Out the Movies is a bi-weekly newsletter about queer film for AF+ subscribers written by Drew Burnett Gregory.
Before I knew I was a woman, I found recognition in women directors. Through the guise of cinephilia — and allyship — I could live within the worlds of women. My favorite world belonged to Agnès Varda.
Due to her later documentaries like The Gleaners and I and Faces Places, Varda became known for her joie de vivre. She traveled the world full of curiosity, finding the small pleasures in regular people and irregular potatoes. But anyone familiar with her entire body of work also knows her sadness and her anger. Her late-in-life love of faces and places always felt like a choice, a perspective she fought for despite a world that’s easy to loathe.
Varda died in March 2019 at the age of 90. The next day I made a short homage to her work, a take on her photographic essay films examining a series of photos taken during the brief moments when I was lucky enough to meet her. In the short, I reference Documenteur my favorite of her films, and a couple years later I’d get the image tattooed on my leg.
My point, I suppose, is that no artist — except perhaps Nan Goldin and Pedro Almodóvar — has been as important to me as Varda. And so the reveal in Carrie Rickey’s biography that Varda was bisexual should have filled me with the joy of a Gaylor finding a Karli Kloss sex tape. Instead, it felt like information I’d already known.
Any attempt I made to revisit Varda through the lens of her early relationship with sculptor Valentine Schlegel merely confirmed the perspective on her work I already had. The cynicism surrounding heterosexuality found in films like La Pointe Courte and Le Bonheur. The alienated outsider found in films like Documenteur and Vagabond. The erotic female friendships found in One Sings, the Other Doesn’t and Jane B. by Agnès V. And the tender understanding found in Jacqot de Nantes, her biographical tribute to her bisexual husband Jacques Demy as he died from AIDS-related causes. Varda’s work was always queer.
The only film that feels slightly changed by this revelation is her most famous: Cléo from 5 to 7. This film about private grief amid global struggle was always deeper than its French New Wave aesthetic and pretty blonde protagonist. But the way women are looked at in the film, especially Cléo herself, gains new meaning with a confirmed queer gaze. I always watched Corinne Marchand as Cléo with lust as well as envy, frustration, and compassion. I like knowing Agnès might have too.
Something happens when we love an artist the way I’ve loved Varda. We feel as if our understanding of the work is deeper than anyone else’s. Even if intellectually we know someone is very famous, very beloved, and very important to many people, emotionally they feel like ours. And, in a way, we’re right. We each have our own version of that artist living within us and that version is entirely our own. As a gay trans woman who felt seen by Agnès Varda before I could see myself, my version of her was always queer.
But, hey, the subtext is now text. And with that we have further proof that queer women really love cats.
