FILM
The Beaches of Agnes (2008): a documentary by/of Agnes Varda
/ Nancy Keefe Rhodes
07.08.09
The Beaches of Agnès/Les Plages d’Agnès (2008)
Director: Agnès Varda
Cast: Agnès Varda, Rosalie Varda and Mathieu Demy, Jacques Demy;
Anne-Laure Manceau as young Agnès
A Cinema Guild release. France/French with English subtitles, 108 minutes.
Of all the ways that French filmmaker Agnès Varda, just turned 81, might frame discussion of the French New Wave in this self-portrait documentary, she mirthfully chooses a giant orange-tiger cartoon cat with a droll, mechanically filtered voice to introduce the subject for posterity. The cat is actually long-time friend and fellow filmmaker Chris Marker, bobbing along disguised in cardboard cutout as his own character Guillaume-in-Egypt, inquiring “What about...?” off-handedly during a stroll through a crowded Paris street.
She recounted just as casually, after Godard had gotten Georges de Beauregard to make Breathless in 1960, that the producer asked Godard if he had “any more pals who could make the same kind of cheap black and white films.” She tells Marker that Beauregard “wanted a stable” of filmmakers. Beauregard made other Godard films, some of Jean-Pierre Melville’s and in 1961 he produced Jacques Demy’s Lola. Getting the same recruitment query, Demy suggested his lover, Varda, whom he would marry the next year. Varda had made one feature in 1954 set in a coastal fishing village, La Pointe Courte, followed by a handful of shorts, and also worked as a photographer. So in this way Beauregard, with Carlo Ponti, came to produce Varda’s acclaimed Cléo from 5 to 7.
Since this discussion occurs well into the film, we already know Marker’s been coming around Varda’s rue Daguerre compound in Paris since the days Varda convinced Alain Resnais to edit La Point Courte. So they have clearly colluded in staging this exchange as a kind of advisement against hoping for portentous announcements at the last minute. Instead, Varda inserts a short clip from Cléo (Corinne Marchand as a glamorous singer trying to fill time before she learns whether she has cancer). She then comments on filming a story in real time and the inspiration of medieval painter Baldung Grein’s images of voluptuous women embraced by boney death figures, then briskly moves on to her 1962 trip to Cuba to photograph Fidel’s “revolution cha cha cha.”
Director: Agnès Varda
Cast: Agnès Varda, Rosalie Varda and Mathieu Demy, Jacques Demy;
Anne-Laure Manceau as young Agnès
A Cinema Guild release. France/French with English subtitles, 108 minutes.
Of all the ways that French filmmaker Agnès Varda, just turned 81, might frame discussion of the French New Wave in this self-portrait documentary, she mirthfully chooses a giant orange-tiger cartoon cat with a droll, mechanically filtered voice to introduce the subject for posterity. The cat is actually long-time friend and fellow filmmaker Chris Marker, bobbing along disguised in cardboard cutout as his own character Guillaume-in-Egypt, inquiring “What about...?” off-handedly during a stroll through a crowded Paris street.
She recounted just as casually, after Godard had gotten Georges de Beauregard to make Breathless in 1960, that the producer asked Godard if he had “any more pals who could make the same kind of cheap black and white films.” She tells Marker that Beauregard “wanted a stable” of filmmakers. Beauregard made other Godard films, some of Jean-Pierre Melville’s and in 1961 he produced Jacques Demy’s Lola. Getting the same recruitment query, Demy suggested his lover, Varda, whom he would marry the next year. Varda had made one feature in 1954 set in a coastal fishing village, La Pointe Courte, followed by a handful of shorts, and also worked as a photographer. So in this way Beauregard, with Carlo Ponti, came to produce Varda’s acclaimed Cléo from 5 to 7.
Since this discussion occurs well into the film, we already know Marker’s been coming around Varda’s rue Daguerre compound in Paris since the days Varda convinced Alain Resnais to edit La Point Courte. So they have clearly colluded in staging this exchange as a kind of advisement against hoping for portentous announcements at the last minute. Instead, Varda inserts a short clip from Cléo (Corinne Marchand as a glamorous singer trying to fill time before she learns whether she has cancer). She then comments on filming a story in real time and the inspiration of medieval painter Baldung Grein’s images of voluptuous women embraced by boney death figures, then briskly moves on to her 1962 trip to Cuba to photograph Fidel’s “revolution cha cha cha.”