Kill Your Idols

Agnes Varda and the film matriarchy

“People’s response to [the elderly’s] separateness can be callous, can be goodhearted, and is always condescending.” 
–Donald Hall, “Out the Window” 

“When all you can say about a woman is that she has a nice ass, then you’ve effectively annihilated her.” 
– Agnés Varda, Interview on Vagabond

Cleo from 5 to 7

Asked to summon an image for the label “Grandmother,” my mind vacillates between, on the one side, each of my own grandmothers and, on the other, a sort of vague grandmotherly-ness that is a patchwork of every grandmother on screen and page that I’ve ever encountered. There is the batty old woman with too much of something (cats, Precious Moments figurines, religious iconography, lace doilies, etc.); there’s the plump baker bustling about, perpetually wearing an apron, in a kitchen that you just know smells of cookies; there’s the dirty and inappropriate old lady, a double (or proudly single) entendre machine who exists to make people uncomfortable or to be used as a punchline; then there’s the stern matriarch, firm and strict but not as unbending as a similar archetypical Grandfather would be. What none of these women have is a past. They were always grandmothers of whatever stripe, as if that was their destiny from birth. 

The so-called Grandmother of the [French] New Wave, filmmaker Agnès Varda is best remembered now as an elderly, short woman with the sharply defined halo of white hair atop an otherwise magenta-dyed bob (the haircut she had all of her adult life), looking a little like a popsicle. That’s the Varda that appeared in her own films from the late ‘90s through her death in 2019. She was born in Belgium the same year (1928) as my maternal grandmother. That grandmother was a biker and a hairdresser during her younger life, although in fact I never saw her either ride a motorcycle or cut any hair, or even saw anything that might hint at that past, like a leather jacket in the back of a closet or even a high end pair of scissors in the pale blue bathroom that always smelled of artificial flowers. Like the popular image of Varda, to me she was always that short old lady with a head of white hair without much of a history. The past has no weight to children.