The Beaches of Agnès

Agnès Varda's The Beaches of Agnès (2008) won the César for Best Documentary. It is the great New Wave pioneer's self-portrait, a film about her own long life made with the inventiveness and curiosity that had driven her work since Cléo from 5 to 7. She made it as she turned eighty, and there is no trace of solemnity in it.

Varda builds the film around beaches: those of her Belgian childhood, of California, of the French coast. She revisits her past with whatever device comes to hand, from actors restaging old scenes and mirrors set out on the sand to trapeze artists, and she returns tenderly to the memory of her husband, the film-maker Jacques Demy. Clips from her own films and from those of her contemporaries run through a collage that is partly memoir and partly installation art, and also an essay on what it means to remember. The tone stays buoyant even when the subject is loss.

Critics loved its wit, its formal daring and its emotional generosity, and saw it as the summation of a singular career. In The Beaches of Agnès Varda takes stock of a life in cinema on her own playful terms, and the film is moving without ever asking to be. Anyone drawn to the French New Wave, or to the personal documentary as a form, should start here or end here.