From Film Quarterly, Winter 2018, Volume 72, Number 2

I first met Agnès Varda a couple of decades ago, in 1998, at the opening of the Istanbul Film Festival. I was on the jury, and she was the honored guest. She arrived sleepy, suspended in time from some faraway place, and fell asleep at dinner. She doesn’t remember, but of course I do.

The next morning, she was up early, raring to visit the Bazaar and the Hagia Sophia; we ended up at a shop high above the city that sold ex-votos. Agnès swept up a small pile of the silvery tin eyes, arms, and legs, explaining that she had a collection. I happened upon an ear that turned out to be unique.

Oh, did Agnès love that ear, so much so that once outside the shop, I offered it to her. She asked if I knew how old she was, and I said no, suspecting she was a few years older than me, perhaps the same five years that separated me from my older sister who always wowed—and frightened—me a bit. Today, I have forgotten her age, our ages, despite knowing them all too well, suspended in a preferred disbelief.

At that time, Agnès was not easily recognized on the international scene, not yet the royal figure of today with her plum-colored crown and incisive comments. We knew about her and her New Wave history, but hardly her full scope as an artist; Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I) would not be released until 2000.

One of those few immortals for whom one name will do, Agnès, with her high energy, velvet voice, and incisive verdicts, is forever young. Belgian-born, she grew up in Sète, a seaport town in the south of France and the site of La Pointe Courte(1955), her debut film, which made waves way before the New Wave. In the mid-1950s, she was already having a brilliant career as photographer at Jean Vilar’s Festival d’Avignon, site of the grand stage adventure of the 1950s, where the new “people’s theater” was being created in front of her lens.

In her first feature, Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7, 1962), the camera traced a young woman (Corinne Marchand) walking through Paris from 5 to 7 p.m., awaiting the news of the doctor’s report on her cancer exam. It would enjoy tremendous acclaim in the women’s film festivals of the early 1970s. Within its haunting portrayal, filmed in real time and in black and white, there is an interlude: Jean-Luc Godard (JLG) and Anna Karina appear in a short film-within-a-film in which JLG famously removed his dark glasses—for mere seconds—just for Agnès.

She has been called the Godmother of the New Wave, sometimes the Big Sister, even the Grandmother, but Agnès rides her own wave. She has never slowed down: a ceaseless creative force, she has been on the spot at historic moments. She never puts anything away for good, so old photos turn into films, and whatever she can’t use right away may turn up later in her short films, recycled with fresh invention. On a trip to Germany, the history of 4711 eau de cologne captivates her as much as the venerable cathedral and re-appears in her Agnès de ci de là Varda (Agnes Varda: From Here to There, 2012). She sees the world in a grain of sand—or in a heart-shaped potato. In her garden, she pays as much attention to a tree’s growth as to any honored guest.

In this house on the rue Daguerre in the fourteenth arrondissement, where she has lived since the 1950s, she raised children and tended cats, developed photos, cooked up movies and installations, filmed neighbors, plotted adventures, and received friends and famous artists, including at least one president of the Republic.

Antoine Bourseiller (who played the soldier in Cléo and was a grand figure in the world of theater) was the father of Varda’s daughter, Rosalie Varda. She raised Rosalie on her own at first, then with the filmmaker Jacques Demy, her husband, who came to live in the house in 1958. Their son, the actor and director Mathieu Demy, today lives in Los Angeles. Rosalie is the head of the Ciné-Tamaris production company, with offices on the premises.

After the success of his Les parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964), Demy was put under contract in Hollywood to make Model Shop (1969), and the family moved to Los Angeles. Agnès, already busy with her own ventures, had learned of the jailing of Huey Newton in 1967 and got on a plane to Oakland, California where she made a 16mm film, Black Panthers. “I was there at the right moment,” she says. As she had been when she traveled to Cuba to shoot Salut les Cubains (1963), her compelling portrait of a triumphant Fidel Castro, the celebration and dancing in the streets that had followed the revolution. She also made Lions Love (Lions Love [… And Lies]) in 1969—a delirious fin-de-régime fantasy, her tribute to Pop Art featuring Andy Warhol’s Viva.1

Eventually Agnès and Jacques returned to the house on the rue Daguerre, a street still full of neighboring artisans and tradespeople. Daguerréotypes (1976) was Agnès’s close-up on this historic street that was home. And later, in this house, she cared for Demy throughout his final illness and made Jacquot de Nantes (1991), her film about his childhood, which was completed fifteen days after his death from AIDS in 1990.

Agnès, so at home in the world, still lives in this house full of memories, ever cooking up new dishes from stray images. Her mind on the move creates and recycles adventures of drifters, souvenirs, objects lost and found. Some may turn up in an installation at the Fondation Cartier, which, a few streets down the road, is the institution that has housed her work. En route between her house and the Fondation is the Montparnasse Cemetery, where Demy is buried and where Agnès plans to be buried with him.

On the rue Daguerre, Rosalie and a team of worker bees hum away at Ciné-Tamaris headquarters, located just on the other side of Agnès’s living space. Friends, children, and cats move freely through house and garden. Visitors may add a plant—or partake of her ratatouille and intense conversation, just as I do, while she presses chocolate cake and more tea on me. It’s been a big year. Agnès has been all over: an honorary Oscar and a Spirit Award in Hollywood, an honorary Palme d’Or at Cannes, and more honors rolling in since the triumph of Visages villages (Faces Places, 2017), made with the visual artist JR, who, with his dark glasses and playful ways, appears almost like a resurrection of JLG. No wonder, then, that the film’s denouement takes place in Rolle, Switzerland, where they have traveled to meet the master, Godard himself—who, despite their appointment, is not at home.

It has not been easy to find time for this interview, either. We met in May at the Galerie Nathalie Obadia, where Agnès exhibited her “Cabane de Cinéma: La serre du Bonheur,” a hothouse of sunflowers made out of film stock from Le bonheur (1965). Then it was time for the Cannes Film Festival, and everybody wanted her. Next came her ninetieth birthday, celebrated with family and grandchildren gathered from Paris and Los Angeles. A week later, we had a date at last, but somehow the DVD of Daguerréotypes she had given me refused to play on my machine!

Finally, the day arrives. Rosalie opens the door. Beautiful Rosalie! She will see about our tea as she sees about the house, the office, and, not least, her mother’s schedule.

And then we are in the garden, and here she is, somehow more compact than before, yet ever more Agnès—intuitive, funny, and also incisive, and so full of her own questions that, of a sudden, I had to wonder: Who is doing the interviewing?

She quickly zeroes in on her interviewer: “You mean you haven’t seen Daguerréotypes? You haven’t seen that many of my movies!” In a flash, though, the famous sharpness subsides and she talks about things on her mind: this generation of kids on the Internet, the visiting grandchildren who do not read. “I tried,” she says, rueful, for Agnès herself is certainly a reader. La Pointe Courte was inspired by William Faulkner’s Wild Palms. It is the film she made as an unknown, the one that Alain Resnais edited, the one he said he would have liked to have made himself.

Just as we finally settle down, Agnès mentions that people will be dropping by later. Friends? “Friends from cinema, people who are writing about me that I appreciate, but don’t read,” she adds with a laugh, and I wonder if I am one of them. We are friends, but she has so many. Never mind. We sit in the garden and have our tea.

Joan Dupont:
You were my introduction to French cinema. I came from New York to live in Nancy in the 1950s and saw movies like Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au grisbi[(Hands Off the Loot), 1954], with Jean Gabin, all in argot which I couldn’t understand.

Agnes Varda:
A period piece!

Dupont:
And then later, in Paris, I saw your Le bonheur, the first movie I could really understand. It made me cry.

Varda:
You were teaching?

Dupont:
No, back then, I was making babies. And the first film that moved me was Le bonheur. Not incidentally, the film is about a young working-class couple who picnic in the country on weekends, making love in an idyllic pastoral setting. One day, the husband meets another woman who looks like his wife and is just as happy with her. It made me suffer!