Agnès Varda: The director Martin Scorsese called “one of the gods”
Any filmmaker who finds themselves being elevated to deified status by someone of Martin Scorsese’s standing can’t be anything other than a towering presence over the art of cinema, a sentiment that unquestionably applies to Agnès Varda.
Paying tribute to the influential writer, director, photographer, and artist who was just as comfortable in documentary as she was in narrative features following her passing at the age of 90 in March 2019, Scorsese called her “one of the gods”. Not only was he constantly left in awe of her professionally, but the two also “became friends and stayed friends”.
With a career that spanned from the 1955 drama La Pointe Courte to the self-directed retrospective Varda by Agnes, Scorsese was stunned by the way in which she was “reinventing constantly”, as he explained at the Telluride Festival by describing her as “a wonder to me”.
Not that she was always enamoured with her peer’s own filmography, considering Scorsese made a point of exclaiming that “she wasn’t too happy with Kundun“, as well as her exasperation at discovering the script for The Irishman came in at a weighty 180 pages: “She said, You can’t do these kind of things! It’s too much for you! It’s really too much!’ I got a lot of the inspiration from her, you know? Because she didn’t care – ‘There are no rules!’ That’s the key to her work.”
The longevity of Varda’s brilliance can be neatly surmised by the fact that her documentary Ô saisons ô chateaux was nominated for the Palme d’Or in the ‘Best Short’ category at the Cannes Film Festival in 1958, six decades before she became the oldest person to ever be nominated for a competitive Academy Award at 89 years old when Faces, Places was shortlisted for ‘Best Documentary Feature’ at the Academy Awards in 2018, prior to her status as the first female filmmaker to be awarded an honorary Oscar being certified the very same year.
One of the pivotal figures in the French New Wave movement in the 1950s and 1960s, Varda’s movies, both fictional and non-fiction, addressed women’s issues, were steeped in rich social commentary, and became lauded as landmarks in feminist filmmaking, all of which were captured in her unmistakable experimental style. Even today, several of the most prominent women working behind the camera are indebted to the ground-breaking and trailblazing path that Varda carved through what was a largely male-dominated industry at the time of her ascension to greatness.
Praised by Greta Gerwig as being “just as good as Truffaut or Godard” and lauded by Alexandra Hidalgo for the way “Gleaners made it clear that I could also make films and that I could do it on my own terms,” multiple generations are indebted to Varda as not just a master of her chosen profession but by her constant desire to test herself in an ever-expanding number of storytelling arenas.
Whether it was art, cinema, movies, documentaries, short films, or television, Varda was equally comfortable and every bit as acclaimed at each discipline she dedicated herself to, leaving behind both a body of work and a legacy that few have – or will – ever be able to match.
