Agnes Varda on Criterion: Films, Feminism, and the Art of Looking
Agnes Varda made cinema feel both intimate and expansive. A face in a doorway, a potato left in a field, a stranger encountered on a road—each could become the starting point for a film about memory, labor, desire, aging, or the ways people see one another. Her work moves freely between fiction and documentary, the personal and the political, the playful and the mournful.
Criterion’s releases offer an unusually rich path through that body of work. The films span Varda’s early experiments in the French New Wave, her feminist dramas, her documentaries about ordinary lives, and the late self-portraits that turn filmmaking into an act of remembrance. Taken together, they reveal an artist who never stopped changing her methods.
For Seattle viewers accustomed to browsing rather than accepting an algorithm’s next suggestion, Varda’s films reward curiosity. A rental shelf can place a celebrated classic beside an eccentric short, a quiet documentary, or a work that seems impossible to categorize. That sense of discovery is central to experiencing her cinema.
A filmmaker who began with a village
Varda’s first feature, La Pointe-Courte, is a remarkable place to begin. Made in 1955, it combines a relationship story with detailed observations of a fishing village in southern France. The couple at the center appears almost abstracted from the world, while the village community is presented through concrete routines, conversations, work, and conflict.
The film’s structure anticipates much of what followed. Varda was interested in how private emotion exists alongside public life, and she resisted treating one as mere background for the other. The result is formally daring without being emotionally cold. Its sharp editing and shifting viewpoints make it an essential Criterion starting point for viewers interested in the origins of the French New Wave.
Varda’s cinema also shares an appetite for visual invention with silent-film masters, although her humor and politics are distinctly her own. A viewer moving from her work to Buster Keaton’s films can trace a similar belief in bodies, spaces, gestures, and editing as sources of meaning beyond dialogue.
Time, anxiety, and the streets of Paris
Cleo from 5 to 7 remains Varda’s best-known film, and its premise is deceptively simple. A singer waits through two hours in Paris for the results of a medical test. The film follows her almost in real time, but the waiting period becomes a transformation in how she sees the city and the people around her.
At the beginning, Cleo experiences the world through vanity, fear, and the expectations placed upon her as a performer. Her clothes, mirrors, fans, and songs reflect an identity built for public consumption. As she moves through Paris, the film gradually redirects her attention outward. Chance encounters become more meaningful, and the city becomes less like a stage for her anxiety than a living network of other lives.
Criterion’s presentation emphasizes the film’s textures: streets, interiors, faces, music, and the tonal shifts between comic movement and private dread. Cleo from 5 to 7 is an ideal rental for someone who wants a sophisticated classic that remains immediately accessible. It has formal precision, but it never feels sealed away from ordinary experience.
Happiness with a darker edge
If Cleo from 5 to 7 explores a woman’s movement toward fuller awareness, Le bonheur asks what happens when happiness is defined too narrowly. The story follows a married carpenter whose affair appears, at first, to fit smoothly into an idyllic family life. Varda surrounds this situation with bright colors, pastoral landscapes, and an almost commercial sense of visual pleasure.
That beauty creates discomfort. The film’s sunny surfaces and carefully composed domestic images expose the assumptions beneath its central character’s idea of contentment. Varda does not provide an easy moral position, and the film’s emotional distance makes its critique more unsettling. The title becomes a question rather than a promise.
This tension between visual charm and social unease appears throughout Varda’s work. She could make a film inviting to the eye while quietly challenging the viewer’s habits of interpretation. For audiences exploring feminist film history, Le bonheur is especially valuable beside One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, where questions of autonomy, friendship, motherhood, and reproductive rights are treated with greater openness and solidarity.
| Film | Primary mode | What to notice | A good starting point for |
|---|---|---|---|
| La Pointe-Courte | Fiction with documentary observation | Community life, fractured perspectives, place | French New Wave exploration |
| Cleo from 5 to 7 | Real-time fiction | Urban space, performance, anxiety, transformation | First-time Varda viewers |
| Le bonheur | Feminist drama | Color, domestic ideals, emotional contradiction | Questions about gender and happiness |
| Vagabond | Fictionalized social inquiry | Testimony, landscape, isolation, judgment | Challenging narrative cinema |
| The Gleaners and I | Personal documentary | Waste, collecting, technology, aging | Documentary and essay-film fans |
| The Beaches of Agnès | Autobiographical documentary | Memory, archives, self-portraiture | A broad view of Varda’s life and work |
Wandering without a safety net
Vagabond is one of Varda’s most severe films. Its opening reveals the death of a young woman named Mona, after which the narrative reconstructs her final weeks through interviews, fragments, and conflicting perspectives. The film never turns Mona into a simple symbol of freedom or victimhood.
Instead, she remains difficult to possess. People she meets describe her according to their own needs and prejudices, while the structure continually reminds us that her life has been observed by others. Mona’s refusal of conventional work, housing, and social behavior appears liberating to some and threatening to others. Varda makes the consequences of that refusal physical and unforgiving.
The film’s winter landscapes and rough roads are as important as its dialogue. They create a world in which movement does not necessarily lead to possibility. Vagabond demands more patience than Cleo from 5 to 7, but its fragmented form rewards close attention. It is a powerful choice for viewers drawn to films that leave ethical questions unresolved.
The documentary as encounter
Varda’s documentaries often begin with a practical subject and expand into something more personal. The Gleaners and I follows people who collect what farmers, markets, and cities discard. Yet the film is also about Varda’s own changing relationship to objects, technology, aging, and the passage of time.
The handheld digital camera gives the film a sense of spontaneity. Varda notices potatoes shaped like hearts, discarded food, forgotten tools, and the people who turn leftovers into resources. Her presence is unmistakable, but it does not overwhelm those she films. She is curious without pretending to be invisible.
That balance makes The Gleaners and I an excellent companion to The Beaches of Agnès. The latter looks backward across Varda’s life through locations, photographs, installations, friends, collaborators, and recreated memories. Together, they show how documentary can be research, conversation, autobiography, and play.
Love, politics, and collective possibility
One Sings, the Other Doesn’t follows two women whose friendship develops across years of political and personal change. Their lives diverge in temperament and circumstance, but the film keeps returning to the sustaining power of connection. Songs, letters, travel, and shared convictions give the story a deliberately expansive shape.
The film is openly engaged with feminist politics, including access to abortion and the right to choose one’s own future. Its optimism is not naïve; it is built through cooperation and persistence. Varda allows political ideas to exist within friendships, families, romances, and ordinary decisions rather than separating public struggle from private life.
Her later work Faces Places, made with artist JR, extends that interest in collaboration. The film’s journey through French villages becomes a series of encounters with workers, residents, and landscapes that might otherwise remain overlooked. Varda’s curiosity is matched by her delight in making images with other people, whether through giant photographs, improvised conversations, or shared movement.
Choosing a Varda film for the evening
A broad collection such as Criterion’s Varda releases can seem intimidating because there is no single correct route through it. The best choice depends on whether the viewer wants a compact fiction, an emotionally demanding drama, a playful documentary, or a film that gathers several strands of her career at once.
These starting points can help shape a satisfying viewing path:
- Begin with Cleo from 5 to 7 for an elegant, accessible entry into Varda’s style.
- Choose The Gleaners and I for a warm documentary built from curiosity and unexpected encounters.
- Watch Vagabond when you want a darker, more formally fragmented film.
- Pair Le bonheur with One Sings, the Other Doesn’t to compare two very different approaches to feminist storytelling.
- Save The Beaches of Agnès for after several earlier films, when its memories and self-portraits can resonate more fully.
Physical media adds something important to this journey. Criterion editions preserve visual details, supplemental conversations, essays, and contextual material that can deepen a film without replacing the experience of watching it. A DVD or Blu-ray also creates a deliberate pause: you choose a title, bring it home, and give it your attention instead of waiting for an endless platform to decide what comes next.
Finding Varda beyond the familiar titles
The most celebrated films are a strong beginning, but Varda’s career becomes even more rewarding when viewers explore outward. Shorts, installations, hybrid works, and films such as Kung Fu Master! and Jane B. for Agnès V. reveal an artist repeatedly testing the boundaries of biography and fiction. She was comfortable with small gestures, artificial constructions, direct address, and sudden changes in tone.
Her work also gains meaning through physical proximity to other filmmakers. On a rental shelf, Varda might sit near Chantal Akerman, Jacques Demy, Chris Marker, or independent documentaries about artists and communities. Those connections are easier to discover when browsing by sensibility rather than genre. Rain City Video’s film resources provide another way to continue exploring after a Varda screening.
Take home a Varda film from Rain City Video and let the choice be guided by mood, curiosity, or a recommendation from someone who knows the collection. Whether the evening begins with Parisian streets, a village shoreline, a discarded potato, or a face remembered years later, her films offer a vivid reminder that looking closely can change the shape of a life.