When 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.
AGNES VARDAGleaning is getting things that are abandoned. I did not abandon my early pictures, my photos, my early films. It’s just going through my body of work as something I can pick from.
More Agnes Varda Quotes
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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 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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It sounds so lovely in French. So I took that because it was the subject: I and myself and myself and I. Which is, in a way, boring, because it is a contradiction.
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I don’t do films pre-prepared by other people, I don’t do star system. So I do my own little thing.
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I was nineteen and I put a bowl on and I said, Cut around! Because it was not the fashion at the time when I did that hairdo – and I kept it all my life!
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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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I don’t try to make a place in history at all! People put me in the history of cinema because my first film, La pointe-courte, was so ahead of some other filmmakers.
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Good cinema is good cinema. It makes you feel like you need to work.
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An old woman I loved very much when I was young – the wife of Jean Villard – she’s just reciting poetry all the time, which is beautiful because it means she went back to the world of poetry that she loved when she was young. That’s all she does.
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We got along very well without trying to make me look like I’m what I’m not.
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I think it’s ridiculous to take such risk. But look, people love to do that. But I was not afraid of doing things I wished to do.
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I had flops, I had success.
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I need images, I need representation which deals in other means than reality. We have to use reality but get out of it. That’s what I try to do all the time.
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Just yesterday I saw a good film, but even if I’d seen a bad one, I’d feel, “Oh my god, what a bad job, I can do better.”
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I call [ordinary people] real people, because they have in themselves an incredible treasure – stories, a way of speaking, a way of sharing, an innocence and a perversity which I find very interesting to discover little by little.
AGNES VARDA






