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Salut les Cubains (1964) is a documentary short by French filmmaker Agnès Varda. Varda spent December of 1962 and January of 1963 visiting Cuba. Later in 1963, Varda gave order to 1,800 of the black-and-white photographs she took during her trip, editing them into a 30-minute documentary film. The photos portray Cuba and the Cuban people four years after the Cuban Revolution triumphed. Photographed and directed by Varda, the piece is a sprawling depiction of the country, its people, music, history, revolution, and energy.

Plot
The documentary short opens with film sequences of the Paris (Saint-Germain-des-Prés, June 1963) exhibition that showed Varda’s photographs of Cuba shortly after her return to France. The film quickly moves from Paris to Cuba, with film sequences depicting the general liveliness and commotion of Havana’s streets. The film then transitions from film sequences to the photo sequences or “animated photographs” that assemble the rest of the documentary. The “moving” photos pay homage to Cuba’s “movement” and to its “picturesque tropical-socialism.” Throughout the film, Agnès Varda and Michel Piccoli salute a wide array of Cuban characters, from bearded revolutionaries and young cinema students to Chinese immigrants and domino players. In the absence of Varda or Piccoli’s voiceover, the film’s Cuban score becomes the melodic background to these characters’ stories.

Voice Over
When the photographs and their subjects are not moving according to Afro-Cuban music, Cha-cha-cha, Danzón, or Bolero, two voices describe the scenarios, ideas, and emotions that the photographs convey. On one hand, there is Michel Piccoli as the male reciter. On the other hand, there is Agnès Varda as the female narrator. These two voices dominate most of the spoken parts of the documentary.

Michel Piccoli
The French actor Michel Piccoli recites the historical facts behind the subjects and scenarios represented. His voice typically describes recent Cuban history and unlike Varda’s lyricism, Piccoli’s recitation inclines towards objective descriptions and literal interpretations. Early in the documentary, for instance, Piccoli directly translates (from Spanish to French) part of a speech recited by Fidel Castro.

Agnés Varda
As photographer and director of the film, Varda’s voice narrates the emotions that her photographs might evoke. She ascribes poetic interpretations to her photographs as well as to the subjects and scenes that her photographs represent.

Notable Portraits
The film also features Cuban subjects photographed by Varda herself. Benny Moré, Raúl Castro, Wilfredo Lam, and Sara Gómez, are some of the highlighted subjects that Varda portrays as salient characters.

Benny Moré
After the Cuban Revolution, Moré was among the group of musicians that stayed in Cuba. In Salut les Cubains, Moré sings and dances a son montuno inspired by peasant songs. These photos were among the last portraits taken of the singer. In 1963, he died of cirrhosis of the liver at 43 years old. Around 100,000 fans attended his funeral. Varda honors Moré with her photographs and takes the opportunity to say goodbye in the film given that he died before the film was finished.

Raúl Castro
In Salut les Cubains, Raúl Castro appears as the Army Secretary and the revolutionary who inaugurated Varda’s photo exhibition in Havana. Castro was a rebel commander during the 1950s, Army Secretary from 1959-2008, and the President of Cuba since 2008.

Wilfredo Lam
Wilfredo Lam’s paintings occasionally take over the screen. He is described as Cuba’s national Picasso, a very international painter, and a surrealist with a tropical realism. Even though he did not live in Cuba during the years after the revolution triumphed, Lam openly supported Fidel Castro and his socialist state all the way from Europe.

Sara ‘Sarita’ Gómez
Varda describes Gómez as a young director of didactic films. Near the end of the short, Sarita Gómez dances the “final cha-cha-cha” with other rising filmmakers at the recently inaugurated Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC). At the ICAIC, Gómez served as assistant director to the visiting French director Agnès Varda during the early 1960s. The rising filmmaker died young in 1974, 10 years after the release of Salut les Cubains.

Rostrum Camera or Ken Burns Effect
Salut les Cubains is a film made, almost entirely, from Varda’s photographs. Although the photos are not physically altered or superimposed, they are thoughtfully ordered, organized, amplified, repeated, and edited together in order to approximate the pace of a feature film. Varda subsequently employed a rostrum camera, which allowed for the slow zooming effects and panning techniques necessary for Varda to stage her images more carefully and provide multiple viewing perspectives of each photograph. Throughout this documentary, photographs continuously surface and resurface – like in Benny Moré’s photo sequence, when the same series of portraits are repeatedly cycled through, giving the appearance that he is moving to the beat of his own singing.

Homage
Besides being a compilation of Varda’s photojournalism, Salut les Cubains is a salutatory homage to Cuba’s “lyrical and rhythmic revolution” and “picturesque tropical-socialism.” The photo sequences frequently capture the exuberant spirit in the early days of the Cuban Revolution. The film score also pays tribute the diverse ancestry of Cuban music. The black-and-white photos, narrators, and music choice crystallize a moment of history and the celebration of not only this revolution but also of the history of Cuban culture before the revolution triumphed.

The Cuban Revolution
Socialist leaders such as Fidel Castro and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara organized the armed 26th of July Movement and fought the Cuban Revolution in order to overthrow General Fulgencio Batista’s military and capitalist dictatorship, which during the 1950s persecuted dissenters and led Cuba towards economic stagnation. By January 1959, Castro’s rebel guerrillas were stronger than the official army and the former took over the Cuban government and proclaimed the establishment of a revolutionary socialist state.

Cuban Music
In his narration, Michel Piccoli describes Cuban music as a product of cultural miscegenation; the mixing of Spanish, African, and French cultural heritages. The film’s original score includes Afro-Cuban songs and dances, Cha-cha-chas, Benny Moré’s son, tangos, danzón, and boleros, all of which display the interactions between these cultures.

Release & Reception
Since the documentary presents and combines multiple artistic genres such as film, photography, and installation art, it has been released three times under different contexts. On May 2, 1964, Salut les Cubains was first released in France as a documentary short film. That same year the film won a bronze medal at the Venice international film festival.

Forty years later, the film was retrospectively released as part of a triptych meant to commemorate the theme of photography often present in Varda’s films. Accordingly, Salut les Cubains appears as the third film of the Cinevardaphoto triptych, which also includes Varda’s Ydessa, The Bears and Etc. (2004) and Ulysse (1982). The Hollywood Reporter celebrates the documentary upon its triptych release in 2004 and describes it as “a highly entertaining cinematic collage of hundreds of black and white photographs taken in Cuba shortly after the revolution, accompanied by narration by actor Michel Piccoli and a soundtrack of vintage Cuban music.

Paris’s Centre Pompidou is currently hosting a Varda/Cuba exhibition until February 1st of 2016. According to curators MNAM/CCI, Cheroux, and Lewandowska, this art exhibit enables visitors to see the photographs taken by Varda in Cuba, which recently entered the museum's collection. “By placing the photographs in dialogue with the film, screened in a loop in the same gallery, this exhibition recreates the tension between the fixed and moving image that is often central to Agnès Varda's work.”