The transience of individual life is woven through Colette's last book Le Fanal bleu, written in her mid-seventies, as through Agnes Varda's latest and last film Les Plages d'Agns, made in her eightieth year. Colette and Varda have much in common: working in cultures that were overwhelmingly male, each challenged the values and aesthetic forms of their era, with a serene determination leavened by both humour and hedonism. Colette virtually invented the pliable, heterogeneous mode of auto-fiction, while Varda has mingled fiction with documentary across her career, and has often emerged from behind the camera to stage, celebrate, and demystify the role of the artist herself. The sense of a life-affirming disorder' in both texts is due in part to the constant fluctuation between past and present. The sense of plenitude is produced in part by the sheer abundance and eclectic diversity of objects and images redeemed from banality by the close verbal or filmic attention of Colette and Varda.