The presence of both photography Andrés musings about the image in Agnes Varda’s cinema

Abstract

The filmmaker Agnès Varda (Brussels, 1928) began creating images as a photographer in the 1950s. Despite abandoning the profession, photography has often been present in her cinema as a reference point and inspiration, but also to reflect on the image itself and consider its testimonial value, its autonomy, its capacity to evoke, and the subjectivity with which an image is created and seen. With regards to her new film, ‘Visages, Villages’ (2017), which she made in conjunction with photographer JR, particular attention is awarded to two films by Varda, ‘Une chante, l’autre pas’ (1976) and ‘Ulysse’ (1982), in which photography plays both a dramatic and meta-linguistic role. In the former, a full-length fictional film, there is a confrontation between two subjectivities: that of a photographer and that of his occasional model. In the latter, a short documentary film, a photograph taken by Varda twenty-eight years earlier is observed by the same filmmaker and by the two people she portrayed on a stony beach in Normandy: with the passage of time, what is remembered or wished to be remembered about the moment that photograph was taken? What is suggested aside from its real point of reference? Is an image only simply an image? Also referenced is a television project by Varda, ‘Une minute pour une image’ (1982), in which she granted a variety of people one minute to comment on a photograph