125

SFC 10 (2) pp. 125139 Intellect Limited 2010

Studies in French Cinema
Volume 10 Number 2
2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sfc.10.2.125_1
KEYWORDS
Les Plages dAgns
Agns Varda
autobiography
documentary
installations
Lle et elle
KELLEY CONWAY
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Varda at work: Les
Plages dAgns
ABSTRACT
Agns Vardas autobiographical documentary, Les Plages dAgns (2008), uses
techniques of collage and discontinuity to explore and memorialize her work in pho-
tography, film and multi-media installations. The film departs from the traditional
concerns of autobiographical documentary, such as the exploration of personal crisis,
in favour of an emphasis on Vardas aesthetic vision, her self-invention, and her
links to social and political history.
At the beginning of her film Les Plages dAgns/The Beaches of Agns (2008),
Agns Varda does a curious thing for someone who is telling her life story:
she works to distance her autobiographical documentary from the myth of
documentary truth. The very first shot of the film features Varda walking
backwards slowly on a beach. She announces, Im playing the role of a little
old woman, pleasantly plump and talkative, telling her life story. If Varda is
playing the role of a little old woman telling her life story, then the question
immediately arises: is this just one of the many roles she could play? Is there
another, truer version of Agns Varda that she is hiding from us?
Vardas documentaries have always emphasized the expressive aspects of
her engagement with her subject over and above the presumed neutrality of
the observational approach seen in films such as tre et avoir/To Be and to Have
(Nicholas Philibert, 2000) or the apparently unassailable authority of the clas-
sical expository documentary. From LOpra Mouffe (1958) to Oncle Yanco/Uncle
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Janco (1967), and from Daguerrotypes (1976) to Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse/The
Gleaners and I (2000), Varda has experimented with different ways of document-
ing the world and her trajectory through it. Documentary theorist Bill Nichols
would call her work performative: hybrid documentaries that foreground the
intervention of the director while combining a wide range of source materials,
such as interviews, archival footage and staged material (Nichols 1991). Yet Les
Plages dAgns is different from her previous work in the intensity of its autobio-
graphical impulse her subject is herself, unabashedly and in its style, which
reflects a more pronounced interest in discontinuity, staging and re-enactment.
Moreover, this film bears the influence of Vardas work in multi-media instal-
lations, with its layered compositions and digital effects. The film employs an
extremely wide range of source material, including family photographs, Vardas
own photography, clips from her films, contemporary interviews and staging
of many varieties. This diverse array of material results in a complex collage
structure. The film jumps from one source to another and moves backwards
and forwards through time, foregrounding discontinuity over a coherent and
chronological narrative. This jagged, jumpy quality has several functions in the
film, one of which is to obscure some major gaps in Vardas account of her life.
Like all autobiographies, written or filmed, Les Plages dAgns offers an inevitably
partial view of its authors personal story. A close look at the style and rhetoric
of the film reveals that Varda is not particularly interested in the traditional con-
cerns of the autobiographical documentary, such as the exploration of personal
crisis, the critique of the family or socio-political analysis. Les Plages dAgns
strives, above all, to assert Vardas status as an active, working, ever-evolving
artist, and to memorialize her uvre in photography, film and installations.
Figure 1: Paris Plage (courtesy of Cin Tamaris).
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Varda at work
127
The film is organized around the places that have been particularly impor-
tant to the film-maker: the beaches of her native Belgium, where she vaca-
tioned as a child; Ste, the fishing village in the south of France where she
lived as an adolescent during World War II and where she shot her first film,
La Pointe courte (1955); Noirmoutier, the island on the Atlantic coast where
she and Jacques Demy had a home; Los Angeles, her temporary home in the
late 1960s, and then again in the late 1970s; and the rue Daguerre in Paris,
where she has lived for more than 50 years, and which she transformed into a
temporary beach for the making of Les Plages dAgns. The beaches of Vardas
life are a handy device for structuring her cinematic autobiography, but they
are neither the only nor even the most important connecting tissue of the
film. Instead, references to her photographs, films and installations are the
glue that holds together its different parts. The result is a supple structure,
allowing for the constant insertion of references to events and to her work
from a range of periods of her life. At the same time, the films style is notable
for the startling array of material used: footage from the past and the present;
still and moving images; colour and black and white; archival images and re-
enacted material; and clips from Vardas own films and the work of others.
The complex ways in which shots and scenes are connected to one another
and the heterogeneous array of material used can clearly be seen in the first
section of the film, which recounts her childhood in Belgium. Analysis of these
early segments illuminates some of the ramifications of Vardas structural and
stylistic choices for Les Plages dAgns.
A FILM-MAKER AT WORK
Before we have time to contemplate the questions that the films prologue
raises about Vardas cinematic self-portrait, she walks quickly away from the
camera and across the sand, finished for the moment with the ruminative
commentary and with the dance-like, barefoot, backward walking. She is no
longer alone; she is with her crew, at work. She authoritatively instructs peo-
ple on where to place various objects on the beach. Soon it becomes apparent
that she is constructing an installation, or a rverie, as she calls it later in
the scene, consisting of mirrors on the beach. Mirrors of all sizes, some with
elaborate frames, others with peeling paint and old, spotted glass, are placed
near the water, reflecting one another, the sea, surfers walking by, the crew
and Varda herself. Complex compositions emerge while Varda jokes with the
crew. Now and then, she makes a brief reference to her parents. She muses
about one frame that reminds her of the armoire in her parents bedroom and
speaks of the music her parents liked. On the soundtrack is a brief excerpt
from her mothers favourite, Schuberts Unfinished Symphony. Sometimes
it is difficult to tell where the mirrors are in relation to one another, to the
sea and to Varda. Quite often we cannot tell where Varda is in relation to her
crew, such as the credit sequence in which she introduces her assistants by
capturing their faces, one by one, in a mirror. Sometimes we can see Varda in
the frame taking photographs of the mirrors. The scene culminates in a lateral
tracking shot that shows the mirrors in the foreground, the sea in the mid-
ground and boats in the background. The cameras movement ceases and the
shot concludes shortly after it reaches Varda, who pivots to face us while film-
ing with her video camera. Finally, there is a shot of Varda looking out at the
sea while sitting in a directors chair labelled with her name, thus confirming
the theme already established, Agns Varda at work.
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Figure 2: Varda creating mirror installation (courtesy of Cin Tamaris).
Figure 3: Miroir, miroir, dis-moi quelle est la plus calme des mers? (courtesy of Cin Tamaris).
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Varda at work
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This scene immediately references the work in which Varda has been
engaged since 2003, the making of multi-media installations that she exhibits
in galleries, museums and at the Venice Biennale. This particular reverie con-
tains many of the components that Varda would eventually use in her exhibi-
tion LA MER ETSETERA, which took place 8 April14 June 2009 in Ste.
The first work one encountered at the exhibition was the large installation
Miroir miroir, dis-moi quelle est la plus calme des mers? (Mirror mirror, tell
me which is the calmest sea?). This work is comprised of two large screens
onto which are projected two video loops containing images of the sea, the
beach, round mirrors, mirror frames and a wooden fence. Initially, the images
on the two video screens are exactly the same, but eventually, the symmetry
is broken. Also in the room are several huge mirrors that serve to create a
complex play of reflections of each other, the screen and the viewers of the
exhibition, much as they do in the prologue to Les Plages dAgns. The refer-
ence to her installations is important, as we shall see, for it situates Varda
as a working professional in general, and more particularly as an artist who
has been capable of working in several artistic environments, including pho-
tography, fiction film-making, documentary production and installation. The
films opening also reinforces the notion that Vardas self-portrait will not be
straightforward. Role-playing, staging and a certain degree of caginess on the
part of Varda will echo throughout the film. It is clear at this point that Varda
is hardly just a little old lady [] telling her life story. She is managing a
crew on location, composing images and only making minimal references to
her past at this point.
The scene following the prologue is organized roughly around Vardas
childhood vacations and her home in Belgium. As with the prologue, we begin
with contemporary footage of Varda talking on the beach. She displays a few
of her old family photographs, which are stuck into the sand as if to echo the
installation she created in the prologue. Varda explains that she is not nostal-
gic for her childhood, and that it is not an important reference or inspiration
for her. But, she says, she likes looking at photographs of her childhood and
she would love to see a little girl in this striped bathing suit and another in
the one with the big straps. We then move immediately from the image of
the black and white stills of Varda as a child on the beach to her contem-
porary video reconstruction of the scene. Two girls dressed in old-fashioned
swimsuits play with paper flowers and shells on the beach, just as Varda did
as a child. A smiling Varda enters the frame of the recreated childhood scene
only a few seconds into the shot. She ruefully admits, I dont know what it
is to recreate a scene like this. Do we relive the moment? For me its cinema,
its a game. Even as she doubts the possibility of recreating her own past in
a convincing fashion, she attempts it and makes of it what she can. She then
cuts to a video image of herself working on the installation she created in
2006, Tombeau de Zgougou (Zgougous Tomb). We see her arranging shells
and paper flowers in the sand, just like the girls we have just seen, but in this
case the scene is constructed for an elaborate homage to her beloved cat that
was part of Lle et elle (The Island/He and Her), her 2006 show of multi-
media installations at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. She created Tombeau de
Zgougou long before she returned to Belgium to shoot the re-enactment of
herself as a child, but now, she explains, she realizes the source of her inspira-
tion for the shells and paper flowers on the beach. So, while Vardas recrea-
tion of a scene from her youth has not exactly helped her to relive her youth,
or even to recreate convincingly the era for the viewer, it has helped Varda,
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and the viewer, by extension, to understand her inspiration for a recent multi-
media installation. Looking into the past helps Varda understand not her past
or present self, but her work. This is a rhetorical gesture that Varda will use, in
many different ways, throughout Les Plages dAgns. The events and the rela-
tionships of her life have certainly enriched her work, but it is her work, the
films structure and logic imply, that offers the richest record of her life.
Vardas weaving together of contemporary video footage with clips from
her large body of work is the films most notable stylistic feature. She tends
to begin a scene with video footage shot in the present in which she muses
about the passage of time or introduces a new location or era in her life, then
cuts to another set of images, either re-enacted or from one of her films, that
echoes in some way what she has said or shown. For example, the Belgium
section goes on to explore Vardas habit of putting elderly people in her films.
After the re-enactment of the girls at the beach, she says, in voice-over,
Imagining oneself as a child is like running backwards. Imagining oneself
ancient is funny, like a dirty joke. Accompanying this image is an unidentified
clip from her documentary Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse of Varda looking into an
elaborate, shell-covered mirror and seeing not her reflection, but a painting of
a womans face. Then we move immediately to a video image of a very elderly
woman walking on the beach with the help of a walker. Its a stylized, obvi-
ously crafted image: we watch the woman from behind a kind of plastic cur-
tain as she advances toward the camera with the help of her seaweed-covered
walker. In the subsequent shot, Varda is in the place of the very old woman,
pantomiming the act of moving with a walker. She explains directly to the
camera, I always liked bringing in old people, even very old people, senior
citizens and beyond, in my films, like in 7 Pices, salle de bain. Next, a brief clip
from that 1984 short film, 7 P., cuis., s. de b (A SAISIR)/7 rms, kitch., bthrm
bargain, shows an elderly, nude woman sitting in an apparently abandoned
house while feathers flutter to the floor all around her. Thus, looking back to
her childhood gives Varda the idea to look ahead and imagine herself, playfully,
as a very old woman; but the ultimate goal is to get us to her work: to be able
to point to one of her predilections in her films, the mise-en-scne of the old
body. She gestures toward her past, but this gesture is ultimately in the service
of reminding us, or introducing us to, elements of her body of work.
The next portion of Les Plages dAgns is ostensibly about Vardas father.
We return to Varda walking and talking on the beach. She recounts, And we
also came here for the casino. The presence of the casino on the beach moti-
vates the use of the next clip from a film directed by Varda, Jane B par Agns
V/Jane B. by Agnes V. (1988), a scene in which Jane Birkin plays a croupier at
a casino and Varda plays a gambler who is losing money. Birkins character
says to the character played by Varda, My, can you afford to lose so much?
This line from Jane B par Agns V sparks the revelation of the death of Vardas
father. Vardas explains in voice-over, I lost my father in this casino []
Eugne Jean Varda. He played, he lost, he fell down and he died. So, in this
case, it is first geography that motivates the clip we are on the beach where
the casino stands, which takes us to Jane B and then the use of word play
(lose/loss) motivates a commentary. The repetition of words, in this case, the
name of Vardas father, motivates the next shift in scene, as well. The next line,
Are you the daughter of Eugne Varda?, is from yet another of Vardas films:
Oncle Yanco, a short, playful documentary she made while living in California.
The subject of the film is Jean Varda, a Greek artist then living in Sausalito
who turns out to be her relative. It is significant that the clip she chose from
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131
Oncle Yanco shows the truncated, repeated and thus obviously staged meeting
between the two artists. Varda approaches the houseboat where Jean lives
several times while he repeats the question, sometimes in French and some-
times in Greek, Are you the daughter of Eugne Varda?. The insertion of this
clip reinforces the fact that Varda has long been interested in the possibilities
around playful staging in her films. Vardas uncle in Oncle Yanco then pro-
vides a brief explanation of the family tree before we return to contemporary
Varda on the beach. In a curious moment in Oncle Yanco, Varda states matter-
of-factly that when she was a child, she never knew that her father was of
Greek ancestry. Back in the present, Varda says that her father never offered
to take his family to visit Greece: We were raised like little French children in
Brussels. Instead of commenting upon her fathers complete and surprising
rupture with his own past, or on what sort of impact he exerted on her own
life, Varda moves ahead, preparing the way for the next scene.
She tells us that she received an invitation from a man who now lives in
her childhood home in Brussels. This, then, provides a transition to the next
scene: the visit to the house where she lived until the age of 11. There, she first
visits her back yard, which is recognizable to her, but fails to evoke her emo-
tion. Like the moments when she views the re-enactment of herself as a child
in a bathing suit, or recounts the death of her father, she is detached from this
visit to her past. The garden is still there but not the emotions. No memo-
ries of games or of tears, she says in voice-over. Once again, the foreclosed
expression of emotion upon thinking of the past leads to the insertion of a clip
from her work. In this case, Varda first says, I know some things. Things that
my mother told me. We see a family photograph of her mother dressed in
her Sunday best in the garden of the family home. Varda then recounts that
her mother taught her how to clean oxidized silver knives by inserting them
deep in the dirt of the garden. We see a shot of oxidized knives that Varda just
bought at the flea market, and then another clip from her film 7 P., cuis., s. de
b (A SAISIR), in which actress Yolande Moreau recounts the same anec-
dote, and demonstrates the action of cleaning a knife in dirt with her finger.
The kitchen set of this experimental film, initially part of an art exhibit that
Varda incorporated into her film, is a curious mixture of a domestic interior
and the outdoors: grass grows on the counters and birds can be seen walk-
ing around. Moreau plays a rebellious, amusing maid working in an unhappy
household ruled by a patriarch. She smokes against the rules of the house,
and goes topless under her apron. While the anecdote about the knives Varda
recounts illuminates very little about the specific relationship she had with her
mother, it allows her to show us that the domestic advice she received from
her mother eventually found its way not into Vardas personal domestic life (as
far as we know, anyway), but into her avant-garde film. The film implies, then,
that the best place to look for evidence of the impact of Vardas childhood on
her life is her films.
Back in her childhood home, we see images, both still and moving, of the
interior. But once again, there is no catharsis or revelation. We learn of her
mothers fascination for Queen Astrid of Belgium, the Lady Di of the 1930s,
and we page through an album containing photographs of the royal couple.
The next scene in the film goes even further in sidestepping sentimentality.
Varda says in voice-over that she had wanted to ask the current owner of the
house if she could see the bedroom where she and her two sisters slept, but
instead he wants to tell her about his collection of miniature trains. She acqui-
esces and lets him talk, turning the encounter into a charming interview of the
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man and his wife. It was an amusing encounter, she says in voice-over as we
see her exit the building. I was taken by this couple and the train collection.
The childhood home part was a flop. But the house and I were separated by
the war anyway. So, the visit to her childhood home evokes no great bursts
of emotion and is even a flop, but she gets a decent mini-documentary about
a train collector out of it. This visit to Vardas past is different from the others,
in that it does not motivate a clip from her past work, but shows Varda at
work, responding spontaneously to unforeseen circumstances in the way that
all documentary film-makers must.
Varda closes the door to her childhood home and transitions to the next
section of the film. At the moment when we might have expected her to
express emotion over this important juncture in her life (the war separated
me from this house), whether remembered anxiety or excitement, over the
dislocation of her family and the war itself, she recounts instead an important
rite of passage in her professional life that occurred in Brussels sixteen years
after the move to Ste, once she was living in Paris. Using still photographs,
Varda evokes the first screening of her first film in a big cinema in Brussels,
and her first stay in a luxurious hotel when she was 27 years old, both of which
were made possible by Jacques Ledoux, director of the Cinmathque Royale
de Belgique. We see a scrapbook-style composition of newspaper clippings
about her film, along with a photograph of Ledoux. His face, she reminds us
by showing a clip from the film, is familiar from Chris Markers film La Jete/
The Pier (1962), in which he plays the role of a sinister scientist. She recounts
in voice-over their trips to the flea market and shows a still image of the two
of them at a market, as well as contemporary video footage of a market. He
would look for old books and I would look for old images, old photographs
of anonymous families. Images of family photographs take us back to the
images of the Varda family photos stuck in the sand of a Belgian beach. We
are back where we started. Our own family photos escaped the flea market
because Mom took them when we left Brussels on 10 May 1940. The sound of
a bomb marks the transition to the section of Les Plages dAgns that recounts
the war and takes us to the next location, the town of Ste, where Varda,
her mother and her siblings lived for most of the war. Before recounting her
adolescence, then, Varda, has already chronicled the professional success she
would experience in her mid-20s with her first feature film, La Pointe courte,
and paid homage to a person who helped along her way. Whatever Belgium
and her life as a young girl actually mean to Varda is less important than what
she has chosen to reference: Varda in the present as an experienced profes-
sional film-maker at work, on the beach constructing installations, and inter-
viewing an eccentric train collector; clips from her films; and the visual traces
of her first professional success in the film world at the age of 27. Nostalgia,
intense emotion, the revelation of secrets and the chronicling of family crisis,
the elements we have come to expect from literary memoirs or autobiographi-
cal documentaries, are usually sidestepped in Les Plages dAgns in favour of
an emphasis on the creative trajectory of the film-maker.
THE CONSTRUCTION OF AN ARTISTIC LINEAGE
One of the most important rhetorical projects of the film is to remind us
what Varda has accomplished as a film-maker and to establish her artistic
trajectory. Throughout her career, Varda has offered information about the
inspirations and contexts for her work as a photographer and a film-maker.
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From the release of Clo de 5 7/Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) to the present, she has
presented, in interviews and in her autobiography, Varda par Agns (Varda
1994), a fairly consistent account of her influences. She invokes her love of
painting, referring to Piero della Francesca, Picasso, Van Eyck, Magritte and
many others. For certain of her films, such as Clo de 5 7, she invokes par-
ticular artists, such as the German Renaissance artist Hans Baldung Grien.
Curiously, she tends not to reference what were likely more proximate
sources for her work. We might have expected references to the theatre,
considering that she was the official photographer for the Thtre National
Populaire for ten years. We might also have expected Varda to name mid-
century European photographers as an important influence on her aesthetic.
As a result of her photography training at the Ecole Vaugirard, and her abun-
dant intellectual curiosity, she must have been familiar with the important
photographic traditions of her day. In a 1992 interview, she states that she
was not, in fact, familiar with the great photographers when she began work-
ing for Vilar, but all the same admired Weston, Atget and Doisneau (Meyer-
Plantureux 1992: 49). She mentions in that same interview that she had the
good fortune to meet Brassa, who showed her his collection of photography
books and helped her see that it was important to know what had come
before so as not to merely repeat the work of others. In Les Plages dAgns,
however, she mentions Brassa, but only to say that he dropped by her rue
Daguerre home during the 1950s to see one of her photography exhibitions.
We see a photograph of Brassa that Varda took, but we do not see his work.
Furthermore, Varda seems not to have drawn on the aesthetic traditions of
other female photographers working in Paris in the postwar era. It seems
likely that she was exposed to the work of important female photographers
such as Germaine Krull, Ilse Bing and Dora Maar, and yet she does not cite
them as having inspired her to take up her camera. In Les Plages dAgns, she
simply states that she went to photography school because she needed a
mtier. The rhetorical valence of the identification of painting as her primary
inspiration allows Varda to place her work in aesthetic traditions that are
much older, and, in some circles, more venerable, than those of photography
and cinema. It also allows her to distance her work from that of her contem-
poraries, thus foregrounding her own aesthetic vision and goals in the mak-
ing of her films and photographs.
Varda likewise claims no lineage or influence when asked about her moti-
vations for turning to film-making. One might have assumed that Varda had
been exposed to Italian Neorealism and to French and Hollywood classical
cinema, given that she came of age in Paris during the golden era of the cin-
club. To the contrary, she claims in Les Plages dAgns and elsewhere to have
seen only five or ten films before making her first feature. Upon hearing this
information during his interview with her in Les Plages dAgns, her friend,
film-maker Chris Marker, hiding behind his costume of Guillaume the cat,
rolls his eyes, as if he does not believe what she just said. Nevertheless, this
information is part of Vardas standard presentation of her artistic trajectory.
She constantly emphasizes her self-invention, even at the cost of risking a
certain naivet. It is as if Varda created herself, sui generis. In the context of
Vardas overall strategy of self-presentation, then, it becomes particularly
meaningful that she reminds us near the beginning of Les Plages dAgns that
she legally changed her name (from Arlette to Agns) when she turned 18.
Autonomy, self-invention and a certain pragmatism (I needed a mtier) are
key elements of her self-presentation.
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Another important element of Vardas self-presentation in Les Plages dAgns
is her insertion of herself and her work in twentieth-century history. Varda sets
her personal trajectory alongside that of the tumultuous political changes in the
second half of the twentieth century. She inserts her story into that of 1950s China
and Cuba by documenting her trips to those places. Likewise, she weaves her life
into the social upheaval of California in the 1960s and 1970s when discussing
the films she made there about the Black Panthers (Black Panthers, 1968), hippy
culture (Lions Love, 1969), and Chicano art and culture (Mur Murs/Mural Murals,
1980). She also writes herself into the history of feminism in perhaps the most
insistent way to date, demonstrating how her films LUne chante lautre pas/One
Sings, the Other Doesnt (1976) and Sans toit ni loi/Vagabond (1985) reflect her
feminist consciousness, and telling us that she, too, signed a famous petition in
favour of abortion rights, marched in the streets alongside the likes of Catherine
Deneuve and Simone de Beauvoir, and loaned her house for two clandestine
abortions. Vardas rhetorical project the constant references to her filmography,
the emphasis on self-invention and the writing of her personal life into political
contexts ultimately works to create a rich primer on her own work and its links
to the momentous events of the second half of the twentieth century.
CINEMA AS DATABASE
The excerpts from my films were treated as if they had come from a
database of my lifes work, from which I could take a scene of fiction or
documentary, and use it out of context.
(Agns Varda, Presskit, Les Plages dAgns)
In a film that uses such a huge variety of source material and that so often
rejects chronology in favour of discontinuity, one of Vardas tasks, clearly, was
to search for strategies to unify the film so as to avoid creating a haphaz-
ard, patchwork quality in the film, and to refrain from confusing her viewers,
especially those unfamiliar with her entire filmography. On a macro level, the
films form uses geography and chronology to group together logically the
disparate events and works of her life: the beach settings justify the films
movements from place to place, while the periods of her life childhood,
adolescence, young adulthood, etc. provide an additional level of structure.
But we have also seen that she freely references different places and periods
of her life within each section of the film. On a micro level, from shot to shot,
she likewise uses a number of strategies for establishing unity.
In the middle of the section on Ste, Varda moves in short order from that
most traditional of documentary strategies the use of interviews of people
who were especially meaningful to her to the following: (1) the reciting of a
poem; (2) a painting; (3) a photograph; (4) people constructing something on
the beach; and, finally, (5) flying trapeze artists performing against the back-
drop of the ocean. A closer look at this brief, but dense, portion of the film
shows how carefully she creates unity between shots that have no obvious
thematic or causal link.
First, Varda continues to demonstrate the importance of the longstand-
ing relationships she has with people in Ste by telling us about a family that
adopted her every summer for five years, the Schlegels. One of the three
Schlegel daughters, Andre, married Jean Vilar, the theatre director who
created the Festival dAvignon and who launched Varda as a professional
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Varda at work
135
photographer when he hired her to work at his Thtre National Populaire.
When Varda interviews the now elderly Andre and her two grown sons, we
learn that Vilar is losing her memory, but can still recite poetry. This leads
to her recitation on camera of several lines from Paul Valrys Le Cimetire
marin (The Cemetery by the Sea). While she is still reciting the lines (The
sea, the sea, the sea renewed forever) we see an unidentified painting of a
man looking out to the sea, La Mer Palavas, painted by Gustave Courbet
in 1858. Echoing both the painting and the theme of the sea in the poem,
we then see Vardas 1954 photograph Ulysses, which features a nude man
looking out to sea and a boy sitting on a rocky beach. Vardas recycling of
this photograph is not new: she revisited it for the first time in 1982 in her
short film Ulysse, in which she situates the photograph in her life and in its
historical context. In Les Plages dAgns, Varda provides a gloss for the pho-
tograph: Any man who gazes at the sea is a Ulysses who doesnt always
want to go home. All the children I love and all men who gaze at the sea, I
call them Ulysses. And then we see contemporary video footage created by
Varda of a nude man looking out to sea, an image that mimics her photo-
graph. Varda has thus used a variety of methods to link images and sounds
here. On the soundtrack, she links the poetry of Valry spoken in voice-over
with her own poetic words about the sea and Ulysses. She links, as well, a
painting by Courbet with her photograph of a similar subject, and then links
her old photograph with her most recent video iteration of the same theme.
The inventive links continue in the next three shots. Varda walks toward
the nude man and covers him with a large plaid cloth. Next, her crew, on
the beach, covers a wooden structure the whale she is creating for one
of the films installation-like moments with large blue tarps. Finally, the
flying trapeze artists appear on the beach and toss away their red capes as
they prepare to perform. Here, Varda establishes unity in the otherwise dis-
parate shots through the repetition of the fluttering cloths. We do not nec-
essarily understand the precise meaning of these images as they unfold. It
is not until the end of the flying trapeze performance that we learn that this
scene represents the childhood fantasy Varda had of running away with the
circus. Likewise, we do not understand until several minutes later in the film
that she is building a whale on the beach to evoke Jonah and the whale, a
story that was central to the course she attended by philosopher Gaston
Bachelard in Paris as a young woman. Finally, the embracing couple will
be explained a little later when she confides that her mother never told her
anything about sex. And just in case the graphic matching of the fluttering
clothes fails to connect the shots sufficiently, Varda also says, while sitting in
the completed whale structure, Im creating today images that have inhab-
ited me for a long time. In other words, she is freely combining images from
the database of her uvre whose connections may only be their ongoing
importance to her.
Thus, while the logic that structures the films large sections and that links
individual shots to one another in Les Plages dAgns can certainly be governed
by chronology or physical proximity, it can also, as we have seen, be gener-
ated by graphic matches or word play, or even their status as the fantasies of
Varda. This flexible structure allows Varda maximal freedom in incorporating
references to her life and her work.
Another stylistic element of the film that stands out is Vardas use of
layered compositions. Beginning in the section on Ste, Varda mixes various
types of source material within individual shots. The compositions can be
SFC 10.2_art_Conway_125-140.indd 135 5/8/10 1:00:58 PM
Kelley Conway
136
Figure 4: Vardas circus fantasy (courtesy of Cin Tamaris).
Figure 5: Recreation of photograph Ulysses (courtesy of Cin Tamaris).
Figure 6: Tarp used to cover the whale installation (courtesy of Cin Tamaris).
Figure 7: The circus cape (courtesy of Cin Tamaris).
SFC 10.2_art_Conway_125-140.indd 136 5/8/10 1:00:58 PM
Varda at work
137
relatively simple, such as the placement of a black-and-white still photo-
graph of Varda as a young girl linking arms with her fellow singers against
the backdrop of colour video footage of the ocean and sea gulls. A second
use of the layered images involves contemporary footage of Varda mixed
with footage from one of her films. For example, when she describes the
process of writing the script for La Pointe courte, we see her re-enacting the
writing of the script, in the present moment, at a table in her courtyard in
Paris. In the upper left quadrant of the screen, a clip from the film is visible
(Figures 8 and 9).
Sometimes Varda complicates further the construction of such scenes by
adding brief shots of a young woman who resembles her at 25 years of age
re-enacting her writing process. At other moments, Varda inserts herself in her
old films via long dissolves, such as when she links footage of herself walking
backwards in her courtyard today with that of Clo walking down the street in
Clo de 5 7. More complex compositions occur, as well, such as in the sec-
tion on the making of Daguerrotypes (1976). Here, Varda demonstrates how
Figure 8: Varda, far left, singing with her choir (courtesy of Cin Tamaris).
Figure 9: Varda writing (courtesy of Cin Tamaris).
SFC 10.2_art_Conway_125-140.indd 137 5/10/10 8:45:04 AM
Kelley Conway
138
she used to pull an electric cable through her door and down the rue Daguerre.
Meanwhile, a variety of clips from Daguerrotypes are layered on top of the
video footage of contemporary Varda. Some of the images fly from the back
of the screen to the front; others are simply placed on top of Vardas image.
Such layered compositions evoke many of her installations, including La
Carte Postale Gante (The Giant Postcard, 2006), which consists of a giant,
coloured image evoking a 1950s pin-up postcard. A nude woman (whose head
is that of Vardas daughter, Rosalie) reclines on the beach while, intermittently,
a black-and-white photographic image of another woman appears, superim-
posed over the pin-ups body. Moving images are also present in the work
when viewers activate the opening of small doors placed on the surface of the
image. Inside are brief video clips of poignant images: a drowned fisherman,
an oil-covered gull, and the hand of Jacques Demy raking the sand near the
end of his life. It is not difficult to understand why the creation of such layered
compositions and the mixture of still and moving images would interest Varda.
Such techniques allow her to recycle her old work productively, something she
has done throughout her career in a variety of ways, all the while experiment-
ing with new digital tools and new exhibition contexts.
In addition to the larger rhetorical strategies I have outlined here,
Les Plages dAgns demonstrates time and again that Varda is still exploring
and inventing and experimenting. Ample evidence of her evolving aesthetic
preoccupations can be seen in the films editing, its layered composi-
tions and the presence of the installation-influenced scenes, a topic that
requires more space for a full discussion. For now, let me simply point out
that Varda begins her film with an installation under construction and she
concludes it with an installation created for Lle et elle at the Fondation
Cartier. The very last shot of the film, excluding the epilogue chronicling
her 80th birthday party, shows Varda inside La Cabane de lchec (The
Cabin of Failure), the celluloid cabin she constructed of strips of film from
Les Cratures/The Creatures (1965). She says directly to the camera, What
is cinema? Light coming from somewhere and captured by images more
or less dark or colourful. When Im here, it feels like I live in cinema, that
cinema is my home. I think Ive always lived in it. Her final words ques-
tion the very nature of cinema in an era in which her 1965 flop could find
new life as an installation, and also confirm that she is most at home in the
cinema, however one may define it.
REFERENCES
Meyer-Plantureux, C. (1992), Entretetien avec Agns Varda, in C. Meyer-
Plantureux (ed.), La Photographie de Thtre ou la mmoire de lphmre,
Paris: Les Annales Photographiques de la Ville de Paris, Paris Audiovisuel,
pp. 4952.
Nichols, B. (1991), Representing Reality, Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Varda, A. (1994), Varda par Agns, Paris: Cahiers du cinma.
SUGGESTED CITATION
Conway, K. (2010), Varda at work: Les Plages dAgns, Studies in French Cinema
10: 2, pp. 125139, doi: 10.1386/sfc.10.2.125_1
SFC 10.2_art_Conway_125-140.indd 138 5/8/10 1:01:06 PM
Varda at work
139
CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Kelley Conway is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication
Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Chanteuse in
the City: The Realist Singer in 1930s French Film (University of California Press,
2004) and essays on the work of Agns Varda, music in French cinema and
Brigitte Bardot.
Contact: Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison,
Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue, Madison, Wisconsin 53706-1412, USA.
E-mail: kelleyconway@wisc.edu
SFC 10.2_art_Conway_125-140.indd 139 5/8/10 1:01:06 PM
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