We are left to consider how this small, pleasant woman, nearly turned into a meme of affability in her final years, leaves behind one of the most vast and rich oeuvres of any film artist to date.

Varda seemed especially happy to serve as both filmmaker and subject in these later years, and perhaps never more so than in Faces Places.

Varda by Agnès may be less the director’s definitive act of farewell than the one that just so happened to stick.

The Beaches of Agnés is meta in that it affords Varda the opportunity to reflect on her life and career with the same verve and experimental spirit with which she approached her life.

Varda’s films from this period develop an astute aesthetic interrogation beneath an air of breezy playfulness, a quality that the seemingly scattershot composition of Cinévardaphoto ends up wholeheartedly embodying.

Varda tracks down some of the subjects of The Gleaners and I to see how they are getting along and tends to find people mostly the same, albeit somewhat changed by exposure or their own determination to improve.

With its focus on sustainability and its denunciation of the colossal food waste of capitalism, The Gleaners and I is one of Agnès Varda’s most immediately accessible films.

After releasing The World of Jacques Demy in 1995, Agnés Varda would take a six-year break from filmmaking before returning with one of her most acclaimed works, The Gleaners and I. It seems that the ‘90s were something of a lost decade for her, as all of her films between Demy’s death in October 1990 and The Gleaners and I …

The spiraling mania of creative passion that fuels Varda’s film is a testament to her ability to reflect and build upon the reflexive puckishness of the New Wave long after its other practitioners soured on their early style.

Who can blame Varda for pretending, in 1991 only months after her husband’s death, that she could return to the wondrous summer of 1966 using that same movie magic?