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. 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 claims, this approach never comes across as narcissistic, but rather touchingly and endearingly honest, with an emotional immediacy that makes you feel privileged to laugh or feel melancholy alongside her. Starting at the beginning of her life, she takes us through her journey chronologically, using a mixture of documentary footage, fiction film, photography, and fictional reconstructions to depict her life’s events. Varda physically walks backwards while facing the camera, leading the audience directly into her past.

In this cinematic exploration of her life, she returns to themes that have consistently reappeared throughout her oeuvre—time, memory and loss. As early as Cléo de 5 à 7/Cleo from 5 to 7 in 1962 – one of Varda’s most well-known films – time has been an important thematic concern. The film, released at the height of the New Wave period, utilises a clock to mark the minutes passed, forcing the audience to remain conscious of the unstoppable progression of time. In The Beaches of Agnès, the theme of time takes on a new dimension of sadness as it becomes attached personally to Varda and the fact that at 80 years of age, her time is running out. As she mentions in the Question & Answer session, her very motivation for making the film was the feeling that when she was 78, she could see the age of 80 “attacking” her, as she described it. Focusing on the issue of her own demise is something that Varda has previously explored in her 2002 film, Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse/The Gleaners and I, where she compares herself to decaying vegetables as she refers, again, to the endless marching of time.

To this concern of time, the themes of memory and loss and are inextricably tied. Throughout the film, Varda often comes back to discuss the fragmented nature of memory, likening it to a swarm of flies that float around as fragments rather than forming any coherent or ordered whole. It seems clear that this film was made in an attempt to capture memories and moments from Varda’s life before they had the chance to fade or be distorted any further; preserving them on film before they could be lost in time.

The film documents Varda’s mourning for a series of lost loved ones, the most tragic and painful case being that of her late husband, Jacques Demy, whose death is conveyed as having left her suffering from a profound sense of loss. As he was dying, she explains how she felt compelled to film every inch of his face in extreme close-up. She says, “It was Jacques dying, but it was also Jacques still alive.” Coupled with the fact that she made a film about Demy’s early life during his final period, the emotional weight that the medium of film carries for Varda is clear: using it to document, and thus preserve, the essence of the loved ones that she sadly no longer has any real and physical access to. The sequences in which she talks of Demy are deeply bittersweet as you can feel the genuine warmth and affection of a relationship that is now tainted by its irretrievability. With the distortion of memory that she frequently returns to discuss, it is made clear that film and photography are now the only avenues through which she can gain access to a true and objective moment in which they both existed together.

Agnès Varda beautifully comments upon cinema’s power to capture a single, fleeting moment in time in a sequence where she documents a couple up the beach together, walking away from the camera. They hold hands while they each drag a deckchair behind them, simultaneously leaving their mark in the sand. Just as the impermanent and fragile lines that the couple mark in the sand will soon fade and be lost, so too will that moment in time become forever unreachable outside of the film that has captured it. In capturing a moment of tenderness between two loved ones – a moment that Varda admits makes her feel a “twinge of jealousy” – the personal importance of cinema, to Varda, is revealed once again through this intelligently encapsulating visual metaphor.

While some of the more breathtaking parts of the film are tinged with a heavy sadness, it would be unfair not to mention the many moments of sheer joy that Varda regularly injects into the film. Despite the pain that she’s suffered throughout her life, Varda certainly hasn’t lost her sense of humour. From trying to manoeuvre a small cardboard car to dressing up as a potato in order to publicise her art, there is a sense of child-like playfulness that often endearingly pervades the screen.

As Varda has previously stated, “This is my aim: to be loved as a filmmaker because I want to share emotions, to share the pleasure of being a filmmaker." Even if a case was to be made for Varda having not met this aim in her work before The Beaches of Agnès – a case which, I have to admit, I think one would struggle to make – after this film, it is undeniable that Varda has completely achieved what she set out to do. So when she mentions after the screening that the film may well end up being her last, it is, of course, in some ways disappointing, but at the same time the decision is deeply satisfying, as there could not be a more perfectly encapsulating work for Varda to end her filmmaking career with. While it is sad that audiences will never again experience that excited anticipation – just as I did – at the thought of seeing a new Varda film, she does leave behind her an astounding body of work for which film enthusiasts everywhere can be eternally grateful. The honesty, warmth and integrity that the director’s cinema bursts with will certainly live on in cinema history for many years to come, ensuring that Agnès Varda, is known now and remembered forever, as a filmmaker.