Varda’s recycling of life in Les plages d’Agnès: Self-representational metacinema as a discourse on creatorship

Abstract

Abstract Stemming from the concept of ‘enunciation’, here posited as an act of expression, self-depiction and reasoning, this article addresses the category of the ‘self-representational metacinema’, which is a self-reflexive variety of essay film as authorial discourse, and analyses the way in which Agnès Varda’s The Beaches of Agnès (2008) is an opus about the world and thought processes of an artist as the artist is immersed in the world (of cinema). Firstly, by presenting herself, in her own body, as ‘Agnès Varda’, the director writes her identity into the film, as a first layer of filmic enunciation placed midway between reality and illusion, thus ambiguating herself as an objective person, on the one hand, and reinforcing her nature as a subjective creator (i.e. endowed with a specifically cinematic worldvision), on the other. The representation of the filmic artist at work (as ars poetica) embraces the self-portrait as a fully fledged art cinema aesthetic category. Secondly, by rethinking the world through (her) cinema, Varda adopts a phenomenological position in which the digressive nature of her cinematic writing is conveyed as a corporeal experience of being in the world, according to Vivian Sobchak with Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Varda not only interacts with the world around her but also inscribes herself in the essay film as both representation and expression, that is, matter and thought. Thirdly, the reality and illusion dichotomy, which pervades the entire film, is particularly intense in the third and final layer of enunciation, which involves mnemonic rewinding. The division of Varda’s life in several coexisting stages from which the director can extract particular memories reconciles Gilles Deleuze’s chronosigns, which imply a non-chronological time structure, with a more traditional Augustinian time as an arrow, a conception of a threefold present, and immortality beyond that. Ultimately, The Beaches of Agnes is a discourse on the power of the image and creation.