Beaches

I am playing the role of a little old lady, pleasantly plump and talkative, telling her life story, says Agnès Varda as she guides us through her memories, reflecting on her life as an artist and filmmaker, with beaches as the connective thread. Memories like these compose an identity, make life understood.

The North Sea and its sand is the start of me, of what I more or less know of myself. If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes. If we opened me up, we’d find beaches, she says. Varda and her film crew set up an installation of mirrors along the North Sea shore in Belgium. Each mirror is a different size and frame; some are stuck in the sand and others on easel stands. The mirrors face each other, creating reflections of reflections that fragment the landscape and introduce unique perspectives of the beach. Varda films herself and her film crew through these mirrors. So many people are willing to enter something imaginary, Varda remarks. I’m reminded of painters who needed mirrors to compose their self-portraits. Indeed, The Beaches of Agnès (Les plages d’Agnès, a 2008 documentary in French) is a moving self-portrait. The installation is a metaphor for cameras and their ability to reflect, record. When glass breaks down, it becomes sand. Mirrors, before mirrorless camera systems, were an integral part of the photographic process, reflecting what one saw through the viewfinder, which then became imprinted on celluloid. In a darkroom I would put an exposed negative into an enlarger, flash light through it and onto photographic paper, which I then placed into a developing bath, eagerly watching splotches of black and gray form coherent shapes, objects, faces, landscapes.

Memory is like an ocean. Thoughts suddenly resurface that were hidden, lost in the depths. We are observers rather than makers of what emerges. I was holding my cousin Danny in the ocean when a set of large waves approached us. Do you remember how to hold your breath? I asked Danny. We went under twice, each wave pushing us closer to shore. I lifted Danny high above my head. Tommy, one of our older cousins, grabbed Danny, and I was dragged into the surf once more. I emerged, my nose and ears clogged with seawater. The ocean was just as calm as when we entered. Memory is unavoidable, arriving without warning.

Every time we recall an event, it is altered, whether we think of it or share it aloud with another. Though a memory may be “of the past,” it is constantly being reformulated through present experience.¹ My present influences my understanding of the past, not the other way around. At the same time, as a classmate of mine explained, we are able to understand the impact of a moment only long after it happens.

Are you nostalgic for your childhood? a voice off-camera asks Varda. A triptych frame is in a dune, with a black-and-white photograph of a young girl in the left frame (I assume it’s her) and mirrors in the other two frames. Varda responds, Not at all. And she removes the photograph, revealing her present-day reflection. But I like looking at the pictures. She lies on a dune and arranges several images of her childhood in the sand. She seems to disagree with the notion that childhood provides a foundation and structure. I don’t feel a strong link to my childhood. It’s not a reference in my thought processes, it’s not an inspiration. Well, I don’t know.

Despite her resistance to the idea, her childhood memories are an inspiration for her art making and, indeed, for this very film. We see a photo of a young girl in a striped bathing suit and another girl wearing a unique suit that consists of long, thick straps extending from her shoulders down to a bathing-suit bottom, almost like she is wearing suspenders. Varda would like to see both suits again, and the scene is recreated in the present with Varda observing two young girls playing on the beach in identical clothing. The off-camera voice asks Varda if she imagined as a child that seventy years later she would create an installation like this. She remarks that she now knows what inspired her to decorate her cat’s gravesite with seashells and flowers.

The actress Yolande Moreau lies on grass in an imaginary kitchen and demonstrates how Varda’s mother would instruct Varda to clean knives. Moreau’s finger is the knife pointing downward into the imaginary soil and twisting while she says Top to bottom. When Varda mentions her separation from her husband, director Jacques Demy, she again uses fiction to describe the event. She includes the scene from her film Documenteur (1981) in which the protagonist, Emilie, tells her friend that she left her husband and is not doing well. Something so emotionally painful cannot always be told outright, it seems, and fiction captures and solicits these feelings. In René Magritte’s 1928 painting The Lovers, two individuals attempt to kiss one another but cannot because their heads are each covered by a cloth. In Varda’s version the individuals representing her and Demy are naked except for the cloth covering. They rub their heads together, struggling for contact. In both depictions the cloaked lovers cannot fulfill their desires. Varda and Demy reunited eventually, but Demy became ill and died of AIDS in 1990.

Sitting at a table, she dabs her brush with spit and dips it in gouache to demonstrate for us how she once edited photographs by hand for work. Later she is driving a cardboard cutout car to show how difficult it was to park in the narrow alleyway where her house was. Wearing a hat with several thick pieces of thread protruding from it like worms, she fills her bucket with coal because it was cold there when she moved in. Her father didn’t understand what she saw in the place. Just wait and see, she told him. What does it mean to recreate these scenes? For me it is cinema. It’s a game.

Others are invited to embark on remembering with her. The Biascamano sons repitch their father’s tent and set up his storm lamp and the pot for his coffee. Agnès is lucky we saved these, Biascamano’s daughter tells us. The tent is patches of fabric and netting. The netting stands out the most to Varda, because their father, Charles Biascamano, taught her how to repair fishing nets, a skill that got her a job on Corsica when she ran away. It was a good start, not a profession. I had to get back to Paris to learn one. Okay, photographer!

The Beaches of Agnès does not progress in chronological order but rocks back and forth. Time intermixes, yet Varda’s film is fluid, seamless. It is the very opposite of how I learned history as narration: finite and separate from the current moment, something that cannot seep into the present. Marcus Aurelius compared time to a river, a violent stream, because as soon as a moment has been witnessed, it is carried away; the moment has ended and been replaced by something else. By comparing time to a stream, Aurelius suggests that time has a kind of continuum, because streams flow in one continuous direction. At some point, the word stream also became part of our conceptualization of thinking, as in stream of consciousness. It is impossible for me to talk about memory absent of time. Neither time nor our thoughts move in one direction. It seems more applicable to use the sea as a metaphor to discuss time and thought, because in these bodies of water, there is a blending of tides and currents that change direction and speed.

Born in 1928, Varda was eleven years old when World War II began. She left her home on May 10, 1940, to the sound of bombs and ambulances. For the duration of the war, her family lived on a boat in Sète, France—a safe zone, though there was little food. Varda explains that she is lucky to still have her childhood photographs. If her mother had not taken them to the boat, they might have ended up in flea-market stalls. It never occurred to me that photographs are sometimes in flea markets or thrift stores because of tragedy. I had assumed they were disposed of because the memories in them no longer meant anything to the present, which, perhaps, is also tragic—the tragedy of being forgotten. How much are we holding on to? How much can we possibly hold on to?

It may be possible that memory, specifically trauma, is something that can be inherited. During World War II, my Oma Anke was confined in a Japanese prison camp in Indonesia. Anke was born in Jakarta, where her father worked in international trading, and she was raised speaking Malay and Dutch. The Netherlands’ three-hundred-year colonialization of Indonesia ended when Japan occupied the country in March 1942. Anke and her older brother had grown up knowing the world outside the camp, unlike her younger sister, an infant at the time of their imprisonment, who had no memory of life outside cramped spaces or beyond barbed wire. My mother believes that this lack of knowledge led to her aunt’s undiagnosed mental illness and subsequent lonely death. When the war ended, Anke was ten or twelve (she rarely discloses her age). Having heard stories of ice skating along the canals, she chose a sweater from a pile of donated clothing to wear on the ship to the Netherlands. Her journey was her first to her parents’ native country, and she arrived sweating in the middle of summer. The stress Anke endured in the camp likely affected the way she raised her children, and may be something that exists in me as well, though I was never imprisoned. My mom would tell me stories about how strict her mother was, how if she wasn’t home when the town bell rang, she wouldn’t get to eat dinner. My mom was tough too. One day on our walk home from my preschool, I fell. I watched a long string of blood inch its way to my white sock. I screamed, My knee! My sock! I hated when my clothing got dirty. My mom briefly examined me. Then continued to push my twin brothers forward in their blue stroller.

I once wrote a short story about someone who composes false family albums using flea-market photographs. He considers the albums art and sells them at his own stall in the market. A woman discovers a lost photograph from her childhood in one of the albums and demands to have it back. The artist refuses, and when he isn’t looking, she swipes the whole album off his table. He finds it on the ground with her photograph removed. She takes back ownership of her memory, her identity. Varda, a female-identifying artist, asserts control over her life, her memories, her art. I want this control too.

There is so much that photographs don’t say. When looking at some pictures, we need context, those identifying notes on the back, to understand what we are seeing. I said recently to my partner, James, that photos lie, because of what is absent, and that I was troubled that there is no documentation of my dad’s illness. Would you want to see them? James asked. No, I admitted, I wouldn’t. The only time I saw an image of my mother’s father, my Opa Johannes, was in line at a grocery store with Oma, who has a photograph of him in her wallet. Johannes was bald and wore large glasses. He died from lung cancer when my mom was sixteen. My own dad stops appearing in photographs around the time he needed an oxygen tank twenty-four hours a day, though he removed the tubes from around his ears to pose for a family photo one Christmas. My dad was embarrassed by his disease. We all look awkward in that image, uncomfortable. After he passed away, I threw the photo in the trash.

Around the time Jacques Demy fell ill during the AIDS crisis, so did the French writer Hervé Guibert, who penned over twenty-five books before his death in 1992 at the age of thirty-six. People want to hold on to their lives for as long as possible. Dad was inseparable from his radio and our dog, Pepi. When he knew his own death was certain, Jacques began to write down what he could recall about his life. Varda suggested that it be made into a film with scenes of his childhood, in his style of filmography. Shooting moved quickly; there was a rush to get all the details down as Jacques’s health continued to deteriorate. Can you see yourself in it? You as a child?

Oh yes, it is just right, I’m there!

Released when Varda was eighty, The Beaches of Agnès describes some of the anxiety we have about aging, forgetting, wanting to preserve and create meaning from a life lived. She does so in a way that is heartening, not filled with the dread we sometimes approach such matters with. She gracefully lies in the colorful fabric of a giant whale’s belly. Today I am creating images which have haunted me for a long time, since Bachelard’s classes at the Sorbonne, she says while fanning herself. I didn’t always understand what he said, but when he spoke of the whale that swallowed Jonas, or Jonas in the whale’s belly unwilling to come out, I felt involved and happy, like I do today.

Rather than being therapeutic, reliving some moments can be exhausting, debilitating. Except for how he survived and how he lost hearing in his left ear (a bullet whizzed by his helmet), my grandfather Harry, the son of German immigrants, never spoke of World War II. My dad has told me that our last name saved Harry in the war. Friedrich Paulus was a German field marshal who led the Nazi army during the Battle of Stalingrad. Paulus was losing to the Soviets, and Hitler ordered him to commit suicide. Paulus refused, based on his Catholic faith, and surrendered alive on January 31, 1943. (We aren’t blood related, as far as I know, and the thought of such a connection has disturbed me.) So, when the Nazis saw PAULUS on Harry’s shirt or dog tags, he was taken prisoner instead of shot, and he was treated better than the others. I’m not sure if this is true or not. I can’t remember the moment my dad told me this story; like most of my childhood memories, that feels lifetimes ago, as if experienced by someone else altogether.

This feeling of having the experiences of another also occurs when I read notes to myself that I’ve left in books and on pieces of paper on my desk. While falling asleep, I occasionally shoot out of bed to write down something that I worry I will forget by the morning, but when I wake up, those notes are incomprehensible, have lost all meaning to me.

Writing is an everyday act that involves a particular kind of remembering. Every time I write, I am remembering how to form letters, to create whole words. This reflex happens so fast that I don’t actively register that I am engaged in a memory act. The page once felt so permanent to me—ink cannot be erased, and pencil leaves a faint shadow—that I worried my anxiety would continue to live on if I wrote it down. Over time, I’ve became comfortable with recording anxious thoughts. Working through a feeling does not mean that it disappears, although I would like it to; rather, as Naomi Shihab Nye mentioned in an interview with Krista Tippett, writing gives the feeling shape, transforming it into something observable, something that allows me to exhale. It is less terrifying in physical form than I thought.

Looking for memory in her childhood home, Varda admits, I know some things, the ones mother told me about. My high-school psychology teacher said that I could not possibly remember being pushed by my dad in a swing while waving to my pregnant mother in the window. I must be fabricating a memory based on what my parents told me, because I was too young then, two and a half years old. Several of my classmates disagreed with him, certain that what they remembered from toddler years was true. I know that as I swung forward, toward the sun, I closed my eyes and saw splotches of red and yellow.

At home we tried to use humor to normalize my dad’s need for an oxygen tank, the kind that resembled those deep-sea divers wear on their backs. I called the tubes his fishing line and tugged on them to get his attention. Would you prefer to be a bass or shark? I asked him.

A sea robin, so you don’t try to eat me. Send me back out there, and I’d let go.

In the photograph that circulated after he passed, he smiles proudly, high up on a dune, his hand on his hip next to the fishing pole, pretending that he cast his line from there.

One might look at the photograph of Jean Vilar, the founder of the Avignon Festival, in which he is wearing his sunglasses beneath his nose like a mustache, and find it amusing, remarks Varda while standing in an exhibition of her photographs of the festival’s performers. Mostly what I see is they’re dead. So, I’ve brought them roses, and she gently drops them in front of the images of performers that have passed on. Roses and begonias, she whispers. All of the dead bring me back to Demy, she says. She sits next to Demy’s grave, twirling a flower in her hand, looking at the stone as if at Demy himself. I’ve never visited my father’s grave, except for when I buried my Uncle Pat next to him. But he intended that I would visit his site on holidays and his birthday like my mother does. He used to take me on walks in the Gate of Heaven cemetery where he, Uncle Pat, Aunt Barbara, and his parents are now buried. My father normalized death and visiting the dead through these visits; for him to die would be normal.

I recall the heat on the day of his funeral, my dress sticking to me, the green fabric folding chairs that we sat on, facing the burial plot. On occasion, my cousin T⸺ will remind me of her father’s response to my dad’s death, his lower lip that trembled uncontrollably, the pages that rattled in his hands. His grief shocked his daughter, made him into someone unrecognizable. But it was his words that surprised me: Billy was the best man at my wedding, and he’ll always be the best man. I never thought of my dad as the best man. He stole money from me and once called me a fucking bitch. I struggle with how to frame the life of someone who was ill but still did me wrong. He can no longer speak up for himself.

As she drove past the street I grew up on, my mom asked if I wanted to turn there and show James. No, I don’t need to see that. I never wanted to go back. One year I cried knowing I would have to leave the Jersey Shore, where we vacationed with my extended family on my dad’s side, and go back home. Bad things happen there, I told my mom.

Bad things? she questioned. My parents didn’t argue at the beach house like they did at home, and my OCD thoughts and behaviors that filled me with fear and dread didn’t occur there either. I now understand that my behaviors were an attempt to assert control over possible crises at home, where I had no power over the catastrophe of my parents’ arguments, my mother’s anger, and my dad’s health. I looked forward to going to the beach house more than any other time of the year, my place of escape.

I revisit only in my dreams, rebuilding it exactly how it was: the wood paneling that my mom painted over, the wood kitchen cabinets with brass handles, the wicker furniture on the porch, the sliding porch door and windows that opened with a crank, the light shades of blue and green, the bowls of shells in each room. This is a beach house! friends would say. The red rug and dark wood of the hallway where I knock on the living-room door. I crouch down so my mouth is level with the keyhole. I am holding something; I feel a weight in my arms. Speaking through the keyhole, I ask if it is safe to come inside. I think I am holding an infant. The doorknob falls to the floor, and the barrel of a rifle slowly approaches my mouth.

A doctor who lives in Varda’s childhood home in Belgium on Rue de l’Aurore sends her a letter inviting her to visit before he sells the property. While standing in the garden that is now overgrown, she tells us that emotion is absent and that she has no tears. Her dusty pink skirt gently blossoms up and down in the breeze. A few unchanged parts of the house do speak to her, like the stained-glass window. Her mother cried facing the window when Queen Astrid, the Lady Di of the ’30s, passed away. A majority of the footage in this section is the doctor explaining his collection of model trains, rather than an exploration of Varda’s childhood before World War II. After leaving, she calls this segment of the film a flop.

Do you see anything of the sort here, even the faintest hint of memory? It seems to me like a dizzying, curved, light bridge leading into the as yet inexplicable future,² the owner of a recently built health resort in Robert Walser’s The Tanners comments on the potential of the new structure. The brand-new building allows her to fantasize about the future. A clean slate.

In W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, the owner of the Iver Grove estate, James Mallord Ashman, had sealed off particular rooms of the house, including his childhood nursery, while the rest of the house was used as a convalescent home during World War II. Austerlitz tells the narrator that when Ashman reopened the sealed rooms, he found them in the exact same state as when he’d closed them, frozen in time. There was no dust. Ashman was so struck by the sight of the rooms unaffected by the war, unaffected by time, that he shot a few rounds at the clock on top of the coach house. The rooms were a memory box of a world before the war, like a museum.

I moved my furniture, boxes of books, and other large items to a storage unit around the corner from my old apartment. Initially, seeing my possessions cramped together and locked away upset me. I had packed away part of myself, my history, in the form of objects that I’d carried with me from my childhood home to my mom’s apartment and later to two Brooklyn apartments. I returned to the unit a few months later for a winter jacket and was disturbed by what I saw. The contents had become a history that I no longer wished to hold onto, because the objects held memories of trauma and stress from those places I’d lived. I can’t help but attach meaning to things that I desperately need to keep, that I violently throw out. My smashed dresser is on the side of the road.

As we were moving out of my childhood neighborhood, my mom set our parakeet loose. Part of her reasoning was that we’d found it outside, so we should just, you know, return it. When we originally saw it in a neighbor’s front bush, we’d assumed the bird belonged to a breeder because of the tag on its leg. Our neighbors—my childhood friends Katie and Genny—discovered it after we let it go. My mom denied that the bird was ours. Only now do I understand that my mom was cleaning out her life after my dad passed away. The bird brings up a real racket when you turn the sink on, he would say, with his fists on the counter to support his weight bloated from steroids. He thinks he’s back on a tropical island.

Watching The Beaches of Agnès feels as though I am experiencing Varda’s thought process. When she traveled in China, she wrote often to her lover. A series of images from her trip ends with Varda closing a drawer of letters that she never read again. Our love affair ended when Rosalie was taking shape. I raised Rosalie alone, then with Jacques. We often went to Noirmoutier. Jacques wanted to show me this island where he camped as a teenager. I can make no guesses about what thought trail Varda will follow next, what will serve as the connection to another moment. She moves so quickly. Events happen much faster in memory than they actually occurred. The mind speeds up events, cutting out certain moments, condensing a whole day to a few seconds. Jacques wanted to find a fisherman’s house on Noirmoutier, but instead they discovered an abandoned mill with a single glove hanging inside. We see a photograph of the mill, followed by a wall with a bunch of colorful work gloves used by workers who clean oysters. Varda’s meditation on oysters, mussels, and waves ends with her first utterance about the New Wave. The fictional cat Guillaume, voiced by Chris Marker, interjects, Hey! Oyster, mussel, wave! Enough! Tell us instead about the birth of the New Wave. An image of Varda is center screen, surrounded by a pictorial wreath of French New Wave directors. A border appears around each director as Guillaume says their names: Truffaut, Godard, Resnais, Chabrol, Rivette, Demy, and you, Varda?

Varda forgoes traditions about what it means to make a biographical documentary film, upsetting our expectations for what she will recall and emphasize. She does not comment on the spring of 1968 in Europe. She wasn’t there. I am playing the role of a little old lady, pleasantly plump and talkative, telling her life story. And yet it’s others I’m interested in, others I liked to film. Others who intrigue me, motivate me, make me ask questions, discontent me, fascinate me. Like the doctor and his train collection.  The Beaches of Agnès is about everyone else, with Varda as the narrator.

No chapter titles, and little mentioning of time periods. How easy it is to forget how old you were when something occurred. The way we understand time and, therefore, our lives, with a beginning, middle, and end, is just one way of perceiving our existence. Even film reels tick like clocks. Presenting her memories in this way, Varda argues that life need not consist of, focus on, nor culminate in grand moments. There are no sweeping conclusions in her documentary. She doesn’t build up to the New Wave, or perhaps her best-known film, Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), which she made in that era. There are other ways of constructing an identity.

Why did you go from photography to cinema? Guillaume asks Varda.

I remember wanting words. I thought that if you paired images with words, you’d get cinema. Of course, I soon learned it was something else.

Were you a film buff?

No, I wasn’t a film buff. I’d only seen about ten films by the age of twenty-five.

Guillaume rolls his eyes.

I didn’t go to film school or work as an assistant. I used my imagination.

In class one afternoon, Professor Schlesinger remarked that there is no formula for becoming a writer. In a world that feels so structured that one is convinced, or forced, to follow particular steps to achieve a goal, his words and Varda’s provide me with relief.

There is a lot of societal pressure to react in a particular way to life’s events. If we don’t cry when someone dies, then some assume that person meant little to us. When she tells us that her father died, Varda does not express any particular emotion. The death simply happened, and the mention of her father allows her to transition and incorporate other footage into her film. When my own father died in late July, I went to work at the photo lab and spent the day developing rolls of film of someone’s eighteenth birthday in a local park. Thin yellow light streaks decorated half of the photos.

We experience a reproduction of a prior state of consciousness when we see a familiar face, object, or place; hear a sound; or smell something recognizable. A sensation or impression from our past ³arises. During World War II, Sebald’s character Austerlitz was sent to England for safety. Returning to the apartment in Germany he had lived in with his parents, he suddenly remembers everything from his upbringing that he previously couldn’t recall, as if that portion of his life, once wiped clean, was now returning in vibrant colors. I had a similar experience when I saw the porch windows and sliding door of my childhood again in a house in Mastic, Long Island. I vacationed there for the first time with James, his siblings, and their children. The house faced the bay and was surrounded by tall brush, which egrets gently glided across. One of the screen doors to the deck came off its track, and I knew to fix it by putting the bottom of the door in first, not the top, as one might suspect. The second night we were there, a leak formed in the hallway, likely a previous leak repaired incorrectly. I thought then about how our kitchen ceiling had collapsed a number of times whenever too much water came down from the bathroom of our neighbors above us. The thin composite wood would gently drip water before suddenly landing on the stove itself. One time, we covered the hole with a flimsy piece of poster board from one of my class projects so we wouldn’t have to look at the dark pipes. Throughout the entire stay in Mastic, large gusts of wind would come in through the screen door, causing the bedroom doors upstairs to slam shut with such force that it made all of us jump, especially me. As irritating as the noise was, it was harmless, just the wind, nothing catastrophic, but during one part of my life such sounds were. After the door slammed, my dad would drive off.

In New York City and the surrounding suburbs, I always walk past nostalgia—I’ve never lived anywhere else. On a daily basis I reckon with memories and move on with my day. At the same time, the landscape here is under constant mutation, a whole block changes, a memory dissipates with a coat of paint. Gentrification is an eradication of memory.

In the brain, dreams are housed in the same space as memory. One explanation for the experience of déjà vu is that something in the present moment is reminiscent of a dream we had. Another theory argues that we are summoning memories from a previous life. The theory that strikes me as most plausible considers the eye as an unconscious recorder. Our eyes pick up information that we are not fully aware of, which gets stored in our mind. Déjà vu is seeing what we unconsciously saw before, or something similar to it, which also explains why we see complete strangers in dreams. They might have been someone whom we glanced at for just under a second as we walked by them or scrolled past them on our phones. I am not always in control of what I am paying attention to.

I was sick and had a terrible headache. James suggested that I watch an easygoing movie, like Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), an anime film I thought I had not seen before. While I watched it, though, I felt like the scene when Kiki attempts to fly on her broomstick after she begins losing her witch’s powers was familiar. Her red bow reminded me of Thumbelina’s pink one in the 1994 film I owned on VHS. The first clip I found on the internet was a giant toad licking his lips at Thumbelina, who is terrified, unsure of how to escape the toads and the book she is trapped in. I realized where my nightmares of giant toads came from, how visual moments in film also feed their way into my subconscious, are indeed part of my larger scope of memory. Thumbelina is saved by her cat, who walks across the book and scares the toads away.

When I’m dreaming, the many different houses that we rented at the Shore merge into one; a room that belonged to one house will appear in another. After rainstorms we would go for walks on the beach to look for shells and sea glass. In a recent dream, I am opening wood-board boxes in midmorning light. I see myself only from behind. I often view myself from this angle in dreams, as if I were watching a film of myself, or had become a ghost observing my living self. The boxes that I open contain my childhood possessions: the plastic yellow horse from my grandmother’s house, the locket my Oma gave me, clothing I do not recognize. As I pull out a dry, stiff purple sweater, piles of sand fall to the ground. There is no one else around. Opening these boxes is exhausting. I feel the sun’s heat on my skin. My cousins appear, and maybe some friends as well, to help me unpack the rest. Even though I dreamed all this the night before, it is sometimes unclear to me what verb tense dreams belong to. They feel real, lived, but leave no visible trace, no stain, brush against no surface.

The beach is a place where remains wash up: hollowed-out sunglasses, plastic particles, tampon applicators, chicken bones, broken pieces of beer-bottle glass smoothed by the ocean, sun-bleached shells of sea animals. During the winter of 1953, large trucks dumped the household objects of bulldozed neighborhoods into what is now called Dead Horse Bay or Glass Bottle Beach. Robert Moses forcefully evicted residents to make way for his highway and road systems. Covered just with topsoil, objects belonging to these former inhabitants continually wash up on shore, refusing to be forgotten.

At the exhibition of the Avignon Festival photographs, a large portrait of Jean Vilar is hung in 11 × 14 fragments. This whole idea of fragmentation appeals to me. It corresponds so naturally to the questions of memory, says Varda. The literal movement of film through projectors, how one can see each frame flashing by.

Do you think you’ll manage? We’re shooting in bits and pieces, asks Jane Birkin.

Varda replies, It’s like doing a puzzle. You place the pieces here and there until it comes together, but there’s a hole in the center.

I feel good by the sea, says Demy, and laughs lightly, a full smile with slight bashfulness. I have no other words. A wave like a curled hand pulling me in. I can’t bear the thought of being landlocked, living in the middle of a mass of land. I’ve continuously sought out the ocean, craving to be near it. A few miles northwest of Dead Horse Bay, in Canarsie, I began photographing the shore, which is the ultimate challenge in stilling a moment before it is covered up by something new, recedes, and drifts away entirely. I always close my shutter a fraction of a second past the instant I wanted. If I look through the viewfinder and wait for the moment to arrive, of course it never comes. At home I cut and rearrange the landscapes I photographed. Reordering them in a collage intensifies what is natural about nature: to be in flux, never finite.

When the brain creates memories, a biochemical reaction occurs, leaving physical traces. Memory is akin to celluloid in the sense that both leave an imprint, a trace of something that happened. Toward the end of The Beaches of Agnès, Varda stands in a glass room in which she has hung strips of one of her films. Light that enters the space illuminates the color strips. She stands amid filmic memory, is surrounded by it as if she were inside out. Even when we dump it all out, we reveal little, remarks the actress Jane Birkin after she empties the contents of her purse.

Andrée Vilar, a friend of Varda’s, has been slowly losing her memory. What she does remember is poetry. She likes to recite poems by heart and repeats the lines from “The cemetery by the sea” by Paul Valéry for the camera: The sea, the ever-recommencing sea . . . / O what reward, after a thought, / Is a long look across the calm of the gods! She is not the least bit frustrated that she recalls these lines and not her own lived past. I wonder what is most important, why we insist on needing to remember certain moments in our lives. How can memory be relied upon if it is a function of the imagination and therefore located in the realm of fantasy and fiction? I have a tendency to use the words ⁴maybe, perhaps. I am contemplating possibilities but also second-guessing myself, aware that I am in a state of not knowing. Varda admits to her own uncertainty about what might have happened:  a swarm of flies decorates a reclining Venus, while Varda compares her memories to flies she’s trying to grab.

Bibliography

McNeill, Isabelle. “Memory and the Moving Image.” In Memory and the Moving Image: French Film in the Digital Era, 19–50. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1r2cnj.6.

Sebald, W. G. Austerlitz. New York: Modern Library, 2002.

Tippet, Krista. “Naomi Shihab Nye—Your Life is a Poem.” On Being. Podcast audio. July 28, 2016. https://onbeing.org/programs/naomi-shihab-nye-before-you-know-kindness-as-the-deepest-thing-inside/.

Walser, Robert. The Tanners. New York: New Directions, 2009.

Other Works Consulted

Bluher, Dominique. “Autobiography, (Re-)Enactment and the Performative Self-Portrait in Varda’s Les Plages d’Agnès/The Beaches of Agnès (2008).” Studies in European Cinema 10, no. 1 (March 1, 2013): 59–69. https://doi.org/10.1386/seci.10.1.59_1.

Conway, Kelley. “Varda at Work: Les Plages d’Agnès.” Studies in French Cinema 10, no. 2 (June 2010): 125–39. https://doi.org/10.1386/sfc.10.2.125_1.

DeRoo, Rebecca J. “Varda Now: Autobiography, Memory, and Retrospective.” In Agnès Varda between Film, Photography, and Art, 1st ed., 143–60. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1trkkmm.10.

Warwick, David, and Agnès Varda. “The Beaches of Agnès: An Interview.” In Agnès Varda: Interviews, edited by T. Jefferson Kline, 193–97. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2tvpbv.28.

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1. Isabelle McNeill, “Memory and the Moving Image,” in Memory and the Moving Image: French Film in the Digital Era (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 25. ↩︎
2. Robert Walser, The Tanners (New York: New Directions, 2009), 332. ↩︎
3. McNeill, “Memory and the Moving Image,” 22. ↩︎
4. McNeill, “Memory and the Moving Image,” 23. ↩︎

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