Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Varda by Agnès
2019 · Agnès Varda · Varda by Agnès on Sightlines
An old woman sits on a stage in front of an audience while a clip from one of her own films plays. She stops it. Not to tell us what it means. To say why the shot lasts as long as it does, why the cut falls here instead of two seconds later. Then she lets it run on.
She had a word for what she was pointing at. Cinécriture, cine-writing: a film is written, but not on paper. It's written in the length of a held shot, the place of a cut, what the sound is doing while you're looking elsewhere. The screenplay is not the writing. The film is the writing. Agnès Varda spent sixty years proving it and then, in her last months, made a film whose only job was to say it out loud.
You could take Varda by Agnès for a very good bonus feature — a career retrospective with the director's commentary turned up. That's not wrong, but it misses what's strange about the thing, and this is where Gilles Deleuze earns a place on the shelf next to it. Deleuze's two books on cinema argue that at a certain point films stopped working as chains of action, where someone sees a problem and does something about it, and started working as images you have to read. He called that kind of image a lectosign: an image that no longer carries its sense in what happens next, and so asks to be deciphered. Usually a film becomes a lectosign by going strange. Varda gets there by talking. Once she tells you why the cut lands where it does, you can't watch the clip as action any more. You watch it as writing, which is exactly what she wanted.
The talking has a shape of its own. Deleuze had a name for a voice that isn't conversation: the speech act, a voice that testifies or legends rather than exchanges lines. Varda's audience never answers her. She isn't in dialogue; she's putting a body of work into words, which is also how it becomes a body of work. And she does it in character. The figure on that stage — small, two-tone bowl haircut, unhurried, quick to deflate herself — is a persona she cultivated for decades, not acted so much as curated. Deleuze, borrowing from Bergson, called this fabulation: a subject caught in the act of legending itself. Not lying. Making. Varda the character is her last piece of cinécriture, edited with the same care she gives a tracking shot.
The order matters too. The film does not run 1955 to 2017. It doubles back, skips forward, gathers by theme the way a lecturer does. Deleuze drew a hard line between a flashback — a dated memory, a former present, delivered and returned — and sheets of past, where the past stops being a line and becomes regions you move around in. That's the structure here. A question about duration takes her into Cléo from 5 to 7 and its ticking real-time chapters; a thought about holding a camera yourself takes her to The Gleaners and I nearly forty years on. Neither is a flashback, because neither is trying to be then. Both are available at once.
Behind all of it sits the fact the film never leans on and never escapes. She finished it in the last months of her life, showed it at Berlin in February 2019, and died six weeks later, aged ninety. Deleuze's crystal-image names the smallest circuit in cinema: the present that passes and the past that is preserved, become impossible to tell apart, like an object and its reflection. On that stage the circuit is literal. There's the actual body, ninety years old. There's Corinne Marchand as Cléo walking through 1962, and Sandrine Bonnaire as Mona in the fractured backward structure of Vagabond. Both are Varda. Film is the machine that splits time this way, keeping one face while the other goes, and she was standing at the point where the split closes.
Meanwhile Cléo walks and a ninety-year-old explains the tracking shot over her. Two accounts run at once: what the image shows, and what the voice knows about how it was made. Varda inherited that wedge between voice and image from her Left Bank colleagues. Chris Marker's Letter from Siberia had re-read identical footage under shifting commentary, proof that a soundtrack can re-cut an image without touching it; Resnais's Night and Fog bound archive to a written commentary track; Sans Soleil threaded a first-person voice through footage gathered from everywhere and shot on anything. Varda's move is to turn that device on her own archive, so the voice re-reading the image belongs to the person who made it.
This is why the film thinks instead of illustrating. Deleuze's noosign is the image that puts thought on screen rather than a story, and Varda by Agnès attempts something few films do: the edit is both the subject and the proof. She argues that meaning is made in the cut, and the argument is carried out by cutting. If the assembly failed, the thesis would fail with it.
Watch her hands while she talks. The new footage is shot plainly on purpose, holding the frame on her speech and her hands, and the hands carry the film's other argument. In The Gleaners and I she had held a small digital camera in one hand and filmed the other, spotted and old. Deleuze called a posture that exposes a relation a gest: the body revealing the arrangement it lives inside. Varda's hands expose an economic arrangement as much as a mortal one. One woman, one camera light enough to hold alone, and behind her Ciné-Tamaris, the company she founded in 1954 and used to keep ownership of her own films. She treated cheap digital not as a fall in image quality but as a widening of who gets to write with pictures, and her hand was the evidence.
There's a small genre of the filmmaker's testament, and most of them hide inside a fiction. The Beaches of Agnès had already built her autobiography as installation and staging, autobiography performed. This one drops the cover and simply explains. What it leaves behind is a form: the masterclass as a film, authorship taught rather than asserted, a working method handed over intact rather than mystified. She organized the whole talk under three words — inspiration, creation, and partage, sharing. The third changes the other two. It makes an oeuvre a gift instead of a monument, which is an unusual thing for a major artist to decide, and rarer still to decide last.
So the next time a shot in any film runs longer than you expect, you'll hear her asking who decided that, and why. That's the better eye she hands over. The question she leaves open is harder. She spent the film showing that a life's work can be written the way a film is — chosen, trimmed, arranged. Whether a life can be, she doesn't say.
Concepts in play
- the readable image (lectosign) — She interrupts her own clips mid-flow to explain why a shot lasts as long as it does and why the cut lands where it lands; the excerpt stops working as action and has to be read as writing — cinécriture demonstrated on the body of the film.
- acte de parole (the legending voice) — The masterclass conceit: Varda sits or stands before a theatre audience that never answers, speaking sometimes to the room and sometimes past it to the camera, her live lecture and voiceover threading every clip into one testifying consciousness.
- fabulation / legending — The one performance in the film is hers, 'not acted but curated' — the small two-tone-haired sage, at ease, self-deprecating, both authority and grandmother, a role cultivated for decades and edited here like any other material.
- sheets of past (order of coexistence) — The assembly is associative rather than chronological, doubling back and jumping forward across 1955–2017 as a lecturer's talk would; Cléo's real-time chapters and the handheld DV of The Gleaners and I are equally reachable at any moment, never dated flashbacks.
- crystal-image (hyalosign) — Completed in the last months of her life and premiered at Berlin six weeks before her death at ninety: the actual aged body on stage set beside the preserved images of Corinne Marchand as Cléo and Sandrine Bonnaire as Mona, present-passing and past-preserved in one frame.
- audiovisual disjunction — Her lecture voice and voiceover run over excerpts that carry their own original sound and scores, so the voice tells the story of the making while the image tells its own — the essay-film wedge inherited from Letter from Siberia's identical footage re-read under shifting commentary.
- noosign (the image of thought) — Editing is both the object and the subject of the film: Varda cut it herself and the thesis that meaning is made in the cut is delivered by the cutting, so the argument stands or falls on the assembly.
- the gest (posture exposing a relation) — New footage shot in a deliberately plain digital style to keep attention on her speech and her hands, backed by The Gleaners and I, where she held a lightweight consumer camera in one hand and filmed her own aging hand — the artisanal posture that matches Ciné-Tamaris keeping ownership of her catalog since 1954.