How Is It That Agnès Varda Is So Well Known Yet So Unknown?

Filmmaker Agnès Varda and singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell are rarely discussed in the same context. That is understandable, considering the two artists never collaborated (though it is worth noting that the sleeve of Mitchell’s 1971 album Blue is briefly visible in the background of a shot in Varda’s 1977 musical film One Sings, the Other Doesn’t). Still, both women share an unlikely kinship regarding legacy — a realization I had upon reading Issy Beach’s VICE article “It’s a Man’s World: Why Popular Culture Left Joni Mitchell Behind,” which explores the unique dual nature of Mitchell’s public reputation.

On the one hand, Joni Mitchell is considered one of the most influential songwriters and recording artists of the 20th (and 21st) centuries. The confessional authenticity of her lyrics, unapologetic feminine sensibility, and unwillingness to compromise her musical experimentation for commercial demands have seen her become a major role model for musicians as diverse and wide-ranging as Cyndi Lauper, Taylor Swift, Sufjan Stevens, and Annie Lennox. Simultaneously, while Mitchell’s name recognition is undeniable, rarely is her oeuvre understood or revered in the way it deserves to be, primarily due to the unspoken rules and limitations of a male-dominated industry.

Mainstream Top 40 (and even classic rock) radio rarely showcases Joni Mitchell’s work in spite of its impact. While she is understood to be something of a trailblazer in her field, she is rarely extolled in broader layperson discourse the way Elvis Presley or the Beatles are. Beach’s article notes that despite her “legions of appreciators,” it was “likely Joni’s female-ness that kept her from skyrocketing into stardom… sexism and misogyny towards women — in and out of the spotlight — is just never not present.” While Mitchell’s musical prowess has earned her the critical reputation of a “legend,” patriarchal hegemony within the American music industry has gate-kept her from relishing the same reverence and cultural ubiquity as many of her male contemporaries.

I experienced this Joni Mitchell “phenomenon” firsthand with my own family. Raised by two well-informed music fans, I grew up with the sounds of artists such as Stevie Nicks, Cass Elliott, Diana Ross, Billie Holiday, Sarah McLachlan, and Diana Krall (among many others). Yet, when I returned from my first year of college with the Blue vinyl in my grasp — and verses of “California,” “A Case of You,” and “This Flight Tonight” whirring in my head — embrace, even recognition, was not immediate.

Surely my parents had heard of Joni Mitchell, but her music came to embody an entirely new, unfamiliar territory outside the Top 40 sphere they knew so well. (In a career spanning decades and accolades, Mitchell never had a No. 1 single). For someone who instantly latched onto her songs, I was frustrated. For my parents, who came of age in the 1960s and ’70s, who seemingly sang Joni Mitchell’s praises but never actually played or honored her music in a widely accessible or highly publicized way, it was like cracking open a part of their cultural identity they didn’t know existed.

Agnès Varda, a groundbreaking artist in a different medium, occupies a similar space in the culture. She proves to be another female maverick whose legacy in broader pop cultural discourse is hampered by the same duality: great reverence, yet, somehow, simultaneous obscurity.

Like Joni Mitchell in music, Agnès Varda in cinema emerged as a singular, deeply personal artistic voice in people’s lives (at least in the lives of those who were able and willing to access her work). Her death in March 2019 engendered a curious experience from my vantage point as a film student. Some cinephiles on campus mourned her passing as though they had lost a surrogate mother, paying tribute to Varda on Instagram stories and in lecture hall discussions. On the other hand, some students barely even noticed her death, and when they were notified of it, they responded with, at most, indifference.

This polarized reaction was jarring, considering Agnès Varda’s key role in catalyzing the French New Wave of the late 1950s and ‘60s. La Nouvelle Vague was a revolution in cinematic storytelling in France that saw narrative and visual filmmaking conventions long implemented by major movie studios upended and reinvented as a kind of creative counterculture. These films were often youthful, iconoclastic, political, and experimental, both engaging with Old Hollywood tropes while simultaneously eschewing linearity and cinematic polish and breaking from traditional narrative structures. Unfortunately, it is in the infancy of her career that Varda’s contributions begin to be erased.

While Agnès Varda was pioneering narrative and aesthetic techniques that would become emblematic of the French New Wave in her first film — the poetic and meditative marital drama-meets-community portrait La Pointe Courte (1955) — it is often François Truffaut’s 1959 coming-of-age drama The 400 Blows (which premiered four years after Varda’s debut)that is consistently misattributed as the beginning of la nouvelle vague. While Truffaut’s film is undoubtedly a cornerstone of the French New Wave, its reputation in academia and the broader pop cultural consciousness cannot be fairly elevated above Varda’s debut, nor can it be understood outside the context of her work. After all, she was churning out films of this ilk with little money and little experience years before the men often credited with inventing la nouvelle vague directed their first features.

In fact, it seems Agnès Varda’s debut film was a burst of originality with no clear precedent. She did not often go to the movies and had not planned to become a filmmaker. She merely traveled to the small coastal village that she would later immortalize in La Pointe Courte to take photographs for a friend. Varda was so moved by the site’s geographical beauty and the people she met there that she felt compelled to pick up a film camera. La Pointe Courte resulted, and in the process, Varda invented a new cinematic language — one that was raw, intimate, and even painterly. She would later credit a book — William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms — and not a film as inspiration for La Pointe Courte’s poetic structure, which vacillates between a talky portrait of a married couple on the brink of separation and a documentary-like chronicle of an impoverished fishing community.

To acknowledge the new ground Agnès Varda broke in La Pointe Courte is not to opine that filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut are undeserving of academic study or analysis. Eminent film critic Roger Ebert dubbed Godard’s Breathless (1960) as influential a film debut as Orson Welles’ 1941 film Citizen Kane. (Funny enough, when La Pointe Courte was first released, Varda admitted to having only seen one film: Citizen Kane).

Ebert’s assessment is not unfair. Godard’s film is a stylish and anarchic celluloid coup that usurped the conventions of the medium, thereby causing a sensation (both in France and around the world) when it was first released. Yet, when a filmmaker such as Varda is making equally neoteric work years before Truffaut and Godard, she deserves to occupy the same place in academic and cultural discourse that they do, not to mention earning the elevated credit of being la nouvelle vague’s foremother. (I write this shortly after completing an entry-level college course about the French New Wave in which Varda’s name was not mentioned once.)

Of course, patriarchal hegemony has undermined Agnès Varda’s station in academia and popular culture. It is a hegemony that impacts not just the film industry but every facet of our society, driven by a privilege so powerful and deeply entrenched in our socio-cultural fabric that it has distilled itself across all mediums, platforms, and modes of expression. It is no wonder, then, that Breathless and The 400 Blows are consistently regarded in film scholarship as being among the most important pieces of 20th century filmmaking while La Pointe Courte (to quote Slant magazine’s Andrew Chan)premiered at “Cannes, where it received critical acclaim but no interest from distributors” and went without home video release or significant airplay for over a half-century before its 2008 Criterion release.

While there is still work to do to venerate Agnès Varda’s filmography (and the oeuvres of countless other long-overlooked women artists), some action has been taken to restore her visibility. Turner Classic Movies has contributed to the cause with its broadcast of 1962’s Cléo from 5 to 7. This broadcast was introduced by filmmaker Ava DuVernay, who spoke to Varda’s directorial work on both Cléo from 5 to 7 and La Pointe Courte as well as her overlooked impact.

Ava DuVernay remarked: “The fact that most of us don’t know her name and don’t know her work [and] don’t regard her in the place in history that she occupies is… I think it’s criminal. The way she was using narrative tools was completely new at that point… she precedes the official start of the French New Wave by three years. You look at the great ‘auteurs’ in that film movement, and you can see very distinctly how they are borrowing and tipping a hat to her work, and yet she is often left out of that conversation.”

Filmed in France in 1961, Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 follows pop singer Cléo Victoire (played by then-newcomer Corinne Marchand) in virtual real-time as she waits from 5 PM to 6:30 PM on the summer solstice for biopsy results that may or may not confirm a stomach cancer diagnosis. Cléo from 5 to 7 is everything the French New Wave is — and is not. Like Breathless, Cléo from 5 to 7 is an existential work imbued with an experimental spirit. It breaks from typical Hollywood filmmaking conventions by shooting almost entirely on location and deviating from the visual polish of so many big-budget studio films of the time. Like many French New Wave films, its protagonist is young, and her story is centered around issues of mortality, identity, and interpersonal relationships.

Elegantly shot in black-and-white (save for brief flashes of color while Cléo’s tarot cards are being read in the film’s opening sequence), the mise-en-scène of Cléo from 5 to 7 is arty and chic, an absorbing tableau of darks and lights. Yet the film is not replete with jump cuts and protracted dialogue sequences (think Breathless). Varda strikes a welcome balance with her visual style.

At times, Varda opts for carefully modulated sweeps and pans. The single tracking shot that comprises Cléo’s performance of the song “Sans toi,” concluding with a close-up of her tear-streaked face against a jet-black backdrop, is one of the film’s most breathtaking moments. Other times, she favors a looser and more propulsive visual approach. Consider the numerous (at times tremulous) POV shots of traffic as Cléo is catapulted through the streets of Paris early in the film. Keeping her film at a tight 90 minutes, Varda pushes the viewer through Cléo’s saga at breakneck speed even as she manages to linger pensively in a host of settings lively and intimate (packed Parisian cafes and storefronts) as well as grandiose and spare (such as Cléo’s spacious white abyss of an apartment, or a virtually empty Park Montsouris near the end of the film where the protagonist strikes up a touching conversation with a soldier about dying).

Cléo from 5 to 7 does not sacrifice substance for style. In a film like Breathless, it is easy to get lost in Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg’s minutes-long musings on morality, sex, and crime, all while they play it up for the camera (in admittedly some of the coolest outfits in film history — who could forget Seberg’s iconic New York Herald Tribune shirt?).

Dissimilarly, Cléo from 5 to 7’s musings are anchored in personal and philosophical concerns that emotionally engage the viewer. The stakes are much higher, and Varda’s dramatic beats somehow feel more intentional and ruminative. Perhaps the most noteworthy deviation from the nouvelle vague films of Varda’s male contemporaries is Cléo from 5 to 7’s feminism.

The character of Cléo is never taken seriously by her lover, her male musical colleagues, or even her female confidantes. Yet, captured in Varda’s gaze and embodied sensitively by Marchand, Cléo transitions from “object” to “subject” in a way that allows the audience to identify with her plight and recognize the manifold layers beneath her glamorous facade. Be it through her delicate singing voice or her perpetually pained visage (repeatedly captured in mirrors), Cléo provides the pathos that anchors Varda’s narrative, making lines like “You make me capricious, nothing but a china doll!” and “Everyone spoils me, no one loves me” register with legitimate anguish.

While a review in Empire Magazine validates Cléo from 5 to 7’s place as “one of the Nouvelle Vague’s boldest achievements,” film critic Josh Larsen notes that the film “stands apart from the French New Wave in that it is very much the story of a woman, not about a woman.” For example, a shot early in the film depicts a car of lecherous young men reaching out to touch Cléo’s hand (without her consent) in moving traffic. One recoils at the sight because Varda has situated the viewer in the back seat of the car with Cléo. Even as the camera lingers on Varda’s protagonist, the perspective of the film always seems to come from her — not at her. 

Think again of Breathless. While Jean Seberg’s Patricia grapples with issues pertinent to many women’s experiences (e.g., a potential pregnancy) — and Seberg imbues her portrayal with shades of complexity through her talent and charisma as an actor — Godard’s characterization of her is often chilly, rooted in Michel’s chauvinistic gaze. Even when the tables are turned in Breathless’ dénouement (after Patricia has betrayed Michel’s criminal activities to the police and he winds up dead in the street), it is difficult to feel positive about Patricia or her motivations. Instead, this writer leaves the film feeling ambivalent about both protagonists. Perhaps this is Godard’s intent: a subversion of the logical and fully-realized “happy ending.”

Cléo from 5 to 7 does not operate in this way. It embraces the ecstasies and agonies of its protagonist’s experience and seeks neither to lionize nor criticize the character of Cléo, but simply to present her for who she is, in all her facets. Occasionally narcissistic and even materialistic, Cléo exhibits neediness, confusion, exhaustion, melancholy, and even privilege. It is no secret that as a successful recording artist, Cléo lives in society’s upper crust.

At the same time, Cléo proves sensitive, contemplative, and ultimately assertive in the face of a potentially dire medical crisis. She emerges as the film’s beating heart, a reluctant but always involving heroine — someone who feels real and someone whom the audience can root for. (Credit where credit is due: it is the verve and intelligence of Marchand’s performance, coupled with Varda’s sympathetic and always inquisitive direction, that makes a character who could have easily registered as one-dimensional or unlikable so indelible).

Breathless’ significance is undeniable, but there is no doubt about the sometimes alienating, archetypal nature of its characters. (Godard and numerous other New Wave filmmakers were obsessed with Classic Hollywood archetypes, and perhaps Michel in particular is meant to feel archetypal as he blatantly models himself after Humphrey Bogart’s “gangster” persona). For all their style and cool, Michel and Patricia can register as pretentious, impenetrable, and even infuriating. Cléo Victoire, on the other hand, is not so easily reduced to parody or archetype. Varda trades coolness for warmth and presents a protagonist who is nuanced, vulnerable, contradictory — in a word: human.

The best way to understand and contextualize Cléo from 5 to 7’s rightful place not only in the history of the French New Wave but also in film history and popular culture at large is through continued exposure and discussion. TCM has contributed to this cause with its recent broadcast. It is also a cause that Boston’s Coolidge Corner Theatre will aid with its forthcoming celebration of the film. In the wake of her passing (and long overdue Honorary Academy Award), it seems a Varda “renaissance” is upon us.

Still, there is much ground to cover in ensuring a film like Cléo from 5 to 7 and an oeuvre like Varda’s is cemented where they deserve to be — in the pantheon of cinematic “essentials.” As critic Matt Bailey notes: “Why Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 is not considered a classic of the French New Wave on the order of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows or Godard’s Breathless is a complete mystery.” In a vacuum, it certainly is a mystery. In the words of Rotten Tomatoes’ laudatory critics’ consensus, Cléo from 5 to 7 stands apart as a landmark work in its “encapsulat[ion] of the appeal of the [French New Wave]” and simultaneous divergence “from its narrative conventions.” In context, it becomes clear why Cléo from 5 to 7 has fallen by the wayside, and films like Breathless and The 400 Blows have enjoyed reputations as “magnum opuses.” It is because — as VICE noted in its article about Joni Mitchell — it is a man’s world.

Is it possible to be an icon and still be, for lack of a better word, unknown? Yes — an artist like Agnès Varda has managed to attain such a reputation. She is iconic because her filmmaking talents are undeniable, and countless (particularly women) filmmakers like Greta Gerwig, Kelly Reichardt, and Miranda July have identified her as a key influence. Still, she is not the household name she deserves to be.

Our current patriarchal cultural landscape is not powerful enough to erase the impact of Agnès Varda’s genius. Nonetheless, it has managed to minimize her legacy in broader film and media discourse. Varda is thus trapped in a kind of pop cultural purgatory, where many people (especially those interested in film history) may have heard of her, but scarcely has the general public had the opportunity to readily access her entire body of work, nor see it discussed and celebrated in the way it deserves to be discussed and celebrated.

In this increasingly democratized digital age, it is now up to us to share, champion, and keep Agnès Varda’s filmography accessible. If we are able to do that, maybe one day the gods (or goddesses) of popular culture will retrace their steps to pick up Varda where they left her, and carry her forward.