Welcome to Film School! This is a column focused on movie history and all the stars, filmmakers, events, laws and, yes, movies that helped write it. Film School is a place to learn—no homework required.
“If we opened me, we’d find beaches.” So says Agnès Varda in Varda by Agnès, the final work in a filmography that spanned over 60 years. As we see in the documentary, we’d find an awful lot of other things too.
Varda started her professional life as a photographer, taking portraits of both famous and regular folk, and that fascination with people and images followed her through her career. As such, the leap to feature films was a natural progression, and she swiftly became the only major female director of the French New Wave; some posit she even “invented” the movement with her first movie, 1955’s La Pointe Courte. While Varda was initially best known for her narrative features, foremost among them Cléo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond, she actually made many more documentaries, especially during her later decades.
The last of them, Varda by Agnès, takes the form of a lecture—though a lecture as lively, warm and wry as the woman delivering it. Varda, 90 years old but as sharp and funny as ever, sits on stage in a theater, talking about her career in front of an audience largely consisting of young film students. She skips back and forth through her filmography, throwing chronology to the wind, dedicating as much time to her lesser-known works as to her big hits. In the last half-hour or so, she discusses her photography, and her later life turn towards video installation (it was typical of Varda’s perennial creative, playful innovation that she should start and excel at a different artistic medium well into her 70s.)
Despite the humble form, for the mere fact of its existence, Varda by Agnès is a remarkable document. To have a legend on the level of Varda talk at great, glorious length about her game-changing work—what drove her, what inspires her—and to have that talk recorded for posterity, is both hugely valuable and rare. All too often important directors go off the boil in their later years, or don’t even make it that far in the first place. Varda kept working at her best all the way to the end of her long life. That she died just before her final film made it to a global theatrical release meant that Varda by Agnès played as if she was eulogizing herself. And who better to do it?!
Several throughlines emerge. For one thing, Varda knew that she was easy to underestimate. At 4’9”, and in her later decades with an iconic two-tone bowl haircut giving her the aura of the coolest grandma imaginable, she presented no threat.
“I intimidated no one. I never have. It gave me the chance to meet people.” She interviewed the Black Panthers at the peak of their powers. She induced Andy Warhol to persuade his muse Viva to appear in Lion’s Love. She got Robert De Niro to fly to France for a single scene in One Hundred and One Nights, and learn his French lines phonetically (and this was the same year he made both Casino and Heat!). However sweet and grandmotherly she may have appeared, Varda knew how to use that image to get what she wanted.
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