She emerged from – or even kick-started – the French New Wave, but Agnès Varda modestly and mischievously redefines the idea of the ‘auteur’. At the start of her most recent film, The Beaches of Agnès, an autobiographical documentary, she muses on how she might go about her project, given that she is interested in other people, not in herself.
Beaches is Varda’s JLG par JLG, an idiosyncratic (anti-)portrait that paradoxically refuses the ideal of the all-powerful director even as it captures the eternally curious, inclusive, collaborative integrity that has shaped Varda’s films since her début, La Pointe Courte (1951).
A pedestrian love story that prefigured Jules et Jim, Pointe is the first of Varda’s watchful portraits of a place and its people. It was followed by Daguerrotypes (1974-75), a minutely-detailed and loving study of the ‘types’ living around her on the Rue Daguerre in Paris; and Mur Murs (1980), a documentary about LA graffiti artists, which blends Varda’s patient eye with the neighbourhood repping of early hip-hop videos.
Its title bears out Varda’s love for puns, both verbal and visual, that structure her films’ idiosyncratic logic. Like the New Wave filmmakers, Varda has consistently experimented with narrative structure; it’s not the seemingly strict ‘real time’ of Cléo de 5 à 7 (1961) that provides the film’s thrilling tension, but how the subjective experience of time blurs interior and exterior realities (including a fantastical silent film-within-film starring JLG himself).
Cléo is paradigmatic of Varda’s female protagonists: the minute observation of her daily life is shaped by the filmmaker’s fascination with other people, yet, New Wave woman that she is, Cléo retains her mystery. Mona Bergeron, the protagonist of Sans toit ni loit (1985), Varda’s subsequent major fiction film, is another study in unknowability: her body is discovered at the start of the film, which then consists of interviews with characters who met the withdrawn young wanderer, brilliantly played by Sandrine Bonnaire.
When Jane Birkin played herself for Varda in Jane B. par Agnès V. (1986-87), it’s not celebrity that’s on screen but the amazing complexity of the human being. As Beaches reveals, Varda was a major player in French cinema and culture while remaining an outsider able to document it. She got her break photographing the Avignon festival, and was introduced to the Cahiers critics (who went on to form the New Wave) by Alain Resnais, who edited Pointe. Like her husband Jacques Demy, she worked with actors Catherine Deneuve and Michel Piccoli (on Les Créatures [1965]) and composer Michel Legrand. In Beaches, she celebrates the couple’s friendship with Delphine Seyrig; one moment, Varda and Seyrig are protesting for women’s reproductive rights, the next she is transformed in Demy’s Peau d’ane “from feminist to fairy.”
As the star-studded Les 101 nuits (1994), with Piccoli as M. Cinéma, shows, Varda loves cinema’s enchantment, its ability to turn Birkin into Charlie Chaplin, or a misshapen potato into a work of art, as Varda’s digital camera does in Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000). But more than that, her films celebrate the more profound magic of looking, whether its the painstaking reconstruction of Demy’s childhood memories (as echoed in his films) in Jacquot de Nantes (1990), or her return visits to the gleaners and interviews with Les glaneurs’ viewers in Deux ans après (2002).
Beaches is an essay in such observational returns, including tantalisiing footage from her never-screened earlier autobiographical film Nausicaa (1970). Perhaps Beaches’ sweetest testament to Varda’s charm as a human being, as well as to her skill as a filmmaker, is that several of the extras who still live in La Pointe Courte agreed to appear in Beaches, even making Varda an honorary member of their jousting society, with a diminutive lance and shield to match her stature. Her physical stature, that is, which is perhaps what inculcated the modest way of seeing that enabled her to see and make magic from what others neglect.
This essay is a continuation of the print feature, Persons Unknown, in the current issue. Look out for subsequent essays on Charles Burnett, Rouben Mamoulian, Bill Douglas and Djibril Diop Mambéty.
