The Beaches of Agnès
‘I’m playing the role of a little old lady telling her life story.’ So begins The Beaches of Agnès, Agnès Varda’s whimsical and lovely autobiographical documentary, which is released in the UK on 2 October. (Varda will be talking about her life and work at 5.00pm on Saturday 17 October as part of Frieze Talks 2009.)
Addressing the camera or watching on while childhood scenes are playfully re-enacted, the 80-year-old filmmaker visits locations from her life – both filmed and private – as the memoir shifts between archival footage (unfinished early projects as well as her better-known films) and gentle flights of fancy involving family and friends.
Though roughly chronological, The Beaches of Agnès proceeds via these loose associations, circling around the several beaches that Varda sees her life as returning to – from the Belgian seaside of her childhood (Varda was christened Arlette after Arles, the town in which she was conceived, though changed her name at 18); Venice Beach, California where she lived with her husband, the director Jacques Demy, between 1967 and 1977; and Paris, where a streetside beach is fabricated in lieu of an actual coastline. One of the film’s many joys is the way in which the films of her contemporaries are interspersed – Demy (who is a palpable though largely silent presence throughout), Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais and Varda’s ‘friend and interlocutor’ Chris Marker. The latter, whose preoccupations with time and the lure of images is the clearest equivalent for the film’s technique, is represented by an orange cartoon cat – I’m guessing an in-joke about his 2004 film The Case of the Grinning Cat.
In a Q&A following a screening of the film in London on Monday evening, Varda discussed how she has always seen memory as a process of slow fragmentation. Though playful in approach – props are often little more than cardboard cut-outs – the film’s retrospective gaze deals with both the horror of forgetting and living on through celluloid. ‘While I live, I remember’, Varda states simply, towards the end of the film. Wise and uninhibited, she’s also an entertaining speaker – when asked why, exactly, she changed her name, Varda said: ‘All names that end with “-ette” I think are ridiculous. If I had been conceived in London I’d have been called Londonette or something…’
Varda showed at the Venice Biennale in 2003 and, more recently, at the Fondation Cartier; though she refers to herself as ‘a young artist and an old filmmaker’, presenting work in an exhibition context is a kind of return for Varda, who spent her 20s more involved with art than with film (after having studied art history at the Louvre, an early job was photographing and retouching Rodin sculptures). However, when asked whether she now considers herself more artist than filmmaker, she responded drily: ‘My first film was in 1954. I’ve been making films for 55 years – I think I’m a filmmaker, non?’
‘I’m playing the role of a little old lady telling her life story.’ So begins The Beaches of Agnès, Agnès Varda’s whimsical and lovely autobiographical documentary, which is released in the UK on 2 October. (Varda will be talking about her life and work at 5.00pm on Saturday 17 October as part of Frieze Talks 2009.)
Addressing the camera or watching on while childhood scenes are playfully re-enacted, the 80-year-old filmmaker visits locations from her life – both filmed and private – as the memoir shifts between archival footage (unfinished early projects as well as her better-known films) and gentle flights of fancy involving family and friends.
Though roughly chronological, The Beaches of Agnès proceeds via these loose associations, circling around the several beaches that Varda sees her life as returning to – from the Belgian seaside of her childhood (Varda was christened Arlette after Arles, the town in which she was conceived, though changed her name at 18); Venice Beach, California where she lived with her husband, the director Jacques Demy, between 1967 and 1977; and Paris, where a streetside beach is fabricated in lieu of an actual coastline. One of the film’s many joys is the way in which the films of her contemporaries are interspersed – Demy (who is a palpable though largely silent presence throughout), Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais and Varda’s ‘friend and interlocutor’ Chris Marker. The latter, whose preoccupations with time and the lure of images is the clearest equivalent for the film’s technique, is represented by an orange cartoon cat – I’m guessing an in-joke about his 2004 film The Case of the Grinning Cat.
In a Q&A following a screening of the film in London on Monday evening, Varda discussed how she has always seen memory as a process of slow fragmentation. Though playful in approach – props are often little more than cardboard cut-outs – the film’s retrospective gaze deals with both the horror of forgetting and living on through celluloid. ‘While I live, I remember’, Varda states simply, towards the end of the film. Wise and uninhibited, she’s also an entertaining speaker – when asked why, exactly, she changed her name, Varda said: ‘All names that end with “-ette” I think are ridiculous. If I had been conceived in London I’d have been called Londonette or something…’
Varda showed at the Venice Biennale in 2003 and, more recently, at the Fondation Cartier; though she refers to herself as ‘a young artist and an old filmmaker’, presenting work in an exhibition context is a kind of return for Varda, who spent her 20s more involved with art than with film (after having studied art history at the Louvre, an early job was photographing and retouching Rodin sculptures). However, when asked whether she now considers herself more artist than filmmaker, she responded drily: ‘My first film was in 1954. I’ve been making films for 55 years – I think I’m a filmmaker, non?’
