The Tender Radical

Feminist filmmaker, experimental filmmaker, godmother of the French New Wave—almost all the descriptors applied to Varda (especially in sum) risk evoking an overly cerebral, coldly technical, perhaps even politically didactic artist. But then you dive into her actual films. They’re tough-minded poetry, absent sentimentality but filled with empathy, tenderness, and an abundance of intellectual curiosity. From her fiction narratives to her documentaries (in which she blurs genre conventions in both forms), she created biting critiques of various iterations of the status quo. Often threaded with sly humor, her body of work illustrates Varda’s delightfully skewed perspective on the world along with its human—and humane—possibilities. 

Born in Brussels in 1928 to a Jewish art dealer father and a mother from a well-to-do Greek Orthodox family, Varda grew up surrounded by the arts and immersed in classic literature. (She frequently referenced paintings in her films and drew inspiration from them for her unique visual style, while Proust and Virginia Woolf were among her favorite writers.) She began her own artistic journey as a photographer, which might help explain the considered but unmannered composition of her films, and the details she captured in every frame. Legendary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, a pioneer of unposed beauty and candid intimacy, was one of her biggest influences. The impetus for her transition from photography to making films, however, was a mystery even to her. “From photography I switched to cinema,” she said in a late career interview. “I don’t know how and why.”

In 1954 she released her first feature, La Pointe Courte, considered by many film scholars to be the opening salvo of the French New Wave. That movement’s roots weren’t in filmmaking itself, but in film criticism founded on unwavering intellectual and political rigor and advocacy for an aesthetic that would push beyond conventional templates of filmmaking. That critical foundation shaped both Varda’s artistic approach and that of the more frequently lionized men of the French New Wave who started making films after her: Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivett, and, of course, Jean-Luc Godard. 

It was Cleo from 5 to 7, released in 1962, which marked Varda as an internationally recognized force in film. Told in real time, Cleo perfectly captures early 1960s Paris in a way that both reifies and punctures the adoring mythologies of the city. It follows the titular Cleo, a pop star, as she prepares for a date. Her prep process becomes a lens through which Varda nimbly addresses concerns that would characterize her career: feminine identity and the construction of it, individuals navigating public space, walking the tightrope of societal expectations (and projections) and one’s own desires and needs. 

Varda’s filmography is a robust syllabus on defying the expectations of genre and subverting the audience’s expectations of what movies are and can do. It’s too varied and expansive to be neatly summed up. A few key films, however, serve as touchstones that illuminate her aesthetics and politics. There’s Cleo, which kicks off the ‘60s, and the short documentaries Huey and Black Panthers (two separate 1968 documentaries that are often confused as one,) which close out the decade. As bookends the films speak volumes about the rapid-fire changes wrought by the decade’s tumultuous politics. The non-fiction films reflect Varda’s interest in and dedication to real-time social justice and change and the people at the forefront of those movements—and what it costs them. Both films are attempts to counter the “public enemy” bullseye American media had placed on their subjects. 

The fiction narrative Vagabond (1985) opens with the discovery of the dead body of a female drifter whose story is then told in flashback. It’s a stark, bracing film that slowly unpeels a very hard life without ever asking for sympathy or tears. Yet it’s haunting for what it says about an uncompromising young woman living in an even more uncompromising world. Her ill-fated struggle to realize herself and her dreams even if she can’t (or chooses not to) articulate either resonates as deeply human. The Gleaners & I, released in 2000, is a documentary both timely and prescient as it looks at poverty, intense food insecurity, homelessness, and the huge gulf between what the world is capable of and what it actually delivers to the most marginalized and disenfranchised of its citizens. Filled with wit, empathy, and the most galvanizing, organic, insightful musings on what human beings owe one another, the film is a must-see for anyone who wants to really grasp the genius and incomparable artistry of Agnès Varda.

Her last film, the 2017 documentary Faces Places, co-directed with the artist JR, was a travelogue-cum-buddy flick. In it, the French countryside and picturesque small towns were leading characters alongside ordinary people encountered on the journey and coaxed into being part of art installations. But the film was also a powerful and, again, utterly unsentimental act of self-reflection as Varda muses on her life and work, puncturing some of the self-importance she had at the beginning of her career while also illustrating the power of art to not only improve but save lives. Deceptively breezy, Faces Places is a convincing argument for the basic goodness of people.

Agnès Varda, who was married to the legendary filmmaker Jacques Demy from 1962 until his death in 1990, and was mother to two children, a son and a daughter, died from cancer in 2019. Through each film she left behind, we’re reminded of how storytelling can challenge, console, and quietly reimagine the world.