Kelly Reichardt discusses her love for French New Wave champion Agnès Varda
A proponent of slow cinema, Kelly Reichardt has been creating movies since the mid-1990s, beginning with River of Grass, which marked her out as an essential up-and-coming voice in cinema. Despite the film’s successful reception, Reichardt struggled to secure funding for her next project, stating: “It had a lot to do with being a woman. That’s definitely a factor in raising money”.
The director finally made her next film in 2006, Old Joy, regarded as one of the year’s best releases. Two years later, in 2008, Reichardt released Wendy + Lucy, her first of multiple collaborations with actor Michelle Williams. Since then, the director has released works such as Meek’s Cutoff, Certain Women and First Cow. The director typically focuses on underrepresented groups, such as working-class people, emphasising realism through long takes and minimal dialogue, allowing audiences to contemplate the events on screen.
Reichardt once told the New York Times that she is most interested in characters on the margins “who don’t have a net, who if you sneezed on them, their world would fall apart”. Thus, it makes sense that the director cites Agnès Varda as one of her main inspirations, a filmmaker who continuously advocated for underrepresented people throughout her seven-decade-long career.
Varda, a Belgian-born French filmmaker, was a champion of the French New Wave. As one of the only women in the movement, Varda’s work stood out compared to her contemporaries, using her narrative and documentary cinema to explore feminist topics such as autonomy and abortion, the civil rights movement, and working-class characters.
One of Varda’s best works remains The Gleaners and I, her 2000 documentary following various kinds of ‘gleaners’, herself included. Armed with a handheld camera, Varda journeyed across France to interview a menagerie of people, such as those who collect food scraps out of necessity, artists that use junk as materials, and hippie teenagers. She splices these interviews between observations on ageing, art, her filmmaking process, and identity.
During an interview with Rotten Tomatoes, Reichardt discussed the films that influenced her whilst creating 2019’s First Cow. The filmmaker picked Varda’s monumental documentary as one of her main inspirations, writing: “In Gleaners And I, what’s around you is what you survive on – it’s a kind of contemporary foraging that they’re doing.”
With that, Reichardt was also greatly inspired by Vagabond, Varda’s 1985 film that follows a young homeless woman wandering around the Languedoc-Roussillon wine country during a cold winter. The heartbreaking tale is a tragic portrait of a woman attempting to make ends meet, with Varda weaving documentary-style techniques into the fictional narrative to give it added realism.
Discussing the film, Reichardt said: “I thought, ‘Oh my God, the inventiveness of that film and the sort of circular motion of it and how she just decides to let people talk to the camera at a point, even though she’s in this narrative’.’ Referring to Varda’s effortless blend of fact and fiction, Reichardt said: “Just her confidence to be so inventive with narrative form. She’s so inspiring. How she moved in and out of documentary and narrative and how her docs have such narrative threads in them and her narratives… she just opens the door.”
She continued: “It’s like, ‘OK, now you’re going to talk to these real people that aren’t actors,’ and she is just very fluid between those two. I admire those things about her work so much.”
