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This chapter highlights Agnès Varda's place in New Wave cinema history. It illustrates how Varda's ever-shifting profile has evolved from avant-garde precursor to the “grandmother” of the New Wave. Yet what remains consistent here is her commitment to storytelling that foregrounds isolated people in distinctive settings in both documentary and fiction films. Varda's ongoing journey reveals an artist who needs to create, who is in motion and incapable of ceasing, making do with whatever resources are available to her (including harnessing that creativity toward visual arts and installation when funds for filmmaking were scarce), remaining eminently pragmatic even when attacking new challenges.

Agnès Varda studied art history and photography, and the influence of the visual arts in her filmmaking has long been remarked. This discussion is the first to close in on the figure of the reclining nude which appears in her work in the form of tableaux vivants from the early film, L’Opéra Mouffe, and returns extensively in her portrait film Jane B. par Agnès V. In this film, together with cinematographer Nurith Aviv, Varda creates an cinematic reclining nude in a very slow, sensual pan across the prone naked body of Jane Birkin, from her feet to her smiling face. Here, and in another film from the 1980s, Documenteur, Varda explores reclining figures as part of her filmic experiments with emotion and rêverie, the reclining figure drawing and expressing feelings of erotic pleasure, repose, delay, melancholy, and depression. Her interest in still visual precedents in her work coalesces with her career-long feminist attention to states of female feeling and being.

This chapter considers three films by French documentary auteurs who late in their careers, chose to make road movies of sorts: Chris Marker’s Chats perchés/The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004); Agnès Varda’s Les Plages d’Agnès/The Beaches of Agnes (2008); and Claudine Nougaret and Raymond Depardon’s Journal de France (2012). It suggests that all three films share an experiential impulse, understood as an invitation to experience space in a mobile, exploratory mode, and the potential to unsettle, de-center, and displace the viewer. Instead of fulfilling the conventional authoritative role of documentary commentary that describes or explains, the narrative instance provides instead a multiple, fragmentary, and unstable narrative center, which comes into being through incomplete journeys with uncertain destinations.

This chapter continues to look into the specificity of Agnès Varda's films within its historical context and also uses a revisionist perspective concerning hardcore auteurism. It revisits the idea of the filmmaker as the all-mighty single auteur of her films by focusing on the collaborative nature of filmmaking, by reassessing the role of other contributors like the editor and the composer, and by looking at Varda's own performances of authorship. Taking La Pointe Courte and Agnès de ci de là Varda as examples, this chapter aims to reconsider some of the filmmaker's preoccupations across time and to evaluate what sort of contribution other artists and collaborators have made to Varda's cinema. This in-depth analysis shows how each of these projects is the result of a complex amalgam of efforts, encounters and influences.

This chapter explores the role of filmic, or ‘screened’, objects in memory. It specifically examines the virtual museums of Agnès Varda, Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard. It is noted that Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma and Marker's Immemory could not be more different in some ways. Varda's L'Île et elle gave a series of interlinked encounters with objects of cultural memory. It also serves as an important reminder of the contingency involved in all engagements with cultural memory objects. Les Plages d'Agnès is explicitly an autobiographical film, a cinematic memory journey that inevitably centres on the figure of the filmmaker herself. The screening of objects in the imaginary museums of moving image texts shows the ways in which material things form a part of the social frameworks of memory, where film both mirrors the functioning of cultural memory and forms a part of it.

This chapter examines a sample of selected films of Agnès Varda and argues that her cinematographic practice has always engaged with the corporeal, and that as a consequence it constitutes a decisive contribution to feminism. The three pieces chosen — L'Opéra Mouffe, Daguérréotypes and Les Veuves de Noirmoutier — were shot years apart and span Varda's career. The first two films can be considered as part of the ‘cinéma de quartier’ (‘local cinema shooting’) that Varda frequently practices. Both were shot in Paris and focus on a well-defined space and its residents. The conditions of exhibition of Les Veuves de Noirmoutier were different from those of the two earlier films selected, but this installation piece makes for a more comprehensive and wide-ranging corpus. Analysing the role of bodies in the films, and discussing the experimental and essayistic nature of Varda's work, the chapter establishes how the subjective and personal intersect with collective experiences and memory.

This chapter considers Agnès Varda's cinécriture, her unique approach to conceiving cinema as an elaborate and potentially powerful combination of moving images, sound, and music. It begins with a section establishing Varda's unorthodox subjects and practices of production, concentrating on four films that illustrate her unique praxis: Elsa la Rose, Uncle Yanco, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, and Deux Ans Après. It then discusses Varda's cinécriture as based on an embodied vision of the world by looking into the films Ydessa, les ours et etc., Réponses de Femmes and 7p., cuis., s. de b., … à saisir. These films support the notion that corporeality forms as the core of Varda's cinema of interpellation. Like other forms of enunciational address, such as the direct gaze into the camera, the bodies of the people on screen call the audience's attention.

This chapter considers how Agnès Varda articulates a model of cinema that subverts classical theory. It analyses this model by determining how Varda approaches space when she films or when she sets up installations. It also identifies the notable common elements in her works. An analysis of her projects shows that space is neither objective nor topographic. It is not a blank canvas or a tabula rasa on which the filmmaker can build anything that she wants, but a perspective closer to that of cultural geographers who argue that space is socially constituted through the interaction of boundaries, representations and practices. Varda's films and installations represent how lived or inhabited space is known phenomenologically through participation in or inhabitation of the world. The chapter discusses first the notion of motional geography and then moves to the relational modus operandi of Varda's work.

This introductory chapter provides an overall description of the works of French New Wave film director Agnès Varda. It first looks into her Salut les Cubains! (1964), a distinctive political documentary, mostly made of animated photographs that she took on trips to Cuba in December 1962 and January 1963, a period filled with political and social changes in Cuba. The photos feature many of the traits found in Varda's other artistic projects. It is informed by its political and historical context and shaped by the conditions in which it was made. The strategies that Varda deploys in her films testify to her lasting commitment to represent women within history. This concern not only with women on screen but with the act of ‘filmer en femme’, as she calls it, makes her an important figure in the fields of film, gender, and cultural studies.

Chapter two (“Digital Impressions”) questions Derrida’s definition of impression as inscription by turning to Varda’s film The Gleaners and I and asserting “gleaning” as the figure for a heterodox mode of archiving, one that moves beyond the distinction of content and form in order to gather what remains, what is left behind, and what is thrown away.

This chapter examines Agnès Varda's ethics of filming and attempts to establish her as a cinéaste passeur, a mediator not only between the filmed subjects and the spectators, but also between a specific space and time and the moment of the screening. It emphasises the factors that dictate Varda's decisions when creating a film, and identifies the two basic elements that serve as foundation for Varda's ethics of filming — relationality and connections. During filming, Varda, as an ‘author’ sees herself as an ‘intermediary who gives her voice to those who have none’. Her approach is based on the encounter with the other, and marked by a consistent concern for the capture and preservation of images. This is most evident in the four films discussed in the chapter: Mur, Murs, Documenteur (1980–81), Sans Toit ni Loi, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, and Le Lion volatile (2003).

This chapter examines Agnès Varda's The Gleaners and I (2000), an elision of documentary with autobiography that connects—through Varda's own working life, spanning feminist and postfeminist generations—to women's early film practice. The film depicts an extended “road trip” that Varda takes in order to encounter and film a variety of people who “glean” things—be their plunder the traditional rural harvest or urban garbage. In noting Varda's extension of the significance of “gleaning” for food to a woman's practice of collecting, the chapter delineates an encounter between a sensibility culturally defined as feminine with the feminized throwaway culture of mass consumerism. Authorship figures, then, as a form of creative recycling or bricolage.

Agnès Varda’s Vagabond (1985) begins and frequently returns to images of the French landscape, and it constructs an allegory that binds the stories and images of its main character, the nation, and the land. At the heart of this and Varda’s subsequent films is an engagement with the significance of the land as a fragile part of an ecosystem, a gendered space, and a powerful symbol of the nation and its patrimony. Rather than view the landscape as an unbreakable link between the nation and the national past preserved in nature, she frames the natural world as a modern phenomenon in a state of ruin and develops an aesthetic of the landscape attuned to this condition. In Vagabond and her later digital documentaries Varda imagines her relationship to the land and history as a process of gleaning from the vibrant possibilities left behind after the process of modernization has run its course.

This chapter is organized around a specific scene and action performed repeatedly in French new wave cinema: characters walking through the city. These emblematic rambles through urban space often unfold without apparent aim or direction, as getting somewhere becomes a secondary consideration and the film concentrates instead on the urban context and the act of walking itself. The films focus on the youthful body in a city undergoing its own process of demolition and renewal, and these scenes stage that interaction between people and the urban environment. Individual cases studies include Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, the documentary and fiction filmmaking of Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7

This chapter focuses on how films get spectators to perform the feat of creating imagined images and layering them over those that are on screen. Gary Tarn’s Black Sun (2005) provides the opening example in which the blind French artist Hugues De Montalembert recounts in voice-over his strong memory of a striking scene that he witnessed prior to going blind and which contrasts markedly with the images that appear on screen for the length of time that he tells his tale. This example serves to explain how and why mental images can appear just as vividly in spectators’ minds as onscreen images do. The ground of imagining is formed before spectators are guided on how to take flight from it across sections that introduce further examples, from Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2015) through Patrick Keiller’s Robinson trilogy (1994-2010) to Agnès Varda’s Jane B. by Agnès V. (1988). In addition to an on-going dialogue with the work of Elaine Scarry, this chapter interweaves references to cognitive psychology and philosophy that inform other chapters too. Layering is just one of the processes at work in the formation of imagined images while watching films, and subsequent chapters outline others.