proud_luddite This magnificent short film was made for the French Tourism Bureau, covering the French Riviera. While it succeeds as a travelogue, it ends up as so much more.Varda pays special attention to emphasize the beauty of the region with a very deep reverence with the use of colourful panoramas.It is also special to see people out and about in an era of a time past. While they may have lived with less liberties than what we have today, they were also less burdened with modern plagues such as too much busyness including those that are self-imposed like smartphone obsessions. Travelogues of France will always be treasures. But for the modern viewer to experience an era of simpler enjoyments is a nostalgic pleasure that is almost indescribable.OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT: Directing by Agnès Varda

OldAle1 The same Criterion disc featuring the 1965 masterpiece "Le Bonheur" also features a copy of Varda's sarcastic 1958 travelogue Du côté de la côte, a 25-minute portraits of the Côte d'Azur mixing beautiful color footage of Cannes, Nice, etc with witty and sometimes nasty narration/commentary by an unseen man and a woman that serves to condemn the shallow luxury of the place. A fascinating piece that deserves more attention in this director's great filmography, and an interesting work in the very French category of essayistic films that can on one level be read as "serious" (travel documentary) but on another as a deconstruction of the same subject.

alice liddell One of the most remarkable documentaries ever made, taking that tedious grey manly genre obsessed with 'serious' subjects and 'truth', and throwing buckets of day-glo paint at it. Influenced by Vigo's A PROPOS DE NICE, it concerns the history and profuseness of French coastal resorts. It is satiric and ironic, although its method is a cool Surrealism. Varda is a lot more sympathetic to the sensual pleasures of resorts, the colours, the costumes, building, the unreality of nature, even as she shows the dehumanising of tourists. There is a wistful nostalgia allied with a barely suppressed fury at the exclusivity of these Edens. Like in Vigo, the trip to a resort is a kind of death, a denial of life. Anyone who loves LE MEPRIS should see this.