How Agnès Varda “Invented” the New Wave

http://www.youtube.com
BY GINETTE VINCENDEAU
In September 1997, I saw Agnès Varda introduce a brand-new 35 mm print of her first feature film, La Pointe Courte (made in 1954), to an admiring audience at Yale University. More astonishing than the luminous black-and-white images was Varda’s claim that she had seen virtually no other films before making it (after racking her brain, she could come up with only Citizen Kane). Whether Varda’s assertion was true or the whim of an artist who does not wish to acknowledge any influence, La Pointe Courte is a stunningly beautiful and accomplished first film. It has also, deservedly, achieved a cult status in film history as, in the words of historian Georges Sadoul, “truly the first film of the nouvelle vague.”

Thanks to historians of that movement, and especially to Sandy Flitterman-Lewis’s study of Varda in her book To Desire Differently, Varda’s role as a pioneer—if not the “mother” or “grandmother”—of the new wave is now better known, and not just for the fact that she was the only woman director in it. Read more...