Her legacy was subsequently reframed, and she began to be called the 'grandmother of the Nouvelle Vague'. The title was supremely #BoreMatKarYaar because it seemed to bleach out the easy libidinality and crackling contemporaneity of her work
Illustration/Ravi Jadhav
Agnès Varda died last week and the RIPs cascaded with a sense of personal loss. She began making films in 1954, with La Pointe Courte, an intimate and highly textured film about a couple going back to the man's fishing village home. Although a pioneering figure of the defining Nouvelle Vague movement, she was never emblematic of it in the way of filmmakers like Godard, Truffaut and Resnais, even if admired by all of them.
Her legacy was subsequently reframed, and she began to be called the 'grandmother of the Nouvelle Vague'. The title was supremely #BoreMatKarYaar because it seemed to bleach out the easy libidinality and crackling contemporaneity of her work.
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One can theorise endlessly about why this happens — the de-eroticising of women artists across identities, the use of their gender to limit, rather than deepen the understanding of their work, and, in fact, to deepen our understanding of the world and art. But it is not surprising. If the world could see artists the way Varda saw the world, we'd be in a very different place. She was often called lucid and accessible — which makes it sound like her work was simplistic. But, it was the very opposite, full of experiment and enquiry. What it did have were generous points of access, a confident belief in curiosity, beauty, pleasure, intellect and humour — not only her own, but that of the audience.
There is no division between pleasure and politics, no declarations of catastrophe, no moral scoldings.
Her films examined how people lived their lives, ethnographically embedded in a multi-layered context, through casual details and frequently included her in them. In one of her most popular documentaries, "The Gleaners and I", she follows those who scavenge for food in fields after the harvest, artists who make work from junk, and compares herself to them, a filmmaker who gleans images from a reality others discard, disregard. She digresses into reflections on ageing and using new digital technology. She also poses as a gleaner from a famous painting, embodying her statement that "Humour is such a strong weapon, such a strong answer."
Fiercely political and feminist, Agnes Varda's gaze was a loving one. She was not interested in the facile saviourism that documentary or feminism have been reduced to — one of finding victims whom mealy-mouthed directors will uplift (meanwhile who will save the audience?). Too many reviews say a fiction film is boring if it is 'like a documentary' and that a documentary is great if it is 'like fiction'. Agnes Varda's work demonstrates that these statements are not only ignorant, but silly. She was a kind of jugni of form, making long and short films, fiction, documentary and something queerly in between, rather than solemnly restricting herself to canonical forms. She explored subjects as diverse as feminism, abortion, misogyny, polyamory and even (tongue-in-cheek) the faux-exotic aesthetic of seaside towns, going where curiosity led her, paying attention to the world.
All this made Varda an artiste who was loved, more than revered. What could be more feminist? Such artistes are hard to pin down, because they are true to the idea of art as something that liberates the human spirit. They are — thankfully — hard to put on pedestals because they work inside life and among people, expanding our gaze and expanding our souls, not saving them.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevipictures.com
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