As a film critic, I have extensive freelance credits nowhere. Please don't let that discourage you from being influenced by my movie recommendations. Here's my first! Cinevardaphoto is playing sporadically around the US and the world. A google search indicates that it's playing tomorrow in Santa Monica, CA at the American Cinemateque at the Aero Theater, so this review is just in time for our hundreds of west coast Rupert readers.
Cinevardaphoto (2005, but not really)
What I love about Agnes Varda, whether discussing a non-fiction film such as Vagabond, Cleo from Five to Seven, or Kung Fu Master, or her documentaries, is the way she puts ideas together. The film ends, and the discussion continues for hours later at the bar or coffee shop and may even lead to blows. And yet the films themselves sometimes feel so light and off-the-cuff that a month later when everything you do seems to keep coming back to Varda, you're caught by surprise. This is particularly the case for me with The Gleaners and I. I left the theater two years ago feeling glad that I'd seen a charming piece of film, and now my friends are sick of hearing me say the title, but that series of vignettes about people who reuse - just reuse - trash, food - ended up shaping the way I view my environment. In a commercial society there is always something left over and yet we're content to learn that there's never enough to go around.
Cinevardaphoto isn't really a new movie. It's a lumping together of three short films. The first and most prominent isn't even a theatrically-intended film but a Canadian television special (in English!) that examines an art exhibit by Ydessa Hendeles consisting mainly of hundreds - thousands? - of black and white portraits of people - families, friends, workers, children, adults - involving teddy bears. Saying anything more about the exhibit would be a cardinal sin because there's more to the installation - where the exhibit takes place, how the photos are presented, what waits for the viewers at the edge of the gallery - and Varda is careful to let her own viewers experience the exhibit slowly over the course of the 45 minute running time, during which the ideas that will continue through the three pieces are thrown down. A photo is a representation of reality and a capturing of a moment, but it's not a statement of fact as much as the capturing of a memory. It's not reality because it will represent something different to each person who views it, and to the person who was in the photo looking back, and in the context of a larger whole. When you have a world in which all the recorded memories have teddy bears, the world seems to be a place in which every family has it's faithful bear, along with false memories of comforts that may or may not have been there.
The second film, from the 1980s is a look back at a photograph Varda took of a naked man, a young boy and a goat. As the short progresses we learn that the man and the boy were living very different realities - ones that Agnes was aware of but which didn't cross her subjects (we get nothing from the perspective of the dead goat, being dead as he or she was). Alone, again, an interesting work, but taken with the more recent film, themes emerge - the power of an image, the power of the human mind to alter their realities due to trauma, the way the meaning of an image can change as facts are revealed.
Finally, we take a trip back to the 1950s, in black and white with a Chris Marker style film (he'd actually been a participant in the film) made up entirely of still photos that are sometimes animated to dance and sing - a look at Cuba from the perspective of social change. For a French woman in Cuba in the 1950s, Castro is a progressive leader and the things achieved harken ahead to the hopes of The Gleaners and I... people volunteer to work the farmlands, a massive movement towards global literacy is born. But anyone who's seen Before Night Falls knows that's not the end. And in relief against the other films, you can imagine Agnes looking back and wishing for more for the country she fell in love with. Time changes the meaning of images again.
And among those 50-year-old photos in the final film - look closely and spot a teddy bear. These films were never intended to go together but once placed side by side, they'll forever be more powerful as a piece than apart... a thesis on the still image that took fifty years to come together. I can't wait to find out how I'll feel about it rewatching it in 20 years.
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