Directed by: Agnes Varda
Streaming on MUBI.
It's a film with a compilation of photographs. Just photographs. About 1800 of them. They explore Cuba, their culture, four years after Fidel Castro came to power. They use a lot of pans, zoom ins, and zoom outs on the photographs and some of them are as effective as how it'd be if they are used on shots intead of just photos. And the photos are cut so fast, that sometimes I had to really focus to see what's happening. There's a lot of dynamism that's there in the film. It's racy, and it snaps just like that. It's interesting how Agnes Varda always combines the two art forms of photography and cinema beautifully. Faces Places is one of the best films I've ever seen. And it's so nice to see that such experiments like this have been done way back, even in the 1960s. So nothing should stop us in this day and age.
Such films are never about plot. They're a compilation of small small observations of life, and small fragments of life. It almost flows like a poem. Music, voice over and these images. It's beautiful usage of the form. I wish more such films use photographs to express. I remember Lars von Trier using that in The House That Jack Built. In films like these, there is terrific scope for filmmakers to traverse themselves into the characters and make their observations about life seamlessly come through characters.
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