‘Ulysse’: looking beyond Agnès Varda’s iconic photograph
Although Agnès Varda will be regarded as one of the finest filmmakers in the history of the medium, she didn’t always want to become one. In fact, she initially wanted to work as a curator and studied art history before she eventually ventured into photography. It was this background as a photographer that defined her vision of cinema, existing somewhere in between the distinct frameworks of documentary and fiction.
While most of her works examined the relationship between those two domains to some extent, one film that focuses on this complex link is her 1982 work Ulysse. It’s an investigation of a photograph that Varda took in 1954, featuring a naked man and a naked child on a sad beach with a goat lying dead on the pebbles. To understand more about that photograph’s relationship with the reality of the 1980s, she tracked down her subjects and asked them about the image.
During a conversation with Film Comment, Varda said: “I learned a lot about how people can look at an image and load it with different feelings—the same image. Even in Ulysse… I leave the photo on screen for 15 to 20 seconds—with nothing—so that, as a viewer, you start to question: ‘What is the goal? Is she dead? What is this shot looking at? What is the man looking at?’ Then you build your own view, impressions, story. Maybe you think it’s beautiful or meaningless, and that’s so important. That’s what I worked on in this film. Even if I do my narration, which leads you here and there, then the image comes back with no words, and you look at it anew.”
The director added: “See, one of my interpretations is that it’s an image of a father and mother, like the mother lying with a big belly, which is one of the images of motherhood, hot and uncomfortable. And the man standing, looking at the future and the child in between those. What impressed me is that when that child [Ulysses] made the drawing after the photo, he brought the figures together so that the little boy is touching the man. In the photo, the boy’s separated from the man. It’s so interesting: nobody wants to be alone. And that child grew up to be a man who doesn’t remember that day, but that child was saying something.”
Ulysse, although only 20 minutes long, is 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. Even though Varda’s photograph will always represent something specific within the context of her journey as an artist, the subjects of the same photograph completely forgot about its existence. It was Varda’s documentary that confronted them with the fundamental conflict between the concreteness of empirical evidence and the abstraction of human memory.
Combining details about her personal life and the people she knew with archival footage of the sociopolitical developments of the time, Ulysse is an important work that proves that a complete picture can only be formed by looking at the same thing from different lenses. The film feels like turning over a photograph and discovering an entire universe scribbled on its back.
Watch the film below.
