Photography AGNÈS VARDA Cinema

Agnès Varda: a woman in cinema, in photography, in the arts, in life, in the world

Agnès Varda is a filmmaker who is beloved and appreciated in Brazil, and around the world. Her extraordinary courage and determination in asserting herself as a woman in cinema, and her empathy for the people and stories featured in her films, have surpassed the Atlantic and made their way to this country. The majority of her productions have been shown in Brazil, and she presented her work here in exhibitions that paid tribute to her, garnering praise from audiences who always held a special fondness for her.

However, an exhibition like this one, presenting her photography and its intersection with her cinema, is a first. Varda began her work as an artist with photography, returning to it in the last years of her life and using it to examine cinema in various video installations.

The exhibition was planned in Brazil, to be presented in Brazil, based on a specific curatorial selection that prioritized relevant themes, such as a particularly sensitive focus on the representation of women’s and children’s living conditions, solidarity with peoples fighting for their emancipation in a post-colonial world, and issues of race, exclusion, and social inequality.

We thank Rosalie Varda, the artist’s daughter, and Agate Bortolussi, assistant on this project at Ciné-Tamaris, the production company Agnès founded, for their support, collaboration, and wisdom. Agnès Varda’s photographic archive is preserved at the Institut pour la photographie in Lille, France, to which we also express our gratitude, namely its director, Anne Lacoste, and Carole Sandrin, who is in charge of the archive and a dedicated connoisseur of Varda’s photographic work. A special word of thanks is owed to all the staff at IMS and at the Institut who contributed to this achievement.

This exhibition is part of and supported by Temporada Brasil – França/Saison France – Brésil, an initiative launched in 2023 by Presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Emmanuel Macron. We would like to highlight and express our gratitude for the enthusiasm with which commissioners Anne Louyot (France) and Emílio Kalil (Brazil) welcomed and encouraged the project, as well as the decisive collaboration of the Consulate General of France in São Paulo.

The exhibition will also be accompanied by a film series dedicated to Varda’s work, which will be shown at IMS’s Movie Theater.
Finally, with the utmost emotion and gratitude, we wish to express our gratitude for Agnès Varda’s life and work. She is an example and a light that illuminates us in this sensitive art of living and working for a better world.

The Board of Instituto Moreira Salles

The Images of Agnès

Agnès Varda (Brussels, Belgium, 1928 – Paris, France, 2019) will forever live on in the eyes, thoughts, and hearts of those who have the opportunity to come across her images, be they her films, for which she has been celebrated the world over, or her photographs, which have been specially selected in this exhibition for their presentation in Brazil.

Varda’s photography is much less known than her cinema. She did not bother much with presenting it. She considered her photographs “old things” she did not have time to revisit, driven by the urgency to make the most of her final years by adding new things to the many she had already done. Nevertheless, she began her work and her life as an artist with photography. In the late 1940s, she met Jean Vilar, who chose her to be the photographer of the Festival d’Avignon during its first decade of existence, as well as the official photographer for the Théâtre National Populaire, both of which he founded. She was a stage photographer, an activity that is presented in this exhibition with some photographs she took of a play staged by Les Griots, the first Black theater company in Paris. Afterwards, she pursued cinema, and, later, a singular form of contemporary art that she practiced mainly through video installations, to which she brought her extraordinary empathy for people, felt in all the images she recorded and created throughout her life, in this art of storytelling.

The exhibition charts Agnès’s travels, her wanderings through working-class Paris, through then poor and forgotten Southern Europe, and through revolutions around the world and uprisings to which she lent her gaze and expressed her solidarity: China, Cuba, the Black Panthers’ struggle in the U.S., the lives of women and children in myriad regions to whom she always devoted special attention. It presents Agnès’s journey from photography to cinema and from cinema to photography, which she returned to in her final years, reflecting upon the nature and condition of the experiences that her empathetic and intimate images allow her to capture.

Photography AGNÈS VARDA Cinema brings together a first and last name, but it also combines two techniques and the mutual influence between them, which the artist never stopped reflecting upon until the end of her days. May all those who visit this exhibition leave touched by the emotion that made so many people feel – at the end of Agnès’s films, in their encounters with her, or when visiting her exhibitions – that their lives had become more sensitive to others and to the world, sparking the desire to proclaim “Long live Varda!”.

The Curators

Agnès Varda organized her first exhibition in the courtyard of her home on Rue Daguerre in Paris. The house was also used as a photo lab and studio. Agnès came up with a device for fixing the photos to the walls, which is replicated here. Photographs depicting landscapes, still lifes, portraits, everyday objects with anthropomorphic overtones, and some nudes are on display. A heart-shaped potato commingles with abstract compositions featuring pieces of wood, an image of a man descending a mountain of salt, and debris photographed on the ground. The young photographer mixes and subverts images, genres, styles, and visual languages in an affectionate ensemble, where humor peeps through. The outdoor exhibition created a kind of site-specific presentation that questioned conventional ideas of an art space, “a place for art”, here subverted by its connection with everyday life. Most of the guests were friends and neighbors, including artists such as Brassaï and Hans Hartung.

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We discovered this contact sheet, a self-portrait of my mother while she was pregnant, after she passed away. It was in a brown envelope at the bottom of a file box... it stayed in the dark for decades. This shoot took place in her studio on Rue Daguerre. A friend, or perhaps Antoine Bourseiller, must have helped her press the shutter button on the Rolleiflex? What strikes me is the radicality: she depicts the body as a sculpture, as fleshy matter, but without ever veering toward seduction. It is a body resting on the ground, anchored, rounded, ready to give birth to a child. At that time, it was impossible to know the sex before birth. This body evokes the nude photographs from 1954, some of which were exhibited in her first show in the courtyard of 86 Rue Daguerre and are featured once again in this exhibition. Motherhood was always important to Agnès. I remember her joy when she was pregnant with my brother, Mathieu Demy, in 1972.

When Agnès Varda became acquainted with La Pointe Courte, a fishing village in the south of France, she had the idea of making it the setting of her first film, which would also be the first of a new generation in European cinema proclaimed as the Nouvelle Vague [New Wave]. A love story between a man and a woman intersects with the everyday lives of fishermen and the community. Agnès took a series of photographs to rehearse shots for the film, each one carefully crafted as a stand-alone image. Abstract compositions with elements of reality, such as images of pieces of cut wood, are combined with a poetic but always concrete representation of that same reality, as is the case in the images of dunes, fish at the market, and a puddle of water’s reflections on the ground. Photography and cinema, still images and moving images, work together as elements of Agnès’s visual grammar, in what she would later call her cinécriture [cine-writing].

Varda began her photography career as a stage photographer, working with the Festival d’Avignon and the Théâtre National Populaire between 1948 and 1961 at the invitation of Jean Vilar, founder of both entities. Fundamental to the history of theater in France, this part of Agnès’s work, in which she recorded dozens of plays and produced thousands of images, is represented here by the selection of Papa Bon Dieu, staged in 1958 by the Compagnie d’Art Dramatique des Griots, or simply Les Griots, the first Black theater company created in post-war Paris. Founded by Sarah Maldoror (1929-2020), who would become a leading figure in African cinema alongside Ababacar Samb Makharam (Senegal, 1934-1987), Toto Bissainthe (Haiti, 1934-1994), and Timité Bassori (Ivory Coast, 1933-), Les Griots inaugurated a space for collective creation that affirmed the African diaspora’s presence and voice in European theater.

The play told the story of a scavenger presumed dead who comes back to life and is mistaken for God returning to Earth. Papa Bon Dieu, the main character after whom the play is titled, and played by Cameroonian actor Ferdinand Oyono (1929-2010), is inspired by the controversial figure of a messiah or preacher. The cast also included Amadou Sissoko (Samuel), Timité Bassori (Jeremi), Toto Bissainthe (Sarah), and Judith Aucagos (Léa). Aucagos later voiced the character Serafina, played by actress Léa Garcia, in the dubbed French version of the film Black Orpheus (Orfeu do Carnaval, 1959).

The play Papa Bon Dieu, laden with miraculous events, expands with Varda’s images, which reveal the intensity of the performances, the care taken with the composition, and the energy of a theater company that brought a new grammar of representation to the stage, paving the way for future generations.

In 1958, Agnès Varda directed Diary of a Pregnant Woman (L’Opéra Mouffe), one of the most personal and poetic films of her early filmography. Set on Rue Mouffetard in Paris’ Latin Quarter, the film documents everyday life on a popular street, employing a subjective audiovisual style that combines social observation, poetic essay, and personal reflection.

Varda combines social observation with personal intuition and political commentary. Thus, la Mouffe [Rue Mouffetard] is not just a backdrop, but a mirror of a world marked by inequalities and fragilities, in which Agnès’s personal experience of pregnancy also takes on new meanings.

Diary of a Pregnant Woman highlights Varda’s approach to nudity. For her, it is “a meeting point between formal beauty and moral beauty. Furthermore, a naked person, who is, so to speak, bare, plain, without masks, is a poignant and beautiful person... The couple I showed in the film is a kind of tribute to love, it is very pure, not in the puritanical sense of the word. There is a beauty in shared love that is phenomenal.” Varda emphasizes that this is not narcissism, but rather the discovery of one’s own beauty through the eyes of another.

Presented in its entirety, the film is accompanied by a series of photographs taken during its preparation. These records, preserved in a notebook belonging to the filmmaker – presented in an animation that flips through its pages – reveal how photography preceded and nourished her visual writing, transforming still images into a true film essay.

In the 1950s, Southern Europe was extremely poor, its inhabitants living off artisanal activities such as fishing and agriculture, and emigrating to the big northern cities. Varda had come to know this south as the Festival d’Avignon’s official photographer. It was also in this South that she directed her first film, La Pointe-Courte. Driven by curiosity and empathy for the people who lived and worked there, people excluded by the social injustice of the continent’s post-war reconstruction, the photographer expanded the geography of her images in a periplus that presents images of fishermen, women, and children in Marseille, Spain, and Portugal. A female bread vendor in front of an edifice’s tower, bearing witness to a past in which religion is represented as a monument, subverts and redefines the historical narrative of power. The photograph of a young woman walking barefoot under a torn advertisement poster featuring Sophia Loren is also an expression of the paradoxes between a movie icon promoted by the society of the spectacle and the everyday life of these inhabitants of the South whom Agnès photographed.

Some years after the Maoist Revolution and before the Cultural Revolution, Agnès Varda was the only artist invited to visit China as part of a French delegation consisting mainly of engineers and technicians. For about two months, she traveled through cities, ports, factories, temples, and rural communities. There, her gaze did not limit itself to the official record. On the contrary, she sought out the smallest gestures and unexpected encounters that revealed the vitality of a society in transition. Her photographs document a country and the lives of its people, between tradition and modernity, collective discipline and everyday ingenuity.

Among the pieces of writing she produced during her trip, the essay “China without an emperor has 154 million kings: its children” stands out. Varda reflects upon childhood as an emblem of the future and the contradictions of a country that, until recently, had endured hunger and high infant mortality. The text reveals the finesse of her attention to children: a diligent record that depicts the promise of transformation and the dignity of young subjects who, in her view, carried the vitality of a country undergoing reinvention.

Though not immediately published, Varda’s images are essential records of a meeting between politics, culture, and subjectivity, traversed by historical contingencies. They did not capture a great narrative of a revolution, but rather elaborated upon a modernity under construction: fragments of ordinary lives and expressions of cultural resistance.

Agnès Varda traveled to Cuba in 1962 at the invitation of ICAIC (Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos [Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry]). In a practical and distinctive way, she took only a Leica camera, film, and a tripod, producing some 2,500 negatives. These images gave rise to Salut les Cubains (1963), a medium-length film constructed entirely from a montage of photographs taken during this visit, which was both diplomatic and cultural, accompanied by Varda’s and French actor Michel Piccoli’s warm narration. As Varda herself said, it was a “tribute to Cuba,” a country that surprised her with the vitality of its tropical socialism, its humor, and its everyday rhythms, which enchanted her.

The process of creating this film, through photographs, contact sheets, and collages, shows how Varda invented a hybrid method in which photography is not limited to freezing moments, but takes on action and movement. Scenes of sugarcane harvesting, grassroots literacy programs, work, religious practices, and celebrations are mixed with portraits of women, children, musicians, and filmmakers, composing a narrative marked by both spontaneity and meticulous construction.

Among those portrayed are iconic figures such as the young filmmaker Sara Gómez, the musician Benny Moré, and Fidel Castro, photographed by the sea in front of rock formations that, in Varda’s words, are suggestive of “angel’s wings,” an image that summed up her utopian perception and, at the same time, her uncertainty about the revolution’s future.

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This photo is a madeleine de Proust. We are in the courtyard of my childhood home at 86 Rue Daguerre in Paris. It was taken when my mother returned from Cuba in the spring of 1963. I was five years old. Agnès had spent several weeks traveling with the idea of creating a documentary out of photographs. In Cuba, she had met filmmakers and artists and photographed Fidel Castro. For me, this image symbolizes the idea we have of childhood: the relationship with our mother, the relationship with toys, the way we relate to memories. The image people have of Agnès Varda nowadays is that of a lady with two-tone hair, white and red, an artist with a long career, but she was also a young woman, a mother, and a lover, always smartly dressed. Here, she is wearing a dress she had made with ribbons brought back from China. When I was little, she dressed me in tailor-made clothes. I had dresses made of upholstery fabric with silk ribbons. It was a princess’s wardrobe. Not a princess from a royal family, but from a family of artists. Like many parents, my mother always brought me back a little gift from her trips, as if she had a guilty conscience for leaving me at home. From Cuba came a small crocodile leather bag and this black doll. Even today it is not trivial for a white girl to play with a Black doll. I played with that doll throughout my entire childhood. In our society, where racism still pervades, we must fight. My mother always taught me to fight.

Agnès Varda’s sojourn in the United States between 1967 and 1968 constitutes a unique chapter in her artistic and political trajectory. In Los Angeles, Varda encountered a city shaped by counterculture, protests against the Vietnam War, and political and cultural resistance movements.

In Oakland, California, she documented the trial of Huey P. Newton, the Black Panther Party’s co-founder and minister of defense, who was wrongfully accused of killing a police officer. The mobilization around the trial became a public rally denouncing police violence and affirming the Black Liberation Movement’s political stance. With a 16-mm camera, she recorded the protest’s historical significance, as well as the faces, small gestures, and details that evinced the gathering’s vitality.

The film Black Panthers (1968) features interviews with Huey P. Newton in prison and with the other leaders of the movement, such as Kathleen Neal Cleaver, the party’s communications secretary, during a day of protests demanding Newton’s release. Cleaver talks about women’s participation in the party and calls for the recognition of Black beauty as a form of resistance: natural hair, features, and bodies became symbols of pride and cultural affirmation.

Contrary to the image propagated by the FBI, which classified the Black Panthers as “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country”, Varda offers rare documentation in which the collective’s strength is expressed in smiles, dance moves, rapt bodies, and insurgent voices.

From her participation in the Venice Biennale in 2003 until the end of her life, Agnès Varda undertook several projects and exhibitions in which photography was expanded into space. As she liked to stress, in addition to being a photographer and filmmaker, she had become a young contemporary artist. In Stilled Moments (Instants arrêtés, 2016), the artist revisits her film Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi, 1985) and selects a violent scene and extracts ten consecutive frames from it, amounting to less than a minute of action. By being stationary, “stilled”, and isolated from the narrative flow, these fragments lose their cinematic nature and acquire an autonomy marked by abstraction and the suspension of time.

Arranged in a linear fashion in a photographic installation, the frames contrasted with simultaneous screening of the original film excerpt. The juxtaposition between continuous movement and its decomposition into stilled moments emphasizes the relationship between photography and cinema, between still images and moving images.

The frames’ abstraction contrasts with the original scene’s violence, inviting reflection upon how images can morph into new forms of perception. Cinema and photography are not opposed in Varda’s work, rather, they place one another under tension, illuminating each other. Until the final years of her career, Varda remained restless, always searching for new ways of seeing, thinking about, and feeling images.

In 1956, Agnès Varda visited Le Corbusier’s la Cité Radieuse [the Radiant City] in Marseille with her friend and then collaborator Alain Resnais. She shot a photo on the building’s famous terrace for a magazine, capturing other visitors, frozen in the instant of the photograph. The terrace emerges as a stage, and its visitors seem to be there for a meticulously composed moment. More than half a century later, Varda would use this photograph to reflect upon the relationship between photography and cinema. She then created a short video reconstructing the scene, based on the photograph and a script she wrote, with the help of a set-designer friend.

She invited people she met, not actors, to portray that moment, keeping to the original photograph. She questions the mystery of their presence, something that photography cannot answer. Why are they there? Do they know each other? Cinema and photography seem to echo one another. For Agnès, both forms of art and both techniques record moments and movements that are not decisive, but are as everyday as life itself. Unlike Bresson, Varda seems to embrace the idea that photography and cinema are forms of art that bring us closer to non-decisive moments. Life as it is.

The artist brought together photography and film in an installation, using contemporary art as a tool to explore these questions.

This photograph taken in 1954 would be revisited for a short film made in 1982, presented alongside the original image in a 2012 spatial installation, using an approach similar to the one we find in Le Corbusier’s Terrace. The People on the Terrace (La Terrasse Le Corbusier. Les Gens de la terrasse, 2008). Varda welcomed a family of Spanish Civil War refugees into her home in Paris. Their son, Ulysses, had polio. Doctors recommended sea bathing, and the family left for Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer, a beach in Normandy, in northern France. Agnès, who had great affection for the child, traveled there with friends and photographed him in an enigmatic and surreal composition. One of these friends, Fouli Elia, editor of Elle magazine, appears turned toward the sea, his back to the camera. Next to him is Ulysses. In the foreground lies a dead goat found on the beach. The mystery arises from a scene in which life and death intertwine: the relationship between the two human figures and the animal’s body invites the viewer’s gaze to wander across the pebble beach, with the sea in the background. In the short film made almost three decades later, Agnès used this mysterious image to question the relationship between cinema and photography.