Agnès Varda’s Ecological Conscience

Jules Breton, The Recall of the Gleaners, 1859.

“Existence isn’t a solitary matter,” says the shepherd to the wanderer in Agnès Varda’s 1985 film, . This vision of collectivity, the belief that we are all in it together, recurs throughout Varda’s films, from her early, proto–New Wave (1954) to her acclaimed (1961) to her most recent film, (2017), made in collaboration with the young French street artist JR. (Filmmaking isn’t a solitary matter, either.) “This movie is about togetherness,” she told . Watching , I couldn’t help thinking about Varda’s 2000 film, Both are road-trip movies in which Varda interviews the kinds of people we don’t often see in movies—farmers, miners, dockworkers, and their wives. Both films proceed by chance, gleaning whatever they happen upon. But though is now seventeen years old, old enough to drive a car and almost. It rewards rewatching.