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2036-461X
16458
26-27
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Varda / Cuba exhibition Centre Pompidou, Paris (November 11, 2015-February 1, 2016)
Text.Serial.Journal
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Reviews / Comptes rendus
2016-10-01
2021-09-22
2016-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Vinzenz Hediger
2016/10/01
Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main
2036-461X
26-27
en
Varda / Cuba exhibition Centre Pompidou, Paris (November 11, 2015-February 1, 2016)
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16458/16780
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                             Reviews / Comptes-rendus


Varda / Cuba exhibition
Centre Pompidou, Paris (November 11, 2015-February 1, 2016)




   How do you exhibit a film? This question has been on the minds of curators,
film scholars and art historians ever since the moving image first entered the
museum space. Varda / Cuba, an exhibition in the photo gallery of the Centre
Pompidou in Paris, offers a surprisingly simple answer: you break down the film
into its component parts, namely individual frames, and hang them on the gal-
lery wall.
   Trips to Cuba were par for the course for French artists and intellectuals
in the early 1960s. Jean-Paul Sartre travelled to the Caribbean island to take
stock of the achievements of the revolution, as did actor Gérard Philippe, writer
Marguerite Duras and photographer René Burri, a Swiss native and honorary
French cultural establishment figure, who came back from Cuba with one of
the great iconic images of the 20th century, the portrait of Che Guevara smoking
a cigar and defiantly looking upwards past the camera. Also traveling with her
camera in Cuba was Agnès Varda, who visited the island from December 1962
to January 1963. Varda had established herself as a major filmmaker in 1961 with
Cléo de 5 à 7, the film that prevented the Nouvelle Vague from becoming yet
another all male chapter in the history of cinema. During her trip to Cuba, Varda
took about 1800 photographs. She photographed politicians, functionaries, and
particularly women in positions of political responsibility, from government
officials to diplomats. But Varda also photographed the life beyond the scene
of politics: musicians, dancers, people in the streets, gestures, looks, attitudes,
interactions. After her return to Paris, Varda edited the photographs into a half-
hour film, which she called Salut les Cubains, with a running commentary by
Varda herself and her actor-friend Michel Piccoli. The title referred to a ragingly
successful French pop culture magazine of the early 1960s, Salut les copains,
which made sense particularly because the film also contained a music track with
popular songs from Cuba. The stars of the film include singer and dancer Benny
Moré, who died before the film was completed and thus appears in Salut les
Cubains posthumously, dancing in intermittent steps to one of his songs. The
commentary elucidates the photographs with a subtle play of shifting meanings,
which undermines any intimation of officialdom that this product of a quasi-state
visit might have carried. In Varda’s commentary, for instance, there is a short
way from ‘corps diplomatique’, the diplomatic corps, to the ‘corps des femmes’,
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the bodies of Cuban women, which Varda describes, both in photographs and
words, as ‘taking the shape of the letter S in constant movement’.
   Today, Salut les Cubains and the photographs from which the film was com-
posed, constitute an artistic ethnography of everday life in Cuba in the early
years of the revolution. At the same time, Varda’s work in Cuba marks a pivot to-
wards a politically engaged form of filmmaking, which she would further expand
in later works of the 1960s. In 1967, for instance, she collaborated with Alain
Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, William Klein and Joris Ivens on Loin du Vietnam,
a collective work which chronicles the American war of attrition against North
Vietnam from the point of view of the civilian population. And in 1968, while
in California to negotiate a contract with a Hollywood studio, which didn’t ma-
terialize when the studio refused to grant Varda final cut, Varda shot a film on
the Black Panther party in Oakland, which stands as one of the great works of
political documentary cinema and feels eerily contemporary in the light of recent
police abuses against African American citizens in the United States.
   From these later works, Salut les Cubains and the Cuban photographs differ
in the cheerfulness they exude, but also in terms of the unusual technique that
lead from the photographs to the film – the montage of a film as a succession of
still photographs. Varda’s colleague Chris Marker employed a similar technique
in his now-canonical science fiction film La jetée from 1963, which is also com-
posed of still images. Where La jetée is a film in ‘immediate short-term memory’,
as Julian Hochberg once argued, Salut les Cubains has a very different effect. By
lining up still photographs of bodies in movement in rapid succession, the film
turns photography into a form of sculpture in time, transforming stills into the
successive steps of a dance. At the same time, the film retains a documentary at-
titude and seizes with great accuracy an expressive repertoire of body attitudes
and gestures, which constitute the fabric of a community.
   That Salut les Cubains depends for its effect on the artistic quality of the indi-
vidual photographs provides the organizing principle of the Varda / Cuba exhi-
bition at the Centre Pompidou. Varda originally trained as a photographer, and
while she shot her first feature film, La pointe courte in 1954, she never ceased
to work as a photographer. While some of her colleagues, such as her friend and
long-time partner in dialogue Jean-Luc Godard forever rack their brains over the
question of what an image is, Varda, now 88 years old and shooting her next film,
lines up one inventive image and striking composition after another throughout
her career as a filmmaker – to the point where one is often tempted to freeze the
frames and place them in a frame to be displayed on a wall. Which is exactly
what Varda / Cuba did for Salut les Cubains. The occasion for the exhibition is
a donation: Varda has recently bequeathed her Cuban photo archive, which is a
core element of her photographic oeuvre, to the Centre Pompidou. The exhibi-
tion consisted of a display of the component parts of the film on the walls of the
Centre’s Galérie des Photographies. The effect was to open up a space between
the images and between the still image and the film, and to relate the rhythm
of the film and the temporality of the individual photographs to each other in

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striking and productive new ways. Another, equally important effect was to re-
mind the visitor that Varda is not only an accomplished filmmaker – and, more
recently, installation artist – but first and foremost a maker of images, a first rate
photographer.


                      [Vinzenz Hediger, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main]




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