Understanding Agnes Varda’s need to reflect time in her films
The director, screenwriter, photographer, and artist Agnes Varda was a crucial figure in the development of the French New Wave movement, undeniably influencing the medium’s properties and perception. Her approach to filmmaking employed women’s issues and other social commentaries as thematic concepts, with a visual presentation of documentary realism and a distinctive experimental style. Varda’s vision prioritised symbolic composition to execute complex narratives.
Varda worked according to the auteur theory, meaning a filmmaker creates a distinct and personal feature in their style. The director cited her cinematic method as “cinécriture”, stating that cinema was a language, a writing exercise. This approach led to some sentimental and layered art films, including Cléo From 5 to 7, a beautiful character study shrouded in thoroughly exposited symbolism. Another notable example is Vagabond, an examination of the landscapes of southern France accompanied by an interior quest for belonging.
During a talk with The Believer, Varda elaborated on her direction in filmmaking when she shared her goal of creating features related to her time. In her explanation, she references her 1954 film La Pointe Courte, her directorial debut following a couple who goes to a small French fishing village to try to solve the problems of their deteriorating marriage. Varda selected this preference of exhibiting her time over presenting traditions or classical standards concerning source material.
The picture is considered to be the first French New Wave film of all time. However, Varda avoids any historical status her directorial feature brings her: “I don’t try to make a place in history at all,” she commented. “People put me in the history of cinema because my first film, La Pointe-Courte, was so ahead of some other filmmakers,” she explains. “Many filmmakers have made resurgent work, and I was just a little ahead of the time. It happened because of La Pointe Courte, which is a very strange film but very daring for ’54.”
Varda describes her early days of filmmaking coinciding with a time when “there were three women directors in France”. Detailing further, she added: “Their films were OK, but I was different,” Varda notes. “It’s like when you start to jump, and you put the pole very high—you have to jump very high. I thought I have to use cinema as a language.”
The art director perceived the medium of film to be “very classical in its aims”, mirroring other artistic mediums such as literature and the theatre. Varda interpreted cinema’s source material to be unfitting, given the potential narratives she could identify around her, and this prompted her to employ an innovative contribution. “I have to do something which relates with my time, and in my time, we make things differently,” was the epiphany the filmmaker experienced.
With this realisation of what the art she would transform film with would look like, Varda invested in cinema’s properties and potential. She added: “I didn’t have a list of things I should do this year, next year, find a good novel, sign two stars and make a deal—because I think cinema should come from cinema. I never adapted anything.”
Varda fulfilled her approach to creating art from the cinema by constructing moving stories that reflected her experiences and understanding of the world around her, exposited by attentive and meaningful imagery as presented in experimental editing techniques. Cleo from 5 to 7 showcases the frustration of women never being validated in their pain or concern as the protagonist struggles to find comfort for her potential illness in the men around her. Varga places images of mirrors and clocks around the protagonist to emphasise how she perceives herself and her concern with time running out. Vagabond tackles the presence of women in cinema, working to de-fetishise the female body by liberating it from the male perspective in a non-linear narrative.
Varda’s cinema is intimate, layered, emotional and expressive, flowing with original ideas that dignified the medium as its own, all stemming from an ambition to reflect the filmmaker’s own time. By straying away from adapted material found in other arts and investing in film’s unique specificity, Varda became one of its most compelling and essential contributors by ensuring that its assets and aftermaths cannot be replicated in other art forms.
