5 Movies | Monday, February 13th
Belgian-born French film director, screenwriter, documenter, photographer and artist Agnès Varda (1928-2019) was a cinematic trailblazer. She was a forerunner of the French New Wave movement and is widely cited as one of the first filmmakers to critically reimagine how women are represented onscreen. Her work is known for its sense of documentary realism and a distinct experimental style. Her signature visual motifs owe to her early career as a photographer in the 1940s and 50s. She said, “I started earning a living from photography taking trivial photographs of families and weddings to make money. But I immediately wanted to make something where I was asking questions with composition, form and meaning.” She made her first film in her words, “without experience, without having been an assistant before, without having gone to film school.” She admitted that she had only seen around 20 films by the age of 25. Varda thus relied on “the sole experience of photography” which remained the bedrock of her nearly four dozen films. Throughout her career she maintained the interrelationship between photographic and cinematic forms once saying, “I put films in the photos or photos in the films.” Her work is characterized by location shooting and nonprofessional actors – lending it the spontaneous introspection that is associated with improvisational street photography.
The Academy Museum honors Varda’s work with the exhibition, “Director’s Inspiration: Agnès Varda,” which explores different influences on the filmmaker’s work. It is organized around three sections: Photography, Real People/Real Life and Art. Each highlights the unique sources that undergird her filmmaking. On February 13, TCM screens some of Varda’s most enduring works, films that reflect her distinct vision.
The tribute kicks off with Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) which follows a pop star, Florence Cléo Victoire (Corinne Marchand), through two hours during which she awaits the results of a recent biopsy to diagnose cancer. (The film represents diegetic action said to occur between 5 and 7 p.m. but its run-time is 90 minutes.) The film is about a woman coming to terms with her mortality, a common trope for Varda. But on a deeper level, the film studies the ways in which women are objectified and only valued for their youth and beauty. Varda suggests that far from being inherently self-absorbed, women come to be obsessed with the way they look because society is. Cléo does not want to lose her youth or beauty to cancer because she is afraid of losing her social worth. Varda gives Cléo hyper focused interiority, and we see the world through her fear, paranoia and sadness. In one famous scene, she walks down the street, her eyes meeting those of hungry judgmental passersby. Mirrors abound in the film, catching Cléo’s reflection at every turn – even windows become reflections of herself rather than transparent openings onto other people. Though made nearly 60 years ago, its prescient themes and docurealist mode of visual storytelling make Cléo from 5 to 7 as relevant today as ever.
Varda’s Le Bonheur (1965) (which translates to “happiness” in English) has an array of interpretations. Set in suburban Paris, young François (Jean-Claude Drouot) appears to live a happy contented existence with his wife, Thérèse (Claire Drouot), and their two children. (Varda cast a real-life French TV family, including the kids, for these roles.) Despite his satisfaction, François openly takes a mistress, named Émilie (Marie-France Boyer), without hesitation or remorse. He justifies loving both women, but not without extreme consequences for Thérèse. Though Thérèse agrees to their open marriage, her acceptance of the arrangement seems coerced – her only job, she thinks (perhaps because society says), is to make her husband “happy” even at the expense of her own. Some critics are quick to recognize the deeply sardonic sneer in the title. Others see it as a lyrical sketch of an open marriage gone awry. In any case, feminist film critics agree that it is Varda’s most shocking film and might better be thought of as a subversive horror movie than a romantic pastoral.
In 1985, Varda made Sans toit ni loi (“without roof nor law”) known in English as Vagabond, a drama about the death of a young female drifter named Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire). The death is investigated by an unseen and unheard interviewer (Varda herself) who focuses on the people who last saw her. The film is told through nonlinear techniques, divided into 47 episodes, each told from a different person’s perspective. The fragmentation of the narrative mirrors the ways in which women’s bodies – in both in life and death – are so often picked apart, sexualized and scrutinized. Vagabond is also considered one of Varda’s greatest feminist works.
Throughout her life, Varda made several short films, including short documentaries, and in 1968 she turned her camera on an Oakland, California demonstration against the imprisonment of activist and Black Panthers co-founder Huey P. Newton. At a time when many Americans misconstrued the aims of the Black Power movement, Varda’s 31-minute Black Panthers allows the influential radicals to speak for themselves. (So important is Varda’s original footage that it was included in PBS’s 2015 documentary, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution.) Newton is himself interviewed as is Kathleen Cleaver who talks about the increasing importance of Black women in the movement. Like Varda’s other films, Black Panthers is timely.
Varda’s films are not only inspired, as the Academy Museum points out, but also inspiring. They have influenced a host of other filmmakers and film critics including Jean-Luc Godard, André Bazin (of Cahiers du Cinéma), Chantal Akerman, Barry Jenkins and more. Martin Scorsese described Varda as “one of the gods of Cinema.” He said, “I seriously doubt that Agnès Varda ever followed in anyone else’s footsteps, in any corner of her life or her art. Every single one of her remarkable handmade pictures, so beautifully balanced between documentary and fiction, is like no one else’s – every image, every cut…What a body of work she left behind: movies big and small, playful and tough, generous and solitary, lyrical and unflinching and alive.” Ava DuVernay wrote about her relationship with Varda, ending her statement with “Merci, Agnès. For your films. For your passion. For your light. It shines on.” In 2017, Varda was the first female director to be feted with an honorary Oscar. The Academy Museum exhibit on Varda runs through March 2024.
On February 13th at 8pm, TCM host and president and director of the Academy Museum, Jacqueline Stewart, sits down with co-host Matt Severson, Director of the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, to discuss the pioneering work of director Agnès Varda.
