The Beach Bodies of Agnès Varda

By Jeremy Schipper | 14.02.2021

Toward the beginning of The Beaches of Agnès (2008), French filmmaker Agnès Varda enigmatically states, “if we opened people up, we’d find landscapes. If we opened me up, we’d find beaches.” Implicit in Varda’s quote is the connection between the body and its surrounding environment, positioning the former as an enclosure or distillation of the latter. It is no mere coincidence that Varda’s semi-autobiographical film unravels seaside, as the beach is a continually reappearing entity throughout her works, including her first feature film La Pointe Courte (1955), Du côté de la côte (1952), Uncle Yanco (1967), Mur Murs (1981), Ulysse (1982), Bord de Mer (2009), among others. I will use Varda’s quote as a jumping-off point into an exploration of how the beach and the ocean function within her films, and to how Varda presents a fluid relationship between the ocean-as-body and the ocean-as-space. In other words, I will explore how the seaside can be read not just as a physical setting for Varda’s films, but also a way of understanding Varda’s filmic body: her self-reflexive musing on film’s ability to turn the immaterial into the material, and the imagined into the lived. Utilizing the site of the beach – a zone where two entirely different entities overlap and collide, where the unreachable suddenly materializes at our feet, and where time feels both limited and limitless – Varda questions the ability of film to materialize and to take up meaningful space in the minds and bodies of its viewers.

Beaches presents multiple versions of the filmic body, or the oceanic body, which will be theorized as follows: first, I will investigate how broader concepts of nomadism apply to theories of embodiment by exploring Varda’s treatment of the self, and the self-as-multiple. Second, I will examine how the corporeality of the ocean intersects with other existing theories of the body by showing how fluid is body, and how the body is fluid. Finally, I will develop an understanding of the oceanic nomadic body as one characterizing the medium of film itself. The individual’s experience of film, like the individual’s experience of the ocean and ocean-space, elicits contradictory experiences of both the infinite potential and inherent limitations of the body (and the body through film), just as it complicates experiences of time and duration. Using nomadic thought as a mobilized concept, I will explore the ocean and its embodiments in their multiple connections to Beaches’ central exploration of the nature of self-identity, the body through the space of film, and of the filmic body itself. 

First, it must be clarified how notions of nomadism - and the oceanic nomadic – hold important stakes in the politics of identity and of the body that Varda’s films are concerned with. Beaches begins with a documentation of the construction of what Varda calls a “reverie;” an installation that blends real and imagined space. She and her crew choreograph mirrors, picture frames, and various reflective surfaces in such a way that it becomes impossible to maintain one objective perspective of the presented scene (Fig. 1). Here, Varda is creating an aestheticized image of nomadism: she denies the possibility of a static viewpoint, and instead opts to reterritorialize the single in favor of the fragmented multiple. As nomadic and feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti contextualizes, “politically, nomadic thought is the expression of a nonunitary vision of the subject, defined by motion in a complex manner that is densely material. It invites us to rethink the structures and boundaries of the self by tackling the deeper issues of identity” (3). Thus, Beaches begins with a nomadic image in which subject, ocean, and camera are forced to occupy the same space. Through her use of nomadic imagery in the context of self-documenting and self-discovery, Varda establishes that to explore the self is to explore the constantly shifting relations of identity present within, and beyond the single individual. In this opening sequence, Varda presents her identity as a relative assemblage of a vast number of experiences and spaces. Thus, for both Varda and Braidotti, this nomadic play between the partial and the whole can be applied to theories of embodiment, and to the relationship between subjective and spatial identity.  

This nomadic experience of the body is further exemplified in the corporeality of the ocean, and in the ocean’s many embodiments. Often referred to as bodies of water, it may be productive to explore what type of bodies oceans constitute. The first characteristic of the oceanic body I will explore is its ability to envelope difference and heterogeneity within one, discreet form. This nature of the oceanic body - of a coherent body made up of constantly shifting and fluid parts - is reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s practice of the Body without Organs; a “field of immanence [that] is not internal to the self, but neither does it come from an external self or a nonself. Rather, it is like the absolute Outside that knows no Selves because interior and exterior are equally a part of the immanence in which they have fused” (Deleuze and Guattari 156). The Body without Organs combines embodiment and nomadic theory by obliterating the traditional functions and limits of the body in order to enable a multiplicity of new connections. Likewise, Varda posits the oceanic body as being liberated from these same traditional notions of space: in filming the story of a couple, she demonstrates of the ocean is able to connect a woman “from the shores of Lake Michigan” to a man “from the shores of New Jersey” in marriage, suggesting a connection between two bodies of water that do not intersect in geographical space. These rhizomatic connections are able to form both within the body (the churning, rearranging currents of the ocean) and beyond (the lapping of waves onto shore, the evaporating mist). Varda presents the body of the ocean not merely as a physical space, but as a mode of thought and a vehicle for connection. Thus, it is fitting that within her autobiographical work, Varda tells the story of her own self through the telling of other subjects and others’ stories.

While the oceanic body resists a set form, it is also intimately connected with human embodiment. In this way, the oceanic body can be read as an extension of the human, just as the human body itself can be read as fluid. Biological and physiological discussions of ‘what constitutes a human body’ cannot be separated from discussions of fluidity, with water constituting approximately 60% of the individual adult body. In Beaches, Varda uses cinematography and editing to privilege shots that graphically link the human body together with the oceanic (Fig. 2, 3). Architectural and spatial historian Mitchell Schwarzer discusses film’s ability to modify our perception of space in Zoomscape, in which he argues that the prevalence of film has “transformed architectural perception” such that “the streetscape is as much a filmic construction as it is an architectural one” (Schwarzer 207). Schwarzer is on one hand suggesting that the human eye is now trained to see and move through space like a film camera, just as he acknowledges the medium’s ability to bring out the extraordinary in the everyday, “ruptur[ing] the continuum of space, reassembling it beyond the bounds of direct experience” (208). Both Varda and Schwarzer recognize film’s potential for destabilization, as the human body and its surrounding environment (here, the ocean) are articulated and fused into a single entity through their simultaneous presence on screen. Further, Schwarzer cites Delueze’s acknowledgement of this concept as he explains that, ‘different views can be fitted together in an infinite number of ways and, because they are not oriented in relation to each other, constitute a set of singularities’. Thus, Varda deploys the formal elements of cinema to destabilize the notion of the singular and discreet body, fusing it together with that of others and the ocean.

This connection between film as medium and the oceanic body can be further strengthened through an exploration of the medium of film itself as an oceanic body/space. To be on the beach is to experience a sensation of vastness through a realization of limitation. It is to gaze upon the seemingly infinite with a partial perspective. The human experience of the ocean is to feel the body’s own potential (I can see for miles…) while simultaneously feeling its limitations (…though I cannot see it all). Spinoza discusses the “potential” of the body as its defining characteristic, as he explains, “we do not yet know what a body can do.” In Spinozian terms, the body is defined by this infinite potential, which bridges the gap between the virtual and the real. Thus, the experience of the ocean is one that catalyzes this dialectic between the limitations and infinite potential of the human body. Varda appears to be acutely aware of this characteristic of the ocean, as she captures it on film, a media which itself creates a sensorial embodiment in its spectator that is both limiting and expansive. To watch and hear a film is to experience a kind of sensorial synesthesia or confusion, in which the viewer can feel, smell, and taste their surroundings primarily through what they see and hear on screen. To experience film is to transcend sensorial expectations of what the body can do, and to feel a limitless – or at least greatly expanded – potential in the body.

 And yet, in Beaches Varda also admits that there is a limit to what film can achieve. When recreating a scene from her childhood, Varda muses, “I don’t know what it means to recreate a scene like this. Do we relive the moment? For me it’s cinema - it’s a game.” In Beaches, Varda explores the limits of film in its ability to create authentic sensation, as she brings the medium into physical and material space through the construction of installations. In one such installation, Varda drapes the bare frame of a shed with celluloid strips, creating what she calls My Shack of Cinema (Fig. 4). This structure layers multiple experiences of space, creating a juxtaposition in which the interior space of the film celluloids and the exterior space which they themselves occupy (the gallery), compete for the viewer’s visual attention. Here, Varda questions what it means to be in multiple spaces at the same time. 

In another attempt to convert filmic space into corporeal space, Beaches presents the viewer with two men who are shown pushing a makeshift mobile cinema (a screen articulated atop a moving cart) as it screens a film of their deceased father walking down the same street which they now walk. Here, the memory of their father is given a new kind of body which is able to occupy space and to exist as a kind of physical being. Yet within this installation, as with the Varda’s frequent representation and discussion of her late partner, the filmmaker Jacques Demy, there is an undeniable sense of lack and absence present in these filmic embodiments. It is this same lack which creates a distancing from one’s expectations of the self, which consequently allows for the experience of infinite potential in the body. The oceanic body’s ability to elicit simultaneous feelings of infinite potential and inherent lack in the body is a trait shared with the medium of film, and thus renders the medium of film an oceanic body itself. 

Film can also be read as an oceanic body through its multiple experiences of time and duration. Within the film, Varda distinguishes between two experiences of time: that of the “metronome”, and that of the “violin”. One can assume that to experience the time of a metronome is to experience a metered, regulated and objective sense of time, whereas to experience the time of the violin is to feel the time of flow, and a subjective feeling of duration. How does one then experience the time of the ocean, and of the oceanic body? I will posit that oceanic movement, like film, is capable of conveying both experiences of time simultaneously. First, the ocean creates the feeling of “the time of the metronome” through the heartbeat that is the unit of the wave. Like the ticking of a metronome, the washing of the wave is metered, regular, predictable, and constant – eternal, even. Intrinsic to the motion of the wave is an eternal departure and return, an infinite nomadism. In filmic terms, the time of the metronome is the framing from 5:00pm to 7:00pm in Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7, just as it’s the one hour, fifty-two minute, and ten second duration of Beaches.

 Conversely, the ocean embodies the experience of the time of the violin through individual experiences and memories of the sea, as Varda frames her own identity in relative terms to her life by the shore. “The North [Atlantic] Sea and its sand is the start for me… of what I more or less know about myself.” She measures her life in these experiences, spanning from her childhood in Brussels to her time in California. She says of the waves off the Pacific Coast of Los Angeles, “the sounds are music to my ears.” In the time of the violin, the heartbeat of the wave is stretched and condensed, remixed and reversed through subjective experience. In Varda’s films, this is the effect of long takes and jump cuts within the supposed two-hour timeframe in Cléo, just as it’s the blending of new and old footage, and of still and moving images in Beaches. This dual experience of time through the ocean and through media can be traced back to Virgina Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, in which the reassuring and meandering sounds of the ocean in “The Window” become a threateningly infinite source of destruction in “Time Passes.” Both the subject of Varda’s films and the filmic bodies themselves can be read as oceanic bodies through their portrayal of time as both predictably repetitive, and wholly unknowable.

 It is an important distinction that the title of Varda’s film is The Beaches of Agnès and not ‘The Oceans of Agnès’. The beach represents a point of intersection between land and ocean; between the fixed landscapes Varda believes we’d find in some people, and between the constantly nomadic and “free-flowing intensity” that is the body of the ocean. The beach is Deleuze and Guattari’s momentary site of territorialization, right before the process of deterritorialization begins. Thus, this film serves as a beach for Varda. It serves as the intersection between her present self and her constantly shifting self. It is a record of the unrecordable. It is a fixed theory on the ever-moving ocean. It is the beach and the ocean – the site of nomadism, of eternal return, of constant movement – that allows Varda to carve her birth name (Arlette) in the sand, only to have it washed away seconds later. 

It is no coincidence that the beach, the ocean, its waves, its sounds, and its movement are regular visitors to Varda’s films. To explore questions of the oceanic body is to explore the very nature of self-identity, insofar as the self is always engaged in a nomadic shifting from one form to the next. In telling her own story so intimately through the stories of others and of the beach, Beaches presents a version of the self that is both individual and communal, limited and boundless, relatable and unknowable. Viewed after Varda’s death, the decade-old film on memory and cinema does little to neatly tie together the filmmaker’s remarkable life and work in a linear or coherent fashion. Rightfully so, the beauty of The Beaches of Agnès is its willingness to open up a set of new questions about what it means to remember someone, and how individuals can continue to create meaning long after their body is gone. For those wishing to pay their last respects to the filmmaker who are unable to visit her at her final resting place in Montparnasse, they would do just as well to pack their bags and head out for an afternoon at the beach.

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