The French filmmaker Agnes Varda offers a new vision of his art at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, where he exhibits a selection of the thousands of photographs he took on the Cuban revolution in 1962, to make them his film “Salut les Cubains “released in 1964.
” I saw Cuba as a move soon, “told the media before the official opening artist of 87 years, unable to carry a film camera for being too heavy for her, he decided to capture thousands of snapshots that country, its people, its artists and its leaders and then shoot your own images.
It was a pure matter of “common sense”. That was “the only solution, funny and smart at the same time. Taking Pictures to film them,” said the artist, Palme of honor for the whole of a race last May at the Cannes Film Festival.
The show includes the uninterrupted projection of that average footage and is freely available, which held most notably -Monument live Varda of the “Nouvelle Vague” film and widow of another of its members, Jacques Demy.
The public can see for the first time about 60 works selected, all “vintage”, ie, revealed at the time by the artist herself, in the Picture Gallery of Pompidou.En first you discover a portrait of Fidel Castro, whom Varda asked, like all models, “no smile” and who sat in a way that seems to have behind him a stone wings.
“He was handsome, nice and quiet, and spoke in Spanish, “his portrait to summarize about ten minutes of interview he gave the Cuban leader.
Continue moments of everyday life in the streets and in the countryside, farmers cutting sugar cane, teenagers full adult literacy campaign; ICAIC students or Cha cha cha dancing, dressed in military uniform revolutionary.
Varda also wanted to capture the functioning of institutions and the lives of its intellectuals and artists, like the famous singer and composer Benny Moré, who died a few weeks later, and who appears in the film practically dancing, while the exhibition shows among other sequences that made this miracle possible film.
Commenting on this exhibition “should not take place, because those snapshots were destined not being exposed,” Varda did not hide his surprise that they were the images and not others selected by the Pompidou Centre.
“I thought I would take a picture of Salvador Dali, Ionesco, or other things of the 50s and 60s,” but interested in Cuba, he said.
The director, which lasted stay until January 1963, had traveled there invited by the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC) in December 1962, four years after the revolution led by Fidel Castro’s dictatorship had just Fungelcio Batista.
It was a traditional trip to the French left, and many artists and intellectuals had done little before, as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir; They were preparing to do so as Marguerite Duras; or they were there while Varda, as Henri Cartier-Bresson and René Burri, recalled at the Pompidou.
The exhibition fruit of that journey beyond the film occurs after some of the images taken by Varda “from entering recently” become part of the collections of the Pompidou said the director of the Gallery Clément Chéroux.
He also co-curator remembered The center now has 157 positive Varda, 145 of them Cuban series, noting that the famous filmmaker is an almost unknown photographer despite being so multiple and valuable their work in that field.
Something is largely because the artist also devoted much of his energy in recent decades to the movies, but in the early 50s was a professional photographer and even photographer holder when the Avignon Festival also ran the legendary Jean Vilar.
(Writing by EFE)
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