Inspiration. Creation. Sharing. I also really, really want to visit (or live?) in one of those Film Shacks, where it's an art installation/structure where everything is lined with reels of film.
The final film by Agnes Varda is her second self-portrait (or is it even third or fifth or we have all lost count I suppose), but then she herself would have (mildly but still forcefully in her way) disputed this simply by the fact that she was so much more interested and captivated by other people and places than herself. She might have even been in the middle of shooting a self portrait like the masterpiece The Beaches of Agnes (that may be my favorite film of hers, up to this poont), and then she'll discover someone in her journey that she wants to make a documentary on instead, like the man with the little toy trains.
The "Beaches" may be a little stronger and more unique than this, which is more or less like a presentation ala Beastie Boys Story or DePalma where we are getting the Full Career Retrospective Extravaganza, but it isn't all Varda sitting down with a sideshow as she is talking to us in other places and the total strength and wonder of this is just how she accomplished so much while (mostly) keeping her ambitions somewhat modest and always about the personal and inter-personal.
She wasn't off making like grand epic films in a desert or out at sea, but there are certainly times when watching how she created some of these films and works of art that she was forging uncharted terrain of expression, whether it was depicting "happiness" ala Le Bonheur, a resentment at life like in Vagabond, or discovering the wonders of potatoes in the Gleaners and I films.
The structure of her life and work is what is so striking to me, how she begins with Uncle Yanco, her short documentary on her uncle she discovered when visiting the west coast in the late 1960s, ends with her and the artist JR on a beach being metaphorically but also it would seen literally away, and in between the flow from one subject to the next, each film to the next, is natural and emotionally congruent.
I even found myself becoming emotional near the end at the (as she would say again) inspitation of that move with the crane and then the helicopter going up to see the flower in the tree and how high it goes. Or, through so much of her travels and encounters, how despite all of her success how humbled and curious she was, and how much pleasure it gave her to share it with audiences, of other people and our relationship to mediums, to screens, and of course to cats and Beaches.
There won't be another like her, and I'm not sure there even should be. But her life and work is an example for others aspiring and long in it of perseverance and adaptability, of how those factors of Inspiration, Creativity and Sharing are such strong components for an artist when yielded properly, of finding some peace even in grief (the part about her being a widow, which I kind of took for granted, and how she transformed even that into art with other widows is astounding), and the joy of getting Robert De Niro to fall off a boat (ok it was his double but still).
