Thinking Photography in Film, or The Suspended Cinema of Agnès Varda and Jean Eustache

Abstract

For years prior to what historians refer to as boom period of 1970s, photography had yet to come into its own as a bona fide object of inquiry. Though critical responses to medium first began to appear shortly after its inception in 1830s, and continued to develop throughout early part of twentieth century with a number of keen reflections on photographic modernism, some of most sophisticated and insightful writing about greater implications of photographic meaning only truly began to emerge in 1970s and 1980s. (2) A critical moment in history of our understanding of medium, this period was characterized not only by academy's recognition of history of photography as a legitimate scholarly discipline, but also by an ever more prominent wave of acceptance by museums. (3) It was also during 1980s that artists became once again comfortable exploring photography as an art form in and of itself, and not merely as a model for painterly process (think Francis Bacon or Andy Warhol) or as a tool used to document more conceptual or site-specific practices (Robert Smithson, Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci). (4) As collectors--with institutional affiliations or otherwise--explored potential for growth in this nascent sector of market, a number of critics, sparked by these developments, turned their own attentions to matter. (5) On heels of 1977 publication of Susan Sontag's pioneering collection of essays, On Photography, editors of journal October, in a special issue from 1978, responded to changing status of photograph both on market and in museum by advocating photography's newfound identity as a theoretical object. (6) In their introduction to that issue, editors proposed that only now could critical thinking about medium really begin to mature. Given dramatic rise of photographic image on cultural stage, as editors wrote over thirty years ago, finally could photography be rediscovered and redeemed from the cultural limbo to which for a century and a half it ha[d] been consigned. (7) Looking back on this period, one notes a sudden proliferation of writing that aims to do just that: from Roland Barthes' hauntingiy personal reflection on photography and death in La chambre claire (1980) and Herve Guibert's similarly autobiographical take on photography, memory, and desire in L'image fantome (1981), to Victor Burgin's seminal compilation on multiplicity of photographic codes (Thinking Photography, 1982), John Berger and Jay Mohr's self-reflexive photo-essay Another Way of Telling (also from 1982), and Philippe Dubois' consideration of singularity of photography and subjectivity of photographic process in Uacte photographique (1983), just to a name a few. (8) If we consider ever increasing cultural prominence of photography and discourse on photography during those years, it is perhaps not so curious to remark that at around same time in France--the veritable birthplace of medium--several of some of era's most innovative filmmakers were also engaging many of same issues. Among them, both Agnes Varda and Jean Eustache stand out for having produced two thought-provoking short films that, while remaining true to each director's artistic vision, dialogue with and contribute to new kind of photographic theory and criticism that was circulating on both sides of Atlantic at around same time. As art historian Linda Nochlin has written, Nothing, perhaps, is harder to write intelligently about than photography. (9) In what follows I would like to suggest how Varda's Ulysse (1982) and Eustache's Les photos d'Alix (1980) tap into motion picture's own privileged potential as a vehicle for thinking--and also, to a certain extent, writing--about medium from which it ultimately evolved. (10) As they create a filmic language capable of speaking for photographic image, films mobilize cinema as a way to theorize indexical ontology of photograph, link between photography, personal memory, and collective history, and perhaps most importantly, often strained, incestuous, but nevertheless vital relationship between photography and cinema. …