Exploring Agnes Varda’s unusual preoccupation with potatoes
In 1955, Agnes Varda made her first film, La Pointe Courte, a low-budget project that mixed narrative fiction with documentary – a style that the filmmaker would frequently return to in her career. After creating a few short films, such as the experimental L’opéra-mouffe, concerning pregnancy, Varda released her seminal entry to the French New Wave – Cleo from 5 to 7 – in 1962.
The film follows Cleo, a popular, vanity-obsessed French singer who spends the evening anticipating a cancer diagnosis. Varda’s film is a cornerstone of feminist filmmaking, employing unique formal and thematic devices to explore the effects of patriarchal demands, commenting on the performance of femininity and the panoptical nature of the male gaze. From the beginning of her career, Varda proved to be a champion of female rights, never straying far away from feminist topics.
During the 1970s, Varda campaigned for abortion rights, signing the manifesto of the 343, risking prosecution by admitting to having previously had an abortion. In 1975, abortion was finally legalised in France, which Varda celebrated with the joyous One Sings, The Other Doesn’t, in 1977, advocating for women’s reproductive rights. Varda unapologetically weaved her feminist values into every project she created, whether that be through fiction or documentary.
In 2000, she released The Gleaners and I, a documentary about the act of gleaning. Armed with a digital camera, Varda interviews people who engage in different forms of gleaning, ranging from those who rummage through bins for food to artists who create pieces from discarded items off the street. The director becomes a gleaner of sorts, collecting images of others to form her own piece of art – one that advocates for audiences to become more environmentally aware.
Yet, alongside her interviews with French civilians, Varda also turns the camera around on herself. Although her documentary mainly concerns food waste and the class divide between French citizens, she also uses the imagery of discarded food – specifically potatoes – as a metaphor for female ageing and desirability. At the film’s beginning, Varda, who was in her early 70s at the time, highlights her wrinkles and grey hair through close-up shots. She declares: “It’s not ‘Old age, my enemy!’ It might even be ‘Old age, my friend.’ Still, my hands and hair keep telling me the end is near.”
From here, she heads to a field, where masses of potatoes are dumped if they don’t meet industry standards. Dumped for being too small, large, wonky or discoloured, Varda finds a connection in these discarded yet perfectly usable goods. She picks up some heart-shaped potatoes and takes them home, allowing them to sprout and wrinkle, much to her delight. Varda contrasts close-up shots of her hands with the wrinkles of decaying potatoes, comparing her ageing body to the unwanted items of food, making a powerful statement on the way society treats ageing women who are no longer deemed as ‘necessary’.
A few years later, Varda created an exhibition with potatoes, which involved videos exploring her fascination with tubers. Alongside the real potatoes lying on the ground of the gallery space, she even appeared dressed as a potato at the opening, literally embodying her potato metaphor. Therefore, when Varda passed away in 2019, fans left potatoes outside her home as a symbol of love for the iconic filmmaker.
