Double Takes

“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes; if we opened me up, we’d find beaches,” says Agnès Varda in her anti-memoir (2008), which, characteristically, is far more about other people than it is about herself. Varda’s films look closely and generously at what we had forgotten to know, and listen intently to people who would otherwise have walk-on parts: women and men glimpsed on park benches and in hospital queues, on sidewalks and in shipyards. Varda, who died in March at the age of 90, made a cinema that was at once in conversation with her nouvelle vague contemporaries and yet entirely her own. In her only book, , she writes that in her films she sought to merge the intimate sensibility of her mother’s notebooks with that of , that bastion of the portrait of the artist as a middle-aged man. Defying Godard’s assertion that the self-portrait is a “practically impossible cinematic genre,” Varda—increasingly using a small camera to insert herself into her films in “a fleshy manner” (as she called it in a 2000 interview)—bridged the divide between documentary