Varda Quotes

I tried to find a language for the film - not just telling stories. I picked the Picasso painting because it said more than I could explain. I need images, I need representation which deals in other means than reality. We have to use reality but get out of it. That's what I try to do all the time. ~ Agnes Varda

I don't believe in inspiration that arrives like a bolt from the blue ... It seems to me that the more motivated I am by what I film, the more objectively I film. ~ Agnes Varda

I don't watch my own films. There is little time; I'd rather see another film. ~ Agnes Varda

The Art and Life of Jean Varda makes clear that Varda, better known today as an outlandish character than as a serious artist, was in fact both. Stroman cuts through the myths that Varda created about himself, while celebrating them at the same time. A lively book, deeply researched, well illustrated."


David Weinstein, CA-Modern Magazine | Eichler Network ~ Elizabeth Leavy Stroman

It's a way of living, cinema. And I see my family, I do this and that, I travel. It's a long process to let it happen. ~ Agnes Varda

I've changed my approach to people and to filming because of the new equipment, which is important. ~ Agnes Varda

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. ~ Agnes Varda

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. ~ Agnes Varda

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). ~ T. Jefferson Kline

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. ~ Agnes Varda

The story of a couple is always very fragile, especially over more than thirty years. People know it's not easy, and even though you have strong feeling and desire and endless love, it doesn't always happen. ~ Agnes Varda

with the help of the next picture." There was a click of a slide ~ Varda Foox

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. ~ Agnes Varda

It's nice to think that we have in ourselves the energy. It's somewhere, but it's sleeping sometimes. I try to wake it up when I need it. ~ Agnes Varda

There is a song of Gainsbourg that Jane Birkin sang, and the words are beautiful in French. It says, "Le jeu et les moi." It's impossible to translate, because it has a very nice sound. It sounds so lovely in French. So I took that because it was the subject: I and myself and myself and I. Which is, in a way, boring, because it is a contradiction. ~ Agnes Varda

Sometimes I want to work with a DP, sometimes I want to work myself. I go to 35mm, 16mm, it's all the same, but it depends on what you want to tell and what are the tools you need. ~ Agnes Varda

I try to do nothing. I drink rosemary when I have a lot of work to do. People take coffee, they take speed, whatever. I take rosemary. ~ Agnes Varda

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. ~ Agnes Varda

I think I got people confidence because I was not looking at them like insects that I would film. ~ Agnes Varda

It's interesting work for me to tell my life, as a possibility for other people to relate it to themselves - not so much to learn about me. ~ Agnes Varda

If the purpose of the stumpy little NFT theatre under Waterloo Bridge is not to acquaint young audiences with Ozu, with Ophuels, with D. W. Griffith and with Agnes Varda, then what exactly does it exist for? ~ David Hare

Some people meet each other again only when I'm there! ~ Agnes Varda

You have to invent life. ~ Agnes Varda

I'm interested in people who are not exactly the middle way, or who are trying something else because they cannot prevent themselves from being different, or they wish to be different, or they are different because society pushed them away. ~ Agnes Varda

You have to be strong to be a carpenter, maybe, but the director of a film doesn't need to have muscles. ~ Agnes Varda

Atra esterni' ono thelduin
Mor' rana li'fa unin hjarta onr
Un du evari'nya ono varda
(May good fortune rule over you
peace live in your heart
may the stars watch over you) ~ Christopher Paolini

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. ~ Agnes Varda

I waited for each film to become important for me. If I had no ideas for a film, I didn't do a film. So I made not that many films for fifty-four years of working. ~ Agnes Varda

I'm not interested in seeing a film just made by a woman - not unless she is looking for new images. ~ Agnes Varda

I had a world. I don't think I had a career. I made films. ~ Agnes Varda

The freedom he gave himself to work and change shape and change ideas and work all the time with joy, the joy of painting was in [Publo] Picasso, which I found beautiful. ~ Agnes Varda

People think you are an orphan when you are a child, and don't believe that old people can feel that they are orphans. ~ Agnes Varda

This is all you need in life: a computer, a camera, and a cat. ~ Agnes Varda

[My favourite are] the films of Agnes Varda, because of her sense of humor and the intimate, personal way she tells her stories. She is brave in taking creative risks, and her curiosity in others is so contagious. This brings me closer to the subjects in her films. ~ Maya Goded

It's peaceful to think about the family as a group. I totally believe in extended families. ~ Agnes Varda

Then the Unlight of Ungoliant rose up even to the roots of the trees, and Melkor sprang upon the mound; and with his black spear he smote each Tree to its core, wounded them deep, and their sap poured forth as it were their blood, and was spilled upon the ground. But Ungoliant sucked it up, and going then from Tree to Tree she set her black beak to their wounds, till they were drained; and the poison of Death that was in her went into their tissues and withered them, root, branch, and leaf; and they died. And still she thirsted, and going to the Wells of Varda she drank them dry; but Ungoliant belched forth black vapours as she drank, and swelled to a shape so vast and hideous that Melkor was afraid. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

I was nineteen and I put a bowl on and I said, Cut around! Because it was not the fashion at the time when I did that hairdo - and I kept it all my life! ~ Agnes Varda

I've seen many films, and many beautiful films. And I try to keep a certain level of quality of my films. I don't do commercials, I don't do films pre-prepared by other people, I don't do star system. So I do my own little thing. ~ Agnes Varda

I'm myself - knowing I'm doing a documentary and speaking with the people, telling them I have a bed, that I can eat every day, but I would like to speak to you. And they really gave me wonderful answers. We got along very well without trying to make me look like I'm what I'm not. ~ Agnes Varda

I never met Publo Picasso. I took pictures at the Festival d'Avignon, but I was too shy to ask to go in his studio. It does not look like me now, but I was very shy, and shy of men also. I think there was a world that frightened me totally. ~ Agnes Varda

I call [ordinary people] real people, because they have in themselves an incredible treasure - stories, a way of speaking, a way of sharing, an innocence and a perversity which I find very interesting to discover little by little. ~ Agnes Varda

People like my films. They understand me through my films; it's like a connection that has been established between all my work and myself and the audience and the viewer. ~ Agnes Varda

To change history is very slow. The first two times I came to the States - black people didn't have the right to vote. ~ Agnes Varda

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. ~ Agnes Varda

I think people should be different. I love people who don't go by the rule that you have to be careful because you're old, you have to do this and that, you have to eat this and that. ~ Agnes Varda

You can buy a good pasta but when you cook it yourself it has another feeling. ~ Agnes Varda

I wanted to speak strongly about feminism in my life, since it's been a struggle. ~ Agnes Varda

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. ~ Agnes Varda

I see all these students, and I admire them - they're trying to learn something, they go to school, they do film school, they go on shoots, they help. I'm sure they learn a lot, and some of them, it makes them aware of what they wish to do. I was - that's the way I was - autodidact. ~ Agnes Varda

[Pablo] Picasso really changed my life. It's strange to say so, but I started to see some Picasso paintings very early. I was very young, and he was not so much known. ~ Agnes Varda

I was eighteen, this was back in '46, so we also had these very frightening images of soldiers in the streets of Paris. So the effect of war, plus my shyness, plus my lack of education - I was afraid of men, really. It changes later, but it took me a certain time to adjust. ~ Agnes Varda

I didn't have a list of things I should do this year, next year, find a good novel, sign two stars and make a deal - because I think cinema should come from cinema. I never adapted anything. Beautiful books are beautiful books, that's it. I don't know why we should transform them. ~ Agnes Varda

Agnes Varda changed my view of cinema; she directs from an artistic point of view, and a film is most of all the expression of an artistic director. I learnt to enter the world and the imagination of a director. ~ Julie Gayet

I think I did fifteen long features and fifteen documentaries, or something like this, which is very little when you think of people making a film every year. Some people have done fifty or sixty films. ~ Agnes Varda

I'm not nostalgic. My memories are back here in my mind. ~ Agnes Varda

I never fought, I never learned kung fu or boxing, I never went into these sportif competitions. I wouldn't cross the ocean. I think it's ridiculous to take such risk. But look, people love to do that. But I was not afraid of doing things I wished to do. I did not think that woman would be restrained. I never saw that, especially not in filmmaking, where you don't have to be strong. ~ Agnes Varda

Cinema is my home. I think I've always lived in it. ~ Agnes Varda

The first exhibition [Publo Picasso] was organized by the communist party - because of his position during the war and all that. ~ Agnes Varda

Here ends the SILMARILLION. If it has passed from the high and the beautiful to darkness and ruin, that was of old the fate of Arda Marred; and if any change shall come and the Marring be amended, Manwë and Varda may know; but they have not revealed it, and it is not declared in the dooms of Mandos. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

I made a braid because Chinese old people, they say that the God will take you by the hair to join you with - but God didn't take me, so I cut the braid. ~ Agnes Varda

I go back to many films that I really love. Some Bresson, some Godard of the early times, the Cassavetes of those years I love. And the early Wim Wenders. But my own films I don't watch, unless I need them. ~ Agnes Varda

I cannot say something different to one person and then another. ~ Agnes Varda

I quit seeing some people who were saying bad things about women; I don't even want to meet them or see them. ~ Agnes Varda