Agnès Varda(1928 — 2019)
Agnès Varda
France, Belgique
7 min read
French photographer, visual artist, film director and screenwriter
Frequently asked questions
Key Facts
- Agnès Varda réalise en 1955 'La Pointe Courte', film précurseur de la Nouvelle Vague française
- Son film 'Cléo de 5 à 7' (1962) s'impose comme une œuvre majeure du cinéma français d'auteur
- Elle cofonde avec Jacques Demy la société de production Ciné-Tamaris en 1954, affirmant son indépendance artistique
- Dans les années 2000, elle se tourne vers l'art contemporain et les installations plastiques, exposant notamment à la Fondation Cartier
- En 2017, elle devient la première femme à recevoir un Oscar d'honneur pour l'ensemble de sa carrière cinématographique
Works & Achievements
Varda's first feature film, shot in a fishing village near Sète with non-professional actors. Considered a founding film of the French New Wave before the movement existed.
A real-time film following a singer during two hours of waiting for a medical diagnosis. A masterpiece of the French New Wave and an avant-garde feminist manifesto.
A film about a young drifter found dead in a ditch. Winner of the Golden Lion at Venice, this radical film questions freedom, marginality, and society's gaze on women.
A tribute to her dying husband Jacques Demy, recreating his childhood in Nantes. A deeply sincere film of love and mourning, blending fiction and documentary.
A personal documentary shot with a lightweight digital camera, exploring the practice of gleaning in France. Varda appears in it herself, aging, reinventing the relationship between filmmaker and filmed subject.
A cinematic self-portrait in the form of a memory walk along the beaches that marked her life. Winner of the César for Best Documentary, it confirms her status as an icon of auteur cinema.
A documentary co-directed with artist JR, traveling across France to photograph and display giant portraits. Nominated for an Oscar, the film celebrates intergenerational encounters and art in public spaces.
Anecdotes
Agnès Varda made her first film, La Pointe Courte, in 1955, without ever having received any formal filmmaking training. She drew directly from American literature, particularly William Faulkner, and shot with non-professional actors in a fishing village near Sète. The film is often considered the first film of the French New Wave, predating even those of Godard or Truffaut.
In 1962, Varda made Cléo from 5 to 7, a film shot in real time following a singer during two hours of anxious medical waiting. To stay as close to reality as possible, she filmed in the actual streets of Paris without official permits, using a lightweight handheld camera — a revolutionary approach for the time.
Well into her eighties, Agnès Varda co-directed Faces Places with photographer JR, traveling through rural France in a giant photo-booth truck. The film, released in 2017, was nominated for an Academy Award, and she received an honorary Oscar. She had also become the first woman to receive an honorary Palme d'Or at Cannes, in 2015.
Agnès Varda was also a recognized visual artist. She built huts made from reels of film from her own movies and installed them in museums and galleries around the world. This approach embodied her belief that cinema was not merely a spectacle but a living material — transformable and recyclable, like memory itself.
Her husband, director Jacques Demy, died of AIDS in 1990. As a tribute to him, Varda made Jacquot de Nantes in 1991, reconstructing Demy's childhood from his own memories. She interspersed throughout the film close-up shots of his hands and face, filmed in his final days, creating a work of heartbreaking tenderness and honesty.
Primary Sources
I didn't learn cinema, I practiced it. I had a camera and I wanted to tell stories. The rest is work, curiosity, and love of people.
I thank cinema for allowing me to be curious, to travel, to meet wonderful people, and to never be bored. It is a magnificent profession when you love human beings.
The French New Wave was a freedom. You could film in the street, improvise, not have a big budget. But I was already in that freedom before anyone gave it a name.
Film stock, when it is exhausted, becomes matter. I build with what remains of my films. It is a way of not letting images die.
Key Places
Varda lived and worked her entire adult life on Rue Daguerre. She made it the subject of her documentary Daguerréotypes (1975), and it is where her home-studio is located.
The town of her adolescence and the setting of her first film La Pointe Courte (1955). Sète remains a fundamental reference in her Mediterranean and working-class imagination.
Varda presented many films there and received the Honorary Palme d'Or in 2015. She is an iconic figure in the history of the festival.
She exhibited her visual installations there, notably L'Île et Elle in 2006, confirming her status as a visual artist beyond cinema.
Varda lived several years in Los Angeles with Jacques Demy in the 1960s–1970s, a period during which she made Lions Love and documented American counterculture.
