Edition 04: The Beaches of Agnès (2008) captivates through originality and variety

Welcome to Auteur, a newsletter that dives deep into the world of film and asks: What can we, as brand builders, learn from this? Published every other week, each edition takes a film of our guest’s choosing, and extracts the creative lessons.

Film is one the richest mediums we have for understanding how narrative, aesthetics, and language can be woven together to move an audience, and this is an ambition that lies at the heart of what we do as designers, marketers, and strategists.

Thank you for joining us. Auteur is written and curated by Thursday—a strategic design studio based in the architectural city of Winchester. We work globally with the ethos that being different isn’t enough—what truly matters is being interesting. 

Agnès Varda—a Belgian-born French filmmaker that Martin Scorsese described as “one of the Gods of cinema”—takes us on an impossibly enchanting wander through her mind, life and creative practice. We go on a voyage of discovery, and from the beaches of Belgium to the boardwalks of Los Angeles, journey through her artistic philosophy.

For Minji, this was a seminal film in her creative life.

“Agnès Varda is perhaps the first and most important artist to truly inspire me – not just through her work, but through her entire approach to being an artist. She embodied creativity in every sense, working across mediums and subject matters with a fluidity that made it feel like she didn’t simply make art – she lived inside it.’

Through film excerpts, detailed narration and fabulous elaborate re-enactments of her life, this documentary captures her in full–her humour, her wisdom, her infectious joie de vivre, her boundless creativity – everything that made her not just a brilliant artist, but a profoundly human one.”

Let’s dive straight in! A few quotes and scene descriptions lie within, but nothing that’ll interfere with your watching experience. 

Every great film, much like every great brand, has a defining concept or conversation that it owns.

“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes. If we opened me up, we’d find beaches.”

Fragmented memories, archival photographs, clippings from past films—Agnès assembles her story like a cinematic scrapbook, one that threads through the feminist movement and Black Panther protests, and documents her contribution to the emergence of French New Wave cinema. 

Mischievous and playful in style, Agnès doesn’t seek to persuade the audience of her story. She doesn’t seem to be saying “Look, see, how credible am I?”, a strategy I’d ascribe to many businesses nowadays. She instead opts for lighter, more inviting touch, saying “Look, see, this is my perspective. Isn’t it fascinating?”.

She succeeds in drawing us in, in part because she experiments with numerous creative devices. Sound, environment, people, humour, colour, voice, history all coalesce to immerse us in her subjectivity. To get us to understand, and more than that, fall in love with her perspective.

She defiantly paints the richest picture possible of her life, and it acts as a great reminder for us in the world of Brand: your uniqueness won’t be felt from one line of copy, or one graphic layout. You must figure out a way to bring everything together—to show, not tell.

“I’m hoping you’ll film me like this, with the scarf blowing over my face”

The film opens with Agnès and her crew members on a beach, assembling a set of mirrors. The scene is delightfully unvarnished: we see cameras, boom mics, studio lights, and hear the ambient sound of waves and wind. Nothing is cropped out or concealed, and all of this adds to the magic of the story she’s starting to tell. 

She doesn’t leave her environment to go and find a story; she turns her environment into the story. 

Authenticity is a word it pains me to use—it’s been stripped of all meaning by strategists like me!—but when I use it, this is what I mean. 

Using what’s real. Not buffing away the edges. Not pretending to be bigger, slicker, or more experienced than you actually are.

Branding is so often understood as a way to polish your story and package it up for consumption. What if instead, we dove deeper on the actual ingredients of our businesses—the people, the processes, the setting, the history—not as something to smooth out, but as raw material? 

“I was in the part where the little boat carries and unloads the shellfish.”

“That was you?” 

“The little boy grew up.”

Though the film is autobiographical, it never feels like a solitary broadcast. Agnès continually foregrounds her collaborators, from editor Jean-Baptiste Morin to composer Joanna Bruzdowicz, and brings everyday people—neighbours, friends, family, pedestrians—into this film, and many of her others too.

Her openness to collaboration doesn’t dilute her vision, it amplifies it. Whilst filming a scene for Documentuer (1981), she catches a real-life couple in the midst of a heated argument about rent. Instead of pausing recording, she lets the camera roll (with their permission) and integrates that moment into the film. 

By inviting others into her creative process, she deepens her cultural impact by allowing others to be a vessel for her message. In our world, we’d call this distribution or reach, a game that is mediated through algorithms, paying-to-play, or singular community-building efforts. What would happen if we considered partnerships a priority?

“I’d only seen about 10 films by the age of 25. I didn’t go to film school or work as an assistant. I used my imagination and took the plunge.”

Every business has their brand and design workflows. Often protected by project managers, or Heads of Department, these linear paths from idea to execution can become sacred. They are rarely challenged because a) there’s no time b) they are outcome of experience and best practice c) the team simply needs to get things signed off. 

However, The Beaches of Agnès is a reminder that side-stepping convention, and pursuing a more interesting process will create a more interesting outcome. We see her during her 2003 installation Patatutopia, where she displayed a heart-shaped potato sculpture on a video triptych, surrounded by 600kg of real-life potatoes.

Rather than stand aside and answer questions on her influences—as exhibiting artists typically would—she wore a custom resin potato costume. Embedded within the costume were speakers, that played her voice naming different potato varieties. Brilliant.

It subverted the process that an artist is meant to follow when exhibiting, and became one of defining moments of her art career.

Thank you for reading, and I’d love to hear if and how this made you consider your brand-building efforts a little differently.

Until next time,

Shopé