In 1956, François Truffaut wrote a short essay in Cahiers du cinema about La Pointe Courte, the first film by the then young photographer and art historian Agnès Varda. In his piece, Truffaut describes the film as “a cinematic essay, an ambitious experimental work” and claims: “If, by the nature of its ambitions, La Pointe Courte joins the family of films that are outside cinema… it is nonetheless superior to these because the result matches the director’s intentions.” Truffaut’s exacting summation of La Pointe Courte applies in a general sense to the extraordinary career of Varda, whose nonfiction work willfully and triumphantly reaches beyond cinema’s conventional borders.

Despite the heartily ambitious new terrain that has now begotten nonfiction filmmakers all over the world, at 81 years of age, Varda still creates films that stand apart. A fresh and innovative essay structure lies at the base of her newest film, The Beaches of Agnes, her most far-reaching and thoroughly autobiographical work to date. Yet, simply stated, “autobiography” is a misnomer. Playfully linking together experiences and memories, observations and thought, culminating in revelations that are far outside the limitations of a linear biography, The Beaches of Agnes may be Varda’s most completely realized cinematic essay. In it, she establishes a distinct relationship between the different objects of memory, connecting photos, films and pieces of art as the purveyors of slippery and ephemeral meaning. This personal tour of past films, blurry photographs, historically repeated images and her own staged memories—all the products of a still wildly dynamic imagination—is a confrontational affront to definitive biography. Fitting for the playful Varda, Beaches is an anti-biography, a fluid and non-linear tapestry where memory, fantasy and verité each vie for equal recognition and authority over the narrative.

Touring her own memory by staging it through a series of objects, films and installations, Varda can’t prevent herself from thoroughly exploring the possibilities of the present, thus denying any narrative license to her past. In visiting what she describes as the “landscapes” of her memory, she is consumed by new discovery. At the house where she spent her childhood, she becomes more interested in its current inhabitants—a toy train collector and his wife—than uncovering revelations from her own earliest years. The most explicit recollections of her past are evoked through excerpts from her films, from the voice of a young Jane Birkin or Yoland Moreau.

Often Varda’s supposed visits to the past take the form of an artistic installation, as in the film’s introduction, when she and an eager team of collaborators set up a number of mirrors on a North Sea beach in the Belgian town of her birth. The mirrors, each like its own screen or lens, perceive passing moments without the ability to capture them. It is this expressive use of images and objects that propels Varda’s exploration of her past and enhances the film’s recurring theme of movement and change. Instead of using photographs as the definitive source on her childhood, she places her family portraits in the sand on a beach, nearly losing them to the wind, and chooses instead to stage a scene with young actors of an afternoon on the beach in the 1930s.

Early in the film, Varda articulates the belief that cinema for her has always been a game. This declaration is in perfect congruence with her frisky nature, but furthermore, it discloses her trust in cinema to bear her most valiant artistic efforts, and to contain her meaningful, textured puzzles. Almost innocent in its sincerity and open-mindedness, the experiments and play staged in Beaches are rooted in a genuine desire to dig deeply into profound human emotion and experience.

The strong emphasis on transience perfectly complements the deep sense of emotional loss that is at the heart of the film; Varda’s love for her deceased husband Jacques Demy provides the emotional keystone. Demy’s perpetual stronghold on her heart is pieced together through many fractured and disparate moments. Intimately confiding his permanence in her memory, the film’s narrative finds Demy everywhere: his photo on a trading card at a yard sale, Varda’s final portraits of him, a flower for a dead friend transforming into another flower on his grave, and the reflections of his life that they each captured in their own films.

Along with her literal memorializing of Demy, Varda expresses her grappling with the confusion of loss by incorporating an installation piece into the film. “L’Ile et Elle”, a play on words meaning literally “The Island and Her” but also “The He and She” in homonym, was a projected video installation of a number of widows’ testimonies about the loss of their husbands. Varda points out her own portrait in the installation, sitting silently in the corner of the projection, listening but not telling her own story. This is Varda at play: creating to observe further, observing to understand, leading us back to her own work to reveal the most meaningful images of herself.

The Beaches of Agnes closes with yet another Varda installation, a house of discarded film stock. While cinema has been for her a game, it is an instrument that has enabled her to play with her own world. Varda’s cinema as essay, her house made of images, subverts the walk backwards through time that she takes in this film. Her joyful interaction with the medium substantiates cinema as a constant companion and eager playmate.

— Holly Herrick

The reenactment of Petit’s high-wire walk between the twin towers tells of the great celebration of humanity that occurred the first time New Yorkers looked up to witness the conquering of the then tallest buildings in the world. That unbelievable feat of human skill and ingenuity sought, like the towers themselves, to fill us with wonder at our own potential; and we still marvel at the concept, thirty-odd years later, when those towers have assumed countless other meanings. The film succeeds in the evocation of pure celebratory joy, but ultimately the profundity and emotional salience of Man on Wire lies in not what is shown, but in what is conjured by the audience’s own memories. Watching the New Yorkers from the ‘70s who looked up in celebration requires a reinterpretation on our part of the ingrained memory of looking up in horror. As we experience the cinematic reenactment of Petit’s daring high wire act, the mixture of their pure joy with our innate grief generates a most unusual catharsis, which is not ironic, but bittersweet.

While it is virtually impossible to view Man on Wire outside of a historical context, it also exists separately as a furiously entertaining biopic of a mad and controversial performance artist. While Petit acts out of a sincere love for his chosen medium and his childlike imagination offers a distinct magic to his performance, his drive is resolutely (and somewhat darkly) masculine. Like the hoards of teenaged daredevils armed with snowboards and handheld video cameras to document their wildness and triumph for YouTube witnesses, Petit too, with a similar degree of innocence, seems to think himself a success object whose existence is authenticated through the accomplishment of yet unperformed feats. To conquer the towers would be to overcome the successes of other men, and it is this quality of competitive, obsessive drive—both admirable and vile—that defines Petit. And it is his character in light, dark and shadow, his uncertain mores, the attractive and innocent, yet questionable, character, that makes him undeniably human and fully captivating.

— Holly Herrick

(Man on Wire was just released on DVD by Magnolia Pictures. Buy it at Amazon, and visit the film’s official website for more information.)

Not only is this festival establishing a much needed niche venue to showcase Arab-Israeli work, its outlook is much broader. Other Israel seeks to create a platform of cultural inclusion, to envision Israel as an ethnically diverse nation, revealing that conflict, while present, is not innate to this coexistence. Other Israel seeks to make visible what is often not: the stories of the Arab-Israeli experience.

The festival began yesterday and will continue through November 13th. The line up is small—just 10 features and a handful of shorts—but the films they have chosen are excellent. Two to look out for are The Heart of Jenin, by Leon Geller and Marcus Vetter, and Lady Kul-El Arab, by Ibtisam Mara’ana. Both are prime examples of the kinds of films that Other Israel is poised to present—the fascinating personal stories from Israel’s diverse Arab minority that catch the intersections between Muslim and Jewish lives.

The Heart of Jenin is a remarkably powerful story, a probing documentary about one father’s quest to turn his young son’s unjust and violent death into a symbol of healing and peace. Ahmed Khatib was a twelve-year-old Palestinian boy living in the Jenin refugee camp, when he was accidentally killed by an Israeli Soldier. At the time of his son’s death, Ahmed’s father, Ismael, decides to have Ahmed’s organs donated to save the lives of a few other children, including a young Druze girl, a Bedouin boy, and Menuha, an Orthodox Jewish girl living in Jerusalem. As Ismael encounters the families of the sick children, a rare portrait of a complex emotional reality emerges. The directors unfold the story delicately and with great intimacy, deeply emphasizing the fragility of turning one’s heartache from blame into a greater desire for peace.

There have been many documentaries about beauty contests, but Lady Kul El Arab offers an intensely different take on the subject. Duah, a young Druze girl, drops out of the local Arab beauty contest in order to enter into the Miss Israel Pageant. Duah drops her Arab name to become Angelina, and enters into rigorous pageant training in the hopes of winning the competition and securing a career in international modeling. The youth and impetuousness that filmmaker Mara’ana so deftly captures in Duah dramatically contrasts with the very serious and terrifying reaction of the Druze community to the girl’s plans. Duah and her family are threatened with violence if she goes against tradition to don a bathing suit and other revealing clothes in the western-style pageant. Mara’ana’s careful and accomplished storytelling points out the vast complexity of a bizarre culture clash.

(Visit the Other Israel Film Festival’s official website for details.)