Book Excerpt: A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda by Carrie Rickey

We are incredibly proud to present an excerpt from Carrie Rickey's new book about the life and work of Agnès Varda, one of the most important filmmakers in the history of the form. The official synopsis is below, followed by the excerpt. The book is available now, and we'll have a review soon.The first major biography of the French filmmaker hailed by Martin Scorsese as “one of the Gods of cinema.” Over the course of her sixty-five-year career, the longest of any female filmmaker, Agnès Varda (1928–2019) wrote and directed some of the most acclaimed films of her era, from her tour de force Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), a classic of modernist cinema, to the beloved documentary The Gleaners and I (2000) four decades later. She helped to define the French New Wave, inspired an entire generation of filmmakers, and was recognized with major awards at the Cannes, Berlin, and Venice Film Festivals, as well as an honorary Oscar at the Academy Awards. In this lively biography, former Philadelphia Inquirer film critic Carrie Rickey explores the “complicated passions” that informed Varda’s charmed life and indelible work. Rickey traces Varda’s three remarkable careers―as still photographer, as filmmaker, and as installation artist. She explains how Varda was a pioneer in blurring the lines between documentary and fiction, using the latest digital technology and carving a path for women in the movie industry. She demonstrates how Varda was years ahead of her time in addressing sexism, abortion, labor exploitation, immigrant rights, and race relations with candor and incisiveness. She makes clear Varda’s impact on contemporary figures like Ava DuVernay, Greta Gerwig, Barry Jenkins, the Safdie brothers, and Martin Scorsese, who called her one of the Gods of cinema. And she delves into Varda’s incredibly rich social life with figures such as Harrison Ford, Jean-Luc Godard, Jim Morrison, Susan Sontag, and Andy Warhol, and her nearly forty-year marriage to the celebrated director Jacques Demy. A Complicated Passion is the vibrant biography that Varda, regarded by many as the greatest female filmmaker of all time, has long deserved.Varda freely admitted that her “total ignorance of beautiful films, very old or recent, allowed me to be naïve and cheeky when I launched into the profession of image and sound.” When planning the film that became La Pointe Courte, she was twenty- five years old and hadn’t yet seen twenty- five films, as she often said. She had no knowledge of film history, and thus was unaware that she was one in an illustrious line of still photographers drawn to make pictures that moved, a line extending from Man Ray and Stanley Kubrick to Gordon Parks and Mira Nair. Nor was she aware that at the dawn of filmmaking, many directors were women, and that women were in the vanguard of experimental filmmaking, like Germaine Dulac in France during the 1920s and Maya Deren in the United States during the 1940s. At the time she made her film, Varda anticipated that her experiment would be a one- off. “I was struck by how literature had made extraordinary leaps and bounds, painting too, but cinema, people said, wasn’t evolving that much.” During the postwar period there were few female directors in France. Most prominent among them were Jacqueline Audry, who adapted Colette’s novels to make Gigi (1949) and Minne (1950); and Andrée Feix, who confected the comedies Once Is Enough (1946) and Captain Blomet (1947). But it was a propitious time in France to be getting into the business of making films. While Varda attended to the bureaucratic process of getting a movie made, François Truffaut, a twenty- one- year- old cinephile, published his incendiary manifesto, “A Certain Tendency of French Cinema,” in Cahiers du cinéma. He blasted postwar French filmmakers for their script- dependent movies, disengaged and bloodless adaptations of great books that were true to neither the letter nor the spirit of the novels. Even worse, they were not cinematic. Truffaut argued for the cinema of the auteur (author), that of the engaged filmmaker who goes beyond merely illustrating a screenplay to create a unified vision for his movie. Truffaut excoriated films that had a literary pedigree but no personality, lauding those with a distinct directorial signature and eye. “A Certain Tendency” introduced readers to what became known as the auteur theory, a director- centric organizing principle for making films as well as writing about them. Seventy- five years later, the essay’s impact on how movies are made and how they are written about is immeasurable. While preparing her movie, Varda knew nothing of the influential film journals Cahiers du cinéma and Positif. Nor did she know of the culture of ciné- clubs, which since 1935 had enriched the social and intellectual life of France by screening movies and fostering lively discussions around them, creating a generation of movie lovers and a near- religion known as cinephilia. While she wrote