Ariadne’s Thread. The Beaches that are Agnès Varda.

Abstract

The Beaches of Agnes begins with the filmmaker Agnes Varda walking backwards on a beach she frequented as a child. It ends with the 80-year old artist sitting in her home in Paris, holding an image of herself surrounded by colourful brooms. Suddenly the photograph becomes animated, and starts to recede into the space behind the frame. Seen together, these two scenes encapsulate the relationship between the still and moving image in Varda’s filmic self-portrait. In the end, it is not Agnes but her photograph that moves backward. The animated body, in two and three dimensions, remains mobile as long as it is able, but ultimately it will be the fixed image that carries on.