Les plages d'Agnès

At the end of her career, Agnès Varda reflects on her life and oeuvre – albeit not without deconstructing the mode of autobiographical narratives to a certain extent. Her look back at her biography is reminiscent of the labyrinth of mirrors that she and her film crew set up on one of the beaches of her life at the start of the film. It is the titular beaches that structure Varda’s essayistic self-portrait as the nodes of an associative network of memory. Her endeavor couldn’t be further from being overly serious or intellectual. Instead, LES PLAGES D’AGNÈS is marked by a playful approach to memories, media and narrative modes. Despite concentrating on her own personality, the film also finds space to show how openly and caringly she approached other people. The lectures by Shirley Jordan (Newcastle) and Mathias Barkhausen (Berlin) draw on this film to shine a light on the themes of living and aging in the context of creative production.