Bring up the topic of the French New Wave in the late 1950s and early 1960s in a discussion, and Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rivette and other male directors immediately come to mind. But to do so completely overlooks the foremother of the New Wave, Agnès Varda, who has been consistently undervalued throughout her long career, though in her final years Varda finally achieved some small measure of the acclaim that she richly deserved. Carrie Rickey’s long overdue book is the perfect antidote to the sexism Varda had to endure during much of her career, and details how she fought to make the films she wanted to create, working with miniscule budgets and shooting on actual locations. Varda’s vision was that of a world in which outsiders are truly the most valuable people any society possesses, even as that same society seeks to continually marginalize them. This is a book that we have needed for a long time – one that absolutely restores Varda to the pantheon of cinema history, as one of the greatest cineastes of all time. 

Born in Ixelles, Belgium in 1928, Varda spent World War II living and working on a boat with her family in Sète, France, before moving to Paris. She initially aimed for a career as a museum curator, studying art history at the prestigious École du Louvre, but then switched to still photography, making a living as a commercial photographer (weddings, family photos, and the like). Soon, however, Varda became more interested in the cinema, making her debut with the groundbreaking feature film La Pointe Courte (1955), which explored the fragile relationship of a young couple deciding whether to continue their marriage in a small fishing village. 

Varda had no formal training in filmmaking, but she mapped the production out with a series of still photographs that constituted a sort of storyboard of shots. The film was a model for future New Wave productions in several ways; shot using just two professional actors (Silvia Monfort and Philippe Noiret), with the balance of the cast members being residents of the village, it had a shooting budget of just $14,000, and mixed documentary and fictional aspects with measured assurance. Varda snagged a young Alain Resnais to edit the film, which he did reluctantly, seeing in La Pointe Courte the style he was soon to adopt in his own work. A critical success, the film nevertheless failed commercially, and Varda had to content herself with directing a few short films for the next several years. 

This all changed with Varda’s second feature, which became her breakthrough film, Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cléo from 5 to 7, 1962), starring Corinne Marchand as Cléo Victoire, a pop singer who spends two fretful hours waiting for the results of a cancer biopsy. Presented in a real time format, the film was a major critical and commercial success, and its reputation has only grown since the film’s initial release. But since most viewers were unaware of the existence of La Pointe Courte, Varda was unjustly labelled a latecomer to the New Wave, in the wake of the runaway success of Godard’s À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960), Truffaut’s Les quatre cents coups (The Four Hundred Blows, 1959), and Resnais’ L’année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961). 

Though Varda followed Cléo with a series of dazzling films – including one of my personal favourites, the dark romantic fable Le Bonheur (1965), in which a young couple’s relationship ends in tragedy when the husband falls in love with another woman – in the 1960s and 70s, Varda never had the sustained career success enjoyed by her male colleagues. Much of this was due to the ingrained sexism of the era, which persists to this day, and viewed Varda as an object of curiosity – a “woman filmmaker” – rather than taking her seriously on her own terms or acknowledging her position as the person who really started the whole New Wave in the first place. After decades of struggle, it was only with the production of Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond, 1985) that Varda regained significant public attention, in an era that was perhaps more open to her vision and her talents. 

Vagabond tells the tale of Mona, a young woman (Sandrine Bonnaire, then just 17 years old), who lives on the road, moving from one place to another with fatalistic disdain. The opening image of the film tells us where the road has led her; she is discovered frozen to death in a ditch. From here, Varda flashes back to the people she met along the way, whom we see in on-screen interviews, or in scenes from their shared past. Some people help her, while others exploit her, but no matter what the circumstances, Mona winds up leaving every situation to go back on the road. Not surprisingly, the project was a tough sell to financiers. The budget was $722,000, but after much negotiation, Varda could only get 10% of that amount from France’s Channel 2 in exchange for broadcast rights. But what about the remaining balance? 

Then Varda had a stroke of luck; she received an invitation to become a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur, one of France’s highest honours. But rather than accepting the award, Varda scrawled across the invitation in red ink that she wanted to trade the Légion d’honneur for funding of her new film and sent the letter back. In response, Jack Lang, the minister of culture, awarded her $1.4 million, more than sufficient to complete the project. Shot in the winter of 1985 with just 25 pages of script, using non-professional actors and actual locations, with new dialogue written each morning before the shoot, Vagabond emerged as a surprise international hit, and was nominated for four César Awards, with Bonnaire winning for Best Actress. From then on, Varda’s international reputation was secure. 

In 2000, Varda moved from film to digital video, using a light, hand-held camera to create Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I), which documents the lives of the numerous people in France – both in the cities and the countryside – who survive by picking up the scraps of food, clothing, and other essentials that people have thrown away as trash. Freed from the necessity of a film crew and shooting most of the film entirely with the small digital camera, Varda creates a vision that is at once warm and yet deeply critical of modern throwaway society. It’s clear that Varda sides with “outsiders” in the film, as she does in Vagabond, with those who are marginalized – the “have nots” rather than the “haves.” 

But Rickey’s book is much more than just an account of Varda’s work in film, video, painting, sculpture, and as an activist for women’s rights. It’s also the story of her marriage in 1962 to Jacques Demy, a filmmaker whose interests would seem to be diametrically opposed to Varda’s. Demy made lavish musicals, such as his first feature film Lola (1961), which stars Anouk Aimée as a cabaret singer, using a “musical” structure in which the characters, having spoken during a scene, explode into song with music by the hyper-luxe composer Michel Legrand – sweeping, operatic and yet intimate films that are very much staged, and divorced from the real world. Varda and Demy’s relationship was loving but fractious; after the premiere of one of Demy’s most popular musicals, Les parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964), with another splashy score by Legrand, Varda took Demy aside and told him that if this was the kind of film Demy wanted to make, they should immediately divorce. Demy nevertheless made yet another lavish musical, Les demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Ladies of Rochefort, 1967) with an international cast including Catherine Deneuve, Françoise Dorléac and former MGM musical star Gene Kelly, which opened to rave reviews (for the most part) and commercial success. 

Meanwhile, Varda struggled during this period, making edgier films that sometimes didn’t find an audience. Les créatures (The Creatures, 1966), a domestic drama set in the aftermath of a near fatal car crash, is perhaps Varda’s least successful film, opening to negative reviews which persist to the present day. She directed a short segment for Loin de Vietnam (Far From Vietnam, 1967), an anti-Vietnam War film with contributions by Godard, Resnais, Chris Marker and others, and then fell in with the Warhol Factory crowd, finding new inspiration from Warhol’s work, and borrowing Factory “superstar” Viva for the leading role in her next film, Lions Love (1969), a mostly improvised film about the life of a female film director, played in the film by real-life director Shirley Clarke. 

However, as the decade closed, matters shifted. Demy had a brief, mostly unsuccessful stint in Hollywood, making the introspective film Model Shop (1969), which would have starred a young Harrison Ford if Columbia Pictures, the producer of the film, hadn’t stepped in and forced Gary Lockwood, fresh from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 (1968) to step in. The film failed at the box office. Demy made a few more films, most notably the charming musical fairy tale Peau d’âne (Donkey Skin, 1970), starring Catherine Deneuve and Jean Marais, but essentially his career was over.  

Demy was bisexual, and along with their divergent careers and aesthetic sensibilities, this put a terrific strain on Varda and Demy’s marriage. But the bond between them remained strong; when Demy was dying of HIV/AIDS in 1990, Varda helped him through this final passage, directing the lovely biographical memoir Jacquot de Nantes (1991), recreating Demy’s life from childhood onwards. She followed this with another tribute, L’univers de Jacques Demy (1995), and worked tirelessly to digitally restore not only her own films, but also those of her husband as well. 

After Demy’s death, Varda’s career reached its highest level. Vagabond is the work of a master, on the scale of Dreyer or Bresson, and The Gleaners and I was a massive commercial and critical success, eventually spawning a sequel, Les glaneurs et la glaneuse… deux ans après (The Gleaners and I … Two Years Later, 2002). The semi-autobiographical Les plages d’Agnès (The Beaches of Agnes, 2008) mixed the present and the past with dreamlike intensity, leading to Visages Villages (Faces Places, 2017), a documentary in which Varda teams up with French still photographer JR, roaming the countryside of France with Varda in a van, taking closeup images of the local people, blowing the images up to enormous proportions, and placing them on buildings in the area. Faces Places was perhaps Varda’s most popular film of all. Near the end of her career and her life, her imagination was still burning brightly. She made her final film, Varda par Agnès (2019), as a sort of guided tour through her work – one last look back at what she had accomplished. Varda died at the age of 90 in March 2019. 

Varda was tough; she had to be. Indeed, she fought right up to the end, when her work on Faces Places was nominated for Best Documentary feature at the 90th Academy Awards in 2018. In November 2017, Varda was given an Honorary Academy Award for her work in cinema in a ceremony led by Angelina Jolie. Varda, then the oldest person to be nominated for an Oscar in cinema history, danced with Jolie on the stage, saying that she was “dancing the dance of cinema,” while suggesting, not all that subtly, that while the Honorary Academy Award was nice, she would prefer a real one, which unfortunately she did not get. 

Rickey’s book is richly detailed, offering almost a day-by-day account of Varda’s life and work, thoroughly documenting the difficulty of making films as both a business and an art form. Complete and comprehensive, A Complicated Passion serves as a model for a cinema biography; Varda’s films (as well as her video and museum work, which was considerable) are thoroughly explored, but kept in constant balance with her life with Demy. This is an excellent book, one that the reader will read and re-read, offering a continuing connection with Varda and her work, and the world that she lived in.

Carrie Rickey, A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda (New York: Norton, 2024.)

About The Author

Wheeler Winston Dixon is the James Ryan Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and, with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, editor of the book series Quick Takes: Movies and Popular Culture for Rutgers University Press, which has to date published more than twenty volumes on various cultural topics. He is the author of more than thirty books on film history, theory, and criticism, as well as more than 100 articles in various academic journals. He is also an active experimental filmmaker, whose works are in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art. His recent video work is collected in the UCLA Film and Television Archive. He has also taught at The New School, Rutgers University, and the University of Amsterdam. His recent books include Synthetic Cinema: The 21st Century Movie Machine (2019), The Films of Terence Fisher: Hammer Horror and Beyond (2017), Black & White Cinema: A Short History (2015); Streaming: Movies, Media, and Instant Access (2013); Death of the Moguls: The End of Classical Hollywood (2012); 21st Century Hollywood: Movies in the Era of Transformation (2011, co-authored with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster); and Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia (2009). Dixon’s second, expanded edition of his classic book A History of Horror (2010) was published in 2023. Dixon's book A Short History of Film (2008, co-authored with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster) was reprinted six times through 2012. A second, revised edition was published in 2013; a third, revised edition was published in 2018; and a fourth revised edition with a great deal of new material will be published in early 2025. The book is a required text in universities throughout the world. As an experimental filmmaker, his works have been screened at The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Anthology Film Archives, Filmhuis Cavia (Amsterdam), Studio 44 (Stockholm), La lumière collective (Montréal), The BWA Katowice Museum (Poland), The Microscope Gallery, The National Film Theatre (UK), The Jewish Museum, The Millennium Film Workshop, The San Francisco Cinématheque, LA Filmforum (Los Angeles), The New Arts Lab, The Exploding Cinema (London), The Collective for Living Cinema, The Kitchen, The Filmmakers Cinématheque, Film Forum, The Amos Eno Gallery, Sla 307 Art Space, The Gallery of Modern Art, The Rice Museum, The Oberhausen Film Festival, Undercurrent, Experimental Response Cinema and other venues. In addition, Dixon’s films have been screened at numerous film festivals throughout the world, including presentations in London, New York, Toronto, Paris, Berlin, Monterrey (Mexico), Urbino (Italy), Tehran (Iran), Naples (Italy), Athens (Greece), Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rybinski (Russia), Palermo (Italy), Madrid (Spain), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Australia, Qatar, Amsterdam, Vienna, Moscow, Milan, Switzerland, Croatia, Stockholm (Sweden), Havana (Cuba) and elsewhere.

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