The Beaches of Agnès


Poster image The Beaches of Agnès

By revisiting the beaches that have marked her life, Varda creates a form of documentary self-portrait. She stages herself amidst excerpts from her films, images, and reports, sharing with humor and emotion her beginnings as a theater photographer, then as an innovative filmmaker in the 1950s. She also shares the story of her life with Jacques Demy, her feminist activism, her travels to Cuba, China, and the United States, her journey as an independent producer, her family life, and her love of beaches.


Multi-devices

Product unavailable

The autobiographical and biographical are at the heart of Agnès Varda's work, just as much as portrait and self-portrait. Throughout her photographic and cinematic practice, from her very beginnings, in both fiction and documentary, fragments of her life, the lives of those she loves, and the people around her, both near and far, permeate her films in a succession of generations marking the passage of time, with its living and its dead. In The Beaches of Agnès, the late, great French filmmaker revisits all of this, haphazardly, using the pretext of the beach as a representation of the notion of self-portrait. For Agnès, these beaches are both geographical, of sand and sea, where she grew up in Sète, where she loved her great love Jacques Demy in Noirmoutier, and found herself all over the world, from Venice, California to the Croisette... and metaphorical, corresponding to the non-geographical definitions of the word: "a period of time occupied by an activity in a schedule" or a "gap, interval, space, latitude between two elements, two possibilities" (Larousse).

Using this motif, she embarks on an immense mise en abyme of her life and work — a terribly moving one, populated, motivated, and propelled by the multitude of digressions dear to her documentary style, yet faithful to the thread of her thoughts which constantly drive her narratives forward, then backward, and forward again, like the ebb and flow of waves caressing the beaches evoked. One could even call it a celebration of distraction when considering her films, and this one in particular. One moment by the water, the next revisiting her childhood home, moving from Sète to Paris in a single scene of a small sailboat, jumping from the small courtyard of her Parisian home to the Black Panthers, to the plates found at the flea market, to her friends from the Nouvelle Vague, to her children. All the disparate little things that make up a life. In essence, Varda's cinema is life itself!

 

 

Claire Valade
Critic and programmer


  • Français

    Français

    1h50

    Language: Français
  • Année 2008
  • Pays France
  • Durée 110
  • Producteur Ciné-Tamaris
  • Langue French
  • Résumé court By returning to the beaches that have marked her life, Agnès Varda explores her life and career memories with humor and emotion.
  • Mention festival Best documentary film · César 2009
  • Ordre 5

The autobiographical and biographical are at the heart of Agnès Varda's work, just as much as portrait and self-portrait. Throughout her photographic and cinematic practice, from her very beginnings, in both fiction and documentary, fragments of her life, the lives of those she loves, and the people around her, both near and far, permeate her films in a succession of generations marking the passage of time, with its living and its dead. In The Beaches of Agnès, the late, great French filmmaker revisits all of this, haphazardly, using the pretext of the beach as a representation of the notion of self-portrait. For Agnès, these beaches are both geographical, of sand and sea, where she grew up in Sète, where she loved her great love Jacques Demy in Noirmoutier, and found herself all over the world, from Venice, California to the Croisette... and metaphorical, corresponding to the non-geographical definitions of the word: "a period of time occupied by an activity in a schedule" or a "gap, interval, space, latitude between two elements, two possibilities" (Larousse).

Using this motif, she embarks on an immense mise en abyme of her life and work — a terribly moving one, populated, motivated, and propelled by the multitude of digressions dear to her documentary style, yet faithful to the thread of her thoughts which constantly drive her narratives forward, then backward, and forward again, like the ebb and flow of waves caressing the beaches evoked. One could even call it a celebration of distraction when considering her films, and this one in particular. One moment by the water, the next revisiting her childhood home, moving from Sète to Paris in a single scene of a small sailboat, jumping from the small courtyard of her Parisian home to the Black Panthers, to the plates found at the flea market, to her friends from the Nouvelle Vague, to her children. All the disparate little things that make up a life. In essence, Varda's cinema is life itself!

 

 

Claire Valade
Critic and programmer


  • Français

    Français


    Duration: 1h50
    Language: Français
    1h50
  • Année 2008
  • Pays France
  • Durée 110
  • Producteur Ciné-Tamaris
  • Langue French
  • Résumé court By returning to the beaches that have marked her life, Agnès Varda explores her life and career memories with humor and emotion.
  • Mention festival Best documentary film · César 2009
  • Ordre 5

Product added to cart

Mode:

Expires:

loader waiting image
loader waiting image