There is a song of Gainsbourg that Jane Birkin sang, and the words are beautiful in French. It says, “Le jeu et les moi.” It’s impossible to translate, because it has a very nice sound.
AGNES VARDAWhen I saw what painting had done in the last thirty years, what literature had done – people like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Hemingway – in France we have Nathalie Sarraute – and paintings became so strongly contemporary while cinema was just following the path of theater.
More Agnes Varda Quotes
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I’m not interested in seeing a film just made by a woman – not unless she is looking for new images.
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I’m interested in people who are not exactly the middle way, or who are trying something else because they cannot prevent themselves from being different, or they wish to be different, or they are different because society pushed them away.
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I’m not nostalgic. My memories are back here in my mind.
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I tried to find images, allegorical images, that I could use to express things that I didn’t want to say or didn’t want to show or I was not able to find how to show.
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You have to invent life.
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I never adapted anything. Beautiful books are beautiful books, that’s it. I don’t know why we should transform them.
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I tried to find a language for the film – not just telling stories. I picked the Picasso painting because it said more than I could explain.
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It’s a way of living, cinema. And I see my family, I do this and that, I travel. It’s a long process to let it happen.
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I quit seeing some people who were saying bad things about women; I don’t even want to meet them or see them.
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Hands are the tool of the painter, the artist.
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I don’t watch my own films. There is little time; I’d rather see another film.
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I’m sure they learn a lot, and some of them, it makes them aware of what they wish to do. I was – that’s the way I was – autodidact.
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I wanted to catch the problem of consumption, waste, poor people eating what we throw away, which is a big subject. But I didn’t want to become a sociologue, an ethnographe, a serious thinker. I thought I should be free, even in a documentary which has a very serious subject.
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Humor is such a strong weapon, such a strong answer. Women have to make jokes about themselves, laugh about themselves, because they have nothing to lose.
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I live in cinema. I feel I’ve lived here forever.
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