Agnès Varda, Acclaimed French Filmmaker and “Grandmother of the New Wave,” Is Dead at Age 90
Agnès Varda, the acclaimed Belgian-born filmmaker who was called the “grandmother of the New Wave,” died today. She was 90 years old. She is survived by her two children, Rosalie Varda and Mathieu Demy.
Born Arlette Varda on May 30, 1928, in Ixelles, Belgium, she studied art history at Paris’s École du Louvre and photography at the École des Beaux-Arts. Varda went on to work at the Théâtre National Populaire as a photographer, where she took portraits of artists like Alexander Calder, Brassaï, and some of the great stage actors of the era. She later confessed that she was not, in the beginning, a frequent moviegoer. “I just didn’t see films when I was young,” she said in a 2009 interview. “I was stupid and naive. Maybe I wouldn’t have made films if I had seen lots of others; maybe it would have stopped me. I started totally free and crazy and innocent. Now I’ve seen many films and many beautiful films. And I try to keep a certain level of quality of my films. I don’t do commercials, I don’t do films preprepared by other people, I don’t do star system. So I do my own little thing.” It worked: In her 2014 work The Cinema of Agnès Varda: Resistance and Eclecticism, the film critic Delphine Bénézet argued for Varda’s importance as a “cinéaste au féminin singulier,” a woman who stands apart in the history of cinema.
Though Varda was not an official member of the Cahiers du Cinema group that formed the Nouvelle Vague school of filmmaking, her first film, La Pointe Courte (structurally inspired by William Faulkner’s novel If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem [originally published under the title The Wild Palms]), premiered in 1954, five years before those filmmakers began their work. She had no professional film training. The critic Georges Sadoul called her film “certainly the first film of the Nouvelle Vague”; its desire to expand the world of filmmaking would set the tone for the rest of Varda’s career. “I had the feeling,” she said later, “that the cinema was not free, above all in its form, and that annoyed me. I wanted to make a film exactly as one writes a novel.”
Although Varda is largely credited with lighting “the fuse under the New Wave,” it wasn’t until her 1962 feature, Cleo From 5 to 7 (a meditative film in which a woman spends two hours waiting to hear if she has cancer), that Varda became established on the international stage. By the mid-1960s, Varda had turned her focus to documentaries. “In all women there is something in revolt that is not expressed,” she told The Believer in 2009. “I’m interested in people who are not exactly the middle way or who are trying something else because they cannot prevent themselves from being different, or they wish to be different, or they are different because society pushed them away.”
Varda met the director Jacques Demy (Lola, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and The Young Girls of Rochefort) in 1958; they were married in 1962 and remained together until his death in 1990. In 1965, they were photographed by William Klein in Vogue (along with their daughter, Rosalie, who Demy cast in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) for a short piece in which Varda is described as “a small woman with huge eyes, her temperament distrustful, enthusiastic, serious” and her film Le Bonheur as “a movie superficially poetic but basically cruel, one that shocked people because it set out as a self-evident truth its moral that happiness is inhuman, the enemy of both memory and beautiful sentiments.” Their coupling, Vogue wrote, “form[s] a brilliant unit.”
She and Demy moved to Los Angeles, where they lived from 1968 to 1970 and where they directed a young Harrison Ford and befriended Jim Morrison, the lead singer of the Doors. (She would later be one of the five attendees at his funeral in Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetery in 1971.) In 1975, Varda founded her own production company, Ciné-Tamaris, which she said allowed her certain creative freedoms, like the ability to shoot and edit in tandem. Her 2000 film, The Gleaners and I, is largely acknowledged to be one of the best documentaries of all time.
In the course of her career, Varda earned more than 50 credits as a director of both fictional films and documentaries, and more than 40 as a writer. In 2002, she received the prestigious French Academy prize, Prix René Clair, for her overall cinematographic work. On April 12, 2009, she was given the highest French decoration, the National Order of the Legion of Honour. In 2015, she was the first woman to be given an honorary Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival; in 2018 she was the spiritual head of a red carpet statement at that same festival, protesting the lack of female representation over its storied history. In 2018, she was nominated for an Academy Award for the first time for Faces Places with the photographer JR, and earlier in the year she became the first female director to receive an honorary lifetime-achievement Oscar from the Academy. “Je résiste,” Varda told The Believer in 2009. “I’m still fighting. I don’t know how much longer, but I’m still fighting a struggle, which is to make cinema alive and not just make another film, you know?”
