Varda's work employed location shooting in an era when the limitations of sound technology made it easier and more common to film indoors, with constructed sets and painted backdrops of landscapes, rather than outdoors, on location.
Her use of non-professional actors was also unconventional for s French cinema. In , she became the first female director to win an honorary Oscar. She was the third of five children. She maintained a fluid interrelationship between photographic and cinematic forms: "I take photographs or I make films. Or I put films in the photos, or photos in the films. Varda discussed her beginnings with the medium of still photography: "I started earning a living from photography straight away, taking trivial photographs of families and weddings to make money.
But I immediately wanted to make what I called 'compositions. Before accepting her position there, she worked as a stage photographer for the Theatre Festival of Avignon.
Varda's still photography sometimes inspired her subsequent motion pictures. And I started making films with the sole experience of photography, that's to say, where to place the camera, at what distance, with which lens and what lights? I made a film in called Ulysse , which is based on another photograph I took in , one I'd made with the same bellows camera, and I started Ulysse with the words, 'I used to see the image upside down.
In , Varda joined the gallery Nathalie Obadia. Varda's filmmaking career predates the French New Wave, but contains many elements specific to that movement. She later said that she wrote her first screenplay "just the way a person writes his first book.
