"The Beaches of Agnès"

(soft music)

(foreign language)

[Richard] I'm Richard Brody and this clip is from

The Beaches of Anais, a 2008 self-portrait film

directed by Anias Vava.

Though the film loosely follows

the chronology of Vava's life

from her earliest childhood recollections from Brussels,

to the celebration of her 80th birthday in Paris in 2008,

the film is something of a collage

of memory and fantasy, staged events,

and collected film clips.

The beaches of the title inform her entire life and,

in fact, she made her first feature film,

La Pointe Courte from 1954 about a fishing village

in the south of France.

Vava doesn't shrink from evoking, in dramatic sketches,

some of the most painful events of her life,

including the deportation of Jewish children

from her neighborhood to concentration camps

during the second world war

and the death of her husband,

the filmmaker Jack Demi in 1990.

A fundamental aspect of the film is memorial.

It's as if Vava were not merely commemorating,

paying tribute to, but even reviving,

reanimating those she loved who were gone.

In a way, this is the work of a survivor

who doesn't minimize the hardships she's face in her life.

But who also has a certain

justifiable pride in her achievements,

and who, in celebrating her life and work,

celebrates those who have lived and created it with her.

She speaks intimately about her family life;

her parents, her children, her grandchildren.

And she talks about her cinematic family,

her friendships with (inaudible, thick accent)

and Chris Marker who is represented here

in his familiar feline icon.

She tells the story of her life

with an exuberant blend of verbal

anecdotes and visual metaphors,

a remarkable collage-like technique

of associative montage and multiple exposures.

She also describes, in detail, her artistic method,

the way the history of art has informed

her cinematic ability and the way that

her affinity for the art of fragmentation,

for the art of the mosaic, loops itself back

into the making of this film.

(foreign language)

She shows how, in mid-life, she made the transition

from being a filmmaker to being a plastic artist.

Museum installations proved central both to her life

and to the making of this film,

many of which arose directly from her private life

as, after the death of Jack Demi,

she created a video installation featuring

widows from their hometown.

Or a memorial to a film that didn't succeed,

from rescued prints of which she made a house of cinema.

Vava's life and her art have always been inseparable

and she makes that clear in this scene:

(foreign language)

which segways from the birth of her son, Mattuer in 1972

to the creation of one of her most celebrated films:

(foreign language movie title)

a documentary about the merchants in the street

where she lived, (foreign language).

(foreign language)