“What is cinema? Light coming from somewhere captured by images more or less colourful”

These are the concluding words to the penultimate scene of Agnès Varda’s incredible visual essay, the documentary The Beaches of Agnès (French: Les plages d’Agnès). I have been an admirer of Varda for an incredibly long time, and one of her previous films, The Gleaners and I, remains perhaps the greatest documentary film I have ever seen. It was Varda’s inescapable ability to take a story and make it inherently personal that I loved about The Gleaners and I, where Varda created a film that was as much about her as the metaphorical and artistic gleaner as it was about physical gleaners in France. In The Beaches of Agnès, Varda expands on the themes introduced in The Gleaners and I as well as motifs that occur throughout her long and storied career that has shaped her to be arguably the most important female filmmaker of all time, and amongst the most influential to ever live.

It is difficult to explain what The Beaches of Agnès is about, because it is about so many things, and perhaps the best way to explain it would be to consider it Varda’s personal odyssey through the most treacherous and oblique place imaginable – the past. Varda set out to document her journey back to the locations of her life, not only physical but also metaphorical, the locations that formed her life, and the people (living or dead) that influenced her, shaped her and made her into the creative artist that is so highly revered today. We see Varda revisiting her past, sometimes unpleasantly uncomfortable or filled with melancholic sadness (especially when discussing her longtime husband, Jacques Demy), but nonetheless absolutely brilliant in how Varda examines her past. However, to simply see this as someone attempting to revisit their past would do The Beaches of Agnès a great disservice, because it so much more than that. It is a film that is simultaneously simple and complex, and I still can’t understand absolutely everything this extraordinary film was trying to tell me.

I absolutely adore personalization in films, films that take on a somewhat autobiographical sentiment towards them. As vain and self-centred as it can seem in the wrong hands when a filmmaker documents their own life (granted they have had a life worth documenting in such a way), it can make for some truly nostalgic cinema. There are very few filmmakers I trust to approach their own life with the graceful dignity and lacking in exploitative or overly-sentimental moments of emotion than Varda. Her films are so delicately constructed, and she consistently crafts her films to be personal and public – she puts herself in the centre of a society brimming with individuals. The Beaches of Agnès may bear the name of the auteur herself, but it is far from simply being about her. It is a film about several people – her husband, Jacques Demy. Her children and their children. The people who supported her in her early days as a starving artist, the actors who worked with her in her films helping her career, in turn having their careers carved. The people that she knew from her early days, as well as those that she might have known.

Perhaps the singular, central figure of this film is just the individual itself. The nameless, homogenous individual of which there are over seven billion in the world today, an individual so simple in terms of just being another person, but also has a story as rich and compelling as Varda’s. That individual could be anyone, and as this film states towards the end, Varda was not attempting to document her life as being a bildungsroman, a portrait of the artist as a young woman. It was an attempt on Varda’s part to tell the stories of others through her own, and her own stories through those of others. If this seems convoluted and confusing, it certainly is – but it is assisted by the fact that there are very few films as uncompromisingly beautiful in construction than The Beaches of Agnès.

The Beaches of Agnès is a film about memory. It seems the almost eighty-year-old auteur venturing into the past in order to revisit memories. Some of them are pleasant and invoke loving images of her earlier life. Some are melancholic. Varda makes sure to state that such an approach to revisiting memory is not entirely void of problems. Some memories are best forgotten, especially those that conjure up feelings of deep despair and sadness. Varda never glamorizes her struggle as a starving artist or as a child of post-war poverty, but she does note how difficult her early life was, and documents her struggles through revisiting them decades later. It causes genuine feelings of emotion in Varda, as well as the audience. It is transcendental in its beauty, and The Beaches of Agnès is a film that offers us the opportunity to enter into the past of Varda, who has made this film both as a way of remembering her own past, as well as inviting the audience to take part in her celestial journey into the fell clutches of the past, the moments of happiness and sadness. Memory is not something to be seen as being purely good and positive, and Varda notes that while her past has been happy for the most part, to view days that have passed through rose-tinted glasses is a dangerous action, as it would avoid remembering the moments where one was at their lowest – and thus, by an extent, refusal to acknowledge the painful but important lessons one learns from such moments.

Varda is a unique artist purely because she is one of the few filmmakers that utilizes that career title to its fullest extent. She makes sure that her films, The Beaches of Agnès, not an exception in any way and perhaps the aptest example, are not made like traditional films. Varda does not film, she writes cinema through the use of her camera. There is not a single moment in The Beaches of Agnès where Varda is not making a bold statement through her meshing-together of various artistic elements – photography, paintings, drawings and cut-outs working in conjunction with the visual form to create meaning. Snippets from her films populate this film, giving a loose timeline through which we can trace her past through her narratives and her history as an artist. The Beaches of Agnès affords Varda the opportunity to add commentary to her films, explaining why they came about and how they reflect on her life. There is something so voyeuristically beautiful about being allowed into the mind of the artist in such a way, with her voice telling us stories behind her artistic processes. It makes Varda less of a distant presence, and more of a close, endearing figure that permits us into the endless landscapes of her mind and her creative process.

I loved The Beaches of Agnès. It is an extraordinarily beautiful film. Varda is such a beautiful soul, an artist who makes films that reflect the world we live in, and placing the focus on her own experiences, Varda provides the audience with a deeply personal account of her own life, as well as making deeply profound comments on humanity as a whole. The Beaches of Agnès is not a film where Agnès Varda makes a film about herself, it is a film where Agnès Varda makes a film about humanity. It is a deeply profound and meaningful film that examines the human experience through the lens of one peculiar and utterly endearing filmmaker who remains an absolute force of cinema, alluring in her brilliance and wonderful in her deep commitment to predicting the future by understanding the past.