AGNÈS VARDA: Emotion Pictures
“I AM A WOMAN, working with her intuition and trying to be intelligent,” Agnes Varda once said about her work. “Finding beauty where it’s maybe not. Seeing.” The act of seeing, and being seen, is at the heart of Varda’s work, in a film and photography career that spanned seventy years, until her death, in 2019, at the age of ninety. She rigorously questioned herself, and therefore us, about what we choose to see, what we dismiss as undeserving of our sight, and what we feel as a result. Varda celebrated the beauty of the marginalized, turning her lens on the elderly, indigent, immigrants, and people of colour. Most of all, she focussed on women. She had a distinct point of view, combining a passionate political engagement that encompassed socialism and feminism with a deeply personal exploration of what it means to be alive, and, therefore, vulnerable. Her work, documentary or narrative, feature length or short, was of a piece—”emotion pictures”—one flowing into the other, blurring the lines between life and art. Throughout, the “female gaze” presents itself without fanfare: “I didn’t see myself as a woman doing film but as a radical filmmaker who was a woman. Slightly different.”
Born Arlette Varda in 1928, in Brussels, Belgium, she reinvented herself as Agnes at the age of eighteen, and soon embarked on a career as a photographer. “I take photographs or I make films,” she said. “Or I put films in the photos, or photos in the films.” Her eye for visual composition is evident in her body of work,
