Before she picked up a film camera, the revered director was a photographer.
The seeds of her groundbreaking cinema lie in her earliest still images, says her daughter, RosalieAgnès Varda, at least in her later years, didn’t make a big deal about being taken seriously.
For decades, the film-maker and artist was much respected as the pioneering feminist voice in French cinema and as the “godmother of the Nouvelle Vague” – New Wave – her work beating Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut et al to the big screen by several years.
But she was also somewhat sidelined, eclipsed by her male peers, and it took until this century for her to be truly revered: last year, her 1962 classic Cléo from 5 to 7 was ranked No 14 in the Sight & Sound greatest films poll.But by the time she had begun to be deified, Varda was prone to sending herself up.
She would appear…
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