193 Quotes by Agnes Varda

I’d been educated stupidly, I knew nothing about nothing, that’s part of being shy.

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.

Gleaning is getting things that are abandoned. I did not abandon my early pictures, my photos, my early films. It’s just going through my body of work as something I can pick from.

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...

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.

Nostalgia doesn’t make sense, because it’s like bringing the memories back to be a special part of my day or to be part of my week. And I’m inside my memories the same way I’m inside my everyday life.

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.

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.

When I started my first film, there were three women directors in France. Their films were OK, but I was different. It’s like when you start to jump and you put the pole very high – you have to jump very high. I thought, I have to use cinema as a language.