor Alanna Thain who was teaching a class on the French New Wave during my second year of university. I’m still so grateful that she was my teacher – she didn’t approach it via the usual ‘auteur’-driven theory, but felt it was important to address feminism, and thus Varda, as part of this filmmaking moment and movement. Because of this, I understood Varda to be on par with her contemporaries like Godard and Truffaut, and not just a Left Bank sidebar. So in this class, in addition to discovering Varda, I also realised the importance of framing and context in film history.
Lauren Elkin: Through Cléo. I had heard about her from way back but that was the first film I watched, when I taught a class on the flâneur at NYU’s Paris campus, a few years before I started writing my book about the flâneuse, which devotes a chapter to Cléo and Varda’s work more broadly.
Jenny Chamarette: I think it was around the time that The Gleaners and I (Les Glaneurs and la Glaneuse) came out in 2000. I was on the cusp of my twenties, living in Paris for the first time, voraciously reading French critical theory and philosophy and slowly discovering a range of concepts to talk about the things I was experiencing – particularly those related to subcultures and gender politics and critiques of political divisiveness. Seeing those things reflected in films like The Gleaners and Chris Marker’s film Chats perchés from 2004 played a major role in how my own identity evolved as a young European feminist. And that is who I am still. Though like Varda, I increasingly take youth from my sense of spirit rather than my own flesh.
AS Hamrah: I read about her first films in Godard on Godard when I was in high school and then I saw Cléo in a French Cinema class when I was a freshman in college, a significant class to me because it was easily the best one I took that year. We were able to see each film projected twice, from 16mm prints, if we wanted to, and 25 films were on the syllabus.
Grace Barber-Plentie: When I started university, I literally had one friend on my course and she showed me that our library had a surprisingly extensive and unsurprisingly underused DVD collection where you could take out three DVDs a week for free. We used to compare our picks of the week and I remember her recommending Cléo to me. I’d never heard of Varda before but I borrowed that and Le Bonheur and fell in love.
Samia Labidi: The first Agnès Varda film I ever watched was One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (L’une chante, l’autre pas, 1977), in high school, in a small town in the South of France, I completely forgot about it and the first time I really got interested in her work was years later in university when I came across Black Panthers (1968), while researching Black Feminism when I was studying Political Science at the Sorbonne. Realising that the same director was able to create these two radically different films, both tackling politically and socially urgent matters, made me curious about the artist herself.
Sheila Heti: I remember knowing her name long before I ever saw a film of hers. I remember thinking always, The time is not right for me to watch this woman’s films. I must have known that she would become very special for me and that it was important to wait for the right moment to ‘meet’. When I finally did watch one of her films for the first time, I immediately watched as many as I could. I couldn’t believe how varied her approach was, how different each film was from the next, and how different her films were from the work of other filmmakers I had experienced.
I think that refusal to be ignored or hidden is very important for intergenerational collectivity, especially right now
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AG: Do you have a favourite Varda film? Which and why?
ASH: Varda’s work is remarkably consistent; she is one of the few filmmakers who worked at such a high level and never made a bad film. Cléo is great but I think it overwhelms her filmography the way The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, 1964) overwhelms Demy’s – or Jeanne Dielman (1975) overwhelms Chantal Akerman’s. Certain filmmakers have these masterpieces that are paradoxically both their ultimate expressions and their least characteristic films – super-versions of themselves and their work. These can be plucked from their filmographies by viewers checking off a list of masterpieces to see. In all of Varda’s renewed popularity near the end of her life it was forgotten that Madonna was at one time trying to remake Cléo as a star vehicle for herself, the pop superstar most dependent on the cinematic achievements of others.
Vagabond seems to me the most resistant to this because of Sandrine Bonnaire’s truculence in her lead performance as Mona. More than twenty years after Cléo, Varda made this film that seems un-remakeable and cut off from the Nouvelle Vague. There is no possibility of a Godard cameo or rejection in Vagabond. Macha Méril is in it, which I guess connects it to the New Wave, but that’s it. Vagabond seems anti-Truffaut to me because of Bonnaire’s performance as a young woman on her own. Mona is Léaud-like in some ways but without a trajectory into bourgeois employment, marriage, and all that. The film’s negativity precludes it, cuts it off.
Le Bonheur is Varda’s most shocking movie. It’s deeply subversive and works like a horror film. The surprise of the way Thérèse, the wife, is simply replaced in it, amid all the natural beauty Varda films so effortlessly, is one of the most eye-opening things in all of cinema. When I first saw it I was really devastated by it. I just couldn’t believe that happened in the film, and then that it existed at all. The deep irony of the film’s title is such an indictment of everything. How many films are truly shocking the way Le Bonheur is? I don’t think there are any others.
SH: I don’t have a favourite, but the one I think about most often is probably Le Bonheur because it had such a devastating ending. It is perhaps the most straightforward in terms of story-telling, yet truly radical – emotionally radical, come the end. And you don’t know what Varda feels about the wife’s final gesture: is this a story about despair or great love and sacrifice, or does what happens to the wife at the end just symbolise the accidental, the chaotic element of life, where something bad which happens to one person, turns out to be good for another? It’s impossible to stop thinking about this ending and what it says about love, life, chaos and fate.
JC: Le Bonheur (1964). It’s like nothing else: a horror movie wrapped up in sunflowers, an excoriating feminist diatribe strummed to the tune of a love ballad. It’s one of the most terrifying films I’ve ever seen. I also have a very soft spot for Daguerréotypes (1976), the documentary she made on her street, the Rue Daguerre in Paris, while she was still nursing her young son.
LE: The one that stands out as absolutely uniquely Varda is L’Une chante l’autre pas, her abortion musical. Who else but Varda makes a musical about abortions! OK I’m being facetious. It’s about female friendship, female bodies, the joys of pregnancy, independence, and, yes, women’s rights over their bodies. I think that’s the film that hits me where I live. The Guardian film critic who wrote her obituary called it “ideologically overloaded and romantic” about the pleasures of pregnancy. Dude needs to take a seat.
There’s another film I think about in tandem with L’Une chante. I once travelled all the way to Cambridge from Paris to see a screening of her short film (or “ciné-tract” as she called it) Réponse de femmes (1975), which she made in collaboration with France 2 for a show called F comme Femme (W as in Woman). The question was: What is a woman? It wasn’t available on YouTube then (though it is now: go watch it!), and it wasn’t in the complete Varda DVD box set either, so I tracked it down and went to see it. It’s very ‘70s feminism in its aesthetic – lots of naked white women with bowl cuts, some pregnant, with enormous nipples, talking about how their bodies belong to them and to no one else. L’Une chante comes out of this imperative, this activist culture, and in spite of its drawbacks, and its lack of ideological nuance, it was fucking important. It was important to say these things clearly, in Varda’s arch, bemused way. This isn’t the dour humorlessness radical feminism gets accused of. It’s lovely and funny and joyful. It also features a soundtrack comprised of Varda herself humming some kind of Bach fugue.
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AG: Can you describe a scene or moment in one of her films that sticks out for you?
JC: There’s a sequence in Cléo (1961) early on in the film, where Cléo comes down the staircase of her tarot reader’s apartment, where the music and soundtrack and editing come together in this incredible symphony of ordinariness. In the time it takes Cléo to walk down two flights of stairs, her subjectivity is shattered and becomes whole again. The cracks in the walls and the rapid cuts between point-of-view shots and her face repeatedly undo and re-form her sense of self, over a sequence of just over a minute. When she arrives at ground level to the narcissistic reflection of herself in a mirror, she tries (and fails) to re-assume the role of what she has been trained to be – a beautiful young singer-celebrity. I’ve taught that sequence many times, and to me it is just the essence of cinema and subjectivity.
It’s like nothing else: a horror movie wrapped up in sunflowers, an excoriating feminist diatribe strummed to the tune of a love ballad
KR: I often think of the jump cuts in Cléo when Cléo is leaving the tarot reader. Before seeing that moment (and the film), conceptually I understood that there was more to film than just white men making movies. But to see a film where a character who would normally only be treated as a vessel for someone else’s desire is given a rich inner life, and to watch her grow into a person, was so meaningful.
LE: The scene in the middle of Cléo where she has just fled her apartment and she’s picturing all the people she knows judging her, and Varda shows each of them in turn as Cléo thinks of them, facing the camera without moving: her maid, her composer, her cats, and then her hairpiece, sitting on top of her mirror where she threw it, silently judging her. It’s so minor but it’s so Varda – witty and inspired and surreal. It comes in the midst of so many lush emotional colours – the pathos of the song Cléo has just sung, the steady throb of fear and dread about her health, and the terrifying liberation of just walking out on everyone and striking out into the city – and then this anthropomorphic comedy. It’s genius.
ASH: The entire wine scene in Vagabond, with its stains, is as indelibly imprinted in my mind along with the landscapes in that film. Mona’s stained shirt is apparent in the film’s first shot, we don’t know yet why it’s that colour, then that colour spreads throughout the film.
SL: In Uncle Yanco (1967) we get to witness Varda’s delight of meeting her uncle through the reenactment in different languages (French, English and Greek) of the family reunion between Agnès and Jean Varda. Every frame of this staged meeting slash greeting slash embrace, the use of the red heart shape filter held by her children are a testimony of her generosity and creativity as well as her eye for beauty that can turn any seemingly banal moment into cinema.
GBP: There’s two in particular that stick out for me – the scene in One Sings, The Other Doesn’t where Pomme is sitting on a boat full of women going to have abortions in Amsterdam and singing. Wow, now I wonder whether I’ve made this scene up but no, I think it exists. I find it really moving but also a way of showing the complexities of someone making that choice without sensationalising it or judging the character’s decisions.
And for reasons I struggle to explain, I also find the bell-ringing scene in Faces, Places hugely moving. I love the way that Varda shot people going about their work, whatever that work may be. She found bell ringing just as beautiful as she did filmmaking, and this is obvious from the loving way that the scene is shot.
SFL: I love the sequence in The Beaches of Agnes (Les plages d’Agnès) where she takes a little boat up the Seine. A bright yellow and red barque, I think, whose angles on the familiar sights of Paris convey something of the delight in the blending of the familiar and the unexpected that is a hallmark of Varda’s creative process. And I have to say, in that same film, the entire short sequence on Varda’s installation in the Pantheon, ‘Hommage aux justes de France’ captures my heart.
SH: Most recently it’s the scene in Faces, Places (Visages, Villages) where she goes with her collaborator, JR, to meet Godard – they have arranged to meet and she has taken a train to go see him – and Godard leaves a note for her on his front door saying he will not see her. And Varda just crumples. If I remember correctly, she stumbles to a bench, and she starts to cry. It was heartbreaking, and it was amazing that she kept such a vulnerable moment – this rejection, this humiliation – in the movie.
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AG: What do you think unites the diversity and complexity of her total works?
JC: I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and more so over the last few days, especially in response to So Mayer’s beautiful obituary for Varda in Sight & Sound. I keep coming back to the idea of colour and black & white. Varda worked across so many technological frontiers: photography, analogue and digital film, installation art, and she had an incredibly fine-tuned understanding of the domestic, emotional and spiritual relationships of colour to black and white. Like the sequence in Les Plages d’Agnès (2008) where she scatters roses and begonias before the portraits of the dead, or her gorgeous, rampant installation from 2006, Ping-Pong, Tong et Camping, which is captured in Les Plages. She understood so deeply the relationships between life, death, mourning and celebration, and she knew how to make that manifest.
ASH: First, her eye. Second, her curiosity and openness to other people. Then a certain bitterness about humanity or society that she constantly works to overcome and often succeeds in overcoming, unlike most serious filmmakers with long careers.
She never withdrew and always made herself seen and heard, across every conceivable platform
SH: I feel she is at the core of all her films, and this she is, at essence, a great intelligence, openness, playfulness, sprezattura, freedom, deep feeling, curiosity about life, and love of people. You always feel she is playing a game with herself, in the best possible way, like in the way of Isaac Newton saying, “I don’t know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore.” She avoided compromise and commerciality completely. And she always performed the greatest trick of art, which is to make it look easy.
SFL: Varda has invented a completely new definition of the personal, a kind of social subjectivity that is constantly formed in relation to others. We move so easily in her work from fiction to documentary, from delight and laughter to serious consideration, from dazzling fullness to sparse symbolic evocation. There is constant revelation in her films, they are always old friends and new faces. Varda has also redefined spectatorial engagement, as the way we interact with her films is protean and suggestive. She can’t be categorised, and yet she’s a master of many cinematic forms. And oh yes, the feminism, always there and always to be rediscovered.
GBP: Kindness and respect for all of her subjects. A dedication to telling stories that aren’t or weren’t being told. A desire to capture beauty in all its forms. Being totally unafraid of film both as an ever-changing medium and as a ‘man’s world’.
LE: Yes, humour and self-awareness.
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AG: Has the way in which Varda worked had any effect on your own working methods or practice?
ASH: Varda showed how it’s okay to directly insert yourself into your own work. Even Vagabond begins with her voice on the soundtrack.
LE: Absolutely. That scene in The Gleaners and I where she’s filming the trucks on the highway and she films her fingers closing over them, to show how small they are, like she’s entrapping them. This moment of visual comedy quickly gives way to a line that I’ve adopted as one of my artistic credos: “This is my project. To film with one hand my other hand.” This idea that it can be a non-narcissistic endeavour to include the self in the frame of one’s work, rather an ethical, technically interesting, and ludic gesture – it summarised for me why I always write in the first person, across genres.
SFL: Writing is always difficult for me, but writing about Varda has become a joyful process. In my own writing on diverse subjects, stimulated by these encounters with Varda and her films, I have found a new desire to invent and yet to be accessible in the manner of Varda’s engaging curiosity.
She can’t be categorised, and yet she’s a master of many cinematic forms
SL: Diving into Varda’s universe opened my eyes to how creative cinema could be, how conventions can be – and need to be – subverted, it allows me to be more open as a programmer and pushes me to highlight works that are considered out of the box. The past couple of years I programmed Palestinian cinema, and lately Arab cinema, I can proudly say that we have a generation of impressive filmmakers that create in the same spirit of Varda in allowing themselves to explore diverse medium to express their art: film, video installations, visual arts, artists like Basma Alsharif, Jumana Manna and Larissa Sansour cannot be put into creative boxes and defy what is usually expected from Palestinian artists.
I also strongly feel that as women evolving in this industry we are forever indebted to Varda: she was instrumental in shaping the industry for us, she paved the way for any women who are struggling to to be taken seriously. She was married to a legend, many tried to keep her on Demy’s shadow, and even if she was continuously overlooked for decades and her role in the Nouvelle Vague erased, she managed to create a legend of her own.
SH: I don’t know, but it always made me feel good that she was in the world, making her work; a model of freedom and resourcefulness and just a kind of pure pleasure in artmaking, and a deep looseness and facility with her craft. I loved knowing she was working and making films; I always looked forward to seeing them. I was happy she was in the world. She gave you the feeling that the greatest artists do, that unearned feeling of intimacy with them: she is mine…
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AG: Did you ever meet her? Can you describe the encounter?
SH: I met her once, when I interviewed her for The Believer at the Toronto International Film Festival. But I was not in a room alone with her, there were other journalists there too, and we all conducted the interview simultaneously. I tried to write the interview within these limitations, the way I imagine Varda would have made a film; not at all ruffled by the limitations but being playful and artful with them. While watching her film at the festival, I went out into the lobby at one point – and she was right outside the doors of the cinema that was playing her film, lying on some chairs, asleep.
SFL: I had the great good fortune to meet Varda several times over four decades of writing and teaching about her. The first time was in her suite in the Mayflower Hotel on Central Park West (demolished to make way for luxury condos) in the early ‘80s… With some trepidation, I walked in as ‘Suzanne’ (Susan Sarandon) walked out, and Varda greeted me on her couch, where she reclined in stocking feet. We talked about numerous things, and she observed about Louise Brooks, that “a sex symbol is a heavy thing to bear.” I was delirious: her kindness and interest in my work overwhelmed me.
Over the years I’d see her when she came to New York or when I went to Paris. In New York I would bring my students to meet her; the encounters were always exciting. She seemed genuinely pleased to meet them and they were often star-struck. My most treasured meeting with her was in the summer of 2007 when I was working on an article about her installation at the Pantheon. We sat in her plant-filled courtyard drinking tea as she told me about what inspired her about the ordinary people who hid or saved Jews during the War. And, as luck would have it, I was at the 80th birthday party that was the inspiration for The Beaches of Agnes. I’m sure she had many of those events, but for me the swirl of activity, the colours and the food, and the graciousness of everyone there to celebrate this phenomenal woman, all combined to create an irreplaceable memory.
LE: One time, a few years ago, Varda turned her house in the south of France into a hotel for the summer. It didn’t cost much to spend the night, so my best friend and I went down there together. We didn’t expect her to be there, but there she was, hobnobbing, taking meetings. When she entered the dining room for dinner, she greeted us at our table in her very polite, old-school way: Mesdames, she said, in that distinctive voice, bowing her head slightly.
The next morning I had a miscarriage in her house. That’s a story for another time, but I remember seeing all the blood and thinking, amazed by the weirdness of it: I’m having a miscarriage in Agnès Varda’s house.
KR: I was fortunate enough to meet Varda twice. In my second year working at TIFF, Cameron Bailey asked me if I wanted to be ‘on Varda duty’, as she was receiving the Roger Ebert Tribute. He didn’t have to ask me, but he knew how much it would mean to me to spend a few days with my hero. He was right. It did. This act, in retrospect, feels very Vardadian (to use So Mayer’s term): not to do something because you should, but because you can. The second time, I interviewed her at her atelier for Cléo’s Varda issue. Both times, I was so amazed at her energy and her engagement with the world. It was as though, even after all her years, she was still amazed by life. It was such a beautiful quality.
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AG: What did you think about the resurgence of interest in her and her work in the past couple of years? And what do you think ignited it, especially across generations?
SH: I suppose the world caught up with her. She had an interest in bringing her life into her work in a way that seems very contemporary. She blurred genres, mixing documentary and fiction in a way that is now is quite common, but she came to it earlier and her reasons felt deeper, stranger and more personal than in some of the work that followed in her wake. I like to think the world always eventually catches up to great artists.
LE: I’m delighted. I think it was due to the fact that Faces, Places is such a joyful, accessible film, so it was able to capture a wider audience than she had in the past. But that film’s release intersected with the radical spike of interest in feminism we’ve seen over the past, I don’t know, maybe decade, and the presence of social media meant that those amazing catchphrases like the one Sheila captured in her ‘interview’ for The Believer – “we all have inside ourselves a woman who walks alone on the road” – could be shared over and over until her status as feminist hero was cemented.
GBP: I guess I’ve been part of it! I think a lot of people like me were either taught about her or discovered her at university, and she opened up a whole new world of filmmaking, plus the totally idiosyncratic world and philosophies of Varda herself. There’s also been more of a mainstream interest in feminism over the past few years, and I think a lot of that new wave of feminism has been saying things that sounds really radical, then realising or being told that people were saying these things back in the ‘70s, and that includes people like Varda.
Plus, she turned 90 and was still making films. I think anyone working as hard as she was up to their 90th birthday deserves a spotlight, and I’m so glad she had a kind of ‘resurgence’ (even though she never really stopped making films) in her career this late on.
JC: I kept thinking to myself: it’s about time. I wish the world would wake up earlier to the talents of women artists, ideally before they are dead (though if I were a Guerrilla Girl I would now adopt Agnès Varda as my pseudonym). Varda was already exhibiting amazing films before Godard had even picked up a camera, and till her last breath she continued to make profoundly innovative, collaborative work.
Yet I also felt uncomfortable with the memeification of her body, or the idea that she was a ‘sweet old grandma’. She was a blazing, raging, joyful feminist. But then again, she never took herself seriously: she initiated herself as a caricature when she asked the French animator Christophe Vallaux to draw her in the 2000s, and when she sent life-sized cut-outs of herself around the world to receive awards on her and behalf in the 2010s she knew what she was doing. She never withdrew and always made herself seen and heard, across every conceivable platform. I think that refusal to be ignored or hidden is very important for intergenerational collectivity, especially right now.
SFL: My sense of Varda, courageously toiling a bit in the shadows, and never giving up, always believing in the forms of art that she was dedicated to, were greatly rewarded in the past few years. She loved the younger generation, she was in a sense one of them, chronology be damned. Lena Dunham, Miranda July, Greta Gerwig, and others truly appreciated her. But we of the older generation also learned from the new kids on the block, and I for one have been awash in gratitude that Varda enjoyed such popularity and renown in the new century.
