Review: Geoffrey O’Brien on Agnès Varda

Though her originality wouldn’t be fully recognized for a long time, she initiated what would come to be called the New Wave

Carrie Rickey’s biography of Agnes Varda, A Complicated Passion, manages, with exceptional art and without ever feeling rushed or perfunctory, to compress into a little more than two hundred pages a very long and very productive artistic life. In a good many biographies the cross-cutting between life and work can seem mechanical; Rickey by contrast shows how life and work can be so thoroughly intermingled as to be inseparable. To a rare degree, Varda's work invites such an approach. At every turn in her evolution—starting as a photographer, directing, over a period of sixty-five years, twenty-one feature films and a comparable number of shorts and television programs, and eventually also flourishing as an installation artist—Rickey shows her working with the materials and circumstances and accidental encounters of her life with extraordinary immediacy and openness, in a process of continual invention. Varda brushed away distinctions of genre—fiction, essay, documentary, memoir, polemic, memento—as minor obstacles to direct expression.

In the words of Varda’s daughter Rosalie, who worked on many of her films: “Everything was fluid … When we did the first day of shooting, we were throwing ourselves into the swimming pool.” The aquatic imagery emerges naturally. Beaches and boats figured prominently in Varda’s childhood, she spent part of World War II with her family in the coastal town of Sète (where she would return to make her first feature), and in her student days worked for a time among Corsican fishermen. As she remarks at the outset of her autobiographical film The Beaches of Agnès (2008): “If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes; if we opened me up, we’d find beaches.” In Uncle Yanco (1967) and Documenteur (1981) she transforms Los Angeles into a city of houseboats and sand. Her films overflow their borders, creating new structures with every turn. The movement of her camera is liquid, exploratory, driven by the impulse to see what is there around the next bend.

She came to film in a roundabout way, studying art, literature, and philosophy in the postwar years, voraciously but with indifference to academic expectations. At the Sorbonne she attended lectures by Gaston Bachelard, author of The Poetics of Space, who impressed her with his “dream of the material in people; a psychoanalysis of the material world related to people, wood, rivers, sea, fire, air, all of these things”—a description that suggests the texture of her films, with their endless curiosity about faces, bodies, painted canvases, the movements of cats and small children, machinery, walls, waterways. Every kind of surface is important to her. Her early immersion in art history informed a style that could be at once painterly and starkly documentary. Determined to master a technical craft, she studied photography and established herself as a professional specializing at first in young children and artists at work. By the early 1950s she was the official photographer for Jean Vilar’s Théâtre Nationale Populaire, working with such actors as Gérard Philipe, Maria Casares, and Michel Bouquet.