Former student at the Louvre, Agnès Varda began her career as a photographer before turning to cinema. Critics and scholars rarely see or stand, in her films, the sharp and erudite taste for painting and photography, which manifests itself mainly by recurrent gestures on image. In this article, we are going to analyse three procedures by which that explicit recurrence can be seen in some of her films. First, by obtaining through a pictorial image the reproduction of a singular gesture that is fixed due to the use of pause (pose), proposing a 'mise en abyme' of the relationship between painting and film. A second procedure explores the gesture generated by a photograph, in films whose characters, frozen in their gestures, become themselves objects. A third procedure evokes an extension of certain gestures, but this time within the very filmic images, through montage. That recurrence of gestures finds strong echoes in the writings of Gaston Bacherlard, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg. Therefore, what we call here a "memory of gestures" attests, in her films, a fine collusion between painting, photography and film.
film; photography; painting; Agnès Varda
