Agnès Varda

Varda by Agnès

Varda by Agnès

The final film from the late, beloved Agnès Varda is a characteristically playful, profound, and personal summation of the director’s own brilliant career. At once impish and wise, Varda acts as our spirit guide on a free-associative tour through her six-decade artistic journey, shedding new light on her films, photography, and recent installation works while offering her one-of-a-kind reflections on everything from filmmaking to feminism to aging. Suffused with the people, places, and things she loved—Jacques Demy, cats, colors, beaches, heart-shaped potatoes—the wonderfully idiosyncratic work of imaginative autobiography Varda by Agnès is a warmly human, touchingly bittersweet parting gift from one of cinema’s most luminous talents.

Film Info

  • France
  • 2019
  • 119 minutes
  • Black and White/Color
  • Various
  • French

Available In

Collector's Set

The Complete Films of Agnès Varda

The Complete Films of Agnès Varda

Blu-ray Box Set

15 Discs

$199.96

Varda by Agnès
Credits
Director
Agnès Varda
Written by
Agnès Varda
First chat codirected by
Agnès Varda
First chat codirected by
Didier Rouget
Produced by
Rosalie Varda
Associate produced by
Joey Faré
Associate produced by
Dany Boon
Varda’s right hand
Julia Fabry
Director of production
Cecilia Rose
Editor
Nicolas Longinotti
Cinematography by
Claire Duguet
Cinematography by
Julia Fabry
Cinematography by
François Décréau
Sound
David Chaulier
Sound
Alan Savary
Sound mixer
Boris Chapelle
Edited by
Agnès Varda
Edited by
Nicolas Longinotti

Current

The Heart of Documentary

The Complete Films of Agnès Varda

The Heart of Documentary

Suffused with a palpable love for her subjects, Agnès Varda’s nonfiction work investigates the complex interrelations between self and community, public and private.

By So Mayer

A Woman’s Truth

The Complete Films of Agnès Varda

A Woman’s Truth

Over the course of an extraordinary six-decade career, Agnès Varda fused her feminist politics with an original artistic practice that made her a leading figure of the French New Wave.

By Ginette Vincendeau

Explore

Agnès Varda

Writer, Director

Agnès Varda
Agnès Varda

The only female director of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda has been called both the movement’s mother and its grandmother. The fact that some have felt the need to assign her a specifically feminine role, and the confusion over how to characterize that role, speak to just how unique her place in this hallowed cinematic movement—defined by such decidedly masculine artists as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut—is. Varda not only made films during the nouvelle vague, she helped inspire it. Her self-funded debut, the fiction-documentary hybrid 1956’s La Pointe Courte is often considered the unofficial first New Wave film; when she made it, she had no professional cinema training (her early work included painting, sculpting, and photojournalism). Though not widely seen, the film got her commissions to make several documentaries in the late fifties. In 1962, she released the seminal nouvelle vague film Cléo from 5 to 7; a bold character study that avoids psychologizing, it announced her official arrival. Over the coming decades, Varda became a force in art cinema, conceiving many of her films as political and feminist statements, and using a radical objectivity to create her unforgettable characters. She describes her style as cinécriture (writing on film), and it can be seen in formally audacious fictions like Le bonheur and Vagabond as well as more ragged and revealing autobiographical documentaries like The Gleaners and I and The Beaches of Agnès.