Agnès Varda, at least in her later years, didn’t make a big deal about being taken seriously. For decades, the film-maker and artist was much respected as the pioneering feminist voice in French cinema and as the “godmother of the Nouvelle Vague” – New Wave – her work beating Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut et al to the big screen by several years. But she was also somewhat sidelined, eclipsed by her male peers, and it took until this century for her to be truly revered: last year, her 1962 classic Cléo from 5 to 7 was ranked No 14 in the Sight & Sound greatest films poll.
But by the time she had begun to be deified, Varda was prone to sending herself up. She would appear on her film posters and DVD boxes in cartoon form as a quizzical, rotund Mrs Pepperpot figure; she even appeared at the Venice Biennale dressed as a potato. The latter guise, she once said, was because she loved the circus as a child. “I thought I should do something to get attention.”
The clownish side of Varda, who died in 2019 at the age of 90, helped endear her to a new international public, as did her double self-reinvention this century: first as a digital documentarist with her groundbreaking The Gleaners and I (2000), then with her extraordinary late flourishing as an installation artist. Her installations included Patatutopia, a reverie on tubers at the 2003 Venice Biennale (hence the spud costume); and a remarkable tribute to her beloved island of Noirmoutier in western France (mixed media: photos, video, beach balls, a hut made entirely from celluloid strips of one of her films).
Nude, Paris, 1954.
What’s often forgotten is that Varda, before turning to cinema, had already developed her own vision as a photographer. This year her black-and-white work from the early 1950s is celebrated by French photography festival Les Rencontres d’Arles with the exhibition La Pointe Courte, From Photographs to Film. The show (and accompanying book) consists of images shot by Varda in La Pointe Courte, an area of the Mediterranean town of Sète, where she lived as a teenager. Varda returned to the area – then an impoverished fishing community – to take photos in preparation for her first feature, La Pointe Courte, which she shot in 1954, a daring formal experiment alternating documentary footage and fictional love story.
La Pointe-Courte (patterns and details on the ‘dark side’ of the port), March-April 1953.
Containing many photos never seen before, the show has been curated in collaboration with the film-maker’s children, Rosalie Varda – who runs the family production company Ciné-Tamaris – and actor-director Mathieu Demy. Since their mother’s death, Rosalie has begun making an inventory of Agnès’s vast archive of negatives. “We’re organising, we’re discovering, we keep finding new things,” she says. The Sète photos are particularly telling, as they show Agnès planning her transition from still to moving images. “When she decided to make La Pointe Courte,” Rosalie says, “she really worked on the photos – it was more than reportage, it was about preparing the film. When she came on set, she had no problem knowing where to put the camera.”
Reflections on the quay, Sète, vintage print, 1950.
Having moved from Sète to Paris in the late 1940s to study photography and history of art, the Belgian-born Varda had soon established herself as a professional photographer, shooting portraits, working for magazines and documenting the Avignon festival and the Théâtre National Populaire. “That’s how she earned her living, right into the 60s,” says Rosalie. Agnès’s early theatre photos, featuring stars such as Jeanne Moreau and Gérard Philippe, have long been reproduced in published drama texts: in France, says Rosalie: “All schoolchildren had textbooks with her photos – all the classics of Racine, Molière, Corneille. Everyone grew up seeing her pictures.”
Varda’s La Pointe Courte photos, taken on her Rolleiflex, include a certain amount of folkloric spectacle – notably the gondolier-like figures competing in Sète’s traditional water jousts, in which participants try to push their opponents off boats with long poles. But she also explores the mundane reality of postwar Sète: children huddled in cramped rooms, dogs and drying laundry on the waterfront, along with familiar objects (barrels, stacked logs, carved wood) transformed into bizarre near-abstractions in the surrealist tradition.
Jousters on board during a tournament on the Canal Royal, Sète, summer 1952.
Published alongside the La Pointe Courte book is a separate photobook, Expo54. It reproduces an exhibition of Varda’s work that she organised in June 1954 at her home in Rue Daguerre in Paris’s southern 14th arrondissement, inviting friends and neighbours, among them the photographer Brassaï and artists Alexander Calder and Hans Hartung.
Expo54 features more children, including an eerie masked trio, as well as Varda’s friends: Calder is seen larking around in a bowler hat and sitting solemnly alongside his wife and daughters. There is also a remarkable set of ruthlessly matter-of-fact self-portraits with Varda either smiling cautiously in sensible-looking jumper and skirt, or naked, sometimes shot from behind, head bowed so as to turn her torso into pure sculpture. Even then, she sported the pudding-bowl cut that would be a trademark right through to old age, when she wore it in aubergine and silver in a style she called “mamie punk” (punk granny).
Varda moved to Rue Daguerre – appropriately named after 19th-century photographic pioneer Louis Daguerre – in 1951 and would live and work there over seven decades, for some of that time with her late husband, Jacques Demy, the director of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. The quartier had changed massively by the time I went to interview Varda there in 2009. The 1954 photos show the sooty, distressed walls of a dilapidated postwar city, but half a century on, Varda’s home vividly evoked the bohemian oasis it must have become during Paris’s cultural boom of the 1950s and 1960s. The courtyard felt like Varda’s private beach, decked with plants and decorated in shades of crimson and purple – very different from the severe site she recalled moving into, with no heating and no bathroom. By the time she and Demy had become star auteurs, the place was better equipped for entertaining, but at that point Varda didn’t photograph their guests: an enduring regret, she told me, was that she never took pictures of the Doors singer Jim Morrison, who would come to dinner.
Heart potato, 1953.
Rue Daguerre became Varda’s base for an eclectic, globetrotting career, taking in era-defining feminist fictions (One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, Vagabond); numerous documentaries, including studies of the Black Panthers and Los Angeles murals; hybrid works such as Jacquot de Nantes, an imaginative recreation of Demy’s childhood; and photographic studies of China in 1957 and Cuba in 1962.
An image of the artist Alexander Calder and his family taken by Agnès Varda in Paris in 1954.
Varda found renewed attention this century partly through films such as her playful, affecting autobiography The Beaches of Agnès (2008), partly through her impish new delight in self-promotion. But photography always remained a key thread – right at the end of her life, she enthused about becoming an Instagrammer. And one way or another, still images continued to fuel her films. One example is an enigmatic photo from Expo54 showing a dead goat, a child and a naked man on the beach; it would inspire her 1982 film Ulysse, in which Varda pondered the image’s meaning, and she mused on it again in The Beaches of Agnès. “It was a way of showing how a narrative can be born out of a single still moment,” says Rosalie Varda of Ulysse. “The shutter clicks – but before and after, there’s a whole story to tell.”
La Pointe Courte, From Photographs to Film is at the Cloître Saint-Trophime, Arles, until 24 September. La Pointe Courte and Expo54 are published by Delpire & Co (€20 each)
