Who is Agnès Varda? Iconic director celebrated in Google Doodle
Varda was a key figure in French New Wave cinema.
Today’s Google homepage features a colourful doodle of a young filmmaker smiling at an older version of herself.
The image celebrates Agnès Varda, the influential filmmaker who enjoyed a career in cinema spanning more than 60 years and became a key figure in French New Wave cinema.
Varda died in March 2019, at the age of 90, but which films did she bring into the world?
Read on for everything you need to know.
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Who is Agnès Varda?
Over the course of her career, Varda switched between feature-length fiction, documentary and shorts.
She released her debut feature, the seaside romance La Pointe Courte, in 1954. The film is widely considered to be a forerunner of the French New Wave.
After creating a number of short films, Varda released her best-known and most commercially successful film – Cléo from 5 to 7 – in 1962.
Cléo from 5 to 7 follows a singer through the streets of Paris in real time as she awaits the results of a cancer test, and is seen as a classic of the French New Wave.
Other of Varda's films include the feminist musical One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977), Vagabond (1985) and Jacquot de Nantes (1991), a moving homage to her husband, Jacques Demy.
Later films included The Gleaners and I (2000), The Beaches of Agnès (2008) and Faces Places (2017).
In 2018, she spoke in front of an audience at BFI Southbank for a retrospective of her work.
“I wanted to invent cinema, and be happy to be a woman. I wanted to be a radical. I wanted to find shapes," she said.
Varda was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2017, becoming the first female director to receive the accolade.
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