The Family Business: An Interview with Rosalie Varda about Varda by Agnès (Web Exclusive)
by Rodney F. Hill

Over the course of several decades, Rosalie Varda has worked in various capacities—as a costume designer, producer, even actor—on a number of films by her mother, Agnès Varda, her adoptive father, Jacques Demy, and her brother, the actor/director Mathieu Demy. Her latest endeavor as producer is the new documentary, Varda by Agnès, the final film by her mother, who passed away in March 2019, after the documentary had premiered at Berlin. According to Agnès Varda’s “director’s statement,” she intended Varda by Agnès to be her final film, as her career had been moving for several years in the direction of art installations, with exhibitions at such major venues as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Venice Biennale.

Varda by Agnès belongs to a trend toward personal “essay films” in Varda’s work since 2000, in which she herself becomes one of the main subjects, reflecting on her attitudes toward film, art, her family, and ordinary people she happens to encounter. Here, though, the focus is almost entirely on Varda herself, as she guides us through her long career as a filmmaker, photographer, and finally, visual artist. The result is a decoupage of images and clips stretching from the early 1950s to the present, interspersed with various in-person appearances by Agnès Varda, in which she discusses her philosophy of film and art, as well as the making of her various projects, often reminiscing with collaborators such as actor Sandrine Bonnaire and cinematographer Nurith Aviv.

Until recently, much of Varda’s cinematic output remained unknown to most U.S. audiences, who likely were familiar with one or two of her films at best—perhaps Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), Vagabond (1985), or the marvelous documentary The Gleaners and I (2000). A few DVD releases by the Criterion Collection have broadened that perspective somewhat: notably, Varda’s films that she shot in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, when she and Jacques Demy had relocated there for a few years. These include the fictional, rather experimental narrative Lions Love (and Lies) (1969) and the documentaries Uncle Yanco (1967) and Black Panthers (1968). Varda by Agnès provides glimpses into all of these, as well as Varda’s often misunderstood narrative film, Le Bonheur (1965), which some critics have misread as antifeminist, but which actually offers a nuanced critique on traditional notions of love and marriage.

As an overview of her work, Varda by Agnès resembles her 1995 tribute to her late husband, The World of Jacques Demy; and the new film may serve a similar function—as a tutorial on Varda to prepare audiences for the inevitable (and welcome) retrospectives to come. Indeed, Janus Films has announced a career-spanning re-release of Agnès Varda’s films, which launched in December 2019 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, followed by a national rollout. Cineaste spoke with Rosalie Varda in the New York office of Janus Films in October 2019.—Rodney F. Hill

Cineaste: There is a long tradition of autobiography in Agnès Varda’s work. What was the genesis of this particular film?

Rosalie Varda: Well, I think that this is not an autobiography at all; I think this is really more a conversation that Agnès would have with the audience, talking about her work, and trying to share how she made films, including some things that the audience did not know so well—for instance, that she was a photographer before, and that for the last fifteen years she was a visual artist. So, in a way, it was intended to explain that her body of work was more than just the films. This project was really, I have to say, my idea, starting in 2015. I thought that Agnès was so brilliant doing master classes around the world; but she didn’t like that term, “master classes.” She said they were more like conversations, spreading little things to help students or audiences to understand her work and give them the desire to see more films, or to be filmmakers themselves, or screenwriters, or to be producers or editors. So, at the end of her life—and in that period she was not at all sick, she was really in good shape for a woman of that age—I thought it would be interesting to have her discuss her own films, because when you talk about something you have done thirty years before, you don’t speak in the same terms as when you did the interviews when the film originally was released. You look at the film in a different way, from a different perspective.

So I thought that Agnès could share with us and explain how she was always, all her life, searching for different ways of making cinema. The audiences don’t really know that; they know one or two of her films. I’m not talking about the film critics and the cinephiles; I’m speaking of normal people. They would have seen maybe one of Agnès’s films. And I thought maybe it would be nice to give them a desire to know more; that’s how the project began. She didn’t really want to do it in the beginning, to be honest. She said, “Oh, we’re going to speak again about my films? Oh, it’s going to be boring!” But no; I don’t think it’s boring at all. It’s very joyful; I think it’s very young. Agnès was younger than me in her head, you know? She was so curious about everything. But as we got more and more into the project, she realized the importance of legacy and that leaving behind information about how she worked as a filmmaker would be very interesting.

Cineaste: For readers who may be less familiar with Agnès Varda, could you discuss her importance in relation to the French New Wave?

Varda: That’s always a very funny subject, because she directed her first film in 1954, when la Nouvelle Vague, the New Wave of French cinema, did not exist. Her film was released and didn’t make much money; and the reviews were not so good, except for one or two. The guys of Cahiers du cinéma—there were no women in their group—they would be going to the Cinémathèque française all afternoon seeing films and then going to a café and talking about structure in Steinbeck, Bergman, and Renoir; but Agnès didn’t really see a lot of movies in her youth. So when she wanted to do this film in ’54, she says in her biography that she had seen only about ten films. I think it’s true for the most part; hers was not a family that was interested in cinema. She already had a career as a photographer, which was working out well; so she did this film, but the guys at Cahiers were very misogynist, and they didn’t help her. François Truffaut really didn’t like the film and gave it a very bad review; but years later, he sent Agnès a letter to apologize, saying that he was wrong—that even before the New Wave, she had totally restructured cinematic narration like none of them had done. If you say the New Wave is getting out of the studio, filming in the street, using natural people, no makeup, with a camera that is free, then yes, it’s true. But Agnès had done all that in ’54. Afterwards people called her the “grandmother of the Nouvelle Vague,” but this annoyed her a little bit…

Cineaste: She was the same age as most of them, right?

Varda: She was the same age, and in fact she paved the road for the Nouvelle Vague. But of course, the history of cinema did not put Agnès at the front of the movement, nor did the guys of Cahiers. It was much later that she was recognized as being a leading figure of the movement. Since the film was not widely shown, people didn’t really see it. Godard’s Breathless (1960) was a success when it was released, so it made a difference, and the same is true of The 400 Blows (1959) by Truffaut. So Agnès was left behind for a time. But this is typical of the history of women in cinema. Think of Alice Guy-Blaché, who made more than one thousand films; and she was left out of the film history books for how many years? We are putting her back into film history…

Cineaste: Finally, we are.

Varda: Finally, but just within the last ten years. The history of cinema was written by men; there were no women critics, and there were few women directors. When Agnès did La Pointe Courte, there were a few other women filmmakers in France: there was Jacqueline Audry, who had a brilliant career up into the late ’60s. Agnès was not the only one. I think that historically, the situation for women has been similar in painting, sculpture, and the other arts, in a way.

Cineaste: Certainly, with the hindsight of history, we can see La Pointe-Courte as a very important film, paving the way, as you said, for the New Wave. It demonstrated that someone from outside the film industry could make a film independently and get it into festivals and into cinemas. That must have emboldened the other directors of the New Wave, even if they didn’t acknowledge the film at the time.

Varda: Of course. And Agnès didn’t have to go to bed with her producer. [Laughs.] She produced the film herself. Her freedom came from producing. In ’54 she created her first company, thinking, “Well, if I want to do a film, I’ll produce it myself.”

Cineaste: Her editor on that first film ended up being another giant of the cinema: Alain Resnais. How did they become acquainted?

Varda: Well they were together—how do you say it?—they were having an affair. Alain Resnais was an editor during that period. Agnès wrote La Pointe-Courte and shot the film; and she knew exactly what she wanted in the project, being inspired by Faulkner to have a double narration. There is the story of those fishermen who were facing normal problems of the difficulty of life, compared to the love story between this couple. Their romantic problems—is the relationship OK?; do they really love each other?—are rather intellectual problems, compared to those fishermen and their families, who don’t have time to think about matters of the heart. Yet, in the middle of all that, there is this young couple in love. Alain Resnais really helped Agnès in thinking about that narrative structure in the film; she always said that he helped her a lot in giving shape to her mental constructions for cinema. Resnais was the one who introduced her to Carl Dreyer films, Bergman films; he was the one who really began her cinematic education.

Cineaste: Both of your parents, Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy, were among the few French New Wave directors to live up consistently to the ideal of the auteur-director throughout their careers. What were their attitudes towards filmmaking as a form of personal expression?

Varda: They certainly were interested in writing their own stories and directing them. I don’t think Agnès was really interested in adapting other people’s work. In the 1980s she created l’Association des Auteurs, Réalisateurs, Producteurs [the Association of Authors, Directors, Producers] along with Claude Berri, Jacques Demy, Claude Lelouch, and several other film artists of that period. She had the idea that if you write your own script, if you direct your own script, and if you produce your own script, you are the only captain making decisions on the project. You don’t have a producer who is going to tell you, “Well, I like your story, but this character I would prefer to be different.” She was always interested in being free and in having what you call in the States the “final cut.” So she really worked hard, collaborating with Claude Berri, to create this association in France, which still exists today. In the film business, to have power, you need money; if you don’t have money, you don’t have power. So they created this association, with the brilliant idea that it would collect a small percentage of the money from their film and video releases; so this association gets money from the films produced by its members. It’s a lobbying company now, to help  protect the final cut, the author/director rights. She was very aware that, if you are produced by a big company, you owe them something. I don’t know what, but you owe them. She loved her own liberty too much to go through that.

Jacques Demy also was really interested in writing his own stories. Even though he had adapted the fairy tale, Donkey Skin (1970), and the comic strip, Lady Oscar (1979), for the most part his career consisted of original stories.

Cineaste: There was also La Naissance du jour [Break of Day, 1980], by Colette.

Varda: Yes, Colette; I love that film! Nobody knows that film, but I just love it; it’s so delicate. I find that Jacques really creates the impression that it’s really Colette. You don’t think it’s an actor playing Colette; you feel that this woman could be Colette. It’s really different…

Cineaste: It’s much more naturalistic than some of Demy’s other films.

Varda: Exactly, yes. I love this film because for me, Colette is Agnès, in a way. I think Jacques agreed to do it largely because Colette—her liberty, her way of thinking, loving cats, writing in her bed, loving to cook for her friends—represented all things that he loved about Agnès. So I think he accepted the project because there was a lot of Agnès in Colette. That’s my theory.

Cineaste: You worked with both Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy on several of their films. How would you compare their approaches?

Varda: I worked as a costume designer with Jacques Demy on several films. I started on the Colette film; that was my first movie. And I worked with Agnès on Vagabond, on Jane B. by Agnès V. (1988); I did a little bit on The Beaches of Agnès (2008), and others. They had totally different ways of working, because Jacques really prepared everything in advance—the film, the script, the editing, everything was in his head. He also had the artistic point of view beforehand, working with the art director, the director of photography, looking at paintings, thinking about the colors. Everything was prepared. With Agnès, to the contrary, everything was open. She would always say, “Le hasard est le meilleur de mes assistants” [“Chance is the best of my assistants”]. Her door would be open always to taking into her film what was going on around her, whereas Jacques was much more intellectually prepared and didn’t really want to depart from that planning. Agnès was always open, saying “Let’s do this, and this…” So if there were somebody walking in the street in the background, suddenly she would say, “Oh my God, this person is wonderful! We should go and grab that person!” Of course she prepared a film in her head, in terms of narrative construction, and she would do a screenplay; but she took more liberty on the set, I think, than Jacques. When he was dealing with music, he had to have everything timed always, so it was very much prepared. He worked more in advance on the costumes, the colors, the art direction. In fact, when the first day of shooting would arrive, we had practically already done the film, in a way. Everything was absolutely prepared. With Agnès, when we did the first day of shooting, we were throwing ourselves into the swimming pool. [Laughs]

Cineaste: The year 2000 marks a shift in Agnès Varda’s work, with the advent of digital cameras. Can you discuss her enthusiasm for this then-new technology and how it impacted her work?

Varda: My brother, Mathieu Demy, and I were in Tokyo with Agnès for a retrospective at the Kobe Festival, and at the airport, Mathieu told Agnès that she should buy a little digital camera. They had just come out, the first Sony cameras. So she bought that camera, and she practiced with it throughout that summer; and that’s how she began to shoot The Gleaners and I. I think the digital camera gave her the liberty to do that film and to be able to conduct the interviews with a very small crew, and not seem aggressive to those people, who were in a very fragile situation. It did give her more liberty to shoot what she wanted. And ultimately it gave her the path to go into visual art, because in her installations she used video and really explored it as a medium. She’s not exploring in the same way as someone like Jean-Luc Godard, who is really a theoretician, exploring the language of cinema. But I think the digital technology gave her much more liberty.

Cineaste: In Varda by Agnès, she seems to acknowledge that this would be her final film, and we get a sense that there is a kind of serene, even beautiful, acceptance of that fact. Is that typical of Agnès’s philosophical or spiritual outlook?

Varda: You know, if you’re ninety years old and have had the kind of extraordinary life that she had, you can accept not to stay longer. I think it’s very humble: there is a time to be here, and there’s a time to go away. And maybe she knew she was sick, and she didn’t want to become a little old woman in a wheelchair, unable to work. I think she had such a beautiful life that she thought, at the moment when it was not possible to do this anymore, it was not interesting to stay alive; and I really respect that. That doesn’t mean at all that she did something to go away! It’s just that, as I worked with her the last ten or fifteen years, we both were prepared every day for the eventuality that she would go away. We were just thinking, “Okay, if we can still do this one project, let’s do it quickly.” There was an urgency in always doing, doing, doing; so it was an everyday victory to do something else. My brother and I thought that maybe the best gift that life could give Agnès would be that she would not be this old woman, sick for years. So we were all at peace.

Rodney F. Hill is Associate Professor of Film in the Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University. He has written extensively on the films of Jacques Demy.

Copyright © 2019 by Cineaste, Inc. 

Cineaste, Vol. XLV, No. 2