Var­da by Agnès

Film is ​“a beau­ti­ful sum­mer peach with a worm inside,” says Agnès Var­da with char­ac­ter­is­tic sass. It’s one of many sen­so­r­i­al images con­jured, then left to rest, across her final work. Just as the late auteur and artist described her pri­ma­ry medi­um – cin­e­ma – in myr­i­ad evoca­tive ways, so too does Var­da by Agnès defy any neat, fixed cat­e­gori­sa­tion. Sure, it’s a doc­u­men­tary – a mode that the direc­tor toyed with across her emi­nent career. It’s also a lec­ture, a scrap­book, a clip show, a polit­i­cal mis­sive, a bil­let-doux, an after­noon with an old friend and a self-penned eulogy.

Var­da passed in March of 2019, aged 90, hav­ing direct­ed more than 50 shorts and fea­tures since 1955. Chart­ing her major cin­e­mat­ic works, Var­da by Agnès opens in a grand old opera house, where the imp­ish auteur set­tles into a director’s chair and per­son­al­ly escorts a live audi­ence through her trea­sured oeu­vre. Irrev­er­ent yet ten­der, she nav­i­gates her cin­e­mat­ic star-map con­cep­tu­al­ly, not chrono­log­i­cal­ly, apply­ing the deep, cere­bral prin­ci­ples that helped her prop­a­gate the Nou­velle Vague move­ment in the mid-’50s, and con­tin­ued to shape her cre­ative prac­tice for the six ensu­ing decades.

In addi­tion to sur­vey­ing Varda’s unique con­tri­bu­tion to film, Var­da by Agnès explores her simul­ta­ne­ous rela­tion­ships with visu­al art, pho­tog­ra­phy, the­atre, music and phi­los­o­phy. A mem­oir writ in mov­ing image, the film returns to her favourite motifs, such as fam­i­ly, fem­i­nism and feel­ing (in the cor­po­re­al sense), to unite Varda’s boun­ti­ful out­put across myr­i­ad artforms.

Each work is illu­mi­nat­ed by insight that burns with – to para­phrase the woman of the hour – ​“the bright clar­i­ty of a too-short sum­mer.” Var­da by Agnès is about time. In archival footage, the direc­tor reflects on her best-known film, Cleo from 5 to 7, curi­ous­ly com­par­ing ​‘sub­jec­tive’ and ​‘objec­tive’ expe­ri­ences of the alle­gor­i­cal tick­ing clock. Both films explic­it­ly grap­ple with time’s lin­ear­i­ty and, implic­it­ly, its inevitable con­clu­sion. Such rem­i­nis­cences are ripe with plea­sure and melan­choly. After all, nos­tal­gia takes root (emo­tion­al­ly and ety­mo­log­i­cal­ly) in pain.

Though a wag­gish woman, Var­da seemed to have an earnest out­look on age­ing, show­cas­ing her wrin­kles in The Glean­ers and I, doc­u­ment­ing her ocu­lar degen­er­a­tion in Faces Places. Yet her final film – pre­sum­ably made as she fought breast can­cer – feels rather like an attempt to pause time, albeit tem­porar­i­ly. Thanks to video tech­nol­o­gy (which she read­i­ly embraced), one Agnès will always live on a beach, cap­tured in dig­i­tal amber, telling seag­ull cut-outs that her worst night­mare is an emp­ty cinema.

“Inspi­ra­tion, cre­ation and shar­ing” were the dri­ving forces behind Varda’s career. While her own pres­ence, both spir­i­tu­al and phys­i­cal, often fig­ured in her films, she was gen­uine­ly more con­cerned with the peo­ple and sto­ries that main­stream soci­ety left behind. After ded­i­cat­ing decades to tru­ly see­ing, hear­ing, feel­ing humankind, per­haps she wor­ried that, in time, her full sto­ry might be sim­i­lar­ly for­got­ten. Var­da by Agnès has future-proofed that prospect for many sea­sons to come.