I Stole a Book From My Feminist Idol

Shortly after filmmaker Agnès Varda died, I went to Paris to learn from her life — and take a piece of it home with me

Agnès Varda’s grave in Montparnasse Cemetery, where she is buried with her husband, Jacques Demy. Photos: Karen Frances Eng

We would see the gleaner, tramping along
gathering the relics
of that which is falling behind the reaper.
— Joachim du Bellay (from The Gleaners and I by Agnes Varda)

I went to Paris almost exactly a month after Agnès Varda died, wanting to pay my respects. I’m not sure why I felt compelled to visit the home of the pioneering feminist filmmaker and artist. We’d never met, though I’d have liked that. I haven’t seen all, or even most, of her work. Yet I feel a kinship with Varda — or at least some imagined idea of her cobbled from her films, and interviews, and articles.

I culled my impressions particularly from her film Daguerréotypes (1976), in which she documents with great tenderness and humor her neighbors on Paris’ rue Daguerre, as well as from the last film released before her death, Faces Places (2017), in which she roams the French countryside at 88 years old with hip young photographer JR, making celebratory portraits of the people they find along the way. In both documentaries, I glimpsed a woman whose artistic drive was, like mine, simply to live with curiosity — in the process, metabolizing her life through her camera.

Shopfronts of rue Daguerre by night.

Maybe all fandom is reflexive. Maybe at this stage in life, I need a role model like Varda. After three decades of running all over the world for work, I’m now feeling myself start to slow down. My body seems to be gently aging into a plumper, softer, more earthbound version of itself, a transformation we’ve watched in Varda over the decades in her films.

Like Varda, age has not made me less childlike in my enthusiasms. My mind works faster than my body now wants to go, but I’m still constantly on the move to follow its whims, camera in hand. I am a vagabond mother whose child has to put up with stopping and shushing when I pause to photograph or film something. I make it my business to talk to strangers. I cherish life’s poignant daily unfoldings. And I leave behind an…