In the distant past of April 2020, Chris and I dove deep into an episode of our podcast Cinema Dual on the films of French filmmaker Agnès Varda. Though technically not my first experience with Varda, that week of watching Varda’s movies was eye-opening, to such an extent that when Criterion announced they were going to release a Blu Ray box set of her complete filmography, I jumped at the chance to catch up on everything I had missed. Each post will cover 1 of the 15 discs in the set.

In the intro to Part 12 of this series, having just seen the trailer for The Matrix: Resurrections, I asked what it meant for Lana Wachowski to return to that series. The answer, explicitly stated in the film, was that Warner Bros was going to make another Matrix with or without her, and under those conditions, Wachowski signed on. I’m almost completely sure that no one was threatening Agnès Varda to make her own biopic without her involvement, but the first thing she clearly states at the beginning of The Beaches of Agnès (2008), is that she is playing a role of a person telling her own life story, but that it’s other people that interest her. The challenge of the project becomes how to reconcile these competing impulses.

Continue reading “Varda by Jon – Part 15: Beaches”