Cinévardaphoto

Few film makers can boast such a large and varied oeuvre as Agnès Varda. The trilogy Cinévardaphoto is an intriguing ode to her first love: photography. In three short films, made over a period of forty years, she investigates the still image. Not in the form of a monologue, but always in dialogue with the viewer and his perception.The oldest film Salut les Cubains (1964) is an effervescent montage of the five years after the coup by Castro. A contemporaneous document with the charm of the candid optimism about the ‘people’s revolution’. Hundreds of swinging photos of attractive Cuban girls and bearded Cuban men under the sun. Or as Varda put it herself: ‘socialism and cha-cha-cha’.Twenty years later Varda won a César for Ulysse (1983), a film in which everything revolves around one photo. She took the photo in 1954, the year of her first film, on the beach in Egypt. An existentialist portrait of a dead goat, a naked man and the seated young Ulysse. Investigating composition and models, Varda commutes supply between earth and metaphysics.The third film in the trilogy is the strange Ydessa, les ours et etc… (2004). The eccentric Canadian artist Ydessa collected more than three thousand historic photos of teddybears. With childlike curiosity, Varda sketches a fascinating picture of curator and collection. A museological unravelling of soft velvet into a grim collective past. (SdH)