and wrote for the influential magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, including directors such as Godard, Truffaut, and Claude Chabrol. The “Left Bank” used a less erratic style and were more concerned with politics. They saw film not so much as merely a form of entertainment but rather as being on the same level with literature and art. Filmmakers in this group included Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Jacques Demy.
Agnès Varda’s style may seem at first glance to be more Right Bank, but she associated herself with the Left. She didn’t come from a film criticism background, instead studying literature, psychology, art history, and photography before moving into film. Born in Brussels in 1928, she changed her name from Arlette to Agnès at eighteen. Her family moved from Belgium to France to escape German bombing at the start of World War II, and she spent her teenage years living in the port city of Sète. Varda then moved to Paris to study and afterwards found work as a photographer for the Théâtre National Populaire (TNP), taking photos of stage productions. There Varda met two actors, Philippe Noiret and Silvia Monfort, who agreed to star in her debut film, La Pointe Courte. In between making La Pointe Courte and Cleo from 5 to 7, Varda met Jacques Demy, whose debut Lola was released in 1961 to rave reviews. They fell in love, marrying in 1962 and remaining together until his death in 1990.
Throughout the 1960s, Agnès Varda was an important voice in the French New Wave. She was the only female filmmaker working in France at that time and was actively engaged with social issues. Varda made narrative dramas and documentaries, often with female protagonists, and her films commented on current issues, such as Le Bonheur (Happiness) released in 1965, which looked at the sexual revolution. Her work is varied, but each of her films contain striking visuals owing to her background as a photographer.
When Jacques Demy passed away in 1990, Agnès Varda made a trio of personal films as a tribute to him. Jacquot de Nantes was a dramatized version of his childhood. For Les Demoiselles ont eu 25 ans (The Young Girls Turn 25), Varda traveled to the town of Rochefort to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort. And L’univers de Jacques Demy (The World of Jacques Demy) delved into his body of work and legacy.
In the 2000s, Agnès Varda continued to make documentaries, each demonstrating a wonderfully inventive and lyrical style. Most recently, she teamed up with visual artist JR to make Faces Places, released in 2017, where they traveled around the French countryside in a photo booth van taking photos of everyday people and pasting them onto the sides of buildings. Eyes are a strong motif throughout the film—evoking both a celebration of the art that Varda’s unique perspective has given the world and her need to see the world before she lost her eyesight completely.
When Faces Places was nominated for Best Documentary by the Motion Picture Academy of 2018, Agnès Varda became the oldest Oscar nominee in history. She was also awarded a special lifetime achievement Oscar in 2017 after receiving an honorary Palme d’Or at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival in recognition of her remarkable contributions to cinema. Now ninety years old, Agnès Varda shows no sign of slowing down—either in work or in activism. At the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, she walked the steps of the Palais des Festivals with eighty-one other women in a protest against gender inequality. Throughout the history of the Cannes Film Festival, only eighty-two female directors have ever been accepted into the official competition, and only two have won the Palme d’Or: Jane Campion and Agnès Varda.
As she stood at the stop of the stairs, actor Cate Blanchett and Varda read out a speech in English and French which included this rousing call to action:
“Women are not a minority in the world, yet the current state of our industry says otherwise. As women, we all face our own unique challenges, but we stand together on these stairs today as a symbol of our determination and commitment to progress…The stairs of our industry MUST be accessible to all. Let’s climb.”
Just like her character Cléo, Agnès Varda has been on quite a journey.
The ending of Cleo from 5 to 7 has been the cause of some debate. Some see it as a cop-out, a woman being saved by a man. Others say it’s a beautiful commentary on finding love in the face of possible death by cancer and war. Regardless, the film has been celebrated as a feminist work both for the way that it features a complex and sometimes unlikable female character (instead of an idealized stereotype) and for its commentaries on how women see themselves and are seen by others.
★Agnès Varda was the only woman working in the French New Wave, and made her first film, La Pointe Courte, at just twenty-seven years old.
★She was dubbed “the grandmother of the French New Wave” when she was just thirty years old.
★The budget of Cleo from 5 to 7 was $64,000, and it took five weeks to film.
★Her film Vagabond, released in 1985, won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
★Throughout her career, Varda has more than fifty credits as a director to her name as well as more than forty as a writer.
★In 2009, Varda was made a Commander of the Legion of Honour—an award of merit in France—for her achievements in cinema.
★When the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences conferred the Honorary Award on Varda in 2017, she became the first female director to ever receive that honor.
Daisies
(Sedmikrásky)
Filmové Studio Barrandov, 1966, Czechoslovakia | Black & White and Color, 72 minutes, Comedy/Drama
This experimental film follows two young women causing chaos.
Director: Věra Chytilová
Producers: Ladislav Fikar,
Bohumil Smída
Cinematography: Jaroslav Kučera
Screenplay: Věra Chytilová, Ester Krumbachova, Pavel Juracek
Starring: Jitka Cerhová (“Marie I”)
and Ivana Karbanová (“Marie II”)
“The form of the film was really derived from the conceptual basis of the film. Because the concept of the film was destruction, the form became destructive as well.”
—Věra Chytilová
Sometimes there are movies which defy easy categorization.
They are experimental, they feel risqué; are about nothing, but
also everything.
This is how I would describe Daisies by Věra Chytilová. It is a film with a deceptively simple plot, but its experimentation with content and form caused huge waves in Czechoslovakia at the time—and eventually, around the world.
First, some background: in 1945, the film industry in Czechoslovakia was nationalized, taking it from privately owned to being under the control of the state. By 1948, a communist government was in place, so the films being made in the 1950s were largely propaganda. Shot in the style of Soviet socialist realism, communist values were strongly depicted, the characters’ struggles were rewarded with happy endings, and narratives proceeded in a very straightforward manner.
Meanwhile, FAMU, the national film school, had been established in Prague, and the teachers there showed their students films from around the world. These were arthouse films not distributed within the country, including works from the French New Wave and the Italian Neorealist movements by Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, Louis Malle, Robert Bresson, and more.