Cinévardaphoto
France, 2004, 35mm, color and b&w, 96 min.
English and French with English subtitles.
Print source: Ciné Tamaris
Cinévardaphoto offers a novel take on the omnibus film popular during the many New Waves that came to a crest in Europe during the 1960s. Rather than bring together short films by different auteurs, this is instead a grouping of three works by Varda, each a meditation on her work as a photographer and the inextricable, yet often uncanny, relationship between the still and moving image. A portrait of an eccentric collector of Teddy Bears, Ydessa, The Bears and Etc. is the longest and most recent of the films and an ode to the act of collecting and memory. At the center is the wonderful Ulysse, a touching return to an enigmatic photo staged by Varda in the early 1950s—a scene she dissects with wonderful precision while acknowledging the impossibility of fully knowing the past, even with photographic “evidence” in hand. The final film Salut les Cubains looks nostalgically back at Varda’s brief time in Cuba during the early years of the revolution, sharing some of the hundreds of black-and-white images Varda shot on the island. A celebration of Cuban music and culture, Salut les Cubains is also a wistful tribute to the promise of revolution that swept through the world during the Sixties and would reach a peak in Paris in 1968.