Ulysse
1982 · 22m · France
Directed by Agnès Varda
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, whimsical
Agnès Varda revisits a photograph she took on a beach in 1954—depicting a naked man, a naked child, and a dead goat—and attempts to reconstruct the circumstances and meaning of that image nearly thirty years later, creating a meditation on memory, photography, and the gap between an image and reality.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Varda interrogating a single 1954 photograph of a naked man, naked child, and dead goat thirty years later. The whole film is one image and what it refuses to give back. César-winning and it earned it.
Varda's César-winning interrogation of a single 1954 photograph is a defining essay film — in dialogue with Marker's La Jetée and Sans Soleil while remaining unmistakably her own. The form of memory itself is the subject.
Varda's 1984 César winner for Best Documentary Short — only the 1:17 ceremony clip is on Vimeo, but the film itself (interrogating one 1954 photograph thirty years later) is canonical essay cinema. A picks-itself piece for any serious vault.
Reviews
Using the simplest of means—first-person voiceover, three interviews, still photographs and judiciously selected music and newsreel footage, Varda has created an intimate and moving essay on art, memory and storytelling.
A work of astonishing scope that perfectly demonstrates how images are crystallised versions of reality that are left behind by the unrelenting march of time.
Festivals
- César Awards 1984, Best Short Documentary Film