Between Two Minds: Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy

Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy met in 1958 at the Festival de Tours, France’s premier short film festival at the time. Varda, a photographer-turned-director, had already shaken the French film establishment with La Pointe courte (1955). Demy was still working on short films, nurturing visions of musicals set in port cities. He moved into her place in Montparnasse the following year, and  they remained together for over three decades, raising children and building two of the most distinctive bodies of work in French cinema, without ever making a film together.

“We were both filmmakers before we met,” Varda explained in a 1964 segment of Démons et merveilles du cinéma, broadcast on French public television. “We are two filmmakers, but that has nothing to do with us as a couple. We might not have been filmmakers at all and still met each other.” In the same conversation, Demy confirmed: “We almost never talk about the craft together. Creative work is deeply personal. You must not get in each other’s way.”

Varda would read Demy’s scripts once he had finished writing them, never before he was ready and never offering unsolicited advice. When the interviewer asked whether she made suggestions, she bristled at the word: “Advice, certainly not. Remarks, if he asks, yes.” Then, with characteristic precision, she drew a distinction that illuminated the entire partnership: “I feel very strongly what Jacques does. I don’t understand it. I don’t try to understand it. I don’t need to understand it.”

Born Arlette Varda in Brussels in 1928, Varda studied at the École du Louvre, worked as a photographer for Jean Vilar’s theatre festival in Avignon, and made her first feature film without having seen more than a handful of movies. La Pointe courte, shot in Sète in 1954 with a cooperative budget and edited by Alain Resnais, weaves together two parallel narratives: a couple’s emotional crisis and the daily struggles of a fishing village. It was immediately hailed by André Bazin as “libre et pur” [free and pure]. The Revue belge du cinéma later wrote that the seeds of the entire Nouvelle Vague could be found in this single film. Varda’s approach was rooted in political engagement and a documentary instinct for capturing the textures of ordinary life.

Demy, born in 1931 in Pontchâteau, came from a different world entirely. The son of a garage mechanic, he had been staging puppet shows since the age of four and was making films with a toy projector by nine. The bombing of Nantes on September 7, 1943 became the fuel for his art. “When something so atrocious has happened, you feel that nothing worse can ever come, and from that point you dream of an ideal existence,” he told French television in 1965. This was evident in his films: musicals, fairy tales and pastel-coloured port cities are threaded with melancholy. 

Before meeting Demy, Varda had chosen to raise her first daughter, Rosalie, from her previous relationship with actor Antoine Bourseiller, as a single mother, registering the child as born to an unknown father. When Demy entered her life, he adopted Rosalie, and their son Mathieu was born later, in 1972. The couple lived on rue Daguerre, a Montparnasse street named after the photography pioneer, and kept a house on the island Noirmoutier. Through it all, they maintained what Varda described in the same 1964 interview as a relationship between “two ordinary people” who happened to make films.

Varda shot in the streets with a lightweight camera, making films about gleaners, muralists and feminist struggles. She practiced what she called cinécriture, filming directly without a screenplay, and gravitated toward documentary as her natural form. While Demy laboured over scripts and musical scores for years before shooting, composing elaborately choreographed worlds where every colour was predetermined. She showed life as it was while he showed life as it might be dreamed.

Their two stays in Los Angeles, first between 1968 and 1970 and again from 1979 to 1981, showed how the same place could inspire two entirely different cinematic visions. While Demy shot Model Shop (1969), a melancholic European’s reverie about the city, Varda took her camera to the streets and made Black Panthers (1968), a short documentary on the Oakland movement, followed by Lions Love (1969), a freewheeling fiction about the hedonistic swirl of 1960s underground stardom. They shared  a circle of friends that included a young carpenter named Harrison Ford, whom Demy wanted to cast as his lead before Columbia Pictures vetoed the idea, insisting he had no future in the profession.

Their work could not have been more different, yet both reached the pinnacle of their profession. Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival in 1964, was entirely sung, every line set to Michel Legrand’s score, its saturated colours masking a story of lovers separated by the Algerian war who meet again years later with almost nothing left to say. Two decades later, Varda’s Vagabond, which won the Venice Film Festival’s Lion d’Or in 1985, retraced the last weeks of a young vagabond found dead in a winter ditch through the testimonies of those who crossed her path.

The couple separated for a time at the end of the 1970s, with Varda returning to Los Angeles alone, where she made Mural Murals (1981), a documentary on Chicano muralists, and Documenteur (1981), a fiction inspired by her own solitude in Venice Beach, for which she cast their young son, Mathieu. The distance proved temporary, but it left lasting traces in her work. Documenteur was the most openly autobiographical film she had made to date. It unlocked a rawness and a willingness to expose her own vulnerability on screen, This carried through in works like The Beaches of Agnès (2008), where she turned the camera on her own memories, her body and how she was aging with disarming frankness.

The most radical expression of their bond came at the end. In the late 1980s, Demy became gravely ill and began writing down his childhood memories. When Varda suggested he turn them into a film he told her to do it herself. The result was Jacquot de Nantes (1991), a work of extraordinary tenderness in which Varda reconstructed her husband’s boyhood in black and white while interweaving clips from his films and close-up footage of the dying man. The last shot was filmed on October 17, 1990, 10 days before Demy’s death at the age of 59. In 2008, while promoting The Beaches of Agnès, Varda finally revealed publicly that the true cause had been AIDS, a fact Demy had wished to keep private.

In the years that followed, Varda became the devoted custodian of Demy’s legacy. She restored his entire filmography through their production company Ciné-Tamaris, produced documentaries about his work, and eventually transformed the film stock of Le Bonheur into an art installation at the Galerie Nathalie Obadia in 2018: a greenhouse made of celluloid and fake sunflowers. Today, their daughter Rosalie continues this work at Ciné-Tamaris, preserving and restoring both parents’ archives.

Varda herself continued working until the very end, completing Varda by Agnès just days before her death in March 2019, aged 90. She was buried beside Demy in the Montparnasse cemetery, the two filmmakers side by side at last, remembered through their musicals and documentaries, fairy tales and street footage, sung words and found images.

They never needed to make a film together to shape each other’s work; their influence was unspoken. Living for decades alongside an artist whose vision was the opposite of your own must have been a constant reminder that cinema could be something entirely different from what you were making. When asked to define himself in that 1964 interview, Demy said: “I’m a sort of sea creature. I’m at home by the sea. And like the sea, I think of changing colours. Perhaps I’m a bit like that: grey and blue.” Varda, who spent her life filming beaches, would surely have recognised that landscape.