-By Maria Garcia

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Agnès Varda’s documentaries are often about Agnès Varda, ruminations on her previous work. In Cinevardaphoto, for instance, the filmmaker contemplates pictures she took shortly after the Cuban Revolution, and a photograph shot on a beach decades ago. Sometimes, Varda turns longstanding preoccupations into a documentary, as she did in The Gleaners and I, which began when she observed modern foragers in a vegetable market near her Paris apartment. That led to the question of why some people discard and others collect, with Varda concluding that to discard is an annulment of life, and to collect is an affirmation of it. The Gleaners and I, made when Varda was in her early 70s, is also a reflection on aging. Self-referential though they are, Varda’s documentaries illustrate how the personal expresses the universal, and how the creation of art relies on seeing something old as something new.

In her latest documentary, The Beaches of Agnès, Varda begins by reminiscing about the people who have been a part of her life and work. “If you opened them up,” she says, “you would find landscapes. If you opened me up, you would find beaches.” Varda is standing on a windy beach surrounded by mirrors. She has transformed the natural landscape in order to introduce the theme, and to transform the beach in her own image. The mirrors are an apt expression of her documentary style—too literal, in fact—and are indeed a harbinger of the intensely personal reminiscences and nostalgia that follow. It’s Varda’s home movie, or Varda writing her obituary—she recently turned 81—and at nearly two hours, it will test the endurance of her most ardent fans.

Varda’s long and creative life, and her marriage to filmmaker Jacques Demy, who died in 1995, introduced her to many other artists, some of whom became her collaborators. While Varda frequently finds clever ways to introduce the ones who are still alive—employing the beach theme—she describes them rather than allowing them to speak. They’re props on a set, all part of the “show-and-tell” motif of The Beaches of Agnès. For instance, Varda recreates the courtyard of a home she lived in with her husband and children, a set from which to tell the story of her younger days. For the audience, the effect is of peering into a lifeless dollhouse. Varda also includes still photos and clips of her films, but unlike their purpose in Cinevardaphoto, here the parade of images is solely in the service of biography.

Varda’s esprit rescues some sequences, as do her drollness and self-mockery. An example is her “movie lover’s hut,” in which she hangs strips of an unsuccessful film to form the walls of a freestanding structure. The hut is a reminder of the creativity and reinvention that inform all of her past work. It stands in stark contrast to Varda’s urge to control her legacy, for there could be no other purpose in making The Beaches of Agnès. This is a movie that is so private, it is easy to understand why friends, family and collaborators are transformed into silent shadows. If they spoke, they could not remain as Varda remembers them. The Beaches of Agnès is a documentary meant for Varda’s children and for her biographers, for those who puzzle through her masterpieces—not for us gleaners.