FRENCH NEW WAVE
Introduction
The 400 Blows, François Truffaut 1959
Hiroshima mon amour, Alain Resnais 1959
Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard 1960
Cleo de 5 à 7, Agnes Varda 1961
Cleo de 5 à 7
(Cleo from 5 to 7, Agnes Varda 1961)
Considered one of the most important films of the early1960s, Agnes Varda's Cleo de 5 à 7 has also been hailed by feminist critics as a landmark film about a woman's self-awakening. As the film opens, a beautiful young Parisian singer named Cleo, is anxiously awaiting the results of an important medical test. She consults a fortune-teller only to have the Tarot cards confirm her worst fears: she will soon die from cancer. Shaken and near hysteria, the young woman returns home where she has a brief visit with her elderly lover followed by a fruitless session with her songwriters. In the course of these encounters, Cleo reveals not only her anxiety but also her preoccupation - underscored by the presence of mirrors and other reflecting surfaces - with her beauty and her 'image'. Concerned, above all, with the way she 'looks' to others, she reassures herself about her illness by telling herself 'as long as I'm beautiful I'm alive'.
Midway through the film, however, the existential crisis she is facing appears to prompt a change in her. Casting off the blonde wig and seductive clothes she has worn thus far, she dons a simple black dress before venturing out, once again, into the city. Even as her appearance changes, she starts to connect with her real being and with the world around her. Graced with this new 'simplicity' and openness, she allows herself to become friendly with a young soldier, on leave from the war in Algeria, whom she meets in a park. Immediately drawn to one another, they go to the hospital to learn the results of Cleo's medical exam. The doctor reassures her - we do not know if he is telling the truth or not - that she will be fine after a few months of treatment. The film ends as Cleo turns to her newfound friend and tells him: 'I am almost happy.'
Cleo de 5 à 7 was apparently sparked by producer George Beauregard's suggestion that Varda make an inexpensive film in black and white about Paris. Varda proceeded to make a film that, like her documentaries of the 1950s, reveals the unique blend of documentary and fiction that typifies virtually all her work: at once an 'objective' portrait of the city, it is also permeated by the intensely subjective, fear-ridden view of its protagonist. Throughout the film we are made aware of the intensity of subjective vision: the ways in which Cleo's anxieties condition how she sees the city. As seen through her anguished eyes, Paris is a place of pitfalls and dangers. Wherever she goes she sees portents of danger and death: images of broken mirrors and funeral homes insistently greet her.
The emphasis on subjective vision that pervades the film is explicitly underscored, moreover, in a short film-within-a-film that Cleo watches in the company of a friend. Made to resemble an early slapstick comedy, the film's star is none other than Varda's good friend, Jean-Luc Godard. The film-within-a-film suggests how profoundly subjective vision conditions the way we see the world. For here Godard plays a young swain who finally comes to the realisation that his worldview - more precisely, whether the world is 'happy' or 'sad' - depends on whether or not he is wearing his sunglasses!
Varda uses similarly unconventional means to evoke the other pole of her film: its objective or documentary cast. To begin with, each segment is prefaced by titles that not only indicate its length - for example, 16:31-16:37 - but, also, serve to emphasise the fact that the duration of the film corresponds to 'real' time. The documentary impulse that governs Varda's approach to time and place also extends to the ways in which the director captures the city's inhabitants. As in a documentary, the camera lingers on people's faces: shots of old women gossiping in a corner, or those of a couple quarrelling in a cafe, suggest the multitude of very real urban dramas that lie outside Cleo's intensely subjective field of vision.
A complex portrait - at once subjective and objective - of Paris and its people, Cleo de 5 à 7 assumes a documentary cast in still another respect. The film also captures the atmosphere of a very particular historical and social moment. Both the presence of the soldier, as well as a radio broadcast overheard in a taxi, are explicit reminders of the continuing war in Algeria and of its repercussions in France. From a still broader perspective, the film as a whole - which portrays, after all, a period of anxious waiting - bears witness to the sense of unease and paralysis that gripped the country before the actual end of the war.
Introduction
The 400 Blows, François Truffaut 1959
Hiroshima mon amour, Alain Resnais 1959
Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard 1960
Cleo de 5 à 7, Agnes Varda 1961
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