When Agnès Varda was introduced as ‘Director. Screenwriter. Legend’ at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival, she promptly objected: ‘I’m not a religion. I’m still alive.’ It was a futile protest. Varda had become the object of widespread veneration. You could buy any number of T-shirts emblazoned with her likeness, whether in the form of a photograph or a cartoon depicting a Mrs Pepperpot-type sporting a silver-and-aubergine pudding-bowl coiffure and an expression of bemused curiosity. But Varda’s extraordinary career – her longevity, the range of her achievements, her political seriousness, her talent for self-reinvention – renders that sense of reverence understandable. The American film critic Carrie Rickey, in the introduction to A Complicated Passion, remembers seeing Varda’s 1962 feature Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) as a student and discovering that women too could make films: ‘tears spritzed from my eyes’.

The woman born Arlette Varda in Brussels in 1928 was fiercely independent, as signalled by her decision to change her first name on her nineteenth birthday. Having learned to mend nets during her family’s wartime stay in Sète, she travelled to Corsica and worked on a fishing boat; the sea would feature in several of her works, notably the autobiographical documentary The Beaches of Agnès (2008). Varda became an accomplished photographer, then turned to cinema, although she had seen very few films. Her first feature film, La Pointe Courte (1955), a low-budget narrative-documentary hybrid, had to be classified as an ‘amateur’ work because she had not gained recognition from the Centre National du Cinema, which regulated filmmaking in France, as a commercial director. Thereafter, Varda would practise her own protean version of amateurism.

La Pointe Courte pre-empted the advent of the French New Wave by a few years, but Varda’s importance has often been neglected. She was responsible for several resounding, female-focused French films: Cléo from 5 to 7 pretty much rewrote the rules on representing female subjectivity on screen; One Sings, the