In praise of The Beach­es of Agnès

About halfway through The Beach­es of Agnès, direc­tor Agnés Var­da casu­al­ly describes her idea of the film while over­see­ing the set-up of an exhi­bi­tion of pho­tographs from her pre-film­mak­ing days. ​“This whole idea of frag­men­ta­tion appeals to me. It cor­re­sponds so nat­u­ral­ly to ques­tions of mem­o­ry.” Filmed around the time she turned 80 years old, this is a sprawl­ing, exper­i­men­tal, auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal project struc­tured around a series of art exhibits, dra­mat­ic recre­ations and installations.

It takes place in and around the sea­side land­scapes of Varda’s past, rang­ing from the shores of La Pointe-Court in Sète (the loca­tion of her fea­ture debut) and the banks of the Seine in Paris, to the Cal­i­for­nia coast­line. As she moves through these spaces, Var­da, a for­ma­tive film­mak­er of the French New Wave, con­sid­ers how the key moments of her life have influ­enced and been affect­ed by her work.

Frag­men­ta­tion and reflec­tion are recur­ring motifs through­out the film. Varda’s hand­held dig­i­tal cam­era, a fix­ture since 2000’s The Glean­ers and I, lingers on images of frac­ture and decay. These can be the new­ly-repaired tiled floor of the pho­to exhi­bi­tion space, or the rem­nants of water dam­age that have splin­tered out into con­cen­tric cir­cles and are slow­ly tak­ing over a cor­ner of her ceil­ing at home.

The open­ing sequence finds Var­da and a young crew installing antique mir­rors of all sizes and in var­i­ous states of dete­ri­o­ra­tion around an over­cast beach. Some are mount­ed on makeshift easels made of drift wood. Oth­ers are buried in the sand with only a glimpse of shiny sur­faces peek­ing through the gran­ules. The rest sit dan­ger­ous­ly close to the surf, soon to be washed away as high tide rolls in. The mir­rors reflect, and so too does Var­da: her ear­li­est child­hood rec­ol­lec­tions are now just fleet­ing impres­sions and emo­tions, also in dan­ger of being swept away by time and tide.

Going beyond sim­ply recount­ing events, Var­da inter­ro­gates the very exer­cise of dis­cern­ing objec­tive truth from mem­o­ry. Dra­mat­ic re-enact­ment is culled from dis­parate ele­ments — archival evi­dence, first-hand tes­ti­mo­ny and the occa­sion­al bit of artis­tic license. These modes of com­mu­ni­ca­tion can pro­duce an emo­tion­al­ly authen­tic ren­der­ing of the past, if not a fac­tu­al­ly accu­rate one.

For exam­ple, the DIY nature of Ciné-Tamaris, the com­pa­ny Var­da found­ed to pro­duce and dis­trib­ute her own films, is depict­ed by recre­at­ing the pro­duc­tion office in the mid­dle of a bustling town square sur­round­ed by mounds of sand — it’s a new beach of Varda’s own mak­ing. Film images are them­selves are also frag­ments of time. Still images cap­tured on cel­lu­loid or dig­i­tal devices serve as the trace evi­dence of some ver­sion of the past. Var­da has remarked on the muta­bil­i­ty of filmic time when she char­ac­terised her­self as anoth­er sort of glean­er in The Glean­ers and I.

She is a glean­er of images, of time and mem­o­ry, pick­ing and choos­ing which to immor­talise and which to leave on the cut­ting room floor, for­ev­er lost and even­tu­al­ly for­got­ten. She returns to the pho­tog­ra­phy exhib­it and is over­whelmed by the grief of see­ing long-dead friends and loved ones in these images. They are rean­i­mat­ed as youths. Lat­er she reflects on her need to film her late hus­band, the French direc­tor Jacques Demy, dur­ing the final years of his life (a project which would become the 1991 qua­si-doc­u­men­tary biog­ra­phy, Jacquot de Nantes). ​“As a film­mak­er, my only option was to film him in extreme close-up: his skin, his eye, his hair like a land­scape, his hands, his spots. I need­ed to do this, take these images of him, of his very mat­ter. Jacques dying, but Jacques still alive.” The flesh dies, but film endures, though only as frag­ment of a life that once was.

To bor­row from André Bazin (co-founder of Cahiers du ciné­ma and con­tem­po­rary of Jean-Luc Godard, François Truf­faut and Var­da her­self), film is ​“preser­va­tion of life by a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of life.” So too is The Beach­es of Agnès. It is Varda’s attempt to cap­ture and pre­serve some­thing of her­self on film, in her own terms. Indeed, much of her late career work (includ­ing this her most recent, Faces Places) has been devot­ed to the project of doc­u­ment­ing and reflect­ing on her age­ing body much in the same way as she did for Demy.

In the com­plet­ed art instal­la­tion, Var­da employs reels of film stock (sal­vaged from a failed and long aban­doned pro­duc­tion) unfurled and stretched to cov­er the emp­ty frame of a shack-like struc­ture. Sun­light shines through the prints, mim­ic­k­ing light from a pro­jec­tor, though the images are now frozen in time (a lit­er­al depic­tion of ​“change [or time] mum­mi­fied” as Bazin would put it). Inside the ​“cin­e­ma-shack” Var­da sits on a stool made from film can­is­ters and artic­u­lates the con­cept behind the instal­la­tion: ​“In here, it feels like I live in cin­e­ma. Cin­e­ma is my home. I think I’ve always lived in it.”

The Beach­es of Agnès plays as part of Light Show #1 – a sea­son of films on 35mm curat­ed by MUBI, the ICA and Lit­tle White Lies. The film screens on Sun­day 10 Decem­ber at 3pm. Book tick­ets here.