The Beaches of Agnès

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