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Film/Art:
Varda, Etc, Etc...
by Andréa Picard
Back in his Cahiers du Cinéma days,
Godard once wrote: “In the French film industry, Varda’s
short films shine like tiny jewels.” That was a long time
ago, yet at 78 years old, Varda has just completed another short
film, Ydessa, les ours, et etc... a 44-minute
documentary on “collector, curator, artist” and Torontonian,
Ydessa Hendeles. Ostensibly, the film belongs to a longer whole,
a feature-length work whose triptych structure is implied in its
cumbersome title: Cinévardaphoto. Ensnaring the
stigmas often associated with the short film format, Varda’s
“new” 97-minute work will find its way, presumably with
relative ease, around the festival circuit. Significantly, her earlier
films, Ulysse (1982) and Salut les Cubains (1963),
both worthy of Godard’s observation, will be resurrected for
a new generation of filmgoers. This is a sly and unsurprising move
on the part of the feisty filmmaker. The question is, do the three
films necessarily belong together? Yes and no. Spending time with
Ydessa Hendeles, whose curatorial approach insists upon not only
the creation of, but also the usurping of meaning, might have greatly
influenced Varda’s decision. The intention, thus, is predominantly
positive and serious, but the results are not impervious to criticism.
The affinities between filmmaker and curator/artist
are not oblique. Varda was so entranced by “Partners,”
an art exhibition at Munich’s Haus de Kunst late
last year (after its earlier Toronto launch), that she found herself
thinking beyond the complexities of the show, to the mind—obviously
sagacious and obsessive—of its curator. The narration in Ydessa,
les ours, et etc...(given to us with childlike curiosity, a
signature of late Varda) relays that the director simply had to
meet this person whose given name is worthy of fiction. As a filmmaker
who has always worked in both documentary and fiction, and has consistently
explored her personal impulses within specific socio-historical
contexts, Varda’s vocation allows her to indulge such a desire;
she immediately flew to Toronto to film Ydessa at her internationally
acclaimed Art Foundation. The film transports us through a continuous
whimsical cut from the brimming gallery space in Munich, up to the
blue sky recorded on her trans-Atlantic flight via her mini-digital
video camera. We land at Pearson on the damp tarmac surrounded by
a drab and familiar landscape. The approach is naïve; perhaps
the stylistic mark of that childlike curiosity?
Varda has come to Toronto to discuss “The
Teddy Bear Project” in particular, the main passage in “Partners”
for which Ydessa is not only credited as curator, but also artist
and installer.* An assembly of a thousand photographs linked by
the presence of a teddy bear, which took ten years of research and
acquisition, “The Teddy Bear Project” is not, Ydessa
tells us sternly, “a theme show.” It may appear, she
continues, as a curator’s careful study of “taxonomies
and typologies,” but it’s a “fantasy world”
in which everyone has a teddy bear and, hence, a sense of security.
She contends that she has created a work of fiction that resembles
documentary, an intersection between the real and the fantastical
where she is most comfortable. With her long, fire-engine red hair
and black, grown-up goth attire, she declares: “Between documentary
and fiction, I am somewhere in between.” By appending Ulysse
and Salut les Cubains, isn’t Varda saying something
remarkably similar? Both artists are adept at positioning, and that
includes themselves. Sadly, in this film, they both retreat into
staid poses and self-mythologizing clichés. Ydessa’s
words seem rehearsed (though there’s no doubting her sincerity)
and Varda’s camera frames her in aphoristic compositions,
in silent contemplation next to her artwork. A pensive Ydessa looks
upward, her titled head and mane in silent emulation of Katarina
Fritsch’s “Ghost,” two variations on the humble
Virgin Mary. “She lives in osmosis with the art she collects,”
Varda observes heavy-handedly. Standing in the large white rectangular
space where Fritsch’s “Ghost” presides alone with
a pool of Plexiglas blood, one feels this already. (The entire Foundation,
celebrating austerity, is painted white, with skylights emitting
natural light), As anyone who attends the Foundation regularly knows,
the works are meticulously chosen and installed according to Ydessa’s
sensibility and singularity. Her art shows are testaments to her
mystery and intellect, to her taste and demeanour, and also, to
her freedom.
The film is full of these quirky (re)marks; in
one instance, Varda creates a faux oval green frame around Ydessa
as she talks about the importance of family photo albums. Included
in the show (as a caption, Varda cleverly notes), are three photographs
from Ydessa’s own family album: one of her parents, both Holocaust
survivors (an ongoing dialogue in Ydessa’s work); one of her
mother, Dorothy, leaning over a baby carriage where Ydessa lay nestled
inside; and the third of Ydessa as a young child in bed with a teddy
bear. Like the rest of the photos in “The Teddy Bear Project,”
Varda recognizes the stuffed animal as the punctum of the photograph,
a conscious reference to Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida,
suggesting that the filmmaker, who has consistently rejected the
virtues of theory, has done a bit of homework. But Camera Lucida,
though rich in ideas, is theory lite. Barthes is unabashedly sentimental
when writing about a discovered photograph of his mother, who, resurrected
by this still moment caught in time, began to haunt the theorist.
Barthes christened it “The Winter Garden Photograph”
and it came to inform his fundamental theories about photography.
Likewise, Varda makes a trenchant discovery in the image of little
Ydessa and her teddy bear, the key perhaps to solving the mystery
of the entire project. This excites her to no end, and her camera
swirls with glee, video entrails breaking Ydessa’s code of
asceticism. The filmmaker postulates that this childhood memory
grew into an obsession, and ultimately fostered this elegiac ode
to the teddy bear.
In a montage of still images from the show, Varda
is tempted by the idea of narrative. We’ve progressed from
the “Where’s Waldo?” approach from the opening
montage where Varda’s main concern is finding the teddy bears
in the photographs, to fabricating worlds and personal histories
for every photographed subject. Varda is teaching us the semiotics
of photography. We are now allowed more time with some of the photographs,
which awaken a sombre reality in the film’s viewer (one that
inevitably occurs at some point during the show, though in a stronger
and more intimate fashion). Like “The Winter Garden Photograph,”
these moments have come and gone, and most of these people, like
Barthes’ mother (and Barthes himself), are no longer alive.
Varda equates the black-framed photographs, hung from floor to ceiling,
to urns (“boîtes de vies”) in a columbarium, and
the room suddenly shifts from life to death. The most powerful line
in the film is delivered when Varda expresses the anguish of these
intensified feelings. It’s worse, she tells us, when the photos
have faded and we suddenly feel the fleetingness of our own life,
our childhood already irretrievably lost. (This sentiment is so
beautifully captured in Ulysse.)
This destabilizing response is corroborated by
gallery-goers who are interviewed in the film. Many are simply overwhelmed
by the sheer volume of photographs, others feel that they are voyeuristic
intruders into intimate settings (do they know of Ydessa’s
fondness for Lee Friedlander?), and one woman says that she experienced
the sensation of being smothered by death. A few remark on the apparent
joy in the photos, the playfulness and eagerness of the subjects
to be recorded. These impressions of buoyancy are harshly subverted
by the third room of “Partners,” which contains “Him”
by Maurizio Cattelan, the sole work in the room. The “Him”
is none other than Hitler, bent down on his knees as if praying.
It’s difficult to forget the unsettling shock this collusion
of images creates and emblazons in one’s thoughts and memories.
We are obliged to rethink what we have just spent hours deciphering.
Suddenly, innocence is lost and we are controlled and confused.
We must go back and relive those images in face of an ugly history.
Naturally, a molten layer existed in Munich, as it was between those
very walls upon which Ydessa hung each of those frames that Nazi
speeches praised Nazi art and decried “non-Aryan” races.
Returning to “The Teddy Bear Project,” we will surely
notice the German soldiers with their teddy bears and the white
bear with its ribbon and swastika. This, Ydessa tells us, was the
prize for a German athletic competition.
Not unlike the work of Christian Boltanski, this
show is Ydessa’s way to fight history (“the German trauma
and the Jewish trauma,” she says), by finding new ways to
talk about the events of the past. The more we look, the more we
learn and uncover the enormity of the project. Series emerge (children
photographing bears; children shooting bears) and speak on behalf
of a collective memory. Ydessa, les ours, et, etc... pays
homage to a brilliant and eccentric artist (because that’s
what Ydessa is above all), but in terms that fail to match the rigour
and grace of this artist’s life work. The final image is a
photograph of a solitary woman standing in a snowy, desolate landscape,
a teddy bear held up to conceal her face. This is Ydessa for me,
forever masked, her mythology and uniqueness intact. We must respect
and appreciate that she believes in our ability to interpret her
statements without curatorial introductions and descriptions. This
film fails to honour the confidence Ydessa has invested in those
who share her passion for art, Varda of course, being one of those
people. Proof of Varda’s passion immediately follows in Ulysse,
the second film in Cinévardaphoto.
Shot in 1982, Ulysse is indeed a jewel.
Varda, ever preoccupied with the tension and unique relationship
between photography and film (and time and memory) revisits a photo
she took in 1954. The image in question, also called Ulysse, is
resolutely an art photograph with her three subjects carefully positioned
on a beach. To the left is a man, a nude with his back to us; in
the centre, a small boy (the Ulysse of the title), also nude and
sitting amidst pebbles; and frame right in the foreground is a dead
goat, a priceless find, Varda tells us, “un sujet en or.”
“Une vraie nature morte.” Twenty-eight years later,
the filmmaker interviews her subjects, recording their selective/partial
memories; she is saddened to learn that so much has been forgotten
(again, “nature morte”). That they perhaps want to forget
is even more troubling. She is also forced to admit how so much
has changed both in the world and in her own life. Ulysse,
with its stripped down aesthetic and thoughtful meditation is a
powerful and poignant portrait of the artist. The insightful commentary
leads us into a meaningful consideration of art-making and its disassociation
with the events occurring in the world at large. It’s this
calibre of filmmaking that a subject like Ydessa commands.
The final film in the triptych is the oldest,
Salut les Cubains. In 1963, Varda thoughtfully gave order
to 1,800 photos that she had recently taken on a trip to Cuba. In
just 30 minutes, the photographer/filmmaker achieves a sprawling
depiction of the country, its people, its music, its history, its
revolutions, its energy. The narration veers towards Marker-like
poeticism (not to mention his brand of “objective history”);
Michel Piccoli and Varda engage in jocular lyric interplay. Out
of the three films, Salut les Cubains most explicates the
title Cinévardaphoto as it’s a film made,
almost entirely, from Varda’s photographs. There are many
touching threads in the film, but one in particular impresses solemnly
and memorably upon us. In rapid stop-motion, we are serenaded by
a dancing, handsome man whose charm and smile are left for us to
remember as we are told that he has died between the time of Varda’s
trip to Cuba and the making of the film. (Could Jørgen Leth
have drawn upon this sequence for his first obstruction, which he
shot in Havana for his von Trier challenge? There are some striking
similarities.) Meaning is formed and manipulated through ordering,
camera effects, and editing. Varda animates her Cuba photographs,
giving them life beyond the still image, saving them from the depths
of the irretrievable that she so fears. She won’t allow these
photos to fade.
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Articles in this
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Global Discoveries on DVD
by jonathan rosenbaum
Film/Art: Cinévardaphoto
by andréa picard
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