Through Agnès Varda’s Eyes: Between Photography and Film

This two-part presentation explores the tenuous connection between photography and cinema that Agnès Varda maintained, particularly in her early career. It will compare the reception of her photographic archive, deposited at the Institut pour la photographie in 2021, with the research initiated that same year by Émilie Goudal on Varda’s visual work as a potential space for resistance through the image. 

Agnès Varda (1928–2019), who began her artistic career as a photographer in 1949, established herself a decade later, in 1961, as a filmmaker. Although she is recognized worldwide for her cinematic work, her decisive shift toward film directing should not obscure the fact that her filmmaker’s eye owes much to her practice of and relationship with photography: it is both the genesis of her work and a medium that stands in direct contrast to her filmmaking practice. 

Since his first film, La Pointe Courte (1954), including the documentary with on-screen captions Hey, Cubans! (1963) and up through the TV series One minute for a picture (1983), this presentation aims to focus specifically on the role of photography in Varda’s filmography. Between staging and mise en abyme, the intertwining and symbiosis of media, Varda’s vision was forged during a period of critical reexamination of the image as a form of resistance and when, in the artist’s own words, “ Women Take the Spotlight " and followed by " all the turmoil and charms of decolonization ". "

This presentation is part of the Institute’s 2022 Fellowship program on the theme “ Image of resistors ". "

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