Varda Brings Life to Oeuvres

At just under five feet tall, with a head of two-toned—red and white—hair shaped in a severe, down-to-business bob, and a raspy voice characteristic of the French, Agnès Varda is impossible to miss. Besides the fact that she is essentially the only famous female filmmaker to have emerged during the French New Wave in the 1960s—an aesthetic turning point in the history of film when naturalistic settings and real-life plot lines challenged traditional, cheesy Hollywood conventions—Varda is a powerhouse.

Varda was celebrated at the Harvard Film Archive’s retrospective, “Ciné-Varda,” a combination of film screenings and lectures that took place this past week from March 8-16. Demonstrating the same independent streak that runs through her films, Varda left quite an impression on Harvard: she refused to be interviewed by a Harvard Gazette reporter who admitted to not sitting through her installation video, “Les Veuves de Noirmoutier” (“The Widows of Noirmoutier”). The video is currently exhibited in the Carpenter Center.

Despite her tough demeanor, however, Varda is a people person. Like her films, she digs to the very core of humanity and allows it to resurface, placing her camera exactly where it needs to be in order to piece together compelling, altogether beautiful and haunting stories.

Varda began her career in the arts as a photographer, but she yearned to go beyond the still image in her work. Her most recent film, “Les plâges d’Agnès” (“The Beaches of Agnes”) is an autobiographical portrait of her life and work that premiered at Venice Film Festival, was awarded best French film of the year by the French Union of Film Critics, and garnered a French Cesar for Best Documentary. In the film Varda discusses how, as a photographer, she imagined cinema was simply photography, but with dialogue.

“This was a stupid thought,” said Varda in an interview. “Cinema is not a still image plus dialogue. When I found this out, that was the minute I went from photography to cinema. I understood cinema was my thing because it is movement, it’s duration, it’s time, it’s words—if you need them—it’s music…it’s a total art, total expression. I think it is even the art of today.”

Varda’s first feature film, “La pointe courte” (1954), stars local fishermen and their families as themselves, a technique she often uses in her work, which blends documentary and fiction. One of her most celebrated films, “Sans toit ni loi” (“Vagabond”), tells the story of a young wandering girl, Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire), as she marches toward her inevitable death. In preparation for the film, Varda became a vagabond herself, wandering and meeting people who would not only inspire characters in the film, but would also play themselves, speaking lines written by Varda. This is an unusual method for filmmakers—so unusual that it merited Varda’s development of her own term—‘cinécriture’ (film writing, or film essay)—to describe her way of approaching and piecing together a film.

“It’s very interesting to decide that you want to capture some images and not others,” Varda said. “It’s the choice. What I call ‘cinécriture.’ The choices you make about what you choose as images, how long you show them—do you use a traveling shot or a still shot? Do you want people to speak, be silent, or to sing?” Varda’s instincts are greatly influenced by the reality of the images as she experiences them—both as a human being and as a filmmaker.

While Varda’s work is diverse and prolific, ranging from feature films and documentaries to short chronicles of her daily life, to installation pieces, Varda recognizes the importance of her humanity, of leaving some parts of the world out of the frame. “I’m not a maniac with a camera,” Varda said.

“People know that I work out of affection, empathy and love,” she continued. “This is not fake. I’m interested in people. When I’m filming, I try to get something that I can catch. Every body has its beauty; everybody has some particularity, some specific thing that is interesting to try to catch. So I’m curious, and that’s helped me a great deal. Not badly curious, but curious.” This curiosity is apparent and contagious. Her documentary “Les glaneurs et la glaneuse” (“The Gleaners and I”) is an investigation with traces of self-portraiture that explores the act of gleaning in rural communities, on the streets, and in the art world. The film demonstrates Varda’s command behind the camera and the trust she quickly gains with her subjects. Her capturing is not passive. She challenges those she films and attacks their inconsistencies. She brings forth passion and vulnerability.

At a lunch conference with students at the Graduate School of Design, Varda was asked to give advice for budding filmmakers. Like her films, which serve to question rather than provide answers, Varda responded: “No advice. No message. No certainty. No explanation. No message. I wouldn’t do that. I would say—stay alive. I would say, avoid hard drugs. That’s my only advice.” —Staff writer Mia P. Walker can be reached at mpwalker@fas.harvard.edu.