Anna Masecchia, "Snapshots of eternity: Varda’s photography between still and moving images"

In the fourth session of the seminar series ‘Women with a camera (and a notebook, a sheet of paper, a pen, a laptop...)’, Anna Masecchia will introduce a multimedia artist through a photo-essay. From 'A comme Agnès' to 'Z comme Zamis, Zinconnus, Zoubliées, Zabsent et Zombies', in 1994, to mark forty years of her career as a filmmaker and visual thinker, Agnès Varda published a book that begins as an alphabetical compendium and evolves into a thematic and iconographic atlas of her personal and artistic journey. Varda par Agnès is both an autobiographical photo-text and an essay in images on photography, cinema, and the second half of the twentieth century. As in all of Varda's creative work, the narrative of the self gives way to the collective 'we', thanks to her primal sensitivity as a photographer. She is capable of 'framing' emotions and sensations, and 'remediating' captured moments - even those 'recycled' from the moving flow of a film. Even when she is a filmmaker, she continues to take photographs; in works such as Ulysse (1982), she sets in motion the punctum generated by the photographs within her and invites us to do the same. The image gives rise to the word, and storytelling - even if it is oral rather than written - is generated by interpreting a photographic image.

Anna Masecchia is Associate Professor at the University of Florence, where she is Head of the Master’s Degree programme in Performing Arts and where she teaches History of Cinema and Cinema and Visual Culture. A die-hard and curious cinephile, she moves between different fields of research, attempting to employ a transdisciplinary and intermedial method that starts from the object to open the gaze to the context, amidst influences, cross-pollinations and references that make the relationships between cinema and the other arts, stardom, and the gaze of and upon women objects of privileged interest. Her monographs and edited volumes include: Mi ricordo mentre vivo. Agnès Varda (Electa 2026); Les plages d’Agnès (Carocci 2024); Vittorio De Sica. Storia di un attore (Kaplan, 2012); Al cinema con Proust(Marsilio 2009); Various Authors, Agnès Varda. Tales of images (Mimesis 2025, edited with L. Malavasi); Various Authors, Cinema, literature, intermediality (Carocci 2023, edited with G. Carluccio and S. Rimini), Various Authors, Pianeta Varda (ETS 2022, edited with L. Malavasi).