Former Inquirer film critic pens the first English biography of a French master filmmaker

One day in 1971, when former Inquirer film critic Carrie Rickey was 19, she started tearing up sitting in an undergraduate film class at her alma mater, University of California, San Diego. The class she was taking was called “A Hard Look at the Movies,” taught by film critic and painter Manny Farber. That day, the class watched the 1962 film Cleo from 5 to 7 by Agnès Varda.

Rickey had misheard the filmmaker’s name when Farber introduced the film, thinking it was Angus Varda. Until she read the credits — “Script and Direction by Agnès Varda” — she didn’t know there was such a thing as a female filmmaker, “although I knew there were female authors and painters and musicians,” she said, “and it was a shock.”

A film critic for The Inquirer for 25 years, Rickey has written film criticism and articles on film history for various publications and has taught at School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania.

Fifty-three years after her first tryst with Varda, Rickey has now written A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda, the first English language biography of the French auteur.

“Agnès Varda moved me to tears even before I’d seen one of her films,” reads the first line of the book.

Ahead of a Sept. 16 book event at the Free Library of Philadelphia, Rickey spoke to The Inquirer about the book, her years at the publication, and her favorite bookshop.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

I just felt really bonded with this woman who was both very self-conscious and also very self-aware. I’d never thought until that moment, “Holy cannoli. All the movies I’ve seen thus far were from the point of view of a man.” That was eye-opening. I loved Cleo [the protagonist], not because I was beautiful or talented like her, but because I was anxious and unsure like she was. So, you know, it was the right movie at the right time. And literally, two months later, Elaine May’s movie A New Leaf came out. And I saw that and I went, “Wow!” And then over the years, I realized, there were possibly more female filmmakers in Hollywood in 1917 than there were in 2017.

I wouldn’t meet her for the first time in person until 1988, at the Cannes Film Festival. She was one of those 5-feet giants. You know, with the demeanor of women who carried themselves like Napoleon, and I was a little intimidated by her, because I felt that I couldn’t keep her attention unless I told her something she didn’t know.

Unifrance, which is the export company for French cinema worldwide, had seated us together, possibly [because] Agnès and I were the only women at this lunch, which was mostly male French filmmakers. In 1988 the preponderance of movie critics were male. There was Janet Maslin from the New York Times, me, and Sheila Benson from the Los Angeles Times. But neither Janet nor Sheila were there that afternoon.

I met her again in 1998, also at Cannes. And I think it was 2013 when she came to UPenn to teach master classes. I went to one of her master classes at Scribe Video in West Philly and she was just great. She was just totally inspirational. And the people in this class ranged in age from 18 to 70, and she’s saying things like, “You know, you really need an idea of what you’re making the movie about. And it doesn’t matter how you make it. Shoot on your phone, take photographs, animate them. Don’t think that you need a lot of money.” That was liberating for a lot of these people and it was great. And she was hilarious and very sympathetic.

At The Inquirer, I had to write a little bit of everything, although my colleagues [Inquirer film critics] Desmond Ryan and Stephen Rea were very lovely and they said, “Oh, it’s a movie by a woman. You want to review it, right? So review it.” And I always said, “Yes, I do.”

I also started keeping track of the percentage of women making studio movies. I decided to devote 50% of what I wrote to movies by women, and I thought that way if I could start writing equally about man-made and women-made cinema, I could do something to alter the coverage. I kept a running tab of what was happening with women in cinema.

I never thought of writing a biography, although I really like reading biographies and actually loved writing obits at The Inquirer. I taught at the college level, and my students were always surprised that there were women filmmakers in the early days of cinema. There was Alice Guy-Blaché, Lois Weber who was very political, and she made movies about how only rich people were going to college. They would be considered very advanced today, but she was doing it in the 19 teens, and that wasn’t really being done anymore. I just wanted to write about the history of female directors.

And then right before COVID hit, a friend called me up and asked, “Would you be interested in writing a biography of Agnès Varda?” There was an agent who was asking three people to write book proposals about her. So I did. I spent three months writing a book proposal, and it got accepted and bought, and that’s how it happened.

It was not intentional but I thought I could tell the story of women in cinema. Varda was a vehicle for that. But she was also, certainly, a very interesting person.

Head House Books.

I have two favorites now. I’ve seen, I think, pretty much everything she’s made. She made this movie called Le Bonheur in 1965 about marriage, and it’s even more shocking than Vagabond. It’s very darkly comic. And I love that movie.

She made so many great shorts, which I hadn’t seen. She’s just such an amazing colorist. My other favorite is the 1958 short Along the Coast; it’s about Côte d’Azur, and she made it for the National Tourism Office. It’s really funny. She was so, so funny. I think she’s the only person I ever met who could pun across three languages simultaneously.

“A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda” by Carrie Rickey is out now, published by W.W. Norton & Co.

Carrie Rickey in conversation with Gary Kramer, Sept. 16, Parkway Central Library, 1901 Vine St., Philadelphia. https://libwww.freelibrary.org/calendar/event/141464