AGNÈS VARDA
(30 May 1928 - 29 March 2019)
The Belgian-born French film director, writer, artist and photographer, who has died at the age of 90, was often called the ‘Godmother of the New Wave’ in French cinema, as her work pre-dates the beginnings of the Nouvelle Vague, after which she was consigned to a back seat while the rise of Truffaut, Chabrol, Resnais, Godard, Rohmer, Rivette and Varda’s husband, Jacques Demy, superceded her initial influences. Varda began her career as a stills photographer but always had cinema in mind and at times combined the two genres. She worked as a theatre photographer for a while, until she decided to make a film. She knew little about cinema, having seen few films. She did some filming for a friend in a French fishing village, La Pointe Courte, and then made a film about the town which she named after the place itself and in 1955 it became the forerunner of the New Wave, edited by no less a figure than Alain Resnais.
She went on to make short documentaries including Along the Coast, a stunning travelogue about the French Riviera. Her next feature, Cléo from 5 to 7, was an international success, heralding a career in which Varda would make films about women and their problems. Here the worries of a young girl (Corinne Marchand) are about the chances of her having cancer. It had music by Michel Legrand and other appearances by French cinema luminaries such as Dorothée Blanck, Jean-Claude Brialy, Eddie Constantine, Danièle Delorme, Sami Frey, Jean-Luc Godard, Anna Karina and Alan Scott.
Le Bonheur was the ironically titled film about a three-way love relationship while Les Crèatures had Catherine Deneuve as a mute woman marrried to a novelist. Lions Love was made in Hollywood with several Tinseltown celebrities. One Sings, the Other Doesn’t is the story of two women set against the burgeoning feminist movement. In Vagabond a young woman is found dead, frozen in a ditch. In Le Petit Amour Jane Birkin plays a woman trying to fathom the mind of a teenage boy. Jane B. by Agnès V. is an imaginary biography of Jane Birkin, and in Jacquot de Nantes Varda pays tribute to her late husband, Jacques Demy, a year after he died. This was followed by Les demoiselles ont eu 25 ans, a documentary on Demy’s musical films Les demoiselles de Rochefort made 25 years earlier. She also made a third film about her husband, The World of Jacques Demy, in 1995.
After that she mostly made documentaries for the cinema or television, including two autobiographical studies, The Beaches of Agnès (2008) and Agnès Varda: From Here to There, a five-part TV series in 2011. She was Oscar nominated in 2018 for the delightful Faces Places, recording her journey around the villages of France with photographer JR, which won awards all over the world including Cannes and the London Film Critics' Circle for documentary of the year. However, in the same year she received an honorary Academy Award for her lifetime’s achievement. Her last work was a final autobiographical TV series in 2019, Varda by Agnès. She was married to Jacques Demy from 1962 until his death in 1990. They have a son Mathieu and Varda was the mother of Rosalie Varda, the daughter she had with the actor and director Antoine Bourseiller.
MICHAEL DARVELL