When Sandy Dreams

Agnès Varda chose to focus on the hanging mobile Vertical Foliage (1941), which she came across during a visit to the Calder Foundation in New York. In When Sandy Dreams, Varda melds footage of the sea and the mobile in motion with photographs she took in 1952 of Calder on the beach in the south of France. “I put these images together thinking of how the slight wind on the beach would move the mobile,” says Varda. In doing so, she bridges admiration for her old friend with her powerful connection to the ocean—a common motif in her visual art and the vessel through which she looked back on her life in the 2008 documentary The Beaches of Agnès.