Screen Picks

Cléo from 5 to 7 | Cinévardaphoto

by Sam Adams

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Published: Mar 12, 2008

Cléo from 5 to 7 (Sat., March 15, 7 p.m., $5-$7, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6555, ihousephilly.org) French new wave filmmaker Agnès Varda began as a documentarian, and the documentary impulse is strongly seen in 1962's Cléo from 5 to 7. Her first feature, 1956's La Pointe Courte, is firmly in a neorealist vein, but Cléo demonstrates the idiosyncratic nature of Varda's voice. Elapsing in more or less real time, the 89-minute movie follows a Parisian chanteuse (Corinne Marchand) as she wanders the city, awaiting the results of a fateful medical test. Insatiably curious and indefatigably restless, Varda loves wanderers and shifting landscapes, such as those explored by Sandrine Bonnaire's doomed homeless woman in Vagabond. She hates sitting still, physically or aesthetically.

Cinévardaphoto (Wed., March 26, 7 p.m., free, International House) Cinévardaphoto is the best single document of Varda's vagabond ways (unless you count the short-film collection available from her Ciné-tamaris Web site). Compiling short subjects filmed in 1963, 1982 and 2004, the one-woman omnibus is delightfully diverse yet strangely coherent, united by Varda's interest in the photographic image. Salut les Cubains, from 1963, uses still photos to create a sort of slow-speed animation journal of Varda's trip to Cuba, depicting the island as a socialist paradise. Ulysses, from 1982, focuses on a single image, a photo Varda snapped in 1954 as she was preparing to shoot La Pointe Courte. The shot of a nude male model and a young boy standing on a beach in the company of a dead goat provides a window into Varda's memories as well as those of her subjects.

The final segment, from 2004, is Ydessa, the Bears, and Etc, which profiles Ydessa Hendeles, a Toronto curator who collects vintage photographs of children posed with their teddy bears. Hendeles, whose family was killed in the Holocaust, exhibits thousands of framed photos alongside a Nazi tableaux as a reminder that such images of childhood happiness are fragile and often illusory, as fleeting as a frame flicking through the camera. Varda's films fix those images as islands in her constantly flowing stream of thought, a giddy current whose pull is irresistible.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

 

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