Agnès Varda; From the French New Wave to a Film in Iran

The Lifetime Achievement Award at the Berlin Film Festival was awarded to Agnès Varda this February, a timely and appropriate recognition. However, perhaps no one expected that so soon - just a month later - French cinema would lose its most important female filmmaker. Varda passed away on March 29th at the age of 90 in Paris. Varda was part of a vibrant generation that sought to change cinema - and the world. Among a group of men from the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma - from Godard and Truffaut to Chabrol - who turned to filmmaking and created the French New Wave - the most famous wave in cinema history - Agnès Varda was the only woman whose name became intertwined with this groundbreaking movement, to the extent that French critic and historian Georges Sadoul referred to her first film (released in 1955) as 'the first film of the New Wave.' However, Varda's most notable film, 'Cléo from 5 to 7,' which is considered one of the most important films of the New Wave, encapsulates the world and perspective of this group of spirited young filmmakers who wanted to be 'different' and not resemble the directors of the dominant French cinema of the 1930s and 1940s; their world was one of 'jump cuts.' 'Cléo from 5 to 7,' aside from its form and structure - including multiple uses of jump cuts - features a sequence paying homage to the seventh art that takes place in a cinema's projection room, depicting Varda's and her contemporaries' perspective in the early 1960s: in a silent film starring Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina, we see everything through Godard's dark glasses, which makes the world appear dark, and then without these glasses, the world takes on a different shape. Young New Wave filmmakers wanted to remove these glasses and rediscover the world, just as the main character in 'Cléo from 5 to 7' - a singer waiting for her medical test and receiving death cards from a fortune teller - sees the world differently throughout the film (which has a real-time duration). This observation of the surroundings - with Paris as one of the film's important characters - becomes the main issue of a film whose most significant aspect is the perspective on a world that, despite not-so-good news for the main character, can transform by the end. Varda boldly follows her main character during what seems like a long time, capturing scenes that sometimes last much longer than usual, and observes the people. Point-of-view shots become a significant part of the film that shares with us the chaotic world of the main character, allowing us to become an observer discovering her surroundings. This type of experimentation and the effort to explore the world - and cinema - from a new angle always remained with Varda and later led to perhaps extreme experimental films, but her more than sixty years of filmmaking show an artist unafraid of experimenting and willing to continue her experimentalism at any cost - even at the loss of an audience. Her later films are often a blend of documentary and narrative cinema from a personal perspective, with her presence as a filmmaker becoming more pronounced in her final works. Her last work, which was screened at this year's Berlin Festival, is titled 'Varda by Agnès'; a film/essay about her world and works, reviewing the films she made over the years, focusing on one of her lectures that forms the main axis of the film. Addressing social issues, especially women's issues, is a common theme that recurs in her works from different periods, from direct engagement with feminism in 'One Sings, the Other Doesn't' (1977) to 'The Gleaners and I' (2000), which is one of her most famous works centered on women and is often referenced in discussions of feminism in cinema. She also traveled to Iran in the 1970s and made a six-minute film titled 'Plaisir d'amour en Iran,' a version of which is available online. Varda was born in Belgium in 1928, studied literature and psychology at the Sorbonne in Paris, and also studied art history and photography. She began her career as a photographer and collaborated with Jean Vilar as a scene photographer at the Avignon Festival. Her photographic experience - which continued until recently - significantly influenced her films and shaped part of their structure. Her husband, Jacques Demy, who passed away in 1990, was also one of the young New Wave filmmakers. Varda made three films about him over the years. The singing scene in 'Cléo from 5 to 7' is reminiscent of Demy's famous works (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort), but Demy's excessive interest in American musicals brought him to Hollywood, where he made films that today no one remembers. However, Varda became more experimental, to the extent that, as she put it, 'fought for independent cinema for a lifetime,' and perhaps this struggle made her victorious in Hollywood as well: Varda received an honorary Oscar in 2017, becoming the first woman in history to receive this award.