I once met her, if you could call it that, for a few seconds at the Frieze Art Fair; she turned to the person who introduced us and asked: “Is he going to look after me?” She must have meant it ironically, because in 2009, a decade before she died, Agnès Varda was not only busier than ever—after photography and film, she had lately embarked on her “third career” as an installation artist—but honored as a New Wave instigator and a pioneer feminist director. Also, to her delight, more and more beloved as an eccentrically turned-out presence on the film-festival and art-fair circuits: beneath the lifelong bob and variegated dye-job, she might turn up in silk pajamas, purple tracksuit (both by Gucci), or dressed as a potato. Varda’s last years formed a giddy and heartening coda to a life and a body of work that were playful and profound. And an artist who, if Carrie Rickey’s new biography of her is to be trusted, was utterly tireless on every front, artistic or intimate.
Varda was born in Brussels in May 1928—her parents named her Arlette, because she had been conceived in Arles. When the Nazis invaded Belgium in 1940, the family fled to France and settled in the Mediterranean port town of Sète, where Arlette loved the color, the light and the arduous labor of a fishing community. Three years later, the Vardas moved to Paris, and with the end of the occupation Varda began her studies in painting, art history (she almost became a curator), and eventually photography. Around this time, she was also auditing classes in literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne, where she revered the work and teaching of Gaston Bachelard. “He had this dream of the material in people”—which sounds like an excellent philosophy for a nineteen-year-old artist already committed to both the poetic and the mundane, seduced as much by the modern theatre she had discovered in Sète as by the sights and sensations of the capital. By the end of 1948 Varda was a working photographer—an early gig involved snapping kids with Santa Claus at Galeries Lafayette—and persuaded her father to buy her two defunct shops in Montparnasse, to serve as home and studio.
In some ways, Varda’s biography is from that moment the story of a cottage industry on rue Daguerre, a career that sometimes touched the mainstream and its flow of funding, but always returned to a small-scale enterprise that over sixty years took on more and more the lineaments of an artist’s life rather than that of a magnificent or militant auteur. Though she was in thrall early on to Modernist writing, Varda’s work was from the start opposed to the literary strain in cinema; unlike her husband Jacques Demy, she was mostly allergic to adapting novels and plays. Among her early shorts are deliciously saturated studies (for touristic purposes) of the south of France and the castles of the Loire valley, but also a very personal, partly fictional black-and-white study of the down-at -heel rue Mouffetard, L’Opéra-mouffe (known in English as Diary of a Pregnant Woman) (1958) which she made when she was expecting her first child. Some of the best of Varda—from Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962) through Daguerréotypes (1975) to The Gleaners and I (2000) feels improvised out of what is local, to hand, haphazardly magical.
She had met Demy in 1958, and they married in 1962. The “complex passion” of Rickey’s title in part describes this relationship, which weathered both Demy’s periodic relationships with men, and the tidal rise and fall of Varda and Demy’s careers as directors. Some of the most fascinating material in this biography has to do with the couple’s time in California in the late 1960s, where it seems they knew and entertained everybody at a time when Hollywood was figuring what if anything to do with the glamorous monsters of the French New Wave (and vice versa). Varda’s friends included Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Mike Nichols, and a pre-fame Harrison Ford. (Whose Hollywood memories does the young Ford, otherwise known as Joan Didion’s carpenter, not turn up in?) She was close to Jim Morrison, and was one of the first friends on the scene when he died in Paris a few years later. A little like her friend Chris Marker, Varda found her real America elsewhere. She made Black Panthers in 1968, a documentary about the incarceration in Oakland of Huey P. Newton and the protests that followed.
Rickey, who was film critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer for twenty-five years, tells Varda’s life with unflagging enthusiasm, knowledge, and respect. Complicated Passions was written with the approval of Varda’s children, Rosalie Varda and Mathieu Demy. Rickey has interviewed numerous friends, collaborators, and scholars; she has done the critical and contextual reading, and she draws here and there on her own encounters with her subject. And yet at times this life feels dutiful and even dull, filled with box-office numbers and dead-on-the-page assertions about Varda’s importance. It’s a cliché, and possibly a mistake, to say the biography of an artist ought to emulate the work. But time and again I longed for more complexity and passion, for something more oblique but daring, like Nathalie Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden (2012) or Ian Penman’s Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors (2023). A book, in other words, that would pay Varda the joyful and rigorous attention she paid to the world. One task for a sedulous and loving biography like Rickey’s is to prepare the ground for such adventures in the future.
Carrie Rickey’s A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda is published by W. W. Norton & Company.