THE BEACHES OF AGNES (Agnes Varda, France, 2008)
‘If you opened people up, you would find landscapes; if you opened me up, you would find beaches. Many old people wish to tell their life. As an old filmmaker, with the enthusiasm and energy of my youth, I tried to find a style and a form to tell my memories, my encounters, the ups and downs of my life. I shot my film as a kaleidoscope, a collage, a fantasy.’- Agnès Varda
I saw this film on Saturday at the London Film Festival. It was fascinating - the director’s rich and playful approach to collaging her memories, mixing footage from past films with photos of her past life, scenes of the past recreated very obviously in the present with clear poetic licence, ’dreams’ of an imagined past and present, footage of the present day including footage which exposes the process of her making The Beaches of Agnes…..narration throughout, holding it all together.
A real balancing act - and she pulled it off. How then?
(a) her life is damn interesting - her own film making career including features, shorts, fiction and non-fiction, and her connections with the world of film and of filmmakers- Goddard, Chris Marker, Jaques Demy her late partner, and many others.
(b) she knows her parameters and sticks to them - eg the film is about things that happened directly to her. So, when the question comes up about what was going on in France in May 1968 she says simply - I wasn’t there - this is what was happening to me in 1968… [she was in America at the time].
(b) she approaches the whole thing with both humour and confidence. Confidence that her story is worth telling, which it is, and humour as she plays with ways of telling/showing a memory, how subjective it can be, being prepared to uncober something you didn’t expect. Eg.what happens if you go chasing memories and find they are not there ? -She visits her childhood home and finds nothing that moves her, nothing to say about it. Instead, she seizes the opportunity to film a family who have recently moved in - and the film takes us on a brief but interesting tangent into their world. So, she celebrates chance…and being open to chances and changes.
(c) some of the most memorable scenes are the ‘fantasie’ pieces such as in the still above, where she imagines her production company transported to a beach where they continue to make telephone calls, order prints etc. But this beach has been created in the middle of a french town street. The sand has been shovelled in, Wooden seagulls fly over head. These scenes are always short, give us a colourful burst that shows the director’s creativity but never becomes self induldgent. She is constantly playing with her and exposing her own conceits eg in this scene, they film the arrival of the rain and the covering of everything with tarpaulins.
Bronia
3 years ago • Notes