La Pointe Courte

Agnès Varda was twenty-six, working as the official photographer of the Théâtre National Populaire, and had seen perhaps a dozen films in her life when she made La Pointe Courte in 1954. She raised the money as a co-operative, paid nobody, and hired a young Alain Resnais to edit it. It is routinely described as the first film of the French New Wave, made four years before Le Beau Serge and five before The 400 Blows.

Two structures run in parallel and barely touch. In one, a couple — Philippe Noiret in his first screen role, and Silvia Monfort — walk through the fishing quarter of Sète picking apart their marriage in literary, deliberately stylised dialogue. In the other, the fishermen of La Pointe Courte, played by the actual inhabitants, contend with an inspector closing the lagoon, a child's death and a wedding. Varda has said she took the alternating structure from Faulkner's The Wild Palms without knowing that this was not how films were made.

The film had no proper distribution for years. Its importance is partly historical and partly that everything Varda did later is already here: the documentary eye applied to a fiction, the interest in a specific working community, the willingness to let form be visibly borrowed from literature. It is a remarkable thing to have made first.