Agnès Varda was an endlessly curious filmmaker whose interest in the margins of society and female subjectivity, together with her vocational background in photography, resulted in a playful and fiercely political body of work.
Discovery, provocation and striving to reach an understanding of society and humanity are all hallmarks of her films, yet Varda refused to idly sit in one genre or stick to one style. Over the course of her more than 60-year career, she effortlessly switched between feature-length fiction, documentary and shorts. Her work can be self-reflexive, referencing the deeply personal, but there’s also rich historical detail embedded in her hugely empathetic and mischievous films.
Humour is such a strong weapon, such a strong answer. Women have to make jokes about themselves, laugh about themselves, because they have nothing to lose.
Varda combined the elements that would inspire her entire career: personal experience, political insight and activism, an ardent vision for landscape, an intense curiosity about the lives of others, and frank confrontations with intimacy, romance, and love. The fusion of direct observation and aesthetic contemplation, of documentary proximity and sociological reflection, led Varda to make films of passionate political engagement that drew, too, on her own experience.
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