More Than an Object of Vardolatry

Conor Williams reviews Carrie Rickey’s “A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda.”

By Conor WilliamsOctober 14, 2024

• Film

• Cultural Studies

• Biography & Autobiography

• Nonfiction

WHEN THE ARTIST Agnès Varda died in 2019 at the age of 90, she left behind an incalculably massive body of work. Varda began her creative career as a photographer, but soon started making films at the age of 27. She made a total of 39 films, including Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) and Vagabond (1985), as well as countless images and installations. For a long time, she was known as one of the filmmakers who made up the French New Wave, along with others like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, although she was never really held in the same regard as the men—often relegated to the status of the token woman director. Then, she was labeled a part of the Left Bank Cinema. Then, she was reconsidered as a founding member of the French New Wave. Then, she became flattened into something of a cartoon character—a cutesy, whimsical old lady.

To truly understand Varda, one must realize that she was never one to be pinned down or categorized—that she was many, many things, and that her influence has carried on to this day.

Varda has been the subject of several resplendent art books but, until recently, no English-language biographies. Now, film critic Carrie Rickey has written A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda, the first major biographical work dedicated to her life and craft. Like Varda herself, A Complicated Passion is short and to the point. Considering that Varda spent practically her whole, long life in a state of creation, Rickey’s biography is surprisingly just under 300 pages but still manages to fit in everything a newcomer would want to learn, as well as everything a die-hard fan might not yet know.

The book is sectioned into three parts: “Still,” “Moving,” and “Dimension,” corresponding to the different phases of Varda’s artistic career—photography, filmmaking, and installation art. A jack-of-all-trades, Varda developed a distinctive approach to art-making that often blended these practices together. That said, it is useful to be able to frame the trajectory of her career through the different modes she would eventually work in, and this triptych illustrates just how much creative freedom she discovered between these artistic categories and impulses. Varda started in the realm of still images, then made those images move, then expanded beyond the cinema frame to the art world at large. She could not be contained.

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A Complicated Passion is most valuable for how it disproves the misconceptions that historically surrounded Varda’s legacy. Rickey makes it clear that the artist was not merely a trendsetter, but that she was there first, making the work, setting the example. Varda began her filmmaking career without much previous knowledge of cinema history. According to the book, Varda “claimed she had seen fewer than twenty-five films before she made one.” Regarding the time in which Varda was preparing to make her first feature film, La Pointe Courte (1955), Rickey writes:

While she wrote her two-tiered narrative set in Sète, Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and the other “Cahiers boys”—as she would soon dub them—spent their waking hours either at the movies or polishing their theories of cinema. The “Cahiers boys” dreamed of becoming directors; Varda just did it.

For too long, Varda was criminally underestimated, and Rickey lays the blame for her “erasure” from culture on widespread misogyny. Throughout the book, as she maps out Varda’s career, Rickey charts the film industry’s encouraging increase in notable female filmmakers over the years.

She also testifies to Varda’s fervent, explicit feminist politics. Rickey recounts Varda’s trip with her husband Jacques Demy to the West Coast of the United States, where she met with an executive at Columbia Pictures, Gerry Ayres, and the studio’s interim head, Bob Weitman, about making a film called Peace and Love:

[T]he interim head of Columbia mentioned that the only thing the studio required was final cut. “Agnès balked,” Ayres remembered. […] The atmosphere of the room grew charged. Ayres defused it with, “Let the lawyers work out the fine points of the deal” […] Then, “Bob walked us to the door where he smiled at Agnès and pinched her cheek. Agnès slapped his arm away. End of deal.”

That slap communicated swiftly to Weitman that pinching her was not acceptable. It was unprofessional. It was condescending. It was also sexist, a word not yet commonplace in 1967. […] Swatting Weitman’s arm was a defense of Varda’s professional and personal dignity and an affront to Weitman’s authority.

Varda was a champion of social justice throughout her life. Of Cléo from 5 to 7, Martin Scorsese remarked, “I felt that I was seeing the world and experiencing time from a woman’s point of view for the first time in movies,” adding, “No male director would ever have dared that kind of lyricism under those dramatic circumstances.” She would go on to defend abortion rights with her bold 1977 musical One Sings, the Other Doesn’t. “I tried to be a joyful feminist, but I was very angry,” she said in her 2008 film The Beaches of Agnès.

Not just an advocate for women, Varda was also an outspoken ally of the poor, the working class, and the Black Power movement. In late May 2020, after the murder of Black American George Floyd at the knee of police officer Derek Chauvin resulted in an eruption of nationwide protests and rebellion, I revisited Varda’s 1968 short Black Panthers on what would’ve been her 91st birthday. In the film, she says of the Panthers, “Their war cries frighten and exasperate the white racists, who consider them Black fascists, forgetting that they are much less dangerous than the police—and much less fascist.”

Varda’s nonfiction films, including her portrait of the brothers and sisters fighting to free Huey Newton, as well as Uncle Yanco (1967), a chance encounter turned beautifully sweet home movie, and Mur Murs (1982), her survey of mural art in Los Angeles, all made while she was in California, are some of her most compelling works. One of Varda’s best—and best-known—films, The Gleaners and I, was shot in 2000 on a small, handheld digital camera. With this film, Varda explored the lives of France’s gleaners, people who live off food waste—misshapen potatoes, expired produce—and ushered in a new aesthetic phase of her filmography.

One thing in A Complicated Passion that I hadn’t seen remarked upon elsewhere was that Agnès Varda had once had a lesbian romance. As a young girl in Sète, Varda met Valentine Schlegel, and the two became best friends. When the Varda family and the Schlegel family moved to Paris, the burgeoning artist convinced her father to pay for a ramshackle studio and living space on rue Daguerre. Varda and Schlegel lived there together for a time. Varda would continue to live there for the rest of her life. Rickey remarks of this moment in time:

From 1951 to 1957, Varda and Valentine resided at rue Daguerre, working in separate studios. By then, Valentine was living openly as a lesbian. […] In The Beaches of Agnès, [Varda] recalls that the two of them “sowed their wild oats together.” I heard that as an acknowledgment of their emotional, and probable sexual, intimacy.

Rickey writes that Rosalie Varda, Agnès’s daughter, confirmed their connection in the 2023 documentary Viva Varda! Having not seen this documentary, I don’t know how it was brought up. But that’s all that’s written about this revelation. This detail about the Varda-Valentine romance is dropped so casually that it takes up just a few sentences in the biography, but it is significant. Varda’s bisexuality more deeply shades in our understanding of her position in society, her own sociopolitical perspective.

It is well known at this point that her husband Jacques Demy, whom she married in 1962, was also bisexual; he died in 1990 from the plague of AIDS. But despite their eventual separation, Varda and Demy loved each other deeply for their entire lives. They truly and beautifully embodied the “free love” ethos of the 1960s while never ceasing to care for one another. The two filmmakers should be thought of as integral figures in our current-day conception of a queer cinematic canon.

If I have one qualm with A Complicated Passion, it is that Rickey too eagerly sanctifies her subject, an overcorrection of Varda’s previous exclusions from the canon. She offers that toward the end of Varda’s life, just as Frida Kahlo had been transformed through “Fridolatry” “ into a secular saint” due to her role as a “champion of women and of indigenous peoples, and lover of animals,” Varda “was an object of Vardolatry […] not only beloved for her films and art but likewise regarded as the matron saint of gleaners, cats, and potatoes.” For a film critic to indulge in this sort of hagiography instead of looking at her subject with a more—well—critical eye can be frustrating, even for the most devoted fan of Varda’s work.

Rickey misses the opportunity to direct her sharp gaze not necessarily at the woman herself but at the cultural processes that ultimately flattened the artist within cultural and artistic conversations. After all, the third section of the book is literally titled “Dimension,” highlighting all she did to traverse such boundaries. Notably, as Rickey details, as Varda became too sick to attend festival events in person, she sent a two-dimensional avatar in her place:

Given the demands on Varda’s time and energy, it was decided that [visual artist and collaborator] JR would attend the [Oscars] nominee lunch. His date was a cardboard cutout of Varda. Other nominees included Greta Gerwig, Meryl Streep, and Steven Spielberg, all thrilled to pose with Cardboard Varda.

I remember that cardboard cutout and how it felt charming at the time, but as I read about it in the biography, I couldn’t help but feel nauseated by the saccharine stunt. Of course those Hollywood hotshots were thrilled to pose with Cardboard Varda—to truly reckon with the totality of the artist’s character would be a real challenge for today’s slick, simplistic mainstream industry. Rickey, for the most part, manages to accomplish this reckoning. With A Complicated Passion, she gives Varda the remembrance she deserves.

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In 2019, after Agnès Varda’s death, I had the opportunity to interview her daughter Rosalie about Varda’s final, posthumous film Varda by Agnès. Rosalie had produced her mother’s penultimate work, Faces Places (2017), a joint effort with JR. I got the sense from her that there was not much of a boundary between Varda’s work and personal life. While her daughter was undoubtedly very happy to help carry on her mother’s legacy, I wondered how she felt about that thin divide. It must have been “a complicated passion” indeed.

Rosalie told me: “I cannot talk for her, so it’s difficult for me. I can help to understand, to give clues, but it’s difficult for me sometimes, to find a good position between working with her, being her daughter, being her producer, and taking care of the company.”

A few years later, I went to France for the first time to meet some of my partner’s extended family. I tried to arrange another meeting with Rosalie, but she was out of town. Nevertheless, she invited us to the studio of her mother’s production company, Ciné-Tamaris, which adjoined Agnès Varda’s house on rue Daguerre. We had coffee with the volunteer workers there and they gave us a tour. I saw boxes and boxes of photographs, Varda’s honorary Oscar, photos of her with Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese. This must have been around the time the company was working with the Criterion Collection on their magnificent box set of Varda’s complete filmography.

After leaving Ciné-Tamaris, we headed to Montparnasse Cemetery, where Varda and Demy are buried together. Their gravestone was dappled with purple kisses from lipsticked visitors. I saw several heart-shaped potatoes left as offerings and laid down a bouquet of roses. There, in the still quiet of that cemetery, Varda spoke to me from beyond the stone, the three words that she repeats in her final film, Varda by Agnès. They floated through the wind, guiding me to this day as a creative creed: “Inspiration, creation, sharing.”