Iconic filmmaker Agnès Varda celebrated in today's Google Doodle

Head to the Google homepage today and you’ll see a candy-coloured doodle of a young filmmaker smiling at an older version of herself.

The woman is the director, photographer and artist Agnès Varda, who was a pioneer of France’s iconic New Wave movement.

The New Wave was all about rejecting traditional filmmaking conventions in favour of experimentation and, as one of the movement’s only female directors, she seemed to embody this very idea.

Throughout her cinematic career, Varda directed more than 40 films, features and documentaries, exploring the complexity of just being human.

Born in Ixelles, Belgium, in May 1928 with the name Arlette, she and her family moved to Sète, France, when she was 12.

There, she studied art history and photography before going on to work as a photographer at the Théâtre National Populaire in Paris.

Speaking about the influence of her childhood on her career, Varda said in a 2009 interview, as quoted by the European Graduate School (EGS): “I just didn’t see films when I was young. I was stupid and naïve. Maybe I wouldn’t have made films if I had seen lots of others; maybe it would have stopped me. I started totally free and crazy and innocent.

“Now I’ve seen many films, and many beautiful films. And I try to keep a certain level of quality of my films. I don’t do commercials, I don’t do films pre-prepared by other people, I don’t do star system. So I do my own little thing.”

The Google Doodle, published on 13 December, pays tribute to the iconic filmmaker and her decades-long career(Google)

Her first feature-length film, La Pointe Courte (1955), which balanced fiction with documentary-style discussions, was an early anticipation of the New Wave.

And yet, whilst her early films preempted the movement, her work remained particular to her unique perspective on the world.

She remained focused on the themes of eroticism and ageing, death and time, the collective unconscious, and the presentability of social taboo, the EGS suggests.

As a self-styled feminist, she also used her films to tell women’s stories, including in her 1977 movie L’une chante, l’autre pas, which she describes as a “feminist musical," according to Google's blurb for its doodle.

She was also one of 343 Frenchwomen to have signed a manifesto, publicly admitting that they’d had abortions in the past and pushing policymakers to legalise them.

Varda (far left) in 1962 with actress Corinne Marchand who starred in her acclaimed film 'Cleo 5 a 7'; at Berlin's International Film Festival in 2019(Getty Images)

Between 1968 and 1970, she lived in Los Angeles, moving there again in 1979 for another two years. Interestingly, she is credited with being the first director to express an interest in the now-legendary actor Harrison Ford.

Indeed, Varda was as keen to cross borders as she was to cross genres, shooting her films in a range of locations including Cuba, Iran and the US, as well as her native Belgium and France.

Her diverse and rich style was recognised over the decades with a number of prestigious awards, including Oscar and Lumières Award nominations for Visages Villages (Faces Places), a César Award for Les Plages d'Agnès (The Beaches of Agnés), a Golden Lion for Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond), and an Honorary Oscar for her lifetime achievements in cinema.

She died at home on March 29, 2019, aged 90, of complications from cancer, her family said in a statement at the time.

So why did Google decide to immortalise her through one of its doodles four years later, on 13 December?

Because on this day in 2014, the European Film Academy presented her with an honorary Lifetime Achievement Award for her work – a prize that was richly deserved.

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