Salut les cubains Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		3.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.0

Salut les cubains Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman July 31, 2020

Note: This film is available as part of The Complete Films of Agnès Varda.

In the wake (figurative or otherwise) of Agnès Varda’s death last year at the age of 90, quite a bit has rightfully been written about this iconic force in both French and global cinema. Varda’s output includes well over fifty credits as a director (including some television entries as detailed by the IMDb), and aside from listing some of her better known triumphs, many obituaries and/or eulogies about Varda mentioned any number of other biographical data points, including her rather unique position as a woman in France’s nouvelle vague movement, her own feminism which was featured none too subtly in some of her films, and her frequently provocative experimental style. But you know what one of the things that kind of fascinates me personally most about Varda? That she was married for 28 years to Jacques Demy, from 1962 until Demy’s death in 1990. That Varda, often a purveyor of verité infused “realism”, whether that be in outright documentaries or at least ostensibly more “fictional” outings, and Demy, a director whose candy colored, dreamlike and at least relatively "Hollywoodized" musicals with Michel Legrand brought a new luster and gloss to French cinema, managed to make a marital go of it for so long is certainly testament to the maxim that “opposites attract”, even if those oppositional forces in this instance played out at least in part in terms of what kinds of films the two were often best remembered for. If Varda's long marriage to Demy is more than enough reason to celebrate her personal life, her professional life is beautifully feted in this rather astounding new set from Criterion, which aggregates an amazing 39 films (albeit some running as short as a few minutes) to provide what is arguably one of the most insightful overviews of Varda's cinematic oeuvre. Perhaps unavoidably, but also undeniably movingly, these personal and professional sides of Varda merge in at least some of the films in this set, including The Young Girls Turn 25, The World of Jacques Demy, Jacquot de Nantes, and The Beaches of Agnès.

American film industry press material often refers to someone (artistically) able to chew gum and walk at the same time as a so-called "multi- hyphenate", and in that regard Agnès Varda had several talents, albeit arguably interlinked ones, at her beck and call. In fact some interesting perceived "sidebars" get covered in some of the "latter day" documentaries both about and by Agnès Varda which address her "extracurricular" interests (aside from filmmaking, that is), with still photography certainly being near the top or actually arguably at the top of that list. Films like the Academy Award nominated Faces Places or The Beaches of Agnès are in fact built at least somewhat substantially around the very idea of a still photograph. Varda's love for still photography is also front and center in Salut les cubains, a really fascinating aggregation of, yes, still photographs that Varda took while on a visit to Cuba in 1963.

Varda's eye for the "common people" is on display throughout many of the photos seen in various montages, and even though there's no real narrative and context is often left to the eye of the beholder, there's still a palpable sense of that Varda staple, "community", running through many of the stills. If Varda's visual sense is immediately accessible, some may find her near hagiographic depictions of Castro's revolution a little questionable, at least in hindsight.

Salut les cubains Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Salut les Cubains is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of The Criterion Collection with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.66:1. Some prefatory text discloses this was shot 35mm silver color stock* in a 1.66:1 format, which was restored by Ciné Tamaris in 2014 at Laboratory Eclair, with a 2K digital restoration from a 2K scan of the original 35mm negative. Color grading was supervised by Agnès . There are a few "moving pictures" in this movie, at least during the opening credits, but as discussed above, this is comprised almost entirely out of still photographs, and so assessing it as a "movie" is a bit difficult, even if Varda attempts to instill "motion" with her editing choices and occasional montage aspects like dissolves. Contrast and black levels are generally consistent throughout, with an understanding that some of the photos have some inherent variances, and grain resolves naturally throughout the presentation.

*Why the prefatory text says color stock is a bit odd since everything is in black and white, but perhaps some verbiage from another similar release (in terms of aspect ratio and restoration data) was ported over and not amended.

Salut les cubains Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Salut les Cubains is another of the shorts in this collection granted only lossy audio, and only a lossy Dolby Digital Mono track in the original French is included. That probably suffices relatively well considering this is in essence simply a narrated series of still photos (occasional background music is on hand). Prefatory text states that E.L. Diapason restored the audio from the original 35mm magnetic mix.

Salut les cubains Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Introduction from 2007 (1080i; 1:48) offers Varda's thoughts. In French with English subtitles.

Salut les cubains Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

This is an absolutely fascinating document of a moment in time, but as a documentary film I'm not sure it totally succeeds. Still, Varda's acute visual sense is on display throughout many of the photos included in this piece, and her political musings may either delight or enrage, depending on individual sensibilities. Video looks fine but this is another short with only lossy audio.