Ulysse, 1982, de Agnès Varda. Breve estudio acerca de la temporalidad de un cortometraje sobre una fotografía

RESUMEN Este trabajo trata de analizar Ulysse, 1982, de Agnès Varda: un cortometraje sobre una fotografía tomada por la misma autora en una playa de La Mancha veintiocho años atrás a un hombre egipcio, a un niño, y a una cabra muerta. El análisis tiene lugar en el ámbito de los estudios sobre artes visuales. Particularmente, en la tradición de teorías sobre la temporalidad en el análisis de las obras. Esta tradición, que forma la trama y urdimbre de este trabajo, refiere autores como George Kubler, George Didi-Huberman, Alexander Nagel, Christopher Wood, y Thomas Kuhn entre otros. El tema central de Ulysse –como también lo ha declarado la autora– además de la cuestión de la memoria y el tiempo, es la relación de la memoria y la representación en la imagen. ¿Cómo la memoria puede ser representada en la imagen en movimiento sobrepuesta a la imagen fija? ¿Cómo la filmación incluye el complejo entramado de tiempos anteriores, en constante actualización, proyectados a futuro, simultáneos, paralelos, coexistentes en el cortometraje? Intento, por tanto, examinar estas diferentes temporalidades contenidas en Ulysse, y el sentido de la plasticidad que da forma al trabajo de Agnès Varda.

Agnès Varda, Jane Birkin, and Kung-fu Master!

Kung-fu Master! (Le petit amour, France, 1988) arises from a story by Jane Birkin, where an adult woman and a teenage boy fall in love. Birkin's story was meant to be realized as one of the dramatized sequences of Jane B. by Agnès V. (Jane B. par Agnès V., France, 1988), but it became its own parallel film. In prioritizing this story and pushing it to feature length, Varda opened it up for imagining with and beyond Birkin. She made it a fairy-tale, a feminist story about what women may imagine and eroticize, about the grief, pathos, damage, and beauty in this. It became a vital part of Varda's film corpus and of her feminist investigations of different subjectivities and desires, of the affective worlds of contemporary women and children. It takes shape in her tenderness for Jane Birkin, but also in light of her own clearer thinking about childhood, nostalgia, and fantasy. In this film, Varda explores female-authored fantasies in delicate, unabashed, and queer ways. This is part of her feminist legacy for the future. Kung-fu Master! is key.

Agnès Varda and Le Collectif 50/50 en 2020: Power and Protest at the Cannes Film Festival

This article examines how Agnès Varda used speeches and activism at the Cannes Film Festival in recent years to reveal and challenge the underrepresentation of female directors in the film industry. At the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, she accepted an honorary Palme (lifetime achievement award) in the name of other creative directors not yet in the spotlight. In 2018, Varda joined with the 50/50 en 2020 collective, a gender equity campaign, on the Cannes red carpet to call for gender parity and greater transparency in the festival's process of selecting films to screen. This article shows how Varda and 50/50 en 2020 explore social, institutional, and economic factors that may influence women's access to the highest levels of artistic success. Their actions articulate a gendered investigation of cultural institutions and the relations of power they represent, focusing on the festival and the film industry. Furthermore, this article considers dynamics of social and economic power and perceptions of cultural value in the 2019 Cannes festival tribute to Varda.

“Virtual Varda”: Sustainable Legacies, Digital Communities, and Scholarly Postcards

This article presents the story of a symposium dedicated to the life and legacy of Agnès Varda and its move online due to COVID-19, reflecting on this process and its implications for future scholarship. Based on this experience, and using Varda's own late-career digital transition as a model, the author interrogates the potential for online platforms to serve as a kind of scholarly postcard that offers accessible and more sustainable practices for sharing research and building more resilient and inclusive academic communities.

Agnès Varda: Photography and Early Creative Process

Agnès Varda frequently presented her career as encompassing three domains: photography, cinema, and visual art. While her cinema and late-career artistic work are widely accessible, her early photography remains a growing area of study. Moreover, it has often been repeated that Varda began her directorial career with little knowledge of cinema (stories Varda herself echoed). This article excavates little-known 1950s photographic studies from her archives to show how, in her early cinematic career, she utilized her training as a photographer to conceive her early films. The article demonstrates that Varda made extensive scouting photographs to plan the shots and motifs of her first film, La Pointe Courte (France, 1954), and sometimes sketched these compositions directly in her shooting script. The article also features photographs she made to develop themes in L'Opéra Mouffe (Diary of a Pregnant Woman, France, 1958). Photography, the author argues, enabled Varda to work aesthetically and economically, realizing these early films without the support of producers or state subsidies. Her photographs reveal her formal composition and thematic concerns; they also demonstrate the stunning scope of her planning and enable new understandings of her early creative process.

Passion, Commitment, Compassion: Les Justes au Panthéon by Agnès Varda

Agnès Varda's 2007 installation Les Justes au Panthéon (The Righteous at the Pantheon, France) honored the many French “Righteous” who saved Jewish children during World War II in a ceremony commemorating their heroic actions with the placement of a plaque in the crypt. For a while this installation held a minor place in Varda's oeuvre, until she gave it a featured position in her autobiographical film The Beaches of Agnès (Les plages d'Agnès, France, 2008). Filmed vignettes of rescue, projected in four loops in the great hall, allowed Varda to display her characteristic blend of documentary and fiction and to navigate the intimately personal with the historical scope of the time. The resulting impression of “empathetic reciprocity” signals a core belief of Varda's in that the artwork (or film, or installation) is an occasion for conversation, for sharing and learning. The ceremony brought together three women of conscience, all dedicated to the power of memory and its ability to bind humanity in a common purpose. Simone Veil and Marceline Loridan-Ivens were both survivors of Auschwitz, while Varda, their exact contemporary, commemorated their experience with her installation. Through sorrow and loss, something affirmative obtains: a Vardian perspective in an unexpected place, a celebration of the most minute expressions of compassion, and a belief in human connection that has traversed the six decades of Varda's work across media and time.

She Listened: Vardian Self-Portraiture and Auto-Refrains of Sea, Wind, and Sand

This article considers Vardian acts of listening and (self-)portraiture. With works that celebrate the material world in its myriad forms and scales, from a beloved button to a bottomless sea, Agnès Varda developed a method of empathetic engagement. Her encounters grasped relations extending from a person, family, or group, to a greater world-memory and duration comprising “us” all. As it heeds these foldings of the world, this article considers subjectification processes that take into a self all elements of nature. With sustained awareness of the “hundreds of thousands of people” she doesn't know, through her acts of listening and portraiture, in her later years Varda simultaneously attained a recognizable persona and an imperceptibility that gestured to an inward-outward movement her works so often foretell: that of a self's full dissolution into memory and world. In line with Varda's lifelong commitment to new forms of making visible the invisible, and her embrace of a sea as a groundless source of intersubjective relations, limits transform via her works into reflective, dissolving surfaces. A doubling of the personal and cosmic—that movement that so singularizes Varda—emanates through this weave of her art and life. As a chiasmatic double herself whose encounters brought extremes into contact, Varda demonstrated a concern for the future of the world that persisted alongside an awareness of her own mortality. Beyond the duration of her own life, Varda's works expose us to ourselves while always foregrounding the woman, and women, behind, before, and beyond the lens.