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3. Agnès Varda’s Paris: Intimacy, Poetry, and Eternal Street Life

The exhibition Le Paris d’Agnès Varda, de-ci, de-là unveils a lesser-known facet of the pioneering filmmaker: her photography. Featuring over 130 prints, rare archives, and film excerpts, it explores Varda’s enduring bond with Paris, from her studio on rue Daguerre to the streets immortalized in Cléo from 5 to 7.

Paris’s backdrop transformed into a mirror, a playground, and a living studio for Agnès Varda, where life and art were inseparable. The exhibition Le Paris d’Agnès Varda, de-ci, de-là reveals Varda as a photographer, far from the film set yet already shaped by the eye that made her one of cinema’s boldest pioneers. At the heart of this journey is her courtyard-studio on rue Daguerre in Paris’s 14th arrondissement, a private cocoon that became both creative laboratory and personal refuge. It anchors a voyage through still and moving images, where reality and imagination overlap, where fiction converses with documentary, and where Paris emerges as stage, character, and accomplice.

Few women between 1928 and 2019 left as profound a mark on cinema as Varda. In her studio on rue Daguerre, she devoted herself equally to photography and filmmaking. As a documentary featured in the exhibition reminds us, her work was not about “women’s cinema” as a manifesto or a rarity, but rather about the natural place of women in the arts — a self-expression that claimed no label other than authenticity. Agnès Varda conquered Paris first through the originality of her ideas as a woman, and then through her capacity to reflect ordinary Parisians on screen: people in the streets, those who never imagined being filmed, their fleeting lives elevated into cinematic eternity.

Her lens also captured major figures, from Jean Vilar to a young Gérard Depardieu, and Jane Birkin in a quiet black-and-white portrait, her hair tied back, far removed from the idolized icon — simply a woman.

Time itself was Varda’s constant subject. She often returned to the same courtyard from which she filmed, appearing at her table in a fixed shot, remarking that the years would pass, the place would remain, and we would watch her grow older and eventually disappear.

Such details shape the viewer’s experience — whether in her films or in this exhibition. Visitors step into Varda’s world and her revolutionary vision, one that never sought to change humanity but rather to portray it in all its humor, realism, and poetry, balancing fiction and truth.

The exhibition runs until August 24, 2025.