One of cinema’s freest spirits, Agnès Varda reinvented her approach to film again and again over the course of a decades-long career. Her observant, inquisitive films are suffused with a sense of wonder, exploration, and endless curiosity about the world around her. With her very first feature, the documentary-inflected marital drama LA POINTE COURTE, Varda laid the foundations for the nouvelle vague before going on to make one of the defining works of the movement: the enchanting experiment in real time CLÉO FROM 5 TO 7. She then moved seamlessly between genres, from the dreamy feminist musical ONE SINGS, THE OTHER DOESN’T to the sparsely poetic character study VAGABOND to idiosyncratic documentary works shot through with her buoyant spirit and committed political consciousness.
Directed by Agnès Varda • 1955 • France
Starring Silvia Monfort, Philippe Noiret
The great Agnès Varda’s film career began with this graceful, penetrating study of a marriage on the rocks, set against the backdrop of a small Mediterranean fishing village. Both a stylized depiction of the complic...
Directed by Agnès Varda • 1958 • France
As if you need any more reasons to visit the beautiful south of France, Agnès Varda celebrates the splendor of this area in a short documentary funded by the French Tourism Office. In this cheeky little film, Varda highlights the importance of tourism to...
Directed by Agnès Varda • 1958 • France
Pregnant with her first child, director Agnès Varda turned her camera to her immediate surroundings capturing day-to-day life along the Rue Mouffetard. Lacking synch sound and incorporating a number of unconventional techniques, this short work displays ...
Directed by Agnès Varda • 1962 • France
Directed by Agnès Varda for her film CLÉO FROM 5 TO 7, this short film stars her French new wave colleagues Jean-Luc Godard, Anna Karina, Sami Frey, and Eddie Constantine.
Directed by Agnès Varda • 1962 • France
Starring Corinne Marchand, Antoine Bourseiller, Dominique Davray
Agnès Varda eloquently captures Paris in the sixties with this real-time portrait of a singer (Corinne Marchand) set adrift in the city as she awaits test results of a biopsy. A chronicle of ...
Directed by Agnès Varda • 1965 • France
Starring Jean-Claude Drouot, Claire Drouot, Marie-France Boyer
Though married to the good-natured, beautiful Thérèse (Claire Drouot), young husband and father François (Jean-Claude Drouot) finds himself falling unquestioningly into an affair with an attrac...
Directed by Agnès Varda • 1968 • France
In her effervescent first California film, Agnès Varda delves into her own family history. The short documentary UNCLE YANCO features Varda tracking down a Greek emigrant relative she’s never met, discovering an artist and kindred soul leading a bohemian l...
Directed by Agnès Varda • 1970 • United States
Agnès Varda turns her camera on an Oakland demonstration against the imprisonment of activist and Black Panthers cofounder Huey P. Newton. In addition to evincing Varda’s fascination with her adopted surroundings and her empathy, this perceptive sho...
Directed by Agnès Varda • 1969 • United States
Starring Viva, Shirley Clarke, James Rado, Gerome Ragni
Agnès Varda brings New York counterculture to Los Angeles. In a rented house in the sun-soaked Hollywood Hills, a woman and two men, Viva, of Warhol Factory fame, and James Rado and Gerome R...
Directed by Agnès Varda • 1977 • France
Starring Valérie Mairesse, Thérèse Liotard, Ali Raffi
In the early 1960s in Paris, two young women become friends. Pomme is an aspiring singer. Suzanne is a pregnant country girl unable to support a third child. Pomme lends Suzanne the money for an illegal...
Directed by Agnès Varda • 1981 • France
After returning to Los Angeles from France in 1979, Agnès Varda created this kaleidoscopic documentary about the striking murals that decorate the city. Bursting with color and vitality, MUR MURS is as much an invigorating study of community and diversity ...
Directed by Agnès Varda • 1981 • France
This small-scale fiction about a divorced mother and her child (played by Agnès Varda's own son) leading a quiet existence on L.A.'s margins was made directly after Mur Murs, and though DOCUMENTEUR is different in form and tone from that film, the two ar...
Directed by Agnès Varda • 1985 • France
Starring Sandrine Bonnaire, Macha Méril, Stéphane Freiss
Sandrine Bonnaire won the Best Actress César for her portrayal of the defiant young drifter Mona, found frozen to death in a ditch at the beginning of VAGABOND. Agnès Varda pieces together Mona’s sto...
Directed by Agnès Varda • 1993 • France
For this documentary about the making of THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT, filmmaker Agnès Varda, director Jacques Demy’s widow, returned to the town of Rochefort for the film’s twenty-fifth anniversary. In it, she interviews actors Catherine Deneuve, Jacque...
Directed by Agnès Varda • 1995 • France, Belgium, Spain
Hollywood has had its fair share of power couples; husband and wife duos that have each enjoyed illustrious careers in the film industry. In France, one of the most noteworthy marital unions occurred when Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda tied...
