Our first Woman of the Week this year is Agnès Varda, a ground-breaking Belgian-born film director, screenwriter, photographer, and artist associated with French New Wave.

Born in the Ixelles quarter of Brussels to a French mother and Greek father, she left Belgium with her family during the WWII for Sète, France. At 18, she legally changed her name from Arlette to Agnès and left to study literature and psychology at the Sorbonne in Paris. Wanting to become a museum curator, she studied Art History at the École du Louvre, but then switched to studying photography at the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1951, she began working as a photographer at her friend Jean Vilar’s Théâtre National Populaire in Paris.

Urged by her friend Alain Resnais, she decided to pursue her interest of filmmaking and returned to her hometown of Sète in 1955 to film her first feature “La Pointe Courte”. Having had no formal training, and only watched a handful of films in her lifetime, Agnès approached the film like a novelist, playing on a “stream of feelings, intuition, and joy of discovering thing” whilst maintaining a certain order and cleverness about it.

Her method of keeping “authorial control” over scriptwriting and editing, which she called cinécriture (cine-writing), exclusively shooting on location, and using a mix of both professional and non-professional actors were all used to portray a parallel narrative of Sète’s fishermen community, and a Parisian couple who return to the husband’s home in an attempt to save their crumbling marriage. This dynamic between “conscience, emotion and the real world” had never been seen before in French cinema.

Agnès’ style, which would permeate throughout her films, exhibits what Roy Armes called a “balance between the personal and the political, the theatrical and the documentary”, and earned Agnès the title of “godmother of French New Wave”, influencing many directors after her, including Resnais’ own 1959 film “Hiroshima Mon Amour”.

Sources

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/obituaries/agnes-varda-dead.html

https://www.nywift.org/remembering-agnes-varda/https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/mar/29/agnes-varda-obituary
https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/agnes-varda/
https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/seven-facets-agnes-varda
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/agnes-vardas-radically-personal-films
https://theartofmoviestills.tumblr.com/search/varda

Agnès Varda

María Izquierdo

bell hooks