A Thousand and One Smithereens

		A Thousand and One Smithereens Yvette Bíró

The way that this endless series of marvellous images and events evokes the famous fairy tale of the Thousand and One Nights is not accidental. Agnès Varda’s unclassifiable new film Les plages d’Agnès (2008) enchants us in the same way that Scheherazade may have bewitched her powerful sultan. In this new succession of fascinating events and unforgettable protagonists, Agnès V. seems inexhaustible in her recounting of reminiscences, associations, dreams and insights.

It is not a story, but a flood of countless fragments and flowing memory images which are complemented by Varda’s playful and/or melancholic remarks, quoting from her own oeuvre. An enormous number of people and observations whirl by on the screen. Joy and mourning, whimsical and heartfelt comments enrich the senses. Far-flung yet never self-indulgent, her own wondering discoveries are floating, as is the spectator’s delight.

Since Varda’s vision is always poetic, she irremediably looks through her lens: the camera-mirror interprets and frames the whole world. She deliberately starts her movie with a kind of prologue, in which a ‘thousand and one’ mirrors are placed all around the beaches she adores so much, from Belgium, to Sète (where she was born), to Paris, Los Angeles, Noirmoutier ... The mirrors represent an exceptionally fine and paradoxical mode of reflection: at once both true and artificial, both direct and indirect. They bring life to what was once stored and recorded as partial image, now suddenly resurrected; however, they radiate the aura of the vivid present. Moreover, each frame reminds us of the creative gesture, never concealing how the content was shaped. Whether they are family photos, souvenirs from the visit to an old house, or her own children or grandchildren, neighbors or protagonists, she owns the memorial traces and offers them to us freely, as a personal gift. Their quality is precisely the same as that of the other scenes: alive and ephemeral.

Autobiographical? Certainly – but narrated with a most unexpected creative freedom, as in a poem or a collage. Retrospection and self-questioning accompany honesty in addressing the spectator. She shares her unbelievable freshness of eighty years with us. ‘I am playing a small, chubby, chatting “oldie” who tells the story of her life’, she ironically announces. We are invited to be her partners and accomplices on the journey – and this connivance creates warmth and an amusing intimacy.

1. Varda par Agnès (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1994), p. 39.

What an always-surprising flexibility! For disorder follows the emotional drive of her recollection. The family photos, when you see past the images, recall the tender but bygone relationships with parents, sisters and brothers; the landscapes, the beaches, here and there – the memories of shooting her films. She remembers how once she was in Sète, already sensitive about the opposing nature of things; while working on her first movie, La Pointe Courte (1954), she remarked: ‘On the side of men and the side of women, the black and the white, the wood and the iron, the world of reality, coming from the observed people, and the mental world in which the vagabond spirit invents structures and forms’. (1) Thus, there is no great difference in her work between the real and the fictional, the documentary and the imaginary; for example Vagabond (1985), which is entirely fictional, including the interviews, although its texture is documentary. Varda likes to blend them together, so much so that at times we simply cannot tell whether the film is a personal journal or an essay, using actors or non-professional performers, putting together both new and past impressions which are triggered by current, contingent happenings.

Yet, interestingly enough, there is a kind of chronology to be followed in Les plages d’Agnès. From childhood to professional career, to the relationship with ‘Jacquot de Nantes’ (Jacques Demy), a real-life experience is present, with the man she loved and whom she faithfully accompanied until his death, and about whom she made a feature-length biography as well as several reconstructive documentaries. As the years have passed, her favorite places (metaphorically expanded as plages or beaches) recur, with herself as an ever-returning, devoted visitor. She is physically present, both in the past and the present while making this movie – daring to leave room for improvisation, enacting some funny or attractive scenes (like on the boat on the Seine), or inviting the collaborators of her company (Ciné-Tamaris) to ‘play with her’.

It would be almost impossible to categorise the many genres of Varda’s filmmaking: from commissioned shorts to poetic reflections, from installations to ‘classical’ fiction. They are coherent, always bearing the mark of the strong and lovable personality of Agnès V. herself. We can go back to the years of her apprenticeship, in the theatre with Jean Vilar, Alain Resnais and Gérard Philipe; or listening to Bachelard, bringing Chris Marker to the screen in his famous effigy. She is never alone, always surrounded by people she likes, filling the screen with her notes, gestures or compassionate sentiments, as in the case of the widows from Noirmoutier – like in one of her disarming recent installations, She and He, where she includes herself as a modest, never self-indulgent participant, having become one of them. (See my article in Rouge 9.)

2. ibid, p. 267.

Her home, on the rue Daguerre, becomes a specific landscape as well, playfully set as the film’s location. Another way of reconstituting the inner self, a surreal image emerges concerning dreamy lovemaking on the shore of the river, enacted as on stage, with the hands of guardian angels pulling back the curtain ... Surreal images are frequent in her movies (7p., cuis., s. de b., ... à saisir, 1984) in order ‘to bring to life the sensation of family: warmth, protection, interdiction ... and the gentleness ... the bathroom of innocence, with an old nude, with the sleep of the feather and the tenderness of the snow’. (2) When she quotes the scene in Plages, the short clip becomes a musical moment, an exceptional pause, touching the spectator with this bizarre and sensual interruption. And other clips from the marvelous Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961) or Le Bonheur (1964) conjure up all the lyricism of her vision: the melancholy of Parc Monceau in Cléo or the bucolic countryside in Le Bonheur – they are more than excerpts, they are organic parts of the film’s fabric.

Mocking herself provides the delicious juice of the movie, never however concealing the sorrow or the indelible pain that accompanies this joyful spirit. ‘Everybody’s autobiography’ (to borrow the title of Gertrud Stein’s memoir), in which she pays homage to the art of cinema itself, described as ‘light maintained by images’. Varda’s moving cinécriture (her favorite, self-coined expression) illuminates the many facets of her own indefatigable and emotionally rich existence. ‘Remembering happiness is itself a bit of happiness’, she says. This is true for us all.

		© Yvette Bíró and Rouge February 2009. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors.