Agnès Varda was the stealth star of the first French New Wave, overlooked in part because her films were less splashy than those of her contemporaries, and in part because she'd already achieved renown as a photojournalist and documentarian. All of Varda's talents factor into Cinévardaphoto, an anthology of three short documentaries grappling with the mysterious properties of snapshots. In "Ydessa, The Bears And Etc.," Varda tours a peculiar museum installation, crammed from ceiling to floor with photos of people and their teddy bears. For "Ulysses," Varda tries to remember what was happening in a picture she took decades ago. And "Hi There, Cubanos!" shuffles a stack of still images from post-revolution Cuba into a celebratory montage. The three shorts were made in different eras—2004, 1982, and 1963, respectively—but all three openly and playfully question whether a photograph can replace memory.
"Ydessa" kicks off the trilogy, with Varda and vintage-photo collector Ydessa Hendeles talking about how the simple hook of a teddy bear gets museumgoers to discover nonexistent themes in an exhibit. One of Hendeles' patrons, confronted with two stories' worth of tiny family photos, grumbles, "I sense nothing but death here." Meanwhile, Hendeles declares her own delusions, insisting that the collection comprises "a narrative that explores world memory." Varda keeps an open mind, though she frequently interrupts to examine what some of the pictures might mean—especially the ones that feature pre-Holocaust Jews and Nazis. "Ydessa" makes some incisive comments about how people see what they look for in art, but at 45 minutes, the film runs too long. The recent documentary Other People's Pictures, also about the haunting power of old photos, covers a wider range of topics in almost the same amount of time, and lets viewers spend more time with the images. Too often, "Ydessa" reflects the art-lovers it depicts: on a bear hunt, missing the scenery.
The second and third parts of Cinévardaphoto are tighter and livelier. In "Ulysses," Varda tracks down two of her former models, and as they share conflicting impressions of what they were thinking on the day their pictures were taken, the director pulls out other shots from the same period and disappears into an idealized memory of her youth. "Hi There, Cubanos!" is even looser, as snapshots from Cuba illustrate a free-form ramble about the great socialist promise. The latter two feel more indelible than "Ydessa" because Varda's voice in each is clearer and more expressive, and just maybe because they're shot on film, as opposed to the video of "Ydessa." Someone as attuned as Varda to the quality of an image should know that a flat, disposable medium like video makes images harder to internalize.