Along The Coast –in French Du côté de la côte (1958)– is a fascinating document of the 50s leisure time directed by Agnès Varda, the New Wave French filmmaker. Commissioned by the French Tourist Office, the short film paints a witty vision of the Côte d’Azur as a place of Eden, with coastal landscapes made up of tourists, Art Nouveau palaces and gardens.
Varda takes the viewer on a playful journey from Nice to Saint-Tropez where the beach –filled up with summer vacationers– becomes the ground of a sociological investigation, a place where the habits and trends of the time are on full display.
The short film prompted us to browse through my archive of photos taken in the South of France in the early 2000s, curious to see what society looked like four decades later.
Here is a selection of what we found, looking forward to showing more on this soon, as the work of digitization of my archive continues.
