Agnès Varda, Legend of the French New Wave and Beyond, Dead at 90

Celebrated filmmaker Agnès Varda, who spent the better part of her life ruminating on the nature of time, the interior and exterior lives of women, and the socially marginalized, died today at the age of 90. According to a statement from her family: “The director and artist Agnès Varda died at her home on the night of Thursday, March 29, of complications from cancer. She was surrounded by her family and friends.”

Varda’s first film, 1955’s La Pointe Courte, has been acknowledged by critics as a forerunner of the French New Wave. She followed that with a series of shorts and, then, in 1962 with Cléo from 5 to 7, the film that would cement her legend. The film, starring Corinne Marchand and scored by Michel Legrand (who died in January at age 86), follows a Parisian pop singer in real time as she awaits the results of a biopsy that will determine whether or not her cancerous stomach tumor is inoperable. According to our own Eric Henderson:

All throughout, Varda captures the fairy-tale essence of early-’60s Paris with a vivacity and richness that rivals Godard’s Breathless. Unlike her New Wave compatriots, whose talents were reared in part at film schools, Varda was trained in the field of photography and consequently films the city with a completely unique vision. Her framing teems with life at every corner: kittens wrestling in Cléo’s apartment, a child playing a tiny piano in an alleyway, and quarrelling lovers in a café. She demonstrates an unerring eye for complex compositions that still manage to delineate between foreground and background planes. And in the bargain, every one of the film’s gorgeously designed set pieces enhance our understanding of the character and amplify Cléo’s understanding of herself.

Varda met her future husband, Jacques Demy, in 1958 while living in Paris. They remained together until his death in 1990. Curiously, given how prolific they were as artists, the couple rarely collaborated: Varda has an uncredited role in Demy’s iconic 1967 musical The Young Girls of Rochefort and served as an executive producer on his 1971 drama Lady Oscar, and Demy co-wrote her 1991 film Jacquot de Nantes. Maybe that was because they were both drawn to different aspects of life and people’s relationship to them.

Varda’s fiction films, among them Le Bonheur and Vagabond, garnered much renown, but she’s now primarily known for her documentaries. According to Slant’s Pat Brown, in his review of Varda’s last completed film, Varda by Agnès, from this year’s Berlinale:

At one time she was best known for the narrative features she made during the first four decades of her career, but many of those films had a tenuous relationship to fiction, featuring as they do non-professional actors, having filmed exclusively on location, and, in the case of 1962’s Cléo from 5 to 7, taking place in real time. At the turn of the millennium—when Varda was 72—she and feature fiction finally broke up for good, and since then she’s made three celebrated documentaries: The Gleaners and I, The Beaches of Agnès, and Faces Places.

Faces Places brought Varda considerable acclaim. Made in collaboration with the semi-anonymous French street artist known as JR, the film tells the story of two Frances, one contemporary and the other made of memories and friendships from Varda’s life. Faces Places, which earned Varda her one and only Academy Award nomination, is, according to our own Peter Golberg, “a many-sided and meditative work that’s at turns delightful, saddening, yet always deeply personal, filled with uniquely Vardian chance encounters with people and places from Varda’s past while also focused on JR’s ability to use his art to engage people.”

We had the incredible honor of interviewing Varda on two occasions, once timed to the U.S. theatrical release of Faces Places in 2017 and two years prior to that timed to the one-week runs that her 1988 documentary whatsit Jane B. par Agnes V. and 1993 drama Kung-Fu Master! received at Lincoln Plaza Cinema.

Varda spent her long life and career giving voice to the voiceless. Her wisdom and empathy knew no bounds, a raison d’etre that’s perhaps best understood in her own words:

We did look for optimism. We looked for energy, we looked for the energy of expressing that everybody could express his or herself. Because that’s important—that it doesn’t stay totally quiet. Every moment can be agreeable to people we meet. But there is no way to say that life is beautiful, let’s go on. But at the same time, I think you have to be fairly honest about not having a ridiculous hope, but let’s meet, let’s share, let’s use the empathy we have for people, let’s create moments in which people understand each other. I mean, that’s already a big deal, you know?