Between Photography and Cinema

The special programme Between Photography and Cinema, marking the 200th anniversary of photography, brings together films made in France by French and international filmmakers. At its core is the question of what happens to photography when it enters the flow of cinematic time, and what happens to cinema when it turns toward the still image.

Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) is one of the most radical experiments of that kind. Built almost entirely of photographs, it recalls the photographic nature of the cinematic image. Stillness here is not a halt: the sequence of frames produces a sensation of movement that the viewer completes in the imagination.

In Ulysse (1982), Agnès Varda approaches the same contradiction from another angle. The film returns to a photograph she took in 1954, where a goat, a child, and a naked man stand together on a seashore. If Marker creates imagined movement out of still images, Varda reflects on whether a single photograph can recover the event itself — the moment that took place before the camera. We know what is pictured, but not what exactly was happening at that instant; around this suspended fragment of time gather memory, speculation, and fiction.

Another pair of films turns to the time that photography usually leaves outside the frame. Reporters (1981), by the photographer and director Raymond Depardon, and Varda’s Daguerréotypes (1975) use cinematic duration to give that time back. Depardon spends a month following photographers from the Gamma agency as they wait for hours for the right moment for a single shot. Varda, meanwhile, turns to the shopkeepers on rue Daguerre, where she had lived since the 1950s. The title itself points at once to a specific place and to the daguerreotype — an early photographic process defined by long exposure.

Four digital restorations of 1920s films by Man Ray, gathered in Return to Reason (2023), and Maria Kourkouta’s Prélude 10 (Analysa) (2011–2012) treat the photographic image and cinematic time as material for experiment. Man Ray, an American artist who formed much of his practice in the Paris avant-garde, and Kourkouta, born in Greece and working in France, come from different artistic and cultural contexts. In their films the border between photography and cinema is especially permeable.

Alisa Nasrtdinova