Agnès Varda

Warm colours, Mozart and pastoral calm fill the sunniest film about infidelity ever made, which Agnès Varda shot just before May 1968. Her hero is a man who falls for a second woman and begins to believe he can add a new happiness to his life without losing the first. — A young carpenter has a comfortable, peaceful life, a lovely wife and two wonderful children. He’s happily married, but on a work trip he meets another woman and they begin an affair. His wife can tell something has put him in an unusually good mood, and since he can’t bring himself to lie to her, he tells her the truth. Nothing has changed between them, he promises. — Special Prize of the Jury | Berlin International Film Festival | 1965

When Jane Birkin, the famous model and actress, confided to Agnès Varda (“Cléo from 5 to 7”) that turning forty terrified her, Varda answered with a film. The playful portrait that came out of it captures a bond between an actress and a director quite unlike any other. — Jane Birkin sits down in front of the camera without make-up and asks to be filmed as if she were as transparent and anonymous as anyone else, which is the one thing this kaleidoscopic study won’t do. Instead it drops her into a Renaissance portrait, a thriller and a black-and-white comedy, and straps her into Joan of Arc’s armour. Woman, mother, muse, idol: every one of them goes by her name.

Sandrine Bonnaire plays Mona, a girl who refuses to belong to any world, in the film that won Agnès Varda the Golden Lion at Venice. It begins with her body being found and then goes back over her last days, and you won’t be able to take your eyes off her. — A reporter we never see turns the camera on the men who found a girl dead, and asks how she got there. Flashbacks show her drifting among homeless people and immigrant labourers, spending time with a professor who studies trees and with a young woman who envies how completely free she is. She once had an office job, and one day she walked out and kept on going. — Official Selection | Venice Film Festival | 1985 FIPRESCI Prize | Venice Film Festival | 1985 OCIC Award | Venice Film Festival | 1985

Agnès Varda’s feminist film about abortion and freedom follows two friends who fight side by side for the right to decide how they live. It’s the most political film the French New Wave icon ever made, yet it’s as full of her energy and humour as anything she did. — Seventeen-year-old Pauline is still at school in 1962 when, in a Paris gallery, she spots a photograph of an old friend. Suzanne, now twenty-two, has two children by the photographer and needs money for an abortion the law forbids, so Pauline lies to her parents to get it before running away from home to sing. They won’t see each other again for ten years, until they meet at a demonstration in 1972.

Agnès Varda’s best-known film unfolds in real time, following a singer around Paris from five in the afternoon as she waits for test results she’s sure will mean cancer. Its title borrows the French expression for time spent with a lover and promises seven o’clock, but the film ends before then. — It’s five in the afternoon on 21 June, and Cléo, a Paris singer whose real name is Florence, is sure her test results will show cancer. The doctor won’t tell her until half past six, so she fills the time with a hat shop, a taxi ride, a café and a rehearsal with her songwriters, before she ends up in a park where a soldier wants to talk to her. — Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 1962

Rather than give interviews, Agnès Varda made this film and had it shown in her place. She was ninety, and a month after the premiere she died, leaving European cinema a farewell like no other, one she wrote herself. — Seated in front of an audience, Agnès Varda talks through her work roughly in the order she made it, from photography to film and finally to installations in galleries. Inspiration, creation and sharing are the threads she keeps picking up. Along the way she explains what changed once cameras went digital and could be held in one hand.

In the early 1980s Agnès Varda turned her camera on the walls of Los Angeles and spent eighty-two minutes with the murals that cover them, from gangs and disco to religion and rebellion. After this, every blank wall starts to look like an opportunity. — At the end of the 1970s, Los Angeles is covered in paint from the pavement to the rooftops. Saints, the history of uprisings and the big moments of street life look down from wall after wall. The painters come out onto the street and explain why they made them. — Nominated for Un Certain Regard Prize | Cannes Film Festival | 1981