ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the French filmmaker Agnes Varda's autobiographical film The Beaches of Agnes, a transitional text straddling the supposedly time-based 'old' media of cinema and space-based new media. Travelling between Belgium, France and the United States via China and Cuba, this documentary eschews conventional narrative patterns in favour of geographic configurations and digital compositions, including collage and other spatial forms. The chapter focuses on long-standing debates regarding the relative dominance of historic and geographic intellectual frameworks and seeks to synthesize these with insights into digital spatiality. It explores the concept of narrative identity before probing how narrative's status may be threatened by technologies that encourage spatial thinking and representation, before turning to explore some of these issues in Varda's film. Focusing on key computer forms such as database, navigable space and hypertext, this chapter ultimately argues for narrativity's continued importance in audiovisual autobiography, but also its remodelling in the light of these spatially oriented forms.
