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“If we opened me, we’d find beaches.” So says Agnès Varda in Varda by Agnès, the final work in a filmography that spanned over 60 years. As we see in the documentary, we’d find an awful lot of other things too.
Varda started her professional life as a photographer, taking portraits of both famous and regular folk, and that fascination with people and images followed her through her career. As such, the leap to feature films was a natural progression, and she swiftly became the only major female director of the French New Wave; some posit she even “invented” the movement with her first movie, 1955’s La Pointe Courte. While Varda was initially best known for her narrative features, foremost among them Cléo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond, she actually made many more documentaries, especially during her later decades.
The last of them, Varda by Agnès, takes the form of a lecture—though a lecture as lively, warm and wry as the woman delivering it. Varda, 90 years old but as sharp and funny as ever, sits on stage in a theater, talking about her career in front of an audience largely consisting of young film students. She skips back and forth through her filmography, throwing chronology to the wind, dedicating as much time to her lesser-known works as to her big hits. In the last half-hour or so, she discusses her photography, and her later life turn towards video installation (it was typical of Varda’s perennial creative, playful innovation that she should start and excel at a different artistic medium well into her 70s.)
Despite the humble form, for the mere fact of its existence, Varda by Agnès is a remarkable document. To have a legend on the level of Varda talk at great, glorious length about her game-changing work—what drove her, what inspires her—and to have that talk recorded for posterity, is both hugely valuable and rare. All too often important directors go off the boil in their later years, or don’t even make it that far in the first place. Varda kept working at her best all the way to the end of her long life. That she died just before her final film made it to a global theatrical release meant that Varda by Agnès played as if she was eulogizing herself. And who better to do it?!
Several throughlines emerge. For one thing, Varda knew that she was easy to underestimate. At 4’9”, and in her later decades with an iconic two-tone bowl haircut giving her the aura of the coolest grandma imaginable, she presented no threat.
“I intimidated no one. I never have. It gave me the chance to meet people.” She interviewed the Black Panthers at the peak of their powers. She induced Andy Warhol to persuade his muse Viva to appear in Lion’s Love. She got Robert De Niro to fly to France for a single scene in One Hundred and One Nights, and learn his French lines phonetically (and this was the same year he made both Casino and Heat!). However sweet and grandmotherly she may have appeared, Varda knew how to use that image to get what she wanted.
That elevation of regular people to the status of celebrities proved a striking mission statement for Varda’s work. This is taken most literally in 2017’s Faces Places (the film most often excerpted in Varda by Agnès) which saw Varda and visual artist JR wander around France meeting everyday townsfolk, learning their stories, taking their pictures and printing them on an enormous scale, then placing them in public areas for everyone to enjoy. No-one, no matter how seemingly ordinary, could escape her relentless curiosity.
Even in her fiction films, she always made room for her fascination with the quotidian spectacle of normal people going about the business of their lives, like the fishermen of La Pointe Courte, or the street performers in Cléo From 5 to 7. In Varda by Agnès, the director discusses shooting The Beaches of Agnès, another autobiographical documentary, made for the occasion of her turning 80. She wanted to go back and film her childhood home, and there she discovered a couple with an incredible collection of model trains: “I made a documentary about them.” After she says this, there’s a warm smattering of laughter in the audience—by this point, the omnivorousness of her interest has been so constant a character, it works as a punchline.
Finally, though, it’s the sea that Varda keeps returning to, and that she makes the final shot of her long career. La Pointe Courte was set in the coastal village of Sète, where she lived as a teenager. Early shorts Uncle Yanco, Along the Coast and Ulysse are set on or by the sea; so are pivotal scenes in Kung-Fu Master and Vagabond, and her video installations The Widows of Noirmoutier, L’Île et Elle, and Bord Du Mer. However different the movies were in form and content, however many years passed in between them, Varda could never keep away from the coast for too long.
The Beaches of Agnès was so named because she had lived by beaches her whole life, and considered them a fitting way of approaching an autobiographical documentary that she, at the time, thought would be her final feature-length movie.
As we know now though, she made two more, and Varda chooses to end her actual swan song with a sequence from its predecessor. In the clip from Faces Places, Varda and JR stick an enormous picture of her long-passed friend Guy Bourdin, who was with her when she took the photo that inspired Ulysse, on the side of a crumbling cliff face by the sea where that photo was originally taken. When the two of them visit the next morning, the waves have washed it away.
It’s easy to imagine how the sea’s equalizing magnitude, its constant reminder of how fragile we all are, would appeal to Varda, the most humanistic of directors. But there are other reasons too.
“The opposite of a wall is a beach,” she says late in her final documentary, contrasting her disgust at the inhumanity of the French government walling up belongings of squatters (a subject of her video installation, Paroles de Squatteurs), with the open, free, democratic space that is the seaside. It’s a place of joy and a place of consolation; a source of wild creativity, and of quiet reflection. The seaside is for everyone.
The same could be said for the work of Agnès Varda.
Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.