Agnes Varda

Born in Brussels on May 30, 1928, Arlette Varda belongs to a cosmopolitan family, with a Greek father, a descendant of Asian refugees, and a French mother. She studied Art History at the École du Louvre, located in a wing of the museum in the French capital. She exercises her first professional activity as official photographer of the Parisian National Popular Theater.

A friend who was terminally ill was to blame for her going to the movies. Since he could not travel to see Sète, a small fishing town, he asked Agnès Varda to photograph it. But she decides that she will be more excited to record a movie that takes place in the place, it would be as if she had been there. This is  how Le Pointe Courte was born , the story of a guy who meets his wife after a significant absence.

Self-financed, the film was shot in 1955, three years before  Claude Chabrol ‘s The Beautiful Sergio , and four years before  François Truffaut ‘s The Four Hundred Blows , which would start the so-called New Wave of French cinema. His debut feature anticipates many of its characteristics, especially intellectual dialogues, a libertarian spirit, general shots in which some of those filmed look at the camera, as if they were in a documentary. “I was described as a forerunner of the movement when I was only 30 years old and had seen very little cinema. That’s why I had the audacity to shoot like that”. It had Alain Resnais as editor , later another of the greats of French cinema.

After several shorts, he directs his first film that would achieve recognition,  Cleo from 5 to 7 , a masterpiece that attacks frivolity, where Corinne Marchand, a young bourgeois singer, walks while waiting for the results of some medical tests. After a fortune teller foreshadows her death, she confesses to a young soldier she has just met that she is afraid.

She is considered the great female contribution to the avant-garde film movement, although she flees from classifications. “The term was invented by a French journalist years after all the films that make it up were released,” he explains. “It is true that an innovative way of making films was born, but each one of us shot on our own. It is not that there were meetings where we decided to create an artistic movement.

Agnès Varda’s subsequent films are of less interest. Titles like  La felicidad  or  Las criaturas  catch the spirit that she would derive in May 1968, but despite her experimental findings, they are too light. She would hit the mark again with  Homeless or Law , where Sandrine Bonnaire plays a homeless woman found dead; In a flashback of her, the last days of her life are shown. In addition to obtaining the Golden Lion in Venice, it is said that she has a lot to do with the later cinema of authors such as Ken Loach or the Dardenne brothers .. With a totally free structure, the character seems like a self-portrait of the author, who seems to wander with the same freedom, assuming the consequences of doing her own thing.

He paid tribute to the centenary of cinema with  One Hundred and One Nights , where a young woman refreshes the gray cells of an old man who is beginning to lose his memory by talking to him about films from different times and places. But the tribute to her husband, the director Jacques Demy who died in 1990 , in  L’univers de Jacques Demy , a documentary about the author of  The Umbrellas of Cherbourg , to whom she also dedicated the films  Jacquot de Nantes , where a child aspires to become a film director, and  Les demoiselles ont eu 25 ans , where he captures the homage organized for the quarter century of the filming of  Les senoritas de Rochefort, in the French city. They both had a son, actor Mathieu Demy , while Varda had given birth to costume designer Rosalie Varda, the fruit of her previous relationship with actor Antoine Bourseiller .

Her last stage is marked by  The Gleaners and the Gleaner , a critically acclaimed documentary that put her back on the map of the great masters of cinema in 2000. It shows a diversity of people who recover the tradition of gleaning, or collecting garbage. discarded by society as it was done especially in the postwar period, with which she herself compares herself when collecting images. In the remarkable  Two Years Later , from 2002, she recovered the protagonists of it, to see how they had changed after the film’s premiere. “I’m much more interested in working with real people than with actors,” she noted. “Spending hours and whole days with them so they can say what they want to say, even if they’re wrong.”

After  Cinévardaphoto  and  Les plages d’Agnes , which went somewhat unnoticed, she once again awakens passions with the sensitive  Faces and Places, where she picks herself up, embarking with the young photographer JR on a journey through French villages in danger of extinction. They will cover various buildings with images taken by the latter printed in giant size. She has received the Honorary Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015, the Donostia Award at the San Sebastian Festival in 2017, and then the Honorary Oscar. “It’s very easy to say ‘Agnès, we’ll give you a trophy’, but when I look for financing nobody answers me”, she comments jokingly. “I have a cabinet full of animals: there is a leopard, and a bear, and a dog, and a lion. And once they gave me a prize that consisted of a box full of sand from all the countries of Europe. Thank you very much, but why don’t you give me a little money for my next film?