Agnès Varda, often called the grandmother of the French New Wave, cultivated a cinema where poetry emerges from the rhythms of life, the overlooked margins of society, and the intimate moments of human experience. Across more than six decades of filmmaking, she seamlessly merged fiction and documentary, personal memoir and social critique, with a lyrical style that makes the mundane radiant. Her films foreground women’s subjectivity, community, and the subtle interconnections between people and place, defining a cinematic language she called cinécriture—writing with the camera.
Two Hours of Life and Reflection
In “Cléo from 5 to 7” (1962), Varda traces a young singer, Cléo, as she wanders through Paris awaiting the results of a medical test. Spanning real time from 5 to 7 p.m., the film captures the city alive with pedestrians, cafés, and fleeting encounters.
Through long takes and spontaneous glimpses of real Parisians, Varda crafts a meditation on beauty, mortality, and solitude. Cléo’s external journey mirrors her internal anxieties, while the vibrant streets pulse with life. Feminist in spirit, the film portrays a woman negotiating the tension between societal expectation, personal identity, and impending mortality—a dual exploration of visibility and invisibility that would influence generations of filmmakers.
Sunlit Reflections on Love and Desire
“Le Bonheur” (1965) presents François, a happily married man whose attraction to a postal worker disrupts domestic tranquility. Filmed in sun-drenched gardens inspired by the Impressionists, Varda juxtaposes luminous imagery with a disquieting narrative, questioning the nature of happiness, fidelity, and societal norms.
Through careful composition and serene landscapes, the film examines human desire with poetic precision: love is visually radiant yet morally complex. Critics at the time debated its stance on gender and fidelity, but the film’s aesthetic audacity and subtle humor reveal Varda’s nuanced critique of romantic convention.
Marginality and Existential Poetics
In her mature masterpiece, “Vagabond” (1985), Varda follows Mona, a young drifter discovered dead in a ditch, reconstructing her last days through encounters with those who crossed her path. Sandrine Bonnaire delivers a committed, magnetic performance, embodying a life lived at the margins.
Mixing fiction with documentary realism, the film interrogates societal indifference and female autonomy. Landscapes—fields, roadsides, and desolate villages—become witnesses to her transient existence. Varda’s methodical observation turns the quotidian into a parable of existential solitude, a poetic reflection on human vulnerability, societal neglect, and the fleeting yet resonant presence of a single life.
Salvaging Value in the Overlooked
Varda’s “The Gleaners and I” (2000) sees the director embrace handheld digital cinematography to explore the act of gleaning—collecting what others discard—and, by extension, the act of noticing. Inspired by Millet’s 1857 painting The Gleaners, Varda travels across France to document both traditional gleaners and modern scavengers.
Her playful and inquisitive camera captures social marginality and ecological consciousness alike, revealing profound dignity in acts often ignored. The film oscillates between observational documentary, personal reflection, and philosophical inquiry, exemplifying Varda’s gift for transforming everyday labor into poetic contemplation.
Memory and Self as Landscape
In this autobiographical reflection, “The Beaches of Agnès” (2008) interweaves personal memories, film clips, and theatrical staging to construct a cinematic self-portrait. Beaches serve as liminal spaces where past and present coexist, and her playful inventiveness—dressing as a potato, animating objects—reaffirms her boundless creativity.
The film reflects on her career, childhood in Sète, and relationships, especially with her late husband Jacques Demy, blending essayistic structure with whimsical poetics. Here, Varda positions the self as a landscape to be explored, re-imagined, and celebrated, showing that cinema can map the interior as vividly as it depicts the external world.
Collaborative Journeys and Public Art
Varda’s final major work, “Faces Places” (2017), sees her journeying through rural France with the photographer and artist JR, creating art with townspeople along the way. The film celebrates community, creativity, and intergenerational dialogue, transforming ordinary spaces into sites of collective reflection.
Varda herself remains a central presence, both guiding and participating, underscoring her belief in cinema as shared experience. The collaboration with JR highlights her commitment to making visible the overlooked, while playful, inventive compositions continue her lifelong exploration of beauty and humanity.
The Poetics of Varda’s Cinema
Across her oeuvre, Agnès Varda consistently elevated the ordinary to the extraordinary. From the real-time anxieties of “Cléo from 5 to 7” to the reflective self-portrait of “The Beaches of Agnès”, her films create spaces where life, memory, and community resonate poetically. She employed cinematic form not merely to narrate but to inhabit moments, to let time stretch, and to render the unseen perceptible. Her attention to gestures, landscapes, and marginal figures generates a delicate rhythm: the silence between dialogues, the sweep of a wind across a field, the light falling on a face—all become vehicles for reflection and aesthetic delight.
Varda’s cinema is a testament to curiosity, empathy, and imagination. Her mastery of cinécriture transforms film into a form of writing with light and shadow, framing ordinary lives with extraordinary care. Each work invites the audience to pause, observe, and perceive the poetry embedded in the everyday. She was an architect of intimacy, an explorer of marginality, and a chronicler of human presence in both fictional and real-world spaces. Her films remain luminous guides to the intersections of social consciousness, feminist insight, and lyrical artistry.
References
- The New York Times, 2019. Agnès Varda: Highlights From Her Film Career, 29 March. [online] Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/movies/agnes-varda-highlights.html [Accessed 11 November 2025].
- The Guardian, 2019. Greatest of the great – Agnès Varda: the eternally youthful soul of world cinema, 29 March. [online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/mar/29/agnes-varda-greatest-of-the-great [Accessed 11 November 2025].
- BFI, 2024. Where to Begin with Agnès Varda. [online] Available at: https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/where-begin-with-agnes-varda [Accessed 11 November 2025].
