Carrie Rickey cried when her professor, artist Manny Farber, performed Agnès Varda’s movie Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) for the category. It was 1971, and she or he had not recognized that ladies made motion pictures. “I needed to grasp Varda not as a timeline however in 360,” she writes as her mission assertion in A Difficult Ardour: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda (2024), the primary English-language biography of the director, screenwriter, artist, and photographer, who died at 90 in 2019. “Endeavor such a challenge, I hope, is a contribution to retaining her work, and her reminiscence alive.”
Rickey leans on main sources akin to Varda’s kids, Rosalie and Mathieu, and the filmmaker’s personal phrases, as drawn from her 1994 guide Varda Par Agnès, to diligently root her topic in key historic and cultural actions such because the combat to legalize abortion in France. The result’s a scrupulous, affectionate, and sometimes vivid chronicle of the girl born “Arlette” in Ixelles, Belgium, in 1928.
The guide is split into three elements, entitled “Nonetheless,” “Shifting,” and “Dimension,” to symbolize Varda’s development from photographer to filmmaker to set up artist. Rickey expresses her first main transition as geographic. At age 12, her household was compelled to flee Ixelles for the French port city of Sète attributable to German bombing throughout World Struggle II. She would later settle in Paris, and discover her ceaselessly residence in Montparnasse, on Rue Daguerre, a artistic and neighborhood hub the place artists like Jim Morrison would drop in. That residence — the place Varda lived for 68 years — was immortalized in her irresistible documentary with a double entendre for a reputation: Daguerreotypes (1975).
A Difficult Ardour emphatically asserts an often-overlooked truth: Varda made the primary movie of the French New Wave. La Pointe Courte, her 1955 romance movie set in a fisherman’s village, got here years earlier than François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960). The business, nonetheless, didn’t reward her pioneering artwork and fierce work ethic; over the subsequent decade, she would direct solely two extra options, Cléo from 5 to 7 and Le Bonheur (1965).
Rickey illustrates a decided pragmatist who, regardless of the challenges of this era, had a daughter, Rosalie; fell in love with Jacques Demy, additionally a director; and made quick movies, as she would all through the remainder of her life, whether or not out of necessity, need, or each. Certainly, Rickey’s description of the a long time to comply with paint Varda as a groundbreaking and soulful artist always pushing into new technical types. Whether or not making documentaries akin to The Gleaners & I (2000) or Faces Locations (2017); docufiction akin to Jacquot of Nantes (1991); or fiction, akin to Vagabond (1985), she was at all times involved with social politics addressing topics akin to abortion rights (One Sings, The Different Doesn’t (1977)) or infidelity (Le Bonheur).
Rickey spritzes her prose with impish wordplay and tributes to Varda’s sensuality. “The petite brunette with Picasso eyes and monkish hair… was not considering of libations however liberation,” she writes, explaining 18-year-old Varda’s concentrate on forging a creative path moderately than searching for rationed espresso throughout postwar reconstruction. And she or he tells compelling anecdotes with out languishing in sensationalism, putting Varda on the scene instantly after Jim Morrison’s loss of life, and telling a story involving Gene Kelly and dangerous actual property recommendation.
But the fervour alluded to within the guide’s title, clearly current in all of Varda’s works, is curiously absent in Rickey’s scholarly descriptions of them. Whereas each single challenge is dutifully lined in chronological order and located within the particular considerations of every period, there’s a detachment to her prose right here. The emotionally wrenching Le Bonheur, as an example, is described as “a mordant social satire and cinematic Rorschach blot that teases out the viewer’s emotions about marriage, constancy, and social prerogative.” This guide might not seduce uninitiated readers to hunt out Varda’s movies, however it’s a heat, rigorously researched complement to her work, a lot wanted to maintain her reminiscence alive.
A Difficult Ardour: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda (2024) by Carrie Rickey and revealed by W. W. Norton & Firm is offered on-line and thru unbiased booksellers.