Her first short feature film pre-dates what many critics would label the inception of the French New Wave by some three years.  Why is that significant?  Because Varda’s La Pointe courte in 1956 exhibited traits that would soon coalesce into the torrid movement known as the New Wave: shooting in real locations, marked use of a handheld camera, a focus on non-professional actors, and scenarios that dealt with the provincial before they dealt with anything else.  Agnès Varda (France’s first female director of any notoriety), like her later contemporaries in the New Wave, was ahead of her time.

Of course, the most prominent principle of New Wave filmmaking was the novel approach to film form (formal elements of a film) in these highly experimental works.  So when Francois Truffaut released Les Quatre cents coups in 1959 and Alain Resnais dropped Hiroshima mon amour the same year, and Jean-Luc Godard followed suit with A bout de soufflé in 1960, critics proclaimed, “Ah ha!  Here, we have an uncompromisingly new approach to cinema!”  It’s a new approach that Varda was already practicing (the ethnographic documentary work of Jean Rouch also paved the way for the French New Wave in the 50s, but that’s a story for another day).

Varda belonged to the subset of the French New Wave that was labeled the Left Bank group (as opposed to Right Bankers like Truffaut, Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette).  She, along with Resnais, Chris Marker, and Georges Franju composed this small division.  The difference between Left and Right Bankers?  Some say a political designation, some only say geographic.  There are many differences between Varda herself and a majority of her New Wave contemporaries, and not just the obvious fact that she was a female director (which, unfortunately, made her a feminist filmmaker by default).

Varda’s background (like Marker’s) is in photojournalism.  This is immediately evident from the documentary quality of her films.  Just as often as she focuses on human subjects, her camera is also concerned with inanimate objects.  These objects are injected with a life and a significance that can be profound, like the tarot cards in the opening of Cleo de 5 a 7 (1962), or mundane, like the multitude of cinematic artifacts in Les Cent et une nuits de Simon Cinema (1995).  Varda’s documentary realism infects her cinematography at every turn.  Which means (like another of her contemporaries, Godard), she often finds herself shooting in the middle of a busy Parisian street, with nosy onlookers glaring directly into the camera iris.  If the French New Wave is about any sentiment at all, it is about freedom.  Films of this kind follow no rules but their own.

Varda’s films often follow a subject who is on the verge of an awakening.  Cleo in the aforementioned Cleo de 5 a 7 undergoes a spiritual awakening, the awakening of a sense of self.  The husband in Le Bonheur (1965) discovers an awakening of desire, and the fatalistic effects that unfold afterward.  Mona in Sans toit ni loi (1985) experiences a literal awakening, a cinematic resurrection.  At the outset of the film we find her lying dead in a cold irrigation ditch.  She is animated in the very next scene as we follow her path and learn about her through the recollections of others.  Of course, her awakening (like life) is finite.  Death hangs over this film like a specter.  Simon Cinema in Les Cent et une nuits experiences an erratic awakening of his own memory and consciousness.  With the aid of a Master’s student in Critical Studies, he attempts to re-capture flashes of a grand career spent in the cinema through the student’s own recollection of classic cinematic moments.

Since Agnès Varda’s films are about awakenings, they are often measured and subtle in the way they unfold.  Cleo in Cleo de 5 a 7 spends the whole film wondering whether her doctor will tell her if she is to die.  As she wonders, she wanders throughout her city and engages in chance encounters with fascinating people.  She pauses, takes in her surroundings, and finally sees the world around her for the first time.  Cleo vit sa vie.  By the end of the film, her doctor’s prognosis matters little.  She’s truly alive, but Cleo will die.  Won’t we all?