The Beaches of Agnès

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

Structuring the film around beaches — of her Belgian childhood, of California, of the French coast — Varda revisits her past through a delightful array of devices: actors restaging old scenes, mirrors arranged on the sand, trapeze artists, and tender returns to the memory of her husband, the film-maker Jacques Demy. Clips from her own films and those of her contemporaries weave through a collage that is part memoir, part installation art, part essay on the act of remembering. The tone is buoyant even when the subject is loss.

Critics adored its wit, its formal daring and its emotional generosity, recognising it as a summation of a singular career. Inventive, moving and irrepressibly alive, The Beaches of Agnès is Varda taking stock of a life in cinema on her own playful terms. It is essential viewing for anyone drawn to the French New Wave and to the art of the personal documentary. Inventive, buoyant and irrepressibly alive, it is Varda taking stock of a life in cinema on her own playful terms, and remains essential viewing for anyone drawn to the New Wave or the personal documentary.