Agnes Varda Quotes

Whatever your brilliance, your pessimism, your thoughts about existence, the answer is always... Life. It's not a dialectical idea, it's a lived contradiction. Gramsci said, 'We have to be pessimists in our thinking and optimists in our actions.

Si on ouvrait des gens, on trouverait des paysages. Si on m'ouvrait moi, on trouverait des plages.

Happiness is a beautiful fruit that tastes of cruelty.

Sometimes, even with a film I really love, I cannot tell the story precisely. Sometimes I cannot even tell what happened chronologically. But I'll have flashes of some things. Sometimes it looks almost like a still. What I know, what I can remember is the emotion I felt. I know I loved a film because I remember feeling good in the film or feeling odd when I came out, either in tears or touched or mad.

Yeah, anything could be art. Anything could be beauty. (...) And that's turning life into - you know, finding not only beauty - amusement, joy, fun. Finding fun where sometimes it's just a bore; finding fun when it's a burden. You can always make something look different. Which is a way of saying that I'm, in a way, protected from being unhappy.

A lot of good men had been thinking for us. Marx did. Engels did. These people did beautifully. Yet maybe we need to get through Marx, for Marx doesn't give the keys and answers for us women.' If women must independently find their images, what of feminist-friendly men? 'If men want to join, leave the door open. They can listen,' Varda says.

I cannot plan anything. I have to have the desire to make a film. Then it's a joy. You have to pick something you believe in. You have to believe it's worth it, and that it makes sense for you to do it. If I don't have that much passion, I won't work.

Every time you make a film, you learn something. You approach other people, other people's work, some landscape you never noticed before. It's like giving sudden life to what you see and capturing the beauty in it.

I let things happen because I never make a film that people ask me to do or bring me a package with a good book and two actors and all that. I think cinema should be made by coming from nowhere to becoming a film. This I believe in.

It seems to me that this dialectic, this ambiguity, this contradiction of the clichés of our mental life and the images of lived life is really the subject of all my films.

I understood that this is to be an artist, you know - because you work by intuition. You go to the right thing, to the right place, to the right image, with your own feelings.

I'm interested in contradiction - the inner contradiction - which makes everybody three persons at the same time, everybody is able to be so different from one moment to another. Even Cléo from 5 to 7, there was a contradiction between the objective time, which is 5:05, 5:10, 5:15, and what I call subjective time - that we feel so different when we have a good time, it lasts so little, and when we wait for something, it's endless.

The most current thing about my work is me on the day I'm shooting.

What I'm saying is that a screenplay - and I am a screenplay writer when I make fiction films - often does not have the distinctive quality of imagination that real life has.

It’s like a stream of feelings, intuition, joy, discovering things. Finding beauty where it’s maybe not. Seeing.

I'd say, rather, the unreal that finds expression in the real; the fantastic; a certain surrealism in daily life which ultimately evokes the magic of the chance encounter, the collage of life.

They always want us to tell stories with action and psychological drama but there are other very interesting directions we can take in time, space, and memory. Emotions, recollections, surprises.

As soon as you begin a film, and the idea begins to germinate, you enter into what I'd call a state of grace in your active relationship to chance. I can say that it's really chance and I that make the film together. (...) You know artists used to talk about inspiration and the muse. The muse! That's amusing! But it's not your muse, it's your relationship with the creative forces that makes things things appear when you need them. Those are the mysteries of my passion for the cinema.

This is what cinema is all about. Images, sound, whatever, are what we use to construct a way which is cinema, which is supposed to produce effects, not only in our eyes and ears, but in our "mental" movie theater in which image and sound already are there. There is a kind of on-going movie all the time, in which the movie that we see comes in and mixes, and the perception of all these images and sound proposed to us in a typical film narration piles up in our memory with other images, other associations of images, other films, but other mental images we have, they pre-exist. So a new image in a film titillates or excites another mental image already there or emotions that we have so when you propose something to watch and hear, it goes, it works. It's like we have sleeping emotions in us all the time, half-sleeping, so one specific image or the combination of one image and sound, or the way of putting things together, like two images one after another, what we call montage, editing - these things ring a bell. These half-asleep feelings just wake up because of that - that is what it is about. This is not to make a film and say: "Okay, let's get a deal, let's tell the story, let's have a good actress, good-bye, not bad," and we go home and we eat. What I am dealing with is the effects, the perception, and the subsidiary effects of my work as proposals, as an open field, so that you can get there things you always wanted to feel and maybe didn't know how to express, imagine, watch, observe, whatever. This is so far away from the strong screenplay, the beautiful movie, etc., that sometimes I don't know what I should discuss. You understand, this is really fighting for that "Seventh Art" which is making films.

Andrea Meyer: What do you think your films offer to people today? Agnès Varda: I would say energy. I would say love for filming, intuition. I mean, a woman working with her intuition and trying to be intelligent. It's like a stream of feelings, intuition, and joy of discovering things. Finding beauty where it's maybe not. Seeing. And, on the other hand, trying to be structural, organized; trying to be clever. And doing what I believe is cinécriture, what I always call cine-writing. Which is not a screenplay. Which is not only the narration words. It's choosing the subject, choosing the place, the season, the crew, choosing the shots, the place, the lens, the light. Choosing your attitude towards people, towards actors. Then choosing the editing, the music. Choosing contemporary musicians. Choosing the tune of the mixing. Choosing the publicity material, the press book, the poster. You know, it's a handmade work of filmmaking - that I really believe. And I call that cine-writing.

Le Bonheur is strange, Documenteur is sad, Sans Toit ni Loi pessimistic but I try to keep somewhere in these films - even in the darkest of them - a feeling of energy. That's different from pessimism or optimism. Inside these films, the mental activity and the pleasure of filming come together to create an energy that ends up replacing the feelings of happiness or sadness. Vital energy...

It is a question of our minds. What culture deals with is not that we have to learn to see all the Italian painting, all the Spanish painting, this is pilling up information about culture. But what culture means is that we are able to associate real things, nature, paintings we have seen, music we have heard, a book we have read, a film we saw, with our real life, our emotional life, which means a lot.

So I had a slight inferiority complex that I had a limit. And after, not only did I get over this complex but I realized that this complex was silly because the role of a woman is not to prove that she can do all that a man can do or knows how to do. On the contrary, the role of a woman is to do what she feels she should do as a woman. And if she wants to do things that are different from what men do then all the better.

I find it difficult to capture in film that time when we didn't feel we were so different from who we are now, even though twenty years have passed. In film, in order to be credible we have to mark the passage of time, using makeup etc... In our heart of hearts we don't feel that we are aging. We don't live in front of mirrors, we don't perceive our reality from outside. We know this but we are only rarely aware of it. The aspect of time that fascinates me in the cinema is the time of the film itself the time of filming, the stuff of time itself, its sudden density.

It was during this period of work that Varda began to conceive a more theoretical approach to her art. She says, “[My work] deals with this question, ‘What is cinema?’ through how I found specific cinematic ways of telling what I was telling. I could have told you the same things that are in the film by just talking to you for six hours. But instead I found shapes” (Warwick). To give a name to her very particular and personal search for a cinematic language, Varda coined the term cinécriture. As she explains to Jean Decock: “When you write a musical score, someone else can play it, it’s a sign. When an architect draws up a detailed floor plan, anyone can build his house. But for me, there’s no way I could write a scenario that someone else could shoot, since the scenario doesn’t represent the writing of the film.” Later she would clarify, “The cutting, the movement, the points-of-view, the rhythm of filming and editing have been felt and considered in the way a writer chooses the depth of meaning of sentences, the type of words, number of adverbs, paragraphs, asides, chapters which advance the story or break its flow, etc. In writing its called style. In the cinema, style is cinécriture.” (Varda par Agnès [1994], 14).

What I'm saying is that this kind of film has two very important things for me: it really deals with the kind of relationship I wish to have with filming: editing, meeting people, giving the film shape, a specific shape, in which both the objective and subjective are present. The objective is the facts, society's facts, and the subjective is how I feel about that, or how I can make it funny or sad or poignant. Making a film like this is a way of living. It's not just a product.

Maybe what I'm doing is called author-as-witness cinema... I believe that I do auteur cinema, but I don't really like the word auteur if it's given too limited meaning. In any case I always insert myself in my films, not out of narcissism but out of the desire to be honest in my approach.

Con Juan nos conocimos el año 2011 en Barcelona. Los dos estudiábamos guión, queríamos escribir películas, series, teleseries, algo que alguien viera en una pantalla. Habíamos crecido en los años noventa, con Los Venegas, las teleseries de Thalía, las series de animación japonesa de Chilevisión, el Chavo siendo expulsado de la vecindad. Nuestros gustos no eran tan sofisticados como los de nuestros compañeros europeosm quienes sabían más sobre cine francés, habían visto la filmografía completa de Agnes Varda, comentaban libros de Slavoj Zizek, nombres que nosotros nunca antes habíamos escuchado-

What I started was, not so much to be young, but deciding that a film should follow inspiration and not, again, the story, the screenplay.

I think that documentary means "real", that you have to meet these real people, and let them express what they feel about the subject. The more I met them, the more I could see I had nothing to make as a statement. They make the statement; they explain the subject better than anybody. So it's not like having an idea about a subject and "let's illustrate it." It's meeting real people and discovering with them what they express about the subject, building the subject through real people. So it is a documentary, but the shape that I gave to it - including the original score and the editing - is really for me a narrative film. Not that documentary is "not good" and narrative film is "good." But I really work as a filmmaker, I would say, to give a specific shape to that subject.

I think we are mediators between what we know but don't always know how to say, and the form that this takes in films where you rediscover things you know but don't know how to express...

I don't see my being a woman as a problem so much as a fact. A fact that has, for many years, become a way of thinking, though perhaps not always in terms as clear or filmable as I might wish.

Cinécriture isn't the scenario, it's the ensemble of exploratory walks, the choices, the inspiration, the words one writes, the shooting, the editing: the film is the product of all these different moments.