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Portrait of the artist with a small bear
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By: TED S. STRATTON Staff Reporter
People have strange obsessions.
Some collect troll dolls. Others are insatiable pack rats for unopened action figures. A more mainstream person might acquire plush stuffed animals.
Then there are those who collect pictures of people with teddy bears. Toronto artist Ydessa Hendeles is one of those people. She doesn't find it odd that she spent more than ten years trolling the Internet and various photo archives for more than 3,000 sepia-toned pictures of people and their stuffed companions. It's all part of her art exhibit "Partners: The Teddy Bear Project," documented in a 2004 film by Agnés Varda called "Ydessa, the Bears, and Etc."
When Varda saw Hendeles's installation in Munich in late 2003, she immediately knew she had to make a film of it. A pioneer of the French New Wave and wife of the late musical film director Jacques Demy ("The Umbrellas of Cherbourg"), Varda has a documentarian's eye and a knack for ferreting out interesting stories about social subsets. Her last film, 2002's "The Gleaners and I," was about poor scavengers in the French countryside.
Varda's digital camerawork captures on screen the power of Hendeles's exhibit. Photographs of every pose imaginable n portraits, candids, boudoir shots, even pornography n line two stories of a balustrated, wood-paneled hall. The one thing all the photos have common is that each incorporates a teddy bear somewhere within. For the viewer, examining the photos becomes a bizarre "Where's Waldo" game as he or she attempts to locate the ursine prop in each piece.
In some of the photos (the majority of which are pre-WWII), the bear is the mascot for a schoolboy sports team. Most of the time, the stuffed animal is accompanying a child as a comforting toy provided by the photographer or as part of a makeshift tea party.
The question is why teddy bears?
The answer becomes clearer when we see the caption (one of only two such descriptors in the whole exhibit) underneath a blurry photo of a family with a young daughter clutching a teddy bear in her hands: "Ydessa Hendeles, daughter of Holocaust survivors Jacob and Dorothy Hendeles."
Both of Hendeles's parents survived Auschwitz, and her mother Dorothy appears in the film. Hendeles lost a cousin, Szalamus Zweisel, whose picture appears in the first shot of the movie and to whom the film is dedicated.
In some ways, the artist has recreated a fictitious family through her found objects, opines the curator of the exhibit. Complete strangers replace the generation missing from her family album.
Hendeles explains the mood of the photos. "Everybody felt safe. Everybody had a teddy bear," she says. It's nostalgia taken to the nth degree: A treasured childhood memory became her obsession.
The flame-haired artist is herself a little "out there," and Varda, who narrates the film throughout in French-accented English, seems to find it charming. A true artiste, Hendeles is not concerned about money. "It's not the price of the work that matters; it's what meaning I can pull out," she says.
Nonetheless, she drives an antique car from the 1920s, lives in a 17-room mansion in Toronto, and thinks nothing of paying $97,000 for a rare blue teddy bear at auction
The source of Hendeles's income is not revealed in the film, but regardless, her commitment to art "deserves our admiration," intones Varda.
The most shocking part of the film comes when Varda leads the camera into the second room of the exhibit. There, the room is bare except for a miniature statue of a small, kneeling Hitler on the floor. Having processed this image, Varda explains, the visitor then returns to look back at the photos again with a fresh perspective.
It's a metaphor for the twentieth century, the curator says. Adding to the irony is the fact that the hall where the pictures are displayed in Munich was formerly a Nazi art museum and the site of rallies, he reveals.
Hendeles insists that her message is not cut and dried. The installation is "complicated, challenging and rigorous," she says. "It's a narrative that explores world memory."
But the film is also a very personal and touching portrait of a woman struggling with identity and loss, one that is engaging enough to warrant a look.
That, and there are lots and lots of teddy bears.
"Ydessa, the Bears, and Etc." screens with two other short films as
part of "Cinévardaphoto" Sat., Aug. 27 at 6:30 p.m. and Sun., Aug. 28 at 8:50 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque, 11141 East Blvd., Cleveland.
Some collect troll dolls. Others are insatiable pack rats for unopened action figures. A more mainstream person might acquire plush stuffed animals.
Then there are those who collect pictures of people with teddy bears. Toronto artist Ydessa Hendeles is one of those people. She doesn't find it odd that she spent more than ten years trolling the Internet and various photo archives for more than 3,000 sepia-toned pictures of people and their stuffed companions. It's all part of her art exhibit "Partners: The Teddy Bear Project," documented in a 2004 film by Agnés Varda called "Ydessa, the Bears, and Etc."
When Varda saw Hendeles's installation in Munich in late 2003, she immediately knew she had to make a film of it. A pioneer of the French New Wave and wife of the late musical film director Jacques Demy ("The Umbrellas of Cherbourg"), Varda has a documentarian's eye and a knack for ferreting out interesting stories about social subsets. Her last film, 2002's "The Gleaners and I," was about poor scavengers in the French countryside.
Varda's digital camerawork captures on screen the power of Hendeles's exhibit. Photographs of every pose imaginable n portraits, candids, boudoir shots, even pornography n line two stories of a balustrated, wood-paneled hall. The one thing all the photos have common is that each incorporates a teddy bear somewhere within. For the viewer, examining the photos becomes a bizarre "Where's Waldo" game as he or she attempts to locate the ursine prop in each piece.
In some of the photos (the majority of which are pre-WWII), the bear is the mascot for a schoolboy sports team. Most of the time, the stuffed animal is accompanying a child as a comforting toy provided by the photographer or as part of a makeshift tea party.
The question is why teddy bears?
The answer becomes clearer when we see the caption (one of only two such descriptors in the whole exhibit) underneath a blurry photo of a family with a young daughter clutching a teddy bear in her hands: "Ydessa Hendeles, daughter of Holocaust survivors Jacob and Dorothy Hendeles."
Both of Hendeles's parents survived Auschwitz, and her mother Dorothy appears in the film. Hendeles lost a cousin, Szalamus Zweisel, whose picture appears in the first shot of the movie and to whom the film is dedicated.
In some ways, the artist has recreated a fictitious family through her found objects, opines the curator of the exhibit. Complete strangers replace the generation missing from her family album.
Hendeles explains the mood of the photos. "Everybody felt safe. Everybody had a teddy bear," she says. It's nostalgia taken to the nth degree: A treasured childhood memory became her obsession.
The flame-haired artist is herself a little "out there," and Varda, who narrates the film throughout in French-accented English, seems to find it charming. A true artiste, Hendeles is not concerned about money. "It's not the price of the work that matters; it's what meaning I can pull out," she says.
Nonetheless, she drives an antique car from the 1920s, lives in a 17-room mansion in Toronto, and thinks nothing of paying $97,000 for a rare blue teddy bear at auction
The source of Hendeles's income is not revealed in the film, but regardless, her commitment to art "deserves our admiration," intones Varda.
The most shocking part of the film comes when Varda leads the camera into the second room of the exhibit. There, the room is bare except for a miniature statue of a small, kneeling Hitler on the floor. Having processed this image, Varda explains, the visitor then returns to look back at the photos again with a fresh perspective.
It's a metaphor for the twentieth century, the curator says. Adding to the irony is the fact that the hall where the pictures are displayed in Munich was formerly a Nazi art museum and the site of rallies, he reveals.
Hendeles insists that her message is not cut and dried. The installation is "complicated, challenging and rigorous," she says. "It's a narrative that explores world memory."
But the film is also a very personal and touching portrait of a woman struggling with identity and loss, one that is engaging enough to warrant a look.
That, and there are lots and lots of teddy bears.
"Ydessa, the Bears, and Etc." screens with two other short films as
part of "Cinévardaphoto" Sat., Aug. 27 at 6:30 p.m. and Sun., Aug. 28 at 8:50 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque, 11141 East Blvd., Cleveland.
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