Daily Inspiration Quote by Agnes Varda

Varda’s line lands like a friendly slap: solidarity, yes, but not the kind that treats identity as an aesthetic in itself. Coming from a director who spent her career smuggling formal invention into everyday life, it reads less like gatekeeping than a refusal of tokenism. She’s wary of the cultural bargain where “a film by a woman” becomes both marketing tag and moral alibi, letting institutions congratulate themselves while leaving the visual grammar untouched.

“Not unless she is looking for new images” is the real provocation. Varda isn’t asking women to make “women’s films” in a narrow sense; she’s asking them (and implicitly everyone) to disturb the camera’s inherited habits: what gets framed, who gets centered, what bodies are looked at and how. New images aren’t just pretty compositions. They’re new ways of seeing labor, age, domestic space, desire, poverty - the stuff cinema routinely flattens into cliché. Varda’s own work made that argument in practice, turning streets, kitchens, beaches, and wandering faces into laboratories for attention.

The subtext is also a critique of the audience. If you’re “interested” only because of the director’s gender, you’re still consuming difference as a curiosity. Varda insists on a higher bar: representation that changes the form, not just the credits. In an era that often mistakes inclusion for transformation, she draws the sharp distinction between letting more people into the room and rearranging the furniture.