Agnès Varda: How this prolific director was for a long time the female exception of the New Wave
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Agnès Varda on the set of "Lions Love (… and Lies)" (1969). JEFFREY BLANKFORT / MAX RAAB - CINÉ-TAMARIS
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Portrait The director did not wait for the men of the New Wave to freely reinvent cinema.
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Although Agnès Varda may have distinguished herself towards the end of her life as the high priestess of recycling, history will remember that the author of "The Gleaners and I" (2000) was above all an avant-garde artist. "Grandmother of the New Wave" (her own expression), chronicler of the golden age of hippies in California in the sixties, a supporter of the feminist movement from the following decade (she signed the "Manifesto of the 343" in "Le Nouvel Observateur"), proto-startup artist with her production company Ciné-Tamaris, she rethought her aesthetic in the light of the digital revolution and was able to perpetuate her image through autobiopics packaged like Instagram stories. From "Beaches of Agnès" (2008) to "Varda by Agnès" (2019), we are blown away by her dexterity in infusing the visual codes of the web into her DIY cinema.
It would be reductive to pinpoint the beginning of this pioneering career to her early days as a filmmaker. For, before inventing, Varda reinvented herself. Born in Ixelles, Belgium, into a large and wealthy family, she was christened Arlette, and struggled to identify with this rigid, austere, bourgeois framework imposed by parents she considered more as mere progenitors, reluctant from a very young age to "be part of the pack" (that is…
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