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Agnès Varda
Varda receiving an honour at the Guadalajara Film Festival
Born	(1928-05-30) 30 May 1928 Brussels, Belgium
Occupation(s)	director, screenwriter, editor, actor, producer, installation artist, photographer
Years active	1955 - present
Spouse	Jacques Demy (1962-1990; his death)

Life and career

The career of Agnès Varda is an important and often overlooked voice in the modern French cinema. Her career pre-dates the start of the Nouvelle Vague (French New Wave) , and La Pointe Courte contains many elements specific to that movement that make it famous. Varda was born Arlette Varda in Brussels, Belgium, the daughter of Christiane (née Pasquet) and Eugene Jean Varda, an engineer. Her mother was French and her father's family were Greek refugees from Asia Minor.Varda studied Art History at the Ecole du Louvre before getting a job as the official photographer for the Théâtre National Populaire in Paris.

Despite similarities to the French New Wave, films by Varda belonged more precisely to the complementary Rive Gauche (Left Bank) cinema movement, along with Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Cayrol and Henri Colpi. The group was strongly tied to the nouveau roman movement in literature and politically was positioned to the Left. Like the French New Wave, its members would often collaborate with each other.

Varda was one of the five persons to attend Jim Morrison's burial in Paris at the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

She was a member of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 2005 and a member of the jury at the Venice Film Festival in 1983.

Notable Films

La Pointe Courte

She liked photography but was interested in moving into film. After spending a few days filming the small French fishing town of La Pointe Courte for a terminally ill friend who could no longer visit on his own, Varda decided to shoot a feature film of her own.Thus in 1954, Varda's first film, La Pointe Courte, about an unhappy couple working through their relationship in a small fishing town, was released. The film is a stylistic precursor to the French New Wave. At the time, Varda was influenced by the philosophy of Gaston Bachelard, whom she once studied under at the Sorbonne. “She was particularly interested in his theory of ‘l’imagination des matières,’ in which certain personality traits were found to correspond to concrete elements in a kind of psychoanalysis of the material world”. This idea arrives in La Pointe Courte as the characters personality traits clash it is shown through the opposition of objects such as wood and steel. To further her interest in character abstraction Varda used two professional actors, Silvia Monfort and Philippe Noiret combined with the residents of La Pointe Courte to provide a realistic element that lends itself to a documentary aesthetic, inspired by Neo-realism. Varda would continue to use this combination of fictional and documentary elements in her films.

Cléo from 5 to 7

Following La Pointe Courte, Cleo from 5 to 7 follows a pop singer through 2 extraordinary hours in which she awaits the results of a recent biopsy. At first glance, the film is about a woman coming to terms with her mortality, which is a common auteurist trait for Agnes Varda. On a deeper level, Cleo from 5 to 7 confronts the traditionally objectified woman by giving Cleo her own vision. She is unable to be constructed through gaze of others which is often represented through a motif of reflections and Cleo’s ability to strip her body of to-be-looked-at-ness attributes (clothing items, wigs, etc). Stylistically, Cleo from 5 to 7 borders documentary and fiction as La Pointe Courte had, which is regularly noticed as the film is to represent real time, between 5pm and 7pm.

Vagabond

In 1984, Agnés Varda created Sans toit ni loi, or Vagabond in english, which is a drama about the death of a young female drifter named Mona called. The death is investigated by an unseen and unheard interviewer who focuses on the men who have last seen her. The story of Vagabond is told through nonlinear techniques, with the film being divided into forty-seven episodes, and each episode about Mona being told from a different person's perspective. Vagabond is considered to be one of Agnés Varda's greater feminist works in how the film deals with the de-fetishization of female body from the male perspective.

Jacquot de Nantes

Varda was married to the film director Jacques Demy from 1962 until his death in 1990, with whom she had one child, actor Mathieu Demy. Jacques Demy also legally adopted Rosalie Varda, Agnes Varda's daughter from a previous union with actor Antoine Bourseiller, who starred in her early film Cléo from 5 to 7. In 1991, Shortly after Jacques Demy's death, Agnés Varda created the film Jacquot de Nantes, which is about his life and death. The film is structured at first as being a recreation of his early life, being obsessed with the various crafts used for filmmaking like animation and set design. But then Varda provides elements of documentary by inserting clips of Demy's films as well as footage of him dying. The film continues with the Varda's common theme of accepting death but at it's heart it considered to Varda's tribute to her late husband and their work.

The Gleaners and I

Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse, or The Gleaners and I, is a documentary made in 2000 that focuses on gleaners who live in the French countryside, but also includes subjects who create art through recycled material, as well as an interview with psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche. The Gleaners and I is notable for its fragmented and free-form nature along with Varda's use of digital cameras. This style of filmmaking is often interpreted as a statement that great things like art can still be created through scraps, yet modern economies encourage people to only use the finest product.

The Beaches of Agnes

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