Dream Life: A Tribute to Agnès Varda (1928–2019)

Magazine

In a tribute to film pioneer and artist Agnès Varda, who passed away this spring, Rajendra Roy, the Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film, and video producer Natasha Giliberti discuss Varda’s indelible influence on the way we see and connect with people in the world. Varda’s was an aesthetics and politics of human connection. As Roy explains, in her films, “she always found a way to draw you in.”

For more than 60 years—and as the sole woman French New Wave filmmaker—Varda’s documentaries, dramatic films, and even a feminist pro-abortion rights musical introduced new ways of making, casting, and imagining movies. Here, Roy and Giliberti discuss how Varda ennobled all kinds of lives and ordinary details through several of her iconic works, including Daguerréotypes (1975), L’une chante l’autre pas (One Sings, the Other Doesn’t) (1977), Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I) (2000), and Visages/Villages (Faces/Places) (2017), the latter of which MoMA helped produce.

“I live in cinema,” Varda once said. Now, she lives on in it.