My favorite film by Agnès Varda—who arrives in town tomorrow for a weeklong residency at the University of Chicago—is the shorts compilation Cinevardaphoto. It’s an ideal introduction to her career, illustrating her artistic practice as it extends from still photography to moving pictures. (Two of the three pieces included in that work are featured in a program that Varda attends this Sunday afternoon at the Logan Center for the Arts.) In each of the shorts, Varda employs cinematic means (editing, narration, camera movement) to bring still images to life and then interrogate their meaning. The results are at once cerebral and playful, as Varda creates the impression she’s discovering things about her art right before your eyes.
In their free-form inventiveness, Varda’s films often evoke uninterrupted trains of thought, and this makes them universally relatable. Pervading all her work is a sense of discovery—her films and photographs imply that by looking at life through a camera’s lens one sees things that wouldn’t be apparent with the naked eye. At the end of her 2009 film memoir The Beaches of Agnes (screening next Thursday at 7 PM at the Logan Center), Varda avers that she’s lived through cinema—a sentiment that resounds in many of her films.
