Agnès Varda, the overlooked genius

Having watched a couple of Varda films, and part of another, I have no doubt that Agnès Varda was a cinematic genius of the highest order.
She has the most unusual career. She opens with 3 feature films each a masterpiece or near masterpiece (the first of which appears to be arguably the first new wave film), and then subsequently works almost exclusively in documentaries for the rest of her career!
I am about to go through the rest of her work, but I already know that her name ought to be more widely known and more prominent in the legend of cinema.

She's OK.

Her first film is her best. Indeed very influential but it's Left Bank, not French New Wave. Her latter films are inferior unfortunately. Still good and worthwhile but not quite up to the quality of her 50s and 60s work.

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San Franciscan lesbian dwarves and their tomato orgies.

I haven't got to her documentaries yet, but I would say there are very few directors who have made 3 films as exceptional as:
La Point Courte
Cleo from 5 to 7
Le Bonheur

All very good or great but far from exceptional.

Duras is a superior female director.

An assistant to Resnais who was an assistant to Varda.

I must say I didn't think much beyond those 3 films. They were superb though.

I am HUGE on Varda. She is the most adorable little woman I've ever seen on a documentary. I love the way she goes about everything that exists on this planet as a way to create art. Watching her go around with her camera in her documentaries is an absolute treat. I also greatly appreciate that fifty years into her career, she's literally inserting HIP HOP songs into her documentary about gleaning. She was a 70-year-old art film director and she's listening to hip hop!

Yeah hip hop makes her inferior to other female directors

I am not particularly big on Varda, though I have seen few. Cleo from 5 to 7 is an excellent idea for a film but I do not think it is a film that lives up to the full potential this idea has, still very good. Le bonheur did not move me. And her two gleaners documentaries are very good and point at a style in her documentary narratives that I may be more drawn to than her fictions.


Other than that, to me her filming and narrative style are in a sort of middle ground from what I've seen. They click, but they don't pack a punch. And a lot of the praise I see toward Varda in many cinephile circles is more of a result of the quirky "relatable" personality she has and transpires (which is admittedly a big part of what makes her gleaners docs so good and perhaps better than his other films I've watched; however, outside of the movies it feels like a tokenized version of the artist and the person and I am not drawn by this way of thinking or relating to authors at all) than about the consistency or the overall interest of the ideas she puts on film.

She’s a master. Cleo is a classic.
I still need to see Duras, but even if Duras is better, it isn’t going to diminish Varda