A New Agnès Varda Exhibition Is an Extension of Her Life’s Work

When Varda shot portraits on location, her practice was both observational and interventionist. She took subjects around town in her car in search of suitably photogenic sites and then framed and posed them with a meticulous eye and firm guidance. One of the highlights of the Carnavalet exhibition is a video screen showing an excerpt from a 1954 TV report by Hubert Knapp on Varda’s session for an outdoor portrait of the photographer Brassaï. Varda, who used a large-format view camera, is seen carrying a big case, a tripod, and a four-legged stool through the street in the rain. Reaching the chosen location, in her neighborhood, on the Rue Cels, she poses Brassaï in front of an abraded and mottled wall that has character, a sort of Abstract Expressionist surface. In an extended take, Varda assembles the bulky camera with practiced certainty; she cranks the tripod to raise the camera, climbs onto the stool, ducks beneath a black cloth that covers the camera’s glass back, and then emerges to wave Brassaï into place. The resulting picture, like most of her street photos, is a work of inner and outer depth in which the human and the material subjects, the foreground and the background, expressively coalesce.

Knapp’s short film is silent, like photographs themselves, but Varda’s movies are, of course, talking pictures (indeed, voluble ones), and a crucial emphasis of “Agnès Varda’s Paris” is the connection in her work between language and images. Pointedly, the first item on display in the show is a spiral notebook in which Varda had jotted down notes for a film, “Christmas Carole,” of which she shot only a few scenes, in 1966. In the two pages on view are the names of dozens of Paris Métro stations (including Pyramide, Convention, and Denfert-Rochereau), with circles and rectangles drawn around words that are embedded within these names—such as ami (“friend”), vent (“wind”), enfer (“Hell”), and roche (“rock”).

In the course of her filmmaking career, Varda invented the term “cinécriture” (cine-writing) to refer to the totality of directorial decisions of which a movie is composed, akin to a writer’s fine-grained and hands-on approach to language. She also had more direct involvement with the combination of image and text: in the fifties, she published photo essays in magazines, one featuring a girl wearing angel wings in the streets of Paris, another on art schools, and a third (using actors) about a new generation of literary-influenced youths. In 1957, she photographed passersby on the Rue Mouffetard and assembled them in a mockup for an intended photobook, taping them into a large-format blank book and adding her own handwritten commentaries. That handmade volume has an exquisite artistic aura, a feeling of craftsmanship even in its sketchlike form, yet it wasn’t published. Instead, Varda returned to the same street the following year with a movie camera and a crew—while pregnant with her daughter, Rosalie—and the result was the short film “L’Opéra-Mouffe,” one of her early masterworks. The film departed from the strictly observational book project, with Varda adding images of a nude pregnant woman, an explicit erotic sequence between a man and a woman, a playful interlude in masks, and Surrealist-inspired visual motifs linking fruits and vegetables to human fertility. What was implicitly personal in her still-photo observations became intimately so in her cinematic—and quasi-literary—transformation of the concept.

Because the bulk of Varda’s photographs were made before, or early in, her film career, the Carnavalet exhibit is richer in work from that period. Nonetheless, the show still explores the full span of her working life, using related materials that she produced and photographs of her by others. Her handmade foldout book of sketches for her second feature, “Cléo from 5 to 7,” is filled with images and text (in tiny handwriting, in red ink) that feels like both a dialectical launching pad for the movie and an integral, active part of the film itself. Similarly, a mimeographed call, from 1976, for women to play demonstrators in a reënactment of a 1972 protest—in support of a teen-ager put on trial for having an abortion—thrums with artistic energy that’s continuous with the movie that resulted, “One Sings, the Other Doesn’t.” The exhibit also features six photographs by Michèle Laurent from the location shoot, in Paris streets, of a 1967 short by Varda, intended for the compilation film “Far from Vietnam,” which its producer, Chris Marker, saw fit to exclude from the finished compilation and which is believed lost. The six images show a young woman in a chic dress and white boots who, as she passes through the streets of Paris, is confronted with Vietnam in various forms—newspaper headlines about the war, a political newsletter pasted to a wall, even a Vietnamese restaurant—and who, in the last photo, is arrested by two police officers. The photographs are practically a movie in themselves.

Whatever Varda touched turned into art, and vice versa: the show concludes with clips of filmed interviews with her, made between 1961 and 2019. They fulfill a desire that Varda expresses in one of the clips: to have her interviews edited together in chronological sequence, in order to show herself passing from youth to old age and also, as she puts it, blooming like a flower. Discussing her 1975 documentary “Daguerréotypes,” about shopkeepers on her street, she calls them members of the “silent majority” and proclaims the philosophical reach of this ultra-local project: “Wherever one is, one can bear witness to what existence is.”

While I was in Paris, I visited the office of Ciné-Tamaris, the production company that Varda founded, which also distributes many of her films and those of her husband, Jacques Demy. There, I was astonished to discover the wealth of materials that it preserves. I was also shown the company’s separate archives, in which images, business documents, correspondence, and objects of many sorts (from cameras to tchotchkes) are stored—a colossal trove of personal activity and artistic history. The room felt like a storehouse of relics, as if the movies of their legators were palpable in the air. Varda, whose materials are far more copious than her husband’s, was a saver, from the very beginning of her photographic career, and this practice of accumulation was a living act of artistic philosophy, a commitment to the future—her own and the world’s. For much of her career, Varda was an underappreciated filmmaker, both in France and here. Appropriately, the work with which she remade her art and her public image was the 2000 video-film “The Gleaners and I,” in which her hands-on camerawork and immediate experience converged with her personality, her own onscreen presence.

That movie and those which came next—“The Beaches of Agnès” and “Faces Places”—made explicit the unity of Varda’s life and her art, the fusion of her daily activities with her self-imagined persona. With these works, Varda made herself into a figure of history in the present tense, an embodiment of the modern cinema—and of women’s cinema, which she had hypothesized, in a 1978 clip included in the exhibit’s concluding assemblage, as “marginal and subversive.” By moving even further to the margins, she put herself at the center of the times; by subverting the ordinary practices of cinema, she refashioned them. Her influence and her authority, the benign dominance of her personality, skipped a generation, as in the relationship of grandparents and grandchildren. The future for which she’d started saving in her twenties arrived while she was still forming and expanding it. With the wealth of treasures that she stored up, “Agnès Varda’s Paris” emerges like a new work of her own—only one of many exhibitions waiting to be midwifed into the world.