We are a culture saturated in lists, from the heroically inane (‘Top 10 Halloween Sex Positions’) to the end-of-year lists from the cultural aesthetes like The Guardian or The Quietus that can define, at least in the immediate, the artistic weight behind those pieces in their Top 100s. Hipster-smothered music site Pitchfork seemingly has a desire to create a list for every aspect of music culture, having a Top 10 tracks and albums for every decade since the 1960s, all the way down to the bizarrely specific ‘10 Overlooked Electronic Albums of 1998’.
For cineastes like us, the bible of greatest-films-of-all-time lists is the Sight & Sound decennial list, which has been published since 1952. The first winner was the neo-Realist masterpiece The Bicycle Thieves before the Mt. Rushmore of the film cannon Citizen Kane remained implacable until Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo took the top spot in 2012. Throughout all these lists, among many glaring omissions was that of the most important female filmmaker of the 20th century, and perhaps of all time: Agnés Varda.
Varda has released enough films to potentially form a top 10 all of her own; Cleo from 5-7, Le Bonheur, The Gleaners & I, and Vagabond among many others. Interestingly, the great Telegraph film critic Robbie Collin included Vagabond in his personal top 100 films, but he’s the best of the best.
One film often missing from the conversation is Varda’s astonishing debut La Pointe Courte, made in 1954 and released the following year. This radical, beautiful, and beguiling film ushered in the Nouvelle Vague, the movement that would rewrite the rules of the staid, post-Golden Age Hollywood 50s.
Varda was the only female director of the New Wave canon – Truffaut, Goddard, Rohmer, etc– and her path to producing La Pointe Courte was radical enough itself. Produced on a budget of $14,000, minuscule compared to studio-based French films of the time, funding came from inheritance and family loans, and she had had no professional training. This came at a period of film history when women directors were considered anathema in the film industry, this display of authorial confidence was revolutionary.
La Pointe Courte exists within liminal spaces; the film explores the murky gaps between love and stability, modernity and tradition, isolation and metropolis, all given a radical presentation by Varda’s directorial eye. The film’s narrative has two distinct but interweaving strands; Elle (played by the imperially elegant Silvia Monfort) arrives in the small, coastal town Seté to solve, one way or the other, her marriage problems with Lui (acted with rugged beauty by Phillippe Noiret).
The second is the depiction of the lives of the eponymous ‘Pointe Courte’ (short point), the part of Seté known as ‘fisherman’s corner’. Here the fishermen, and their wives and children, are struggling to survive as they enter the regimented, globalized world of modern fishing; where the ancient freedom to take a boat and fish with impunity is slowly being eroded to the rules and regulations of modern, free-trade capitalism.
Varda combines a twin aesthetic; she frames the scenes depicting the fishermen’s lives with a documentary style, still-life portraits that create a verisimilitude portrayal of their rustic existence. The scenes of Lui and Elle are more experimental; using ground-breaking compositional and editing techniques, Varda established the aesthetic foundation for the French New Wave that would follow.
Arguably the most revered and sublime part of the film is the sequence in which Lui and Elle walk around the town laying bare their marital problems with a brutal if poetic honesty. Over the course of ten stunning minutes, Varda combines lyrical, intelligent dialogue about love, marriage, and the meaning of happiness, with staggering compositions and non-linear editing. The dialogue is presented in a continuous flow, as Lui and Elle agonize over the creaking foundations of their marriage; ‘Do you love me or our love?’ asks an increasingly desperate Elle at one point. Even though their conversation has a linear progression, Varda rejects the then norm of linear sequential scene construction, instead crafting a series of shots that jump drastically from one place to another.
The shots Varda creates are some of the most astonishing in cinema and remarkably varied in their style. There are the jarring, close-up portraits of Lui and Elle together, their faces presented at jagged, almost Brutalist, and defiantly unromantic angles. Then there are more straightforward compositions; Elle and Lui standing on either side of a fence debating the merits of their marriage is beautiful in its pure simplicity.
Varda and her editor, future director Alan Resnais, use harsh, quick cuts to move from scene to scene, allowing each shot to have a greater force as it’s thrust onto the screen. These editing techniques would be made famous by Godard in À bout de souffle, but it was Varda who created the filmic space for these techniques to be explored.
Why then does La Pointe Courte not feature in the same conversations of greatness as À bout de souffle or Les Quatre Cents Coups? Well, there is the historical and contemporary problem of the lack of institutional recognition for female filmmakers, the most famous and obvious example being only two female winners of Best Director in Oscar’s history. However, another reason is that often those who precede a movement are left behind until we look back and recognize they were the actual pioneers.
The radical outsider, entering new artistic territory alone but for their vision of what cinema or art or music could be. That’s what Varda was. Truffaut and Godard may have bought the French New Wave to a global audience, but it was Varda’s determination and visionary genius that allowed them to walk that path.