TSPDT

Key Production Countries: France, USA
Key Genres: Documentary, Drama, Short Film, Culture & Society, Biography, Comedy Drama, Psychological Drama, Marriage Drama, Essay Film, Anthropology, Romantic Drama, Feminist Film
Key Collaborators: Joanna Bruzdowicz (Composer), Janine Verneau (Editor), Marie-Jo Audiard (Editor), Mathieu Demy (Leading Character Actor), Nurith Aviv (Cinematographer), Jean Rabier (Cinematographer), Rosalie Varda (Leading Character Actress), Georges Delerue (Composer), Michel Legrand (Composer), Eddie Constantine (Character Actor), Jane Birkin (Leading Actress), Bodan Litnanski (Leading Actor)

"Agnès Varda’s startlingly individualistic films have earned her the title ‘‘grandmother of the New Wave’’ of French filmmaking. Her statement that a filmmaker must exercise as much freedom as a novelist became a mandate for New Wave directors, especially Chris Marker and Alain Resnais. Varda’s first film, La Pointe courte, edited by Resnais, is regarded, as Georges Sadoul affirms, as "the first film of the French nouvelle vague. Its interplay between conscience, emotions, and the real world make it a direct antecedent of Hiroshima, mon amour"... Varda’s reputation as a filmmaker dazzles and endures." - Louise Heck-Rabi (International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, 2000)

"Agnès Varda is a major force in the French New Wave who happily has remained true to her vision as an independent and uncompromising artist, has readily adapted to technological change in the cinema, and is still active today as a digital filmmaker with a wide audience... Varda is as up to date and modern as many of her younger colleagues, and the grandmother of the New Wave continues to inspire a new generation of filmmakers." - Wheeler Winston Dixon (501 Movie Directors, 2007)

"Agnès Varda used the skills she honed early in her career as a photographer to create some of the most nuanced, thought-provoking films of the past fifty years. She is widely believed to have presaged the French new wave with her first film, La Pointe Courte, long before creating one of the movement’s benchmarks, Cléo from 5 to 7. Later, with Le bonheur and Vagabond, Varda further shook up art-house audiences, challenging bourgeois codes with her inscrutable characters and offering effortlessly beautiful compositions and editing. Now working largely as a documentarian, Varda remains one of the essential cinematic poets of our time and a true visionary." - The Criterion Collection

"Varda has stayed loyal to documentary, given the flavor of essay or even the charm of storytelling—as in Jacquot de Nantes, her tribute to the dying Jacques Demy. But easily her most powerful film of recent years—and probably her best ever—is Vagabond, the tracking of a fierce, willful outcast, set more surely on a path to death than Cléo ever contemplated. Vagabond burns in the memory, lucid and unsentimental, like the challenging gaze of Sandrine Bonnaire." - David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2010)

"Agnès Varda has been dubbed the grandmother of the nouvelle vague. Her 1954 debut , La pointe courte, was an iconoclastic synthesis of ragged documentary and Bergmanesque fiction that ran counter to the French tradition of quality cinema, controversially using nonprofessional actors and real locations (as opposed to studio sets)... She essayed a series of documentaries before Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961). Along with Le bonheur (1965), a visually sensuous exploration of a love triangle, it cemented Varda's reputation as one of the most important women directors in the history of cinema." - Lloyd Hughes (The Rough Guide to Film, 2007)

"You know, the boundaries between contemporary art and cinema are so rigid. It's unbelievable. The film critics don't know my artwork and the art world doesn't know my films." - Agnès Varda