Lettre d'Alain Cavalier (Alain Cavalier, 1982)
Ulysse (Agnès Varda, 1983)
La Villa Santo Sospir (Jean Cocteau, 1952)
Les Années declic 1957-1977 (Raymond Depardon, 1983)

Alain Cavalier, faced with the blank page while writing his film Thérèse, turns to Therese's letters to explore the character and his own anxiety. Lettre (14 mins, Color) has the same refusal of classic editing as would later appear in Thérèse. (“Shot footage equals projected footage,” Cavalier said. “No one has the right to touch it.”) In Ulysse (22 mins, B&W/Color), Agnès Varda returns to a photo taken thirty years ago-”A goat, a child, and a man by the sea. The goat was dead, the child's name was Ulysee, and the man was naked”-to explore memory, reality, and imagination. La Villa Santo Sospir (39 mins, Color, 16mm) is Jean Cocteau's guided tour of a villa which he has completely redecorated; thus, it is a guided tour of himself and his artistic preoccupations. As for his frescoes, “It wasn't a question of dressing the walls, but rather drawing on their skin; it's a tattooed villa.”

In Les Années declic 1957-1977 (70 mins, B&W), Raymond Depardon, the marvelous photojournalist and direct-cinema documentarist (Faits Divers) turned feature-filmmaker (Empty Quarter, Captive of the Desert) here gives an autobiographical tour of his life-done in pictures, of course. It is a powerful and moving examination of an artist; photos of his youth, and extracts from his films, show us what has counted most for him. “In an unusual development in direct cinema, (Depardon developed) a sort of `auteur' complex. The ultra-light and ultra-flexible camera is his alter ego, a mirror along the road as Stendhal said of the novel, and a mirror in the Cocteau tradition, Narcissus's perfect tool.” (L. Marcorelles)