As may be gleaned from the title, the 1961 film “Cleo From 5 to 7” concerns two hours in the life of a modern Parisian woman. While awaiting the results of a cancer biopsy, she roams around the city to the music of Michel Legrand, encountering, among others, Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.

A freewheeling mix of verite, melodramatic whimsy, and graceful self-reflexivity, “Cleo” was written and directed by the photographer turned filmmaker Agnes Varda. Her previous feature, “La Pointe Courte,” pointed to the revelation that “Cleo” would fully manifest: There was now an elle in the nouvelle vague.

More than four decades later, Ms. Varda is still making movies, and as late as 2000, with her enchanting documentary “The Gleaners and I,” still making great ones. Opening today at Film Forum, her latest is the pleasant but middling “Cinevardaphoto,” an assembly of three short films on the subject of photography.

The program, arranged in reverse chronological order, begins with her most recent film, 2004’s “Ydessa, the Bears and Etc…” Ms. Varda became interested in the artist/gallerist/collector Ydessa Hendeles after visiting her Munich exhibition “Partners (The Teddy Bear Project),” a strange and obsessive installation of hundreds of vintage photographs containing Teddy bears.

Stacked from floor to ceiling, the photographs trigger disparate feelings in gallery-goers, a number of whom, along with Ms. Hendeles herself, are interviewed in the film. At once charming and suffocating, the exhibition is booby-trapped with a shock finale in an adjacent gallery, which casts the entire project in a new light and illuminates the concerns of Ms. Hendeles, the daughter of Holocaust survivors.

Winner of the 1983 Cesar for Documentary Short, “Ulysses” meditates on a photograph Ms. Varda took many years ago. Facing the ocean, a nude man stands to the left of a small boy, who sits on the pebble beach looking toward the camera. The composition is completed by the startling presence of a dead goat, twisted in the foreground.

In her wry running commentary, Ms. Varda muses on the personal and poetic meanings of the image. She interviews the boy, Ulysses, who has grown up to be a camera-shy shopkeeper. The man, a successful art director, agrees to disrobe once more for her camera.

“Salut Les Cubains” is a montage of photos taken during a 1962 trip to Cuba. Cut to the bright rhythms of Cuban music, the montage ranges through hundreds of images and dozens of cheerful thematic nodes: cigars, hats, and beards; workers, musicians, and women; Castro. It’s an exuberant, naive display of Cubaphilia, one the filmmaker has come to look back on with a certain skepticism. “We must, of course, replace this documentary in the context of 1962,” Ms. Varda writes in the press notes.

“Today, 40 years later, all the sadness caused by the lost illusions comes out of the film.”

Ms. Varda’s method in each film shows a debt to her longtime friend Chris Marker, supreme practitioner of the sly cine-essay. Less concise than the densely epigrammatic master, she’s also more relaxed. Her warmly voiced commentaries leave room to breathe, and if her thoughts are less than penetrating, they glance off the images with a solid, sincere charm.

Until March 1 (209 W. Houston Street, between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).