"Istantanee dell'eternità: Varda fotografa tra immagine fissa e in movimento"

In the fourth meeting of the seminar series "Donne con la macchina fotografica (e un quaderno, un foglio, una penna, un laptop...)", Anna Masecchia will present the figure of a multifaceted artist through a phototext. From A comme Agnès to Z comme Zamis, Zinconnus, Zoubliées, Zabsent et Zombies, Agnès Varda, marking forty years of her activity as a filmmaker and thinker in images, published in 1994 a volume that begins in the form of an abecedary and becomes a thematic and iconographic atlas of her human and artistic journey.

Varda par Agnès is at once an autobiographical phototext and a visual essay on photography and cinema (and on the second half of the twentieth century). As always in Varda’s creative work, the narration of the self expands into a collective dimension, through and thanks to her original sensitivity as a photographer, capable of “framing” emotions and sensations and of “re-mediating” captured moments, even those “recycled” from the moving flow of film. A photographer even when she is a filmmaker, in works such as Ulysse (1982) she sets in motion the punctum generated by photographs within herself and invites us to do the same. The image gives rise to the word, and storytelling—even when oral rather than written—is generated through the reading of a photographic image.

The meeting will take place in person. It will be possible to arrange a virtual room upon request for valid reasons (physical distance, study commitments abroad, health conditions, etc.) by writing to ficlit.textl@unibo.it in order to receive a personal invitation link.

Anna Masecchia is Associate Professor at the University of Florence, where she serves as President of the Master’s Degree Programme in Performing Arts Studies and teaches History of Cinema and Cinema and Visual Culture. An avid and curious cinephile, she works across different fields of research, adopting a transdisciplinary and intermedial method that starts from the object and opens up to its context, exploring the interactions, contaminations, and connections that make the relationship between cinema and the other arts, stardom, and the gaze of and on women her primary areas of interest.

Among her monographs and edited volumes are: 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); Agnès Varda. Tales of Images (Mimesis, 2025, edited with L. Malavasi); Cinema, letteratura, intermedialità (Carocci, 2023, edited with G. Carluccio and S. Rimini); Pianeta Varda (ETS, 2022, edited with L. Malavasi).