Agnès Varda had seen about twenty films when she decided to make one
At 25, the photographer Agnès Varda had watched perhaps 20 films, never assisted a director and never attended film school. She shot her debut anyway, planning every frame from her own still photographs. Six decades later she became the first woman to receive an honorary Palme d'Or and an honorary Oscar.
She was born Arlette Varda in 1928 in Ixelles, Brussels, to a French mother from Sète and an engineer father from a family of Greek refugees from Asia Minor, and she renamed herself Agnès at 18. In 1940 the family fled to Sète, where they lived on a boat during the war. Paris, when she moved there to study, struck her as grey and inhumane, and she found Sorbonne lectures antiquated. She trained in art history at the École du Louvre, meaning to become a curator, then switched to photography.
Photography paid the bills first, through family portraits and weddings, but she wanted to make compositions that asked questions about form and meaning. Her friend Jean Vilar hired her as official photographer of his Théâtre National Populaire in 1951, a post she held for a decade while taking photojournalism assignments across Europe. For La Pointe Courte in 1955 she photographed everything she intended to film, using the pictures as models for camera position, distance, lens and light. She and friends formed a cooperative to fund it.
Her methods were unusual for the 1950s: she shot on real locations when sound equipment pushed most directors into studios, and she cast non-professionals. That made her a forerunner and then a leading voice of the Left Bank group and the French New Wave. The historian Tim Palmer argues she also belongs among overlooked postwar makers of shorts and essay films, such as Chris Marker and Georges Franju, whom the louder New Wave overshadowed.
Her features include Cléo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond, which won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1985. As a documentarian she made The Gleaners and I and Faces Places, the latter nominated for an Oscar, and she moved freely between images, once saying she put films in photos and photos in films. Martin Scorsese called her one of the gods of cinema. Her last film, Varda by Agnès, came out in 2019, the year she died.
Source: Agnès Varda
