Along the Coast

At first glance, it would be tempting to believe that Agnès Varda's Du côté de la côte is a simple tourist film intended to promote the exotic splendors of the French Riviera (it was commissioned by the French Tourist Office). It is in fact a much more subtle and subversive film than it seems. Traveling through Nice, Cannes and Saint-Tropez, Varda fulfills her mandate by sublimely photographing the attractions of this region of southern France and its equally colorful tourist fauna. For it is not the local population that interests us here, but rather the mass of people who migrate to the coast every year, in search of a certain Eden, and have done so for decades. The filmmaker draws up a rather impressive inventory of the many artists who have visited the coast in search of inspiration over the years, from Nietzsche to Matisse, to name but a few. Architecture also plays an important role and testifies to the hierarchy of tourism - for there is indeed a hierarchy of tourism; the numerous villas and large hotels that populate the coast are proof of this. By filming, for example, a series of fences and barriers closing in on the idyllic setting of huge private gardens, Varda reminds us that access to these holiday resorts is reserved for a handful of privileged people, and that, "if these reveries are collective, the gardens are not public. The false Eden is not for us, nor is Eden."

Frédéric Savard
Archivist and programmer