Agnès Varda

“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.”
— Agnès Varda

Upon her death, Martin Scorsese said of Agnès: “I seriously doubt that Agnès Varda ever followed in anyone else's footsteps, in any corner of her life or her art. Every single one of her remarkable handmade pictures, so beautifully balanced between documentary and fiction, is like no one else's — every image, every cut … What a body of work she left behind: movies big and small, playful and tough, generous and solitary, lyrical and unflinching … and alive.” 


Widely regarded as the greatest female filmmaker of all time, she made films spanning 65 years, from 1954 to 2019. An art history major who became a photographer who eventually started making films. She edited them at her kitchen table, in a house she lived in for over 50 years. She became enamored with the act of gleaning (collecting leftover crops from farmers' fields after the main harvest) and turned it into an aesthetic, a way of seeing the world. She picked up what the world discarded and created from it: leftover film stock, amateur actors, her own aging body, potatoes shaped like hearts, beaches at low tide, and strangers’ stories. Let’s explore Agnès’ heart and soul together, watching a few of her films along the way.

Required Viewing

Cleo, a singer and hypochondriac, becomes increasingly worried that she might have cancer while awaiting test results from her doctor.

Watch the film on Kanopy or HBO Max.

As always, choose your level of participation:

Besides watching “Cleo from 5 to 7”, here are supplemental things to listen to, watch, and/or read:

  • EXPAND THE EXPERIENCE:

    A young woman's body is found frozen in a ditch. Through flashbacks and interviews, we see the events that led to her inevitable death.

    Varda films and interviews gleaners in France in all forms, from those picking fields after the harvest to those scouring the dumpsters of Paris.

    Agnès Varda explores her memories, mostly chronologically, with photographs, film clips, interviews, reenactments, and droll, playful contemporary scenes of her narrating her story.

    DEEP DIVES:

    François, a young carpenter, lives a happy, uncomplicated life with his wife Thérèse and their two small children. One day he meets Emilie, a clerk in the local post office.

    Director Agnes Varda and photographer/muralist J.R. journey through rural France and form an unlikely friendship.  

    • Article: Mirrors and Windows: Read this very short paragraph-length article on how both reveal your views about others and yourself.

    • Article: Exploring Agnes Varda’s unusual preoccupation with Potatoes: Agnes once built a potato-shaped hut as an art installation because she thought her body resembled a potato and found this delightful rather than tragic, read this article to discover more about her artistic potato fascination.

“I’m interested in contradiction - the inner contradiction - which makes everybody three persons at the same time, everybody is able to be so different from one moment to another. Even Cléo from 5 to 7, there was a contradiction between the objective time, which is 5:05, 5:10, 5:15, and what I call subjective time - that we feel so different when we have a good time, it lasts so little, and when we wait for something, it’s endless.”
— Agnès Varda