Reviews Agnès Varda: A Life Through Film
I was privileged enough on 7th September to attend the preview screening of Agnès Varda’s latest film, Les plages d’Agnès/The Beaches of Agnès, held at the independent cinema, Curzon Soho, London candida treatment. Viewing a film from a director as prestigious and well-renowned as Agnès Varda is an exciting prospect in itself, so when I was informed that there was also to be a Question & Answer session after the film with the so-called ‘grandmother’ of the 1960s French New Wave movement, I really did feel like all my Christmases had come at once. One of the first questions Varda was asked after the screening was what she now considers herself to be, having worked as a photographer, filmmaker, and artist. Her reply needed not even a moment of consideration: “I have been making films for 55 years now,” she recalled, “so I am a filmmaker.”
The five decades that Agnès Varda’s filmmaking has spanned is certainly an undeniably impressive feat, but what really resonates with the above statement is the simple and unquestionable claim that she is, in every sense of the word, a filmmaker. In her films – more so than in almost any other director’s – it is indisputably clear that filmmaking is not something that Agnès Varda just does, it’s something that she is; it sculpts her just as she has sculpted it. Her life has been lived for and through the cinema, the medium and the very notion of herself now completely inextricable from the other. And it is with regards to Varda’s complex and intimate relationship with film that there is no better culmination than her latest autobiographical, quasi-documentary, The Beaches of Agnès.
Varda has previously stated that she is “always very precisely implicated in [her] films, not through narcissism but through honesty in [her] approach.” Nowhere is this more honesty apparent than in The Beaches of Agnès. She declares at the very beginning of the film that if you were to open her up, you would find beaches, and it is from this initial point that Varda does just that, using the medium of film – and indeed, the visual metaphor of many mirrors – to lay herself out for all to see. Just as she cl...
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