Cléo de 5 à 7 9781838713256, 9781844571765

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FOR LUCIA CLAIRE AND HELENA LISBETH FOSTER

Cléo (Corinne Marchand) on the rue Delambre

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Acknowledgments The idea for this book grew from a session that Catherine Portuges, Jill Forbes and I organised for the Twentieth-century French and Francophone Studies conference in April 2000. I wrote a first draft during a spring 2006 stint as Scholar in Residence at the University of Florida Paris Research Center, with support from the University of Iowa’s Office of the Vice-President for Research. In Paris, Philippe Dubois and Laurent Jullier invited me to speak at the Université de Paris-III’s Séminaire Roger Odin, where questions from Christa Blümlinger, Michèle Lagny, Michel Marie and Roger Odin prodded me to rethink a number of assumptions concerning Varda’s 1954 film debut, La Pointe-Courte. Lynn Higgins’s invitation to talk to Dartmouth College students in her Reid Hall course on the city of Paris likewise allowed me to present thoughts on this work in progress. Agnès Varda and Anita Benoliel welcomed me at the CinéTamaris offices and provided generous access to archival materials. At the BFI in London, my editors Rob White and Rebecca Barden gave this project attentive support from start to finish. Closer to home, timely input from Paula Amad, Corey Creekmur, Natas˘a ˘ urovic˘ová, Ofer Eliaz, Kathleen Newman and Sasha Waters Freyer D did credit to the unique atmosphere of intellectual dialogue in Iowa’s Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature. Dudley Andrew, Ben Estes, Marie and Patrick Ferran, David Gompper, Franklin Miller, Dania Mounsef, Marian Pavuk, Andrew Peterson, Catherine Portuges, Sally Shafto, Dana Strand, Maureen Turim and Daniel Wronecki also provided input at critical points along the way. My thanks to everyone. Robin Ungar lived patiently with this book on a daily basis for the better part of two years. More than anyone else, she knows how it came to be. I cherish our life together.

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Introduction: Sense of Time, Sense of Place

I don’t want simply to show, but rather to convey a desire to see. Agnès Varda

When I first saw Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7, 1962) at a film society screening in Madison, Wisconsin, in the mid-1960s, my enthusiasm for going to the movies was often akin to that I had at the time for reading a novel or going to see an art exhibition. If the price of entrance – thirty-five cents, if memory serves – reminded me that films were always part of a business and an industry, I still relished the stimulation that films such as Cléo provided with reference to a culture and a country to which I would soon devote a significant portion of my life. Some of this stimulation has returned recently in the form of DVD releases whose bonus features provide new access to films that had long remained out of circulation. This repackaging affects the status of these films in two ways: first, as documents of a specific time and place; and, second, as products of visual practices and material features. I thought again of the effects of this repackaging when the December 2005 release of a two-disc DVD set programmed Cléo – surely one of Varda’s two or three signature films – alongside recent remarks by her on the film, images of paintings by Hans Baldung Grien and a TV clip of Varda and Madonna discussing a possible remake of Cléo, with the American pop star in the title role. A second disc contained three films by Varda – Daguerréotypes (1975), L’Opéra Mouffe (1958) and Le Lion volatil (2003) – devoted to neighbourhoods of Paris. English and German subtitles facilitated marketing of the new DVD outside France. This wealth of features and bonus materials underscored the personal nature of the new

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DVD as a product released by Varda through her Ciné-Tamaris production company, located in the same house on the rue Daguerre in Paris where she has lived since 1951. A notice on the back of the DVD cover informed ‘all cinephiles’ that the hardware store seen thirty years earlier in Daguerréotypes had become an editing room and boutique for Ciné-Tamaris, selling DVDs of films by Varda and by her late husband, Jacques Demy. As with the packaging of the new DVD, this gentle sales pitch derived less from vertical integration of production, marketing and sales than from Varda’s efforts to emulate the artisan whose signature was a mark of hands-on effort. The effect cast Varda as an arty neighbour of the local shopkeepers on the rue Daguerre whom she had portrayed in Daguerréotypes. The detail of artisanal signature was not simply figurative. Much like the publisher whose colophon identifies her effort in the form of a unique emblem, Varda marked the cover of the new DVD three times with the logo of a cat enclosed within the inner arc formed by the hand-written letters, C and T, for Ciné-Tamaris. This self-reference was in line with distinctive aspects of Varda’s films that have long raised questions concerning history, style and genre. While these questions engage issues of theory, Varda has preferred to cast her answers primarily in terms of practice. By her own count, Varda has made nineteen feature-length films (longs métrages) and seventeen short subjects (courts métrages) since 1954. Closer examination discloses this breakdown as less than absolute in light of conventions that classify a film as a short subject if its running time is less than sixty minutes.1 Typically, Varda seems to honour these conventions by transgressing them at will when it suits her creative goals. This is not a matter of caprice (a word used several times in Cléo), but rather one of independence in continuous evolution. Varda’s first film, La Pointe-Courte (1954), had a running time of eighty minutes and – unusual for a debut effort – was shot in 35mm format. Yet its visual style and production quality displayed fewer affinities with mainstream feature films of the mid-1950s

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than with postwar short subjects in 16mm by Alain Resnais and Chris Marker. Along with these two, Varda is often associated with what Richard Roud dubbed the Left Bank Group, at a remove from New Wave film-makers such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.2 Roud’s designation was generational (Marker was born in 1921, Resnais in 1922 and Varda in 1928), loosely geographic (all three were then living on the Left Bank, south of the Seine) and political (all three openly opposed colonialism, racism and imperialism). Ten years later, Claire Clouzot added Alain RobbeGrillet, Marguerite Duras, Jean Cayrol and Henri Colpi to Roud’s core and made a distinction between those who had come to filmmaking from a literary background (Marker, Robbe-Grillet, Duras, Cayrol) and those with technical training (Resnais, Varda, Colpi).3 In 1954, Varda hired Resnais to edit La Pointe-Courte. In the early 1960s, Varda and Marker each made films about Cuba. Soon after, they worked with Joris Ivens, Jean-Luc Godard, William Klein, Claude Lelouch and Resnais on the collective project Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam, 1967). A second received idea – concerning distinctions between fiction and documentary films – further complicates matters. The standard English translation of the French film de fiction as narrative, fiction, or feature film emphasises a storytelling function that may differentiate it from documentaries ostensibly grounded in reality. Documentary films also tell and show stories. But they often do so with different types and degrees of emphasis and often to ends other than those at work in many feature films. The new DVD lists Daguerréotypes as a documentary, even though its running time is seventy-five minutes. L’Opéra Mouffe, whose running time is sixteen minutes, is listed simply as film. In such terms, Varda’s films exploit genre and running time as variable within a practice she continually remodels. The effect promotes what is less a hybrid genre between narrative and documentary than a practice in which expectations prompted by conventions of genre and length are met and/or disappointed from film to film. The result supports Varda’s status as a

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role model for independent film-makers working in and across documentary and fiction formats. A third received idea targets visual style and the status of authorship. For to characterise Varda as an auteur (author) whose films convey an identifiable directorial style – as in blanket references to a Bergman, Fellini, or Godard film – only begins to contend with the distinctive glance (regard) by which her films transform people, places and things into memorable stories told in moving images and sound.4 Prose narratives of the 1920s by Parisian Surrealists André Breton (Nadja) and Louis Aragon (Le Paysan de Paris) were known to have transformed urban landmarks with histories of their own into sites of personal mythologies. The Paris seen throughout Cléo likewise depicts recognisable streets from points of view that promote new perceptions of the city and its topography. This is the force of Varda’s dynamic of showing and seeing conveyed by the epigraph at the start of this introduction, in conjunction with the reconsideration of Cléo that its 2005 release on DVD occasions.

Ulysse (1954 photo)

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I Between photography and film A naked man, a boy and a dead goat on a rock-strewn beach. Agnès Varda’s Ulysse (1982) centred on a photograph she took in 1954 and soon forgot. When a request from friends prompted her to look through old images, she came across a print of the photograph she had mounted on the door of a cupboard in her studio years earlier and wondered what had motivated her to do so: This questioning became the subject of a short film. And the little boy named Ulysse seated at the centre of the image gave the film its title. A mythic name in any case. … Once again, everything took off quickly, starting with the desire to locate the two people in the composition and reconstitute the puzzle of elements that led me to take the photograph that day.5

The photograph was a material trace whose rediscovery prodded Varda to explore its making and aftermath in first-person voiceover. The effect personalised her words – ‘Agnès Varda speaking’ – as those of a self-styled archaeologist out to unearth what the passage of time had covered. To this end, she re-established contact with the two people in the photo who, twenty-eight years earlier, had been, respectively, a friend and the son of a neighbour. The results were mixed. Fouli Elia, the man seen standing on the beach, agreed to be filmed while sitting naked at a desk, but recalled only vague details concerning the 1954 photo. The boy, Ulysse Llorca, had grown to adulthood and showed little enthusiasm for Varda’s questions. His detachment raised doubts that Varda refused to dodge: Do I know what I had on my mind twenty-eight years ago when I set this child in the middle of a beach in the middle of an image that now carries

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his name? … What was real that day while I was on the beach? What was happening that 9 May 1954?6

Only after looking at newsreels and newspapers of the period as though she were digging through sand on the beach in the photo did Varda realise that the day she took the photograph coincided with the fall of Dien Bien Phu, which marked France’s decision to pull its military forces out of Vietnam (referred to at the time as Indo-China). But even this coincidence left Varda wanting, as though the process of disclosure remained incomplete: And there you have it! I located this image in my life and in its age just as we were told to do in school. But the anecdotes, the interpretations, The stories, nothing appears in this image, which I could have made last Sunday or yesterday. I … or someone else … The image, you see in it what you want. An image and that’s all there is.7

As Ulysse retraced the photograph from genesis to aftermath, Varda broadened her enquiry from the material object towards abstractions of creation and history: Ulysse was also the evocation of the link that an image established to the totality of other images of a period – other portraits of the same kind and images of the contemporary present – as well as an attempt to weave the strands of individual creation and the collective imaginary (mythology/myths).8

Varda did not simply elucidate direct links to events as they appeared in textbooks or in newspaper headlines. In Ulysse, as in Cléo de 5 à 7, she meant to account for the interplay between

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personal story and socio-historical context that still and moving images evoked with a force of affect that words alone seldom attained. This interplay of personal story and broader context also holds for Salut les Cubains (Howdy, Cubans, 1963), whose political and didactic nature Varda balanced with an emphasis on popular music. This chapter emulates the logic of Ulysse by working outward from two early films by Varda, La Pointe-Courte and L’Opéra Mouffe, to explore how her foray into film before she makes Cléo in 1961 is inflected by her involvement with the visual cultures of art history and photography. Consensus among critics and historians who considered Varda a precursor of the French New Wave started as early as 1960, when André S. Labarthe listed La Pointe-Courte among films whose artistic and commercial success promoted reform of conventional practices among a generation of young film-makers.9 The inclusion was striking because Varda had made the film without training as a film-maker or significant experience as a filmgoer. The films Varda recalled seeing through her mid-twenties include the Walt Disney Studio’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937), Marcel Carné’s Quai des brumes (Port of Shadows, 1938) and Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise, 1945), Luchino Visconti’s La Terra Trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948) and Alain Resnais’s 1950 short subject, Guernica.10 Unlike the ‘Young Turks’ Truffaut and Godard, who began to make films as critics steeped in film history, Varda’s early exposure to visual culture occurred via the history of art, photography, theatre production and the fashion press.11 This formative experience – Bernard Bastide has aptly described it as an apprenticeship of the gaze – provided Varda with a practical grasp of visual and plastic arts that she refined in her early films, up through Cléo.12 How, then, might La Pointe-Courte be approached on its own terms, rather than in retrospect as a precursor of the New Wave and Cléo? Even more to the point, who is Agnès Varda and how did she come to film? Agnès Varda was born in Ixelles, Belgium, on 30 May 1928. She has written that her parents named her Arlette – it remains her legal

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name – because she was conceived in the city of Arles, in the south of France. Ridding herself of the suffix as a teenager, she took the name Agnès because of its frequency among earlier generations of her father’s family13. In the early 1940s, she moved with her family to Sète, a Mediterranean port south of Montpellier also known as the location of Paul Valéry’s early twentieth-century poem, ‘Le Cimetière marin’ (‘The Graveyard by the Sea’) and birthplace of the popular singercomposer, Georges Brassens (1921–81). Varda went to Paris in 1946 and completed her secondary-level studies at the Lycée Victor Duruy before entering the Sorbonne, where one of her professors was the philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard, whom she remembered as rolling his ‘r’s like a peasant and whose lectures on epistemology she failed to understand14. In 1948, Varda took up the history of art at the École du Louvre and pursued a professional degree in photography at the École de Vaugirard. Commenting in 1962 on her studies for a career as a curator, she confessed: ‘I thought I’d find a contact with matter. I soon realised that I was exceptionally clumsy and so I chose a form of hands-on activity – photography – in which intellectual matters took precedence over manual activities without excluding them.’15 When Varda began to film La Pointe-Courte in August 1954, she had been working for three years as official photographer at the Théâtre National Populaire (henceforth TNP) in Paris, where her responsibilities included publicity, rehearsal, production and archival shots. Varda held the position until 1961 and thus well after she began to make films. At the TNP, she used a twin-lens Rolleiflex to stage posed shots to evoke the play being performed rather than simply record its production: ‘I tried to create images that would remain in the memory of the spectators and these are the images they retained rather than the snapshots that were more faithful to the spectacle’.16 This predilection for the evocative image was evident throughout sections of La Pointe-Courte devoted to a young married couple, played by TNP actors Silvia Monfort and Philippe Noiret.17 The French Ministry of Culture created the TNP in 1951 with a mission to draw new audiences to productions of classical and more

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recent plays. A high-profile venue at the Palais de Chaillot across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower enhanced the theatre’s role as a showcase for the performing arts. The TNP’s first director was Jean Vilar (1912–71), whose dynamism attracted young stars of the theatre, such as Gérard Philipe, Jeanne Moreau and Georges Wilson. Vilar’s efforts to reach new audiences among workers and young adults was in line with postwar government policies to bring high culture to greater Paris and the provinces. They also meshed with efforts by leftwing Catholic groups such as Travail et Culture (Work and Culture, henceforth TEC), which organised film screenings and theatre workshops. The history of TEC is inseparable from those of the activist groups that emerged following World War II on the Catholic left around the monthly, Esprit. A key figure here was the film critic André Bazin (1918–58), whose essays made him a prime mentor of the Cahiers du cinéma and the French New Wave. It was in Bazin’s TEC office at 5 rue des Beaux-Arts that Resnais first met Marker, for whom Esprit became a frequent venue. Early TNP productions included Pierre Corneille’s tragedy, Le Cid, T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral and Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage. Vilar’s unconventional repertory often spawned controversy, as when the TNP’s 1953 production of Georg Büchner’s Dantons Tod. Ein Drama (Danton’s Death: A Drama, 1835) drew protests from the French Communist Party and others, who charged that Vilar had sided with Danton against Robespierre and thus with a figure of treachery opposed to the Revolution. Vilar was a native of Sète and a family friend. In 1948, he recruited Varda to work with him at Avignon, where his populist vision transformed a summer workshop into an annual festival of theatre, art and dance. The energy he fostered there and at the TNP enhanced Varda’s apprenticeship by providing a creative environment that tempered the literary culture of the theatre with the physical activities of staging and production. Varda brought a taste for Surrealism – she repeatedly cites Luis Buñuel’s L’Âge d’or (1930) as a favourite film – and for the prose of Franz Kafka, William Faulkner

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and Nathalie Sarraute to her activities at the TNP and as a freelance photojournalist for Prestige-France, Marie-Claire and Réalités. Influenced by what she considered Vilar’s signature quality as a theatrical director, Varda explored ways of achieving equivalent theatrical effects in still photography. In order to evoke the exalted, lyrical aspect of a 1951 production of Wilhelm von Kleist’s The Prince of Hamburg, she had Gérard Philipe pose surrounded by dense foliage so that its quivering would convey the tone and romantic colour of the spectacle.18 Photography has remained integral to Varda’s work in film more than a half-century after her stint at the TNP. It is at the core of Salut les Cubains and Ulysse, both of which she re-released in 2005 along with a newer film, Ydessa, the Bears, and etc, under the collective title, Cinévardaphoto. (As I complete revisions of this essay in August 2007, Ciné-Tamaris has announced the release of a two-disc DVD set containing all of Varda’s short subjects.) This persistence of still photography in Varda’s films counters the view that she has progressed from photography to film. Varda has never abandoned photography for film. When still and moving images coexist in her films, photography is less a formal exercise privileging light, colour and texture than a conjunction of elements and relationships whose interplay she continually explores as a means of storytelling.19 The production stills Varda created for TNP productions were part of a broader practice that included fashion photography as well as portraits of children, neighbours and others encountered by circumstance. As in Ulysse, this practice has remained integral to Varda’s film-making. A second perspective on the role of photography derived from the concept of cinécriture (cine-writing) Varda formulated to clarify what a film-maker did when she separated the work of the screenwriter from that of the director, even when the same person filled both roles. In 1994, she wrote: I am so tired of hearing people say: it is a well-written film, knowing that the compliment is meant for the screenplay and for the dialogues. A well-written

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film is also well filmed, the cast is well chosen and the same for the locations. The continuity, the movements, the points of view, the rhythm of the filming and of the editing have been sensed and thought out much like the choices a writer makes: dense or light sentences, vocabulary, frequency of adverbs, indentations, parentheses, chapters continuing the direction of the narrative or working against it, etc. In writing, it is style; in film, it is cinécriture.20

The passage is a minor profession of faith in which Varda asserts the primacy of hands-on activity against specific duties that commercial film production usually divides among specialists and technicians. One should not, however, equate this active presence of the filmmaker in all aspects of production with the defence of directorial style that Cahiers du cinéma critics conceptualised in the mid-1950s as an auteur theory (politique des auteurs) related to distinctive style among directors such as Jean Renoir, Alfred Hitchcock, Roberto Rossellini and Orson Welles. What Varda means by cinécriture refers less to distinctive film style than to film-making as an integrated creative process. Varda’s cinécriture also posited an analogy between the filmmaker and the literary writer, as if the film-maker constructed a film much as a writer composed a poem, a novel or a play; as if the filmmaker wrote dialogues and monologues the same way the film-maker constructed an image.21 The analogy is limited because language is only one element of what film-makers use to construct sequences of moving images in colour or black and white (sometimes both), with non-diegetic and ambient sound. Somewhat closer to Varda’s use of the term was the concept of movie-camera pen (caméra-stylo) that Alexandre Astruc set forth in a 1948 article on a new cinematic avant-garde, grounded in a notion of the director as an author (auteur) who exploited visual and sound elements to express ideas through a style as distinctive as those of Faulkner, Malraux, Sartre and Camus.22 Astruc wanted film to convey ideas on a par with literature rather than merely explore film as a distinct medium of expression. By contrast, Varda has consistently asserted the stylistic

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importance of film stock, lens openings and lighting. No cinécriture, then, without its corresponding cinétechnique. When, for example, Varda wanted the lawns of the Parc Montsouris in Cléo to appear creamy thick (‘as though they were covered with snow’), she had her cameraman shoot with green filters early on a June morning when the solar spectrum was highly charged with infrareds.23 Varda’s remarks on cinécriture confirmed the multiple functions she ascribed to photography as a means of visual storytelling in La Pointe-Courte, where the framing of individual shots often assumed a distinct narrative force. The priority Varda granted to visual effects related to painting and to photography set the figurative sense of cinécriture within a practical understanding of materials and techniques. In La Pointe-Courte, one such effect involved contrast: At high noon, the shadows are as black as the tar of the fishing nets and the sheets drying in the sun are dazzling white. The violence of the light beats down on a couple in disarray, barely connected with reality. Their lucidity in the full sun is like a dull pain, while the sun, Mediterranean this time, animates and prettifies the life of the fishermen.24

A neophyte who claimed to have seen fewer than twenty-five films before undertaking La Pointe-Courte, Varda used her knowledge of photography, art history and theatre production to counter what she ostensibly lacked in film culture. Absolute beginner? In a 1956 review of La Pointe-Courte, André Bazin wrote that Varda’s independence had empowered her to make a woman’s film (film de femme) he considered unique, free and pure.25 Around the same time, François Truffaut described Varda’s film as ‘an essay to be read’, combining documentary scenes of daily life in the fishing village and a narrative about a married couple on the verge of separating who come to the village (where the husband grew up) to discuss their future. Much like Bazin, Truffaut recognised the film’s

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visual freshness and intelligence, admiring in particular the slowness with which it told its story ‘to the inflexible rhythm of passing time … in the lucid light of a uniformly sunny weather’.26 Bazin also noted La Pointe-Courte’s break with the economic conventions of commercial film production and the specific set of problems Varda faced as an independent film-maker who was also a woman. Varda initially tried to finance La Pointe-Courte with a family inheritance and through loans. Her production budget – first calculated at the equivalent of $24,000 but later reduced by $10,000 – was about 10 per cent of the average for feature-length films at the time. After Ciné-Tamaris raised only a quarter of the funds needed to make the film, Varda proposed that actors and technicians form a cooperative that would own 35 per cent of the film, which meant that no one was paid a salary during the shoot. In the end, it took thirteen years to reimburse everyone for the loan of work-capital. By comparison, La Pointe-Courte’s production budget of 12 million anciens francs amounted to about a third of Truffaut’s budget for Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959) and less than a quarter of what Godard needed for À Bout de souffle (Breathless, 1959).27 Freedom from the constraints of studio production led to additional difficulties. Uncertified and without formal training as a film-maker, Varda needed to apply for a government agency waiver before each of her six first films could be authorised for commercial distribution. When the same agency granted professional certification to her a decade later, she was proud to be among the first women film-makers to receive this status, but wondered if the pioneer film-maker Germaine Dulac (1882–1942) ever needed a card of her own.28 Varda initially undertook La Pointe-Courte as a project matching words to images, following what she believed at the time was the proper formula for making a film: ‘Photography struck me as altogether too silent. It was kind of: “Look pretty and keep your mouth shut. Pretty photos, pretty frames, it already reeked”’.29 The project was also intended as a distraction to occupy a friend whose serious illness prompted Varda to invite him and his wife to help her make a

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film in the fishing village she had come to know a decade earlier. Inexperience motivated Varda to write out story boards and initiate the practices she later conceptualised as cinécriture. Sympathy for the village of La Pointe-Courte and its inhabitants stemmed from what Varda has called the theatre of everyday life (théâtre du quotidien). What she meant by ‘everyday life’ should not be equated with the attention to heightened forms of alienation that Henri Lefebvre and the Situationist group under Guy Debord analysed around the same time in conjunction with the demographic changes affecting postwar France.30 To the contrary, La Pointe-Courte seemed often to dwell on details of day-to-day life in settings that varied from bed sheets and underwear flapping in a stiff wind to seasonal festivals that marked local tradition. Where the attention Varda paid to facial expression, voice and gestures among the local villagers drew on documentary practices and filmed ethnography in films such as Georges Rouquier’s Farrebique (1946), the sections of the film centred on the young married couple derived from conventions of theatre. This crossover will extend to Cléo, which can be understood as a fictional portrait of a woman set within a documentary about Paris. Varda structured La Pointe-Courte to convey parallel difference in the form of eight ten- to twelve-minute sequences, devoted alternately to the village and to the Parisian couple, for which she has cited William Faulkner’s 1939 novel The Wild Palms as a model. Her invocation of this novel echoed Claude-Edmonde Magny’s remarks on the Mississippi River whose role in Faulkner’s novel Varda might have emulated in her depiction of the fishing village.31 Godard included two references to the novel in À Bout de souffle. The first occurs when Patricia quotes the line, ‘Between grief and nothing I will take grief.’ The second occurs when Patricia’s journalist friend tells her that he is reading a book about a woman who dies following an abortion, adding that that he hopes such a thing does not happen to her.32 The effects of this alternating structure in La Pointe-Courte were especially evident in conjunction with language and physical

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movement. The fishermen and their families spoke in clipped sentences and with a regional twang, recalling Marcel Pagnol’s interwar films shot in Marseille and rural Provence. By contrast, the Parisians played by Monfort and Noiret often spoke as though reciting a script on stage. Only during the film’s final sequence did these two narratives cross visually as the couple made its way through a procession during a local festival. But even here, meaningful interaction failed to occur, as the couple and the locals seemed only to share the same space. Varda stated in 1962 that, in line with what Alain Resnais had done in Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), she structured the film’s chapters with the express intention of keeping the themes of marital discord and daily life in the fishing village apart. As with Faulkner’s Wild Palms and Resnais’s collaboration with Alain Robbe-Grillet, L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961), this structure forced the reader/spectator to make sense by reorganising individual sensations, chapters and stories into a meaningful whole.33 Material interaction (le rapport plastique) between the two stories was thus a primary organising principle on which Varda grounded thematic and visual aspects of her first film.34 Evolved expressions of this interaction will persist in her later films, up through Cléo. Varda may have asserted that she failed to understand Gaston Bachelard’s Sorbonne lectures on epistemology, but the first ten minutes of La Pointe-Courte displayed a refined imagination of natural elements – especially concerning water and air – throughout her depiction of the fishing village and its inhabitants. A sensitivity to material detail enhanced the opening credits, seen over a background of heavily grained wood whose function as a sign of rusticity Varda reinforced by setting the film’s title in the stencilled lettering often seen on packing crates against a soundtrack of folk melodies on reeds and drums.35 Only after the credits concluded did the camera pan to the left to reveal the image to be that of an oar, presumably one belonging to a local fisherman. This opening shot enhanced the symbolic value of

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material objects by linking Monfort’s character to trains made of steel and metal and Noiret’s character to wood.36 Similar details strengthen the force of the film’s first three minutes. An establishing shot lasting forty-five seconds tracks forward along a deserted backstreet under a midday sun, filmed in stark blackand-white contrast. After about ten seconds, the folk melody heard over the credits drops out, leaving only the ambient sounds of sea birds, laundry flapping in the wind and voices of children in the distance. Image and sound combine to convey provincial domesticity. A quick cut shows a man wearing a sports coat standing under a fig tree outside a house. The camera pans ninety degrees to the right as a second man, whose casual dress suggests that he is a local, walks towards the camera along one side of the house and greets the first man curtly before entering a side door. As the camera tracks to the right with a slight pan along the front of the house, the second man tells a woman – presumably his wife – that there is someone outside. She asks him who it is and he answers that he doesn’t know. The camera tracks to the right along the house front for another ten seconds before entering an open front door outside of which more laundry hangs. It moves forward through the door to show a woman serving food to children seated around a table and next into a rear room where a boy of three or four lies in a wooden bed that resembles an open casket. (The boy is sick and dies later in the film.) The extended shot moves through the rear of the house to a junkfilled backyard, where the local man is seen climbing to grab another look at the interloper, whom the family has identified as a health official sent to the village to halt fishing after water quality in the area was deemed unsafe. This initial resistance to authority is matched by a suspicion of outsiders that some inhabitants of the village will direct to the two Parisians. The initial travelling shot along the backstreet fails to specify its point of view as anonymous or personalised. Does it belong to an identifiable character in the film or is it instead a means by which Varda conveys geographic setting and visual ambience? The second travelling shot along the front and

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through the house prolongs this irresolution. The hanging laundry marks the milieu as working class. The faces of the children – especially that of the sick boy in the back room – recall those seen in Buñuel’s Las Hurdes (Land without Bread, 1934). Only some ten minutes later does Varda clarify the narrative function of this initial perspective in contrast to her visual presentation of the young couple. The visual perspective of this opening depiction of the fishing village is decidedly subjective. This is the case even if the subject in question is less that of an identifiable character in the film than that of a visual style imposed by the director. Varda has characterised her early films, including La Pointe-Courte, as deforming the world by showing it from a situated glance.37 In this, she echoed Jean Vigo’s reference some twenty years earlier to a documented point of view (point de vue documenté), even though Varda filtered Vigo’s emphasis on social cinema through a more subjective engagement with life in the fishing village.38 Dramatic staging (La Pointe-Courte)

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A subjective point of view is most evident in the sequences of La Pointe-Courte devoted to the married couple, some of which resemble Varda’s TNP work by posing Monfort and Noiret dramatically, as though in a photograph or a painting. Varda was taken by Montfort’s natural grace and by her resemblance to women in fifteenth-century paintings by Piero della Francesca, ‘with their absent gaze in round and calm faces lengthened by graceful necks’.39 A second visual precedent is that of the tableau vivant, a nineteenth-century form in which groups of individuals pose as though in a painting. Numerous sequences of the film show Monfort and Noiret posed dramatically, as though they were living statues reciting their lines on stage. Shots in the film are often framed geometrically, with lines formed by objects such as a post or tree defining a spatial perspective and concomitant horizon point that recalls Italian Renaissance paintings in which represented space was understood as both real and symbolic. Varda also used a variation of the tableau vivant featuring a split or dual field of depth, with the couple up front and scenes of daily life in the fishing village visible in the background. Individual shots in the film conveyed an affective force that was irreducibly photographic, as in one of two women in frozen agony after a child (son and grandson?) has died. Perhaps this shot was among those that some critics found too photographic – that is, too static and composed – and thus inadequately cinematographic. On the other hand, this was the very kind of image that Varda could have made with still camera in hand while shooting the film, much as some painters create new pictural elements while holding the brush or writers add an insight or flourish as they write with pen in hand.40 La Pointe-Courte explored forms of visual expression specific to film, as they affected the fashioning of cinematic narrative. This co-presence of technical and narrative concerns was what Bazin and Truffaut immediately recognised as distinctive about the film. La Pointe-Courte’s narrative alternated between two sets of actions linked in the main by the place-name invoked in the title. For the

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Grief (La PointeCourte)

couple, the fishing village served as a dramatic setting; for the fishermen and their families, it was where their lives were a daily struggle. Varda exploited her knowledge of art history and photography to fashion a film narrative in which the social and the private juxtaposed rather than mixed.41 This juxtaposition supplemented her efforts to explore visual practices beyond conventions of the cinéma de qualité often grounded in adaptations of novels or plays. Only in retrospect, then, can Varda’s conception and making of the film be seen in conjunction with New Wave practices that, according to Michel Marie, included a scenario written by the auteurdirector, shooting in natural locations rather than studio sets, and improvisation on the part of actors, many of whom were nonprofessionals.42 Going once again against convention, Varda made her first film in feature-length and 35mm format. Only in postproduction did she concede the limits of her expertise by hiring Alain

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Resnais to edit the ten hours of silent footage. (Resnais worked on the editing for months without transforming or adapting what he saw as the structure and rhythm that Varda had given to her film).43 A related critical measure of La Pointe-Courte involved precluding spectator identification with characters as a distancing effect Varda sought to sustain: The film was structured in ten-minute sequences so that as soon as one identified with a character, she or he drops out: it is a withdrawal principle. I wanted to make a film in which one neither identifies nor judges, a cold film. This impression is conveyed by the fact that the couple and the village are linked in a very disconcerting manner.44

A related feature of La Pointe-Courte, to which Varda would return in Cléo, involved a temporality composed of moments of slow or dead time during which little seemingly happened. At the film’s end, life in the fishing village returns to its daily pace following the water joust festival. If the two spouses seem closer to mutual understanding, nothing – as the character played by Monfort states in the final speech of the film – is decided. The pregnant gaze When Varda wrote that La Pointe-Courte was best approached as ‘a film to be read’ (un film à lire),45 the exploration of narrative form and technique that this approach promoted summoned up Astruc’s 1948 call for avant-garde practices in which film rivalled literature as a means of expression and authorship. (It is unclear whether Varda knew the Astruc article; she mentions it nowhere in Varda par Agnès nor in interviews I have consulted.) Four years later, she committed to a more jarring visual style in L’Opéra Mouffe, in which short narrative sequences alternated with documentary images of the rue Mouffetard area in Paris. The visual effect was experimental, in the form of images shot (and seen) in the main for their own sake. L’Opéra Mouffe also extended Varda’s exploration of the sense of

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place, even as it moved from the Mediterranean fishing village seen in La Pointe-Courte to the Left Bank of Paris she featured again in Cléo de 5 à 7. Varda undertook L’Opéra Mouffe as a filmed notebook of impressions by a pregnant woman making a documentary about the rue Mouffetard. Some of the photos Varda used came from stills she had taken to illustrate poems and texts by two singer-poets from Sète, Jean-Pierre Suc and Henri Serre. (Serre would later play the role of Jim opposite Oskar Werner and Jeanne Moreau in Truffaut’s Jules et Jim [Jules and Jim, 1962].) When a friend, Jacques Ledoux, offered Varda a slot in a programme of experimental films to be shown at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, she jumped at the opportunity to undertake a more personal project as a break from commissioned work.46 Varda was pregnant when she shot the film, but she has often stated that L’Opéra-Mouffe was neither an account of her pregnancy nor a film about pregnancy. Instead, pregnancy was a precondition on the basis of which she filmed what she considered a pregnant woman might see, hear and imagine: Pregnancy is something that can alter one’s imagination to the point of neurosis. It is life stripped raw. The film continually retains the tone of a flayed work. I had a very happy pregnancy. I translated what a pregnancy of a woman from the Mouffe district might be like. The sensitivity is not what one must feel, but rather what can be felt.47

The visual style of the film evolved from the dramatic framing and sustained tracking shots in La Pointe-Courte towards faster editing rhythms with a focus on faces and bodies. Tracking shots in L’Opéra-Mouffe alternated with static shots of objects and individuals in the street. Narrative and fantasy sequences evoked the interwar work of photographers Brassaï, André Kertész and Jacques-André Boiffard. Where Varda had generated La PointeCourte through parallel narratives grounded in documentary and drama, L’Opéra Mouffe interspersed elements of documentary with

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A face in the crowd (L’Opéra Mouffe)

A modernist experiment

avant-garde experimentation in photography and film linked to Parisian Surrealism and its interwar offshoots. Sequences in slow motion enhanced formal concerns with objects and bodies in photos by Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and Man Ray. Individual images evoked scenes of daily life taken early in the century by Eugène Atget and later by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Efforts by Atget (1857–1927) to capture images of what he termed ‘Paris pittoresque’ (picturesque

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Paris) yielded thousands of photos he sold to national and municipal libraries under the guise of ‘documents’. His inventory of urban life elicited interest from Surrealists, who used one of his images on the cover of the June 1926 issue of La Révolution surréaliste, and from Walter Benjamin, who wrote that Atget’s pictures evoked those taken at the scene of a crime. Atget’s 1925 photo of a produce stand on the rue Mouffetard was notable for a plasticity feel that bordered on the three-dimensional. The marked absence of people added an element of enigma at odds with Varda’s densely populated images of the same area. Varda shot the seventeen-minute short in black and white during the winter of 1957–8 by standing on a folding chair to film passers-by from above as they walked up and down an open-air market street that runs for a kilometre or so between the Place de la Contrescarpe, east of the Place du Panthéon, and the St Médard Church. The geographic setting dated back to the Roman period, with narrow streets and an architectural style that recalled a medieval market, where street performers mingled with hawkers and walkers in an animated public space. L’Opéra Mouffe heightened the attentiveness to sensory detail evident in La Pointe-Courte in images Rue Mouffetard (Eugène Atget, 1925)

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and associations that may accompany pregnancy. Its visual perspective thus internalised through point of view what La PointeCourte had conveyed from the outside in conjunction with documentary practices devoted to street-life in a specific locale. Under the aegis of subjective documentary, individual images and sequences derived less from the dreams and unconscious favoured by the Surrealists’ loose reading of Freud than from the physiological condition of pregnancy, which prompted a base materialism linked to human and animal bodies. Varda engaged this base materialism in images tracing the passage from life to death in the faces of the elderly, alcoholic and homeless, some of whom died during the severe winter of 1957–8. The same passage towards death in images of animal body parts recalled Georges Franju’s 1949 documentary on Parisian slaughterhouses, Le Sang des bêtes (The Blood of the Beasts): ‘The food on display – including calf heads, innards, rabbits and kidneys – linked wordplay to the sensations imposed by the décor: namely, the intermingling of the large belly of food and the large belly of the pregnant woman’.48 L’Opéra Mouffe was a collage of these two motifs. Nowhere was this base materialism more evident than in an opening sequence in which shots of a pregnant woman’s protruding stomach seen from the side cut to a shot of a large pumpkin being sliced open and its seeds pulled out by hand. The sequence tapped

Images of ripeness and violence

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into an affective dimension of pregnancy with which, Varda has written, many women identified in a positive way because they saw the image as a figurative liberation from sensations and thoughts they had otherwise repressed: ‘Filming something more personal came to me at the moment I observed in myself a possible change of gaze or of sensitivity’.49 The sense of subjective documentary also built on a lexical playfulness conveyed by the film’s title, whose reference to music Varda developed in structure and motif by combining the familiar place name attributed to the rue Mouffetard – la Mouffe – with a reference to a form of comic opera or musical comedy (opera buffa) that originated in eighteenth-century Naples in the interludes (intermezzi) performed between acts of the opera seria. The opera buffa typically staged dialogues as songs and included at least one pair of lovers. The Italian word buffo is also a near homonym of the French noun (la bouffe), which translates into English as ‘grub’. (The infinitive, bouffer, is likewise a familiar alternative to the verb manger, ‘to eat’). The adjectival and nominal forms of the French bouffon translate into English as ‘farcical’ and/or ‘clown’, whose visual expression through masks and costumes was enacted by two children frolicking during the film’s ‘happy holidays’ (joyeuses fêtes) sequence. Finally, the term bouffes – as in the Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiens – refers to a form of musical comedy adapted to French boulevard theatre in the mid-nineteenth century from Italian comic opera. Varda divided L’Opéra Mouffe into nine sections, each of which was introduced by a song of between two and six lines. As in the traditional opera buffa, all words in the film were sung rather than spoken. Additional theatrical touches included a stage curtain rising and falling to frame the film, over a boisterous soundtrack of reeds and horns, and the use of song titles as inter-titles at the start of each section. Georges Delerue’s orchestration varied from slow laments to dissonant bursts. Music during individual sequences included recurrent motifs – such as the slow waltz for the lovers – and

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mordant sequences such as an orchestration of reeds and horns, which transformed images of two women in conversation into barnyard sounds of squawking fowl. L’Opéra Mouffe overlaid a sentiment of expectation associated with pregnancy and what Sandy Flitterman-Lewis has called the nonnarrative articulation of shots whose coherence depends on the organising principle of a central point of view.50 Flitterman-Lewis argues that L’Opéra Mouffe replaced conventional narrative action with sequences of images whose coherence devolves from a physiological condition. Yet it is also important to see this emphasis on a biological and essentialist definition of woman in conjunction with what Varda has described as a struggle, starting with La PointeCourte, for something that comes ‘from emotion, from visual emotion, sound emotion, feeling, and finding a shape for that, and a shape which has to do with cinema and nothing else’.51 L’Opéra Mouffe also developed on the basis of a sense of place that enhanced changes in perception related to a Parisian neighbourhood presumably familiar to at least some spectators. Three years later, in Cléo, Varda exploited the same combination of emotion and sense of place when she portrayed ninety minutes in the life of a young Parisian woman.

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II A film about time and space If, at a certain level of abstraction, all films are about time and space, some are more so than others. Cléo de 5 à 7 is an account of ninety minutes – from 5pm to 6.30pm on 21 June 1961 – in the life of an aspiring pop singer, Cléo Victoire (Corinne Marchand), who awaits the results of medical tests she fears will confirm stomach cancer. With measurable time a major formal constraint around which the film is structured, the presumed equivalence of running or screen time and narrative duration suggests an immediacy of actions in the present, ‘of recording life as it is lived’.52 It is, however, important to note that ellipses, tropes, extensions and compressions throughout the film disclose this immediacy as represented rather than recorded. Breaks in shot continuity and in linear chronology also support the equivalence of screen time and narrative duration as approximate rather than strict. Varda first heightened attention to measured duration (chronometry) by dividing Cléo into a narrative comprised of a prologue and thirteen chapters, with each of the latter marked by starting and ending times and by a title bearing the name of one or more characters. The prologue’s duration is unmarked, but the first chapter’s listed starting time at 17h05 (5.05pm) confirms that the prologue is fully integrated into the chronological (‘real-time’) format. On occasion, individual settings and sequences extend over two chapters to reflect different perspectives on a single set of actions. Varda repeatedly overlaid objects associated with measured duration such as clocks, metronomes and taxi meters with a subjective temporality of anxious expectation. The sound of a clock ticking on a mantel accompanies the opening dialogue between the fortune teller and Cléo in the prologue. Even when they are in the background or appear only fleetingly, clocks visible in the fortune teller’s salon, in

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Cléo’s apartment and outside on the city streets draw the spectator’s gaze as though in emphatic identification with Cléo. These clocks also serve as visual checks to confirm that the film is playing by the rules it establishes. Departing from measurable duration, Cléo’s anxiety concerning the outcome of her medical tests accumulates across individual chapters of seemingly little consequence towards its presumed resolution marked in advance at 18h30 (6.30pm). A suitable idiom for the temporal expression of this anxiety is that of dead time, understood as an interval not immediately related to the resolution of a central story. A related idiom – ‘killing time’ – likewise heightens the dramatic force of Cléo’s desire to fill the ninety minutes that separate her from a prognosis concerning her medical health, about which she is understandably ambivalent. This ambivalence is a product of the dramatic tension between Cléo’s anxiety concerning the prospect of imminent death and her desire to learn the truth. It motivates her to turn her primary focus of attention away from this resolution that she wants simultaneously to hasten and to defer. Varda has characterised the interaction among these two durations in musical terms, as variations on a metronome and violin.53 It is also possible to understand Cléo’s ambivalence – her desire both to avoid and to confront a painful truth – as an offshoot of what Freud referred to in Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920) and elsewhere as a death drive (Todestriebe) staged throughout the film by omens of death only some of which Cléo sees.54 Varda anchored this mix of measured and subjective time in the geography of Paris with an attention to spatial detail that was close to topographic. Sequences of Cléo and her secretary-confidante, Angèle (Dominique Davray), riding in a taxi, of Cléo walking in Montparnasse and of Cléo and Antoine (Antoine Bourseiller) in an open-platform bus disclosed details of urban architecture, clothing and cultural activities – from pop music to art exhibits, theatre productions and avant-garde films – that marked the moment and the

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period. Some details took on added meaning in light of Cléo’s personal concerns. Others varied in register and resonance from wordplay and period authenticity to national politics. Cléo’s anxiety sharpens her attentiveness to objects and messages she links to illness and death. And this occasionally to the point of a paranoia that sets her at odds with a human and spatial environment she takes to be threatening. As Cléo and Angèle return by taxi to her apartment in Montparnasse, they pass a Left Bank art gallery on the rue Guénégaud whose displays of African masks frighten Cléo because she sees them as omens of supra-human powers. Her fear heightens when a black student among art students parading in costume draws near the taxi and plays at scaring her. It is as though one of the masks she had just seen suddenly came to life. The relative absence of people of colour in the film – two appear briefly as Cléo walks through the Dôme in chapter VIII and two more are seen outside the Montparnasse train station in chapter XI (see top image on p. 72) – makes this encounter all the more jarring. If the Paris through which Cléo moves is largely white and middle class, Varda seems at times to dwell on non-whites, whose presence evokes migration from territories in North and subSaharan Africa that had recently attained independence from French colonial rule. The major exception among these territories in June 1961 remained that of an Algeria many French on both sides of the Mediterranean were unwilling to give up. Varda continually set the subjective perception associated with Cléo’s anxiety against a depiction of urban Paris that drew on documentary concerns already evident in La Pointe-Courte and L’Opéra Mouffe. The effect was archival and close to ethnographic, especially as details of the period in question have receded into a past that fewer and fewer of the film’s spectators have witnessed first hand. The taxi sequence (chapters III and IV) includes a radio broadcast of news items ranging from demonstrations in Algeria and among farmers in the French provinces to the upcoming Tour de France bicycle race and the state of Edith Piaf’s health following a life-threatening

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condition. These news items document daily life and the historical moment to which Cléo’s preoccupations make her alternately hypersensitive and aloof. The mention of Edith Piaf is doubly charged with meaning in light of Cléo’s professional ambitions and the unstable status of Piaf’s health, with which Cléo empathises. In line with such documentary and archival concerns, Varda used a recording of the actual radio broadcast on Europe no. 1.55 A third evocation of time in the film involves an appeal to occult practices as a form of what Judith Mayne has aptly called ‘primitive narration’.56 Since the film begins with Cléo consulting a fortune teller, it is probably no coincidence that the film occurs on 21 June the day the astrological calendar moves from the sign of Gemini to that of Cancer. (Incomplete financing had forced a three-month postponement from the 21 March starting date Varda had originally chosen.) Where the card reader predicts that Cléo will undergo a deep transformation of her entire being, the doctor in the final sequence suggests only that her condition – to which he never refers explicitly as cancer – is treatable. Opposing perspectives – the first occult and the second clinical – thus frame Varda’s account of Cléo’s concerns with the impact of a potentially fatal condition. Yet these frames fail to match, with the authority of the ‘scientific’ male doctor trumping that of the presumably more primitive female fortune teller. Varda paired these three models of time – chronological, subjective and astrological – with a spatial logic that traced Cléo’s itinerary through Paris as a near-loop. The film starts in a commercial district on the Right Bank before moving south across the Seine to the Left Bank neighbourhoods of St-Germain des Prés, Montparnasse, the Parc Montsouris and ending at the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière near the Jardin des Plantes, the Gare d’Austerlitz and the Seine. This trajectory included no fewer than forty-eight locations. Varda the cartographer has created two maps of Cléo’s itinerary. The first appeared in the screenplay of the film, published in 1962. The second, in Varda par Agnès, included film stills colour-coded to

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mark their placement in the order of the film’s sequences. These maps plotted the film in two ways; first, by disclosing its structure in the mode of a static image; and, second, by marking the spatial direction of the narrative within the city of Paris. When the prologue sequence is added to the thirteen chapters that follow it, the sum of fourteen temporal units matches the numerical limits of the urban districts (arrondissements one through fourteen) in which the film takes place. Varda’s complex structuring of space and time is crucial to the way Cléo tells and shows a story that many critics consider a figurative equation of woman and city. Varda first posits this equation visually, with Cléo in the frame or as the origin of point-ofview shots for nearly the entire ninety minutes of the film. One brief exception occurs in the prologue, when the fortune teller states to a man – her husband? – sitting in a small room or closet that she saw cancer in Cléo’s future. A second occurs in chapter VI when the musicians Bob and Plumitif disguise themselves as male nurses. A third is the short film-within-a film in chapter X that Cléo watches from a projection booth with two friends. These exceptions break the continuity of perspective originating from or around Cléo. They underscore the extent to which her narcissism isolates her from others as well as from social and historical concerns of the moment first invoked by the radio news broadcast heard during the taxi ride across Paris. The figurative equation of woman and city evolves minute by minute as Cléo approaches her final destination, the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière.57 Varda’s sustained attention to time and space within an urban setting recalls modernist films of the 1920s and, in particular, city symphonies such as Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (Book of Hours, 1926) and Dziga Vertov’s Cheloveks kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929). A worthy literary antecedent is Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel which likewise traces a day in the life of her female protagonist. Much like Cléo, Woolf’s novel, an early draft of which she entitled ‘The Hours’,

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included a detailed urban topography as Clarissa Dalloway walks through London on errands to prepare for a dinner party to be held at her home later the same day. As in Cléo, Dalloway’s walk leads to an encounter with death as her itinerary crosses that of a shellshocked World War I veteran, Septimus Smith. A second literary echo evokes Rainer Maria Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), in which a young Dane is shocked by the impersonal death he sees on the faces of passers-by he encounters in the streets while visiting Paris. By the clock and on the map One measure of a significant novel, play, poem or film is its ability to engage successive generations of first-time readers or spectators, as well as those who return to it anew. The enduring appeal of Cléo de 5 à 7 since its 1962 release derives initially from Varda’s mastery of cinematographic staging (mise en scène) as a synthesis of visual and sound elements. The immediate sensations of this staging are often so pleasurable in their own right that the complexity of the film’s narrative structure may emerge only after repeated viewings. This chapter simulates a viewing of Cléo by describing essential features of this experience with reference to the exercise of ekphrasis understood as a verbal account of visual representation.58 This description, in turn, is tempered by contextual analysis following the logic of what the late anthropologist Clifford Geertz has termed thick description.59 The historian of art Michael Baxandall addressed much of what I see at stake in this process when he wrote that claims to explain pictures were first of all claims to explain thoughts about the picture and only secondarily the picture itself.60 Description is thus less a representation of the picture or of seeing the picture than an account of thinking about having seen the picture (my emphasis). The temporal gap and retrospection at work in Baxandall’s understanding of this process of description are crucial to Varda’s film-making in Cléo and to critical thinking in general.

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Distinctions between painted picture and moving image (which do not pertain directly to Baxandall’s concerns) also warrant attention in light of Varda’s debts as a film-maker to the histories of painting and still photography. The pages that follow describe the immediate sensations of spectatorship that my efforts to describe and analyse Cléo formulate – following Baxandall – as an account of thoughts about having seen and heard the film. I also take a cue from Ulysse, in which Varda practises a thick reading of sorts, in order to: (1) identify how temporal and spatial constraints structure Varda’s account of ninety minutes in the life of a young female pop singer; (2) explore how Cléo discloses Varda’s ongoing engagements with painting and photography; (3) address elements of soundtrack, music, voice and song that add to critiques of visual models presenting woman as the object of (mainly male) gaze; and (4) consider how Varda uses point of view in Cléo as a commentary on France during the Algerian war to which the character of Cléo is more or less oblivious. The fourteen subheadings listed below are the chapter titles Varda uses to structure Cléo within the formal constraints of point of view and near real-time. Prologue (untitled and without marked duration) The establishing shot is a direct overhead (plongée) image of hands shuffling cards on a surface with an ornate carpet-like covering. The sequence is in colour and the only sound is of the cards being shuffled. After about six seconds, a female voice off screen asks another woman, addressed as ‘Mademoiselle’, to cut the cards. The second woman does this with her left hand visible from the top of the screen while film credits appear intermittently over the next two minutes. The dramatic setting is a tarot card reading, with the female client, unseen for the moment, drawing nine cards: three each for the past, present and future. As the fortune teller turns the cards over, she comments and asks questions. Her words and the responses of the second woman are heard over the ticking of a clock. The exchange provides an initial back story to explain why Cléo is in the room. The effect follows classical models

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of narrative in which disclosure and unresolved questions motivate readers/spectators to keep reading/watching. At this point, the significance of the card reading is only tentative because the spectator does not yet know the fuller context that the eighty-five remaining minutes of the film will provide. Among the first cards drawn is the Dame de Pique (Queen of Spades), whose significance as part of the Madame Lenormand tarot deck portrays a potentially sinister side to the character of Cléo’s confidante, Angèle, whom Cléo goes off to meet at a nearby café following the session with Irma (Loye Payen).61

Fateful faces

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The fortune teller turns up a card of the three Fates and another of a woman, but describes the interpretation as difficult and unclear. She asks the second woman to choose four more cards, this time from another deck. The card of the hanged man appears and is read to represent change and suffering. When the fortune teller asks whether her client is sick, the faces of the two women are seen for the first time. They appear in black and white. The contrast is coded as a mark of difference between the symbolic order of the tarot and the physical world of daily life in which Cléo has come to consult the fortune teller, Irma. From this point and through the remainder of the film, all sequences will appear in black and white.62 Cléo draws a final card – the skeleton – and recoils in fright. Irma tries to reassure her that the skeleton does not necessarily represent death, only a deep transformation of her entire being. Cléo tells Irma to say no more because she already knows the results of the test sample her doctor is expected to report to her at 6.30pm. Inconsolable, Cléo asks Irma to read her palm. A tight close-up shows Irma looking down to Cléo’s hands, up directly into the camera, and back down, before stating quickly that she does not really understand much about hands. The rapidity of Irma’s glance and her desire to avoid Cléo’s gaze imply that she is reluctant to say

A profound upheaval of being

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what she has seen. Cléo pays Irma for the session by putting some paper money in her hand; their eyes do not meet. After she leaves, a close-up of Irma’s hand grasping the handle of a door she closes conveys the finality of her prophecy. She opens another door and says to a man (her husband?) dressed in a pyjama top, ‘The cards say death. And me, I saw, I saw cancer. She is doomed.’63 The exchange establishes dramatic suspense in which the spectators know more than a character for whom this knowledge may have direct consequences. It also suggests the rapidity with which Irma falls out of character – and back into daily life – after the tarot reading ends. The prologue is dominated visually by the two pairs of hands whose flesh discloses differences of age. Irma’s arms are covered by violet-coloured sleeves matching the earth tones of the table top illuminated by a lamp whose shade is visible on the far right. Cléo’s left hand sports a ring with a pearl and the figure of a toad; it is the ring Antoine will notice and comment on in chapter XII. The tarot cards are seen alternately in close-up and in medium shots over the dialogue between the two women. The card showing the three Fates corroborates Cléo’s anxiety, with the three female figures of destiny in classical Greek mythology – Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos – embodying the transition from birth to death to which Cléo is suddenly attentive. In sum, the prologue provides an accurate reading of Cléo’s situation and of the resolution that the rest of the film will disclose. Moreover, it does this through a reading of tarot cards whose static images are among the variety of visual formats that Varda deploys throughout the film. The switch from colour to black and white upholds a distinction between the representation of Cléo’s life in the cards and the reality of that life as she lives it during the subsequent eighty-five minutes of the film. The colour sequence makes for an uncanny form of spectatorship, as if Cléo were watching her past, present and future projected onto still images in the form of a silent film for which Irma’s comments were the inter-titles.64

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Chapter I: Cléo from 5.05 to 5.08 The chapter is divided into three sites: the waiting room and staircase outside Irma’s office, the rue de Rivoli and the café Ça va, Ça vient (It Comes, It Goes) on the rue des Bourdonnais. Each is dominated by Cléo’s presence, whether as the object of a gaze or in reflection. At first, the clients waiting to see Irma glimpse Cléo, whose sobs they have probably overheard. A musical theme on strings starts in as she walks down the stairs. After a cut to Cléo’s point of view shows a courtyard seen through a staircase window, a thrice-repeated jump-cut zooming on Cléo’s face enhances her descent towards the street. The repetition recalls Fernand Léger’s film Ballet mécanique (Mechanical Ballet, 1924) and Marcel Duchamps’s painting Nude Descending a Staircase (1912).65 Disrupting visual and temporal continuity of chronological (‘objective’) time, the moment provokes viewers to revise assumptions concerning subjective aspects of spectatorship while watching a character on screen undergoing a similar change of perspective. Cléo stops at the foot of the stairs in front of facing mirrors that multiply her reflection into an infinite regress. Another zoom ends with a close-up on her face reflected in the mirrors, as she resumes her self-assured persona. Her voiceover captures this moment of self-repossession: ‘Pretty butterfly … To be ugly, that’s

Pretty butterfly

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what death is … As long as I am pretty, I am alive and ten times more so than the others’.66 Varda next films Cléo from above on the rue de Rivoli in long tracking shots of vendors and pedestrians looking at and hailing her. Her gait and expression suggest that she enjoys the attention. She enters a café, looking for her secretarycompanion, Angèle. The space is one large room: open, mirrored and bustling with noise. As the women look for a place to sit, Angèle asks if Irma has helped Cléo get rid of her fear. Cléo says no and asks Angèle if her face shows it, before blurting out that if she really is sick, she will kill herself, as though she is already dead. She rises suddenly to look at herself again at the joint of two mirrors on a column, but the deformed reflection she sees only heightens her self-pity. She bursts into sobs. Chapter I initiates the first of three takes on Cléo in her public persona of the pretty woman as self-centred child. (La Petite Fille [The Little Girl] was a working title for the film.) The screenplay for the chapter describes Cléo as tragic doll (poupée-tragique). The next chapter casts her as poupée-patronne (boss [or bossy] doll). A variant of the equation of woman and doll – poupée d’amour (love doll) – recurs twice in chapter X, in the film Cléo watches with two friends from the projection booth of a movie theatre. In spatial terms, the staircase sequence removes Cléo from a site where she has given full expression of her fear. The mirror image in the hallway reminds her of the surface beauty she retains despite the prospect of internal illness she fears. The brief sequence of Cléo walking on the rue de Rivoli sustains this sense of surface beauty as an attention-getting asset. It is also the first of numerous sequences recording period details such as open-platform buses, the Gare Montparnasse before it was modernised and Citroën taxis, all of which exude a nostalgic glow as a record of Paris in June 1961.67 In this instance, long tracking shots overlay Cléo’s brief walk with images and sounds of a Paris that no longer exists, even if one can walk the same streets today. The effect is one of uncanny spaces whose familiarity is tempered by

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the ever-increasing gap between past and present. The soundtrack heightens the affective force of the sequence by repeating the musical theme heard as Cléo walked down the stairs. This close coordination of image and sound marks Varda’s first treatment of the motif of the female urban walker to which she returns at length in the second half of the film. Chapter II: Angèle from 5.08 to 5.13 The chapter again divides into three sections and three locations. Angèle’s name in the chapter title does not imply that the action centres on or around her. Rather, Varda means to underscore Angèle’s perspective regarding Cléo. The café setting serves multiple functions as an enclosed space of sociality and display, where people go to see and to be seen. Varda shot the entire sequence so as to enhance the reflective surfaces of windows and mirrors lit from within and outside. Much like the hat shop that she and Angèle soon enter, the café is a hall of mirrors, a minor theatre in which Cléo acts out her preferred role of the little spoiled girl, with Angèle cast opposite her as the stern but ultimately indulgent mother-figure whom Irma had identified in her tarot reading as ‘a widow who keeps you company’.68 Varda filmed the café as a performance space where people tell stories or become characters in stories fashioned through overheard conversations. While Cléo drinks a cup of coffee, two conversations take place simultaneously. To her left, two young lovers bicker over housing problems that prevent them from spending a full night together. To Cléo’s right, the gregarious Angèle chats with the owner of the café before launching into an extended story about a man from her native village in the Causses region in southwest France. Varda initiates the sequence with a short pan to the right showing the young woman and man seated next to a mirrored column, behind Cléo and to her left. While they talk, Angèle continues to be heard, telling her story off camera on Cléo’s right. The young man gets up to leave and Cléo looks up as he crosses in front of her. The two conversations

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disclose Cléo’s isolation within an urban environment where others suffer and die on a daily basis. Varda’s notation in the screenplay approximates this simultaneity in graphic form by setting the conversations in twin columns.69 Cléo and Angèle leave the café to look for a taxi. They turn right, cross to the north side of the rue de Rivoli and cross the rue des Bourdonnais to look in the window of a hat shop, Chez Francine. A tracking shot of the two women walking across the street in front of car traffic cuts to a low-angle shot from within the shop, which records the women’s respective facial expressions of keen interest (Cléo) and disapproval (Angèle). The same angle shows distant storefronts behind the two women, including one that reads ‘Rivoli Deuil’ (Rivoli Mourning) and in front of which they had passed a few seconds earlier. This storefront of a clothing store for those attending funerals is an initial sign of death that the spectator – but not Cléo – sees in passing. The storefront is part of a graphic unconscious in the form of signs (symbolic and explicit) in the spatial environment surrounding Cléo. It is visible – either directly in the background or in reflection on a shop window – no fewer than four times in this and the following chapter. Listening in

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The women enter the hat shop, where they are greeted by a saleswoman whose solicitous manner is captured by a quick zoom from below that casts this commercial space as yet another minor theatre and performance space. A fur toque seen in the shop window has caught Cléo’s fancy, but she asks to see a number of other hats as well, pointing to them with pure pleasure, much like a child in a candy store. The shop-window display recalls similar images in city-symphony films and in Atget’s photographs. Angèle and the saleswoman look on as Cléo tries on several hats while she admires her reflection in the mirror and turns around for nods Signs of mourning

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of approval. When the saleswoman comments that one hat looks well on her, Cléo laughingly rejects the ploy and Angèle rolls her eyes in mock exasperation and utters the word caprice (whimsy). This second section of the chapter reinforces Cléo’s public persona by focusing on self-indulgence as a momentary distraction and escape from her health concerns. Even more than the café, the hat shop is a space of pure narcissism that Varda exploits in the following chapter when Cléo matches the initial pleasure of trying on hats and seeing her reflection in the mirror with the pleasure of buying a hat on a whim. The word caprice, heard here for the first time, will return in the pivotal chapter VII during a frank exchange between Cléo and her composer-accompanist, Bob. Chapter III: Cléo from 5.13 to 5.18 Cléo looks at her reflection in a small mirror, saying to herself in voiceover that everything suits her and that she could get drunk trying on hats and dresses. Mirrors continue to function as props that reinforce an appearance of beauty Cléo may soon be unable to sustain. She tries on several hats in a sequence of nearly ninety seconds during which the only sounds are those of traffic on the rue de Rivoli. Varda conveys Cléo’s pleasure in the moment with a slow tracking shot that follows her from the pavement outside. As she walks through the shop, the glass storefront reflects images of cars, buses and pedestrians. Visible inside the shop are mirrors of various sizes that reflect Cléo and the street scene behind her. The tracking shot ends with a zoom that frames Cléo admiring her reflection in a small mirror on a table, while larger mirrors on the wall reflect the street outside the shop behind her. An especially striking effect involves a group of uniformed soldiers on horseback, the Garde Républicaine, passing by on the street, with shiny metal helmets seen through the hat shop’s windows and reflected in the mirrors. The visual complexity of the sequence is

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complemented by the ambient sound of horse hooves clattering on the asphalt. The sequence juxtaposes Cléo’s self-absorption in the pleasurable space of the hat shop and the ongoing spectacle of daily life on the street outside. The tracking shots and slow pans that accompany Cléo as she walks through the hat shop lend a liquid quality to the reflections. The formula ‘water plus crystal = mirror’ in Varda’s screenplay conveys her intention to film the hat shop as a dreamlike sequence taking place within a kind of aquarium.70 (The effect recalls the pages Louis Aragon devotes in Le Paysan de Paris [Nightwalker, 1926] to storefronts in the Passage de l’Opéra.) Along with the musical rehearsal in chapter VI and the sequence shot in the Café du Dôme in chapter VIII, this highly choreographed section of chapter III is close in visual style to the glossy fashion photos Varda had taken during the 1950s. Cléo decides to buy the fur toque and says that she will wear it right away. Angèle chides her, reminding her that it is considered bad luck to wear anything new on Tuesdays. When Cléo wants to carry How do I look?

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the hat home in a box, Angèle protests again and asks to have it delivered to Mademoiselle Cléo Victoire, 6 rue Huyghens. (This first mention of Cléo’s last name – is it a stage name? – is a partial disclosure that Cléo’s revelation of her given first name in chapter XII will complete.) The saleswoman reacts with a broad smile of recognition and asks whether Mademoiselle Cléo might send her an autographed photograph for the store. This adulation reassures Cléo as she walks out of the hat shop. The third section of the chapter includes the return to Cléo’s apartment in the Montparnasse neighbourhood, about two miles to the south. Out on the street, the taxi the women choose has a woman driver (Lucienne Marchand). (Angèle decides against the first available taxi because she says that its licence plate has an unlucky number.) As they settle in the back seat, Cléo mentions that she likes the car model, which she identifies as a Citroën DS. Just after she says this, she realises that her comment was a pun, because the letters DS in French are a homonym of the noun déesse (goddess). After she says, ‘C’est une déesse, j’aime ça’ (‘It’s a goddess, I like that’), the driver corrects her and says, ‘C’est pas une DS, c’est une ID’ (‘It’s not a goddess, it’s an idea’). This response extends the verbal game – which the driver has probably heard before – because ID is a homonym of the noun idée (idea). Angèle shows that she gets the joke when she adds, ‘Une idée, comme une drôle d’idée?’ (‘An idea, as in a funny idea?’)71 The repartee provides a moment of levity among three women whom circumstances bring together. For Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, the association of terms that ground the word game (DS/déesse/goddess and ID/idée/idea) also traces Cléo’s emotional trajectory during the ninety minutes of the film as she evolves from narcissistic divinity towards a clearer idea of herself as a mortal woman.72 As with the tarot reading in the prologue, the full significance of a seemingly minor association is understood only after the fact. The taxi crosses the Place du Châtelet and the Pont-Neuf towards the Left Bank. Alternating camera angles show Cléo and

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Angèle from the side, with identifiable landmarks such as the Île Saint-Louis and the Conciergerie visible through the open windows of the rear doors. A man in a car to the left of the taxi whistles at Cléo and reaches out playfully to touch her hand. Cléo and Angèle laugh. The taxi driver turns on the radio; the song on the air is one of Cléo’s few recordings, ‘La Belle P …’ (‘The Beautiful P …’).73 The driver does not know that her passenger is the singer whose recording she is listening to. When she asks Cléo if she like songs, Cléo tells the driver to stop the music by changing the station or turning off the radio. The driver misunderstands the request and stops the taxi in the middle of the street. Cléo laughs and says that she is the singer on the recording. The taxi enters a Left Bank area between the Latin Quarter and St-Germain des Prés. The narrow streets seem to make Cléo ill at ease. As she leans her head out of the window, a quick pan turns to a shot of African masks in the window of an art gallery. Cléo asks if the driver is afraid to work at night, but she seems unable to Primal fear

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control her growing distress. When art-school students parading in costume surround the car, Cléo is frightened by a black student with a painted face. Her sense of isolation from the two other women in the taxi replaces the lighter mood that had fuelled their earlier banter with a heavier silence throughout the following sequence. The effect suggests that the brief distraction of the hat-shop sequence has yielded to Cléo’s anxiety concerning the possibility of fatal illness the fortune teller had seen in her reading of the tarot cards in the prologue.

Left Bank street; Buñuel and Duvivier on the wall

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Chapter IV: Angèle from 5.18 to 5.25 Angèle chats with the taxi driver as Cléo broods. The dominant visual perspective is that of the two passengers, who look straight ahead through the windshield at streets and landmarks such as the rue Mazarine, the Carrefour de Buci, the Place de l’Odéon, the Jardin du Luxembourg and the rue de Vaugirard. The driver turns on the radio to listen to the news. Two items related to the Algerian war warrant comment. The first mentions continued anti-French demonstrations in eastern Algeria at a moment when violence had escalated both in Algeria and in France. The second refers to the military trial of a Commandant Georges Robin, who was implicated in the failed April 1961 putsch among rogue officers in the French army, headed by General René Salan, to take control of Algeria while the French government was holding secret negotiations with the Front de Libération Nationale (National Liberation Front, known as the FLN). These two items interject the presence of the so-called ‘war without a name’ in the daily lives of Cléo, Angèle and Parisians at a moment when its irresolution – would Algeria remain French or would it attain political autonomy? – divided France down the middle, much as the Dreyfus affair had done some sixty years earlier. The silence of the three women in the taxi – it is unclear to what extent they are actively listening to the broadcast – suggests the nature of the war in their lives as both present and absent. It clashes with a brief exchange between two men later, heard in chapter VIII – ‘These crazy Algerian events … their damned politics … where does that leave our painting now?’ – seated near the juke box as Cléo plays her recording of ‘La Belle P …’ in the Dôme.74 If Cléo does hear the exchange in the café, she walks away as soon as her recording begins to play. Her apparent lack of reaction is yet another instance of the ambiguous nature of a lengthy war some Parisians in 1961 were ignoring (or trying to ignore) on a day-to-day basis. In chapters XII and XIII, Varda depicts the war’s presence with far less ambiguity through the character of Antoine,

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the soldier whom Cléo meets in the Parc Montsouris on the eve of his return to Algeria. The two women arrive at Cléo’s studio-apartment whose stark décor of white walls and white floor is dominated by an enormous bed of sculpted black wood. Cléo walks across the room, puts on a silk housecoat, and hangs by her arms from a trapeze-like bar suspended from the ceiling. She smokes a cigarette while she hangs for about fifteen seconds. The moment is laughable in its juxtaposition of healthy and unhealthy practices. Afterwards Cléo gets back into bed as she awaits the arrival of her composer-accompanist to rehearse new material. Just as Angèle gives her a hot-water bottle and tells her to rest, the door bell rings. Chapter V: Cléo from 5.25 to 5.31 Angèle announces an unexpected visit from Cléo’s lover, José (JoséLuis de Villalonga). Her formal tone –‘Madame, c’est Monsieur’– suggests a slip from daily life into a playfully enacted drama, with Cléo in the role of mistress as hothouse flower. Varda sets the tone of the sequence with a musical theme akin to the flowery romances by Paul Delmet (1862–1904) that were in vogue in late nineteenth-

Feline beauty

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century Paris. Varda films Cléo in medium and closeup as she coils on her bed to check her reflection in a hand-held mirror, while the feathery fringes of her dressing gown evoke a felinity she shares with the kittens seen romping in the apartment. José says that he has come by unannounced for a brief kiss. His manner is coy and familiar. When he says that his schedule leaves him little time to see Cléo, she chides him playfully by calling him a fleeting lover (‘Tu es l’amant … du moment’; literally ‘You are the lover … of the moment’75). When he notices Cléo’s hot water bottle and asks what is wrong with her, he dismisses her reference to illness as imaginary. Because Cléo is reluctant to talk seriously about her health – Angèle has advised her not to do so because men do not like it – the dialogue with José exudes dramatic irony. José gets up to leave and blows her a final kiss.76 The two women sit down together, sharing a cigarette and confidences about men as though in a modern-day comedy of manners by Molière or Marivaux. All at once, Cléo drops this role: she is morose and increasingly unable to suppress her fear, complaining that José is too self-centred and too sure of her feelings for him to take serious notice of her. Ever superstitious, Angèle warns Cléo not to tempt fate by thinking too much about death. The buzzer rings again and Cléo returns to her bed to await the arrival of the musicians. Staged intimacy

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Taken as a minor dramatic section, chapters II, III and IV depict the day-to-day isolation of Cléo’s life that her momentary anxiety increases. In interpersonal terms, she rejects Angèle’s warnings, grounded in superstition, and retreats from the momentary pleasure of shared female company during the taxi ride across Paris. More importantly, the role of mistress she plays opposite ‘Monsieur’ prevents her from speaking to her lover in any kind of sincere dialogue concerning her health. Banter between Cléo and José discloses affection in the form of an easy routine. The brief episode with José extends on a personal basis Cléo’s removal from political and social issues of the moment illustrated by her apparent deafness to the radio news broadcast a few minutes earlier. It remains unclear if this isolation is a product of momentary circumstances or merely a variant of a day-to-day superficiality she is less and less able (less willing?) to tolerate. Chapter VI: Bob from 5.31 to 5.38 Bob, played with disarming verve by Michel Legrand, is Cléo’s composer and accompanist. He is also an old friend who thinks he knows exactly how to deal with Cléo’s moodiness. His presence exudes a nervous kinesis that Varda films in swift camera movements that contrast with the ersatz lyricism of long takes and slower camera movement in the previous sequence with José. More than any other character in the film, Bob embodies the pumped-up energy of the modern entertainer and of mass-market French music that brought together the music-hall tradition of Edith Piaf, the crooning of Charles Aznavour and the bouncy yé-yé sounds that drew on American pop music of the period.77 Bob’s playing throughout the rehearsal sequence, which extends into the next chapter, samples a range of musical styles to support Varda’s sonic evocation of the moment that is also a composite portrait of Cléo. Angèle says that Cléo is a bit under the weather (un peu souffrante) and Bob plots to cheer her up. He and his lyricist, Plumitif (Serge Korber) use aprons and kitchen utensils to improvise doctors’

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costumes and paraphernalia. Cléo wants to play along, but the sight of Plumitif carrying a large syringe frightens her and it takes significant clowning by Bob before she relaxes enough to laugh. Bob sits down at the piano and asks Cléo why she has changed their schedule to choose new songs as soon as possible. The word he uses, caprice, is the same Angèle had uttered in a voiceover with reference to Cléo in the hat shop. Repeated here in a cajoling tone and without malice, it nonetheless wounds Cléo, who will repeat it when she lashes back at Bob in chapter VII. At this point, Cléo is reluctant to explain that the change in schedule is a consequence of the illness she fears. Cléo, Bob and Plumitif review songs for the new recording. Bob’s jocular tone suggests that he fails to grasp the extent of Cléo’s distress. As they move through bits and pieces of songs, each successive composition evokes a different female persona – the woman of a thousand faces, the gold-digging liar, the flirt – that Cléo seems to sample, much as she had tried on hats in chapters II and III. Varda catches the light tone of the songs with camera motions that move with the music and circle the upright piano. When Bob segues from an up-tempo song to a waltz, cinematographer Jean Rabier swings his hand-held camera back and forth in time while Angèle rocks on a swing. Plumitif presents a new song, ‘Je joue’ (‘I Play’), whose clever lyrics (by Varda) seem to please Cléo. Il joue du violoncelle

He plays the cello

Tu joues du piano droit

You play the upright piano

Et moi

And I

Et moi je joue de la prunelle

And I, I give ’em the eye

J’en joue

I play it to the max

C’est fou

It’s crazy

De la prunelle

How I give ’em the eye

Tu joues sur ton piano

You play on your piano

Des noires et des blanches

The white and black keys

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Et moi, et moi

And I, and I

Et moi, je joue des hanches

And I, I play at swaying my hips

J’en joue, c’est fou

I play it to the max, it’s crazy

Des hanches

How I can sway

Il joue du cor anglais

He plays the English horn

Toi, tu joues du banjo

And you play the banjo

Et moi, et moi

And I, and I

Moi je joue contre joue

I play cheek to cheek with you

J’en joue, c’est

I play it to the max, it’s crazy

De la joue

Cheek to cheek

Il joue à perd qui gagne

He plays at gambling

Tu joues au plus fortiche

And you’re the shrewd one

Et moi, et moi

And I and I

Moi, je m’en fous, je triche

I don’t give a damn, I cheat

Je m’en fiche, c’est fou

I just don’t care, it’s crazy

Je triche.

I cheat.

Bob asks if Cléo likes the music as well and adds with mock irony that there was a time when she did not disdain him and when she appreciated his music. His words bring the playful mood to an abrupt end. They extend Cléo’s growing isolation from this long-time friend and professional collaborator. Chapter VII: Cléo from 5.38 to 5.45 This pivotal sequence halfway through the film marks the onset of Cléo’s transformation towards a sense of self stripped of the roles she has performed for others who, as she says, spoil her but do not love her. Varda stages the chapter around two songs and a series of quick decisions Cléo makes in light of the distress she has shared at this point only with Angèle. An initial decision involves the rehearsal as an interaction she is unwilling to sustain. Bob and Plumitif ask Cléo to sing a new song; Plumitif calls it a cri d’amour (plea of love, although a more literal translation as ‘love scream’ conveys the song’s raw emotion, in line with its status as an allegory

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of loss). Still unaware of the depth of Cléo’s distress, Bob resorts once again to levity, with a mock declaration, ‘Cléopatre, je vous idolâtre’ (‘Cleopatra, I idolise you’), whose internal rhyme may be a bit too clever for Cléo to tolerate on this particular day. Cléo picks up the sheet music of another new song, ‘Sans toi’ (‘Without You’), as Bob’s arpeggios convey a sober lyricism suited to the emotion of the words. Cléo’s voice is initially soft and tentative; it builds in volume and intensity as the camera tracks slowly around the front of the piano until a ninety-degree pan to the right isolates Cléo against a black curtain on the wall behind her. Varda dramatises the moment with a head-and-shoulders shot, setting off the matte textures of skin and dressing gown against the black curtain and the hard brilliance of drinking glasses atop the upright piano. Suddenly, Cléo is heard singing over a full orchestra, with a side spotlight on her face, as though her performance completely removed her from the immediate moment and setting.78 Toutes portes ouvertes

With all the doors flung open

En plein courant d’air

With the wind rushing through

Je suis une maison vide

I am an empty house

Breakthrough

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Sans toi …

Without you …

Sans toi …

Without you …

Comme une île déserte

Like a deserted island

Que recouvre la mer

Covered by the sea

Mes plages se dévident

My beaches of sand slip away

Sans toi …

Without you …

Sans toi …

Without you …

Belle en pure perte

Beauty wasted

Nue au coeur de l’hiver

Naked in the cold of winter

Je suis un corps avide

I am a yearning body

Sans toi …

Without you …

Sans toi …

Without you …

Rongée par le cafard

Worn down by despair

Morte au cercueil de verre

A corpse in a crystal bier

Je me couvre de rides

Covered with wrinkles

Sans toi …

Without you …

Sans toi …

Without you …

Et si tu viens trop tard

And if you come too late

On m’aura mise en terre

I will be have been buried

Seule, laide et livide

Alone, ugly and pale

Sans toi …

Without you …

Sans toi,

Without you,

Sans toi!

Without you!

The brevity of the sequence – just over two minutes long, with the orchestra heard after some forty-five seconds – belies the complex performance blurring distinctions between the Cléo who sings and the persona her singing performs. The camera zooms away quickly as the song ends; this visual cut away from the abstract time and space of performance marks a return to the real world in which Cléo awaits the results of the medical tests. She breaks into sobs and blurts out that she can no longer go on, ostensibly because the words of the song refer too openly to the medical condition whose seriousness only Angèle knows. Cleo’s performance of the new song breaks with

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the professional persona she has projected in other songs heard during the rehearsal and in ‘La Belle P …’, as heard earlier on the radio during the taxi ride. It exposes the unrealised self whose transformation towards authentic subjectivity the remaining fortyfive minutes of the film will record.79 The aftermath of the live performance polarises along lines of gender. Angèle tries to explain away Cléo’s tears as a sign of fatigue, adding that the ‘evil’ (maléfique) word cafard (‘depression’ or ‘blues’) may have upset her. When Bob dismisses this behaviour as yet another caprice, Cléo snaps back, ‘Caprice, caprice, that’s the only word you can say, but you are the one who makes me into someone capricious’.80 After shouting that the rehearsal is over and that she is leaving to go out alone, Cléo walks behind a black dressing curtain and comes out in a sleeveless black dress. Visible on the wall behind her is an album cover of a recording by Edith Piaf, icon of realist female singers in the French tradition of music hall and cabaret.81 Cléo approaches her dressing table and looks quickly at her reflection in the mirror. She repeats a line from the new song – ‘Seule, laide et livide’ (Alone, ugly and pale) – in direct contrast to the words Breakdown

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she had said to herself in voiceover in chapter I, when she still prized her surface beauty as an attribute of health. These words – rather than the cafard that Angèle mentions – are what prompt Cléo to tears. As she pulls off what spectators may not have realised is a blonde wig, she says, ‘If only I could tear off my head along with …’.82 This use of a wig as narrative prop recalls the black wig the presumably blonde Brigitte Bardot dons two years later in the role of Camille in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963). The actions in both films are provocations. Camille puts on the black wig to mark her emotional estrangement from her husband, Paul. Cléo removes her wig to strip away her identity linked to the role-playing and masquerade she had performed to elicit the attention and approval of others. Though she may not yet realise it, Cléo’s action is a first expression of the profound transformation that Madame Irma had prophesied in the prologue in conjunction with the illness she had foreseen in Cléo’s future.83 Angèle, Bob and Plumitif look on as Cléo walks across the apartment and down the stairs, wearing the black fur toque she had bought a half-hour earlier. In the courtyard, a three- or four-year-old boy bangs on a toy upright piano. The soundtrack picks up deformed and discordant strains of ‘Sans toi’. The uncanny effect – both familiar and unfamiliar – sustains the break with role-playing marked by Cléo’s abrupt exit. (Is the boy a child-sized Bob and thus a counterpart to Cléo’s persona of spoiled little girl? Does the fact that Cléo walks right past the boy express a lack of maternal attentiveness in line with Irma’s prophecy that Cléo would not marry?) As Cléo emerges into the rue Huyghens, the sounds of the toy piano turn into a pizzicato variant of ‘Sans toi’ played over billowing strings. The camera tracks slightly behind Cléo as she walks down the street, oblivious to a group of men dressed in black – waiters or hotel staff – who stare at her from a doorway. She turns left onto the Boulevard Raspail and checks her reflection in a mirror outside a

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restaurant. The mirror is covered with Chinese ideograms advertising the restaurant and Cléo must manoeuvre to see a reflection that no longer reassures her: ‘This doll face of mine, always the same. And this ridiculous hat. I cannot even read my own fear in it. I always thought that everyone was looking at me and that I’m the only one look I ever look at. How boring’.84 Seeing a small crowd reflected behind her in the mirror, she pauses to watch a street performer swallow live frogs and walks away in disgust when he spits out a mouthful of water. Cléo walks amid ambient sounds of car traffic. An overhead shot of her passing in front of a flower seller yields to a quick upward tilt to the right towards the bustling Carrefour Vavin on the Boulevard Montparnasse. A clock mounted on a street or lamp post in the right corner of the screen reads 5.50pm, just past the temporal midpoint of the film.85 The rehearsal sequence is capped by the transition Cléo initiates when she removes her wig and dresses to please herself rather than others. It is equally important to note that this transition is precipitated in part by the way that Cléo listens to herself as she sings. Listening as I use it here refers in particular to subject identification. Cléo’s rehearsal performance of ‘Sans toi’ – in which she hears and identifies with her full self during the song – contrasts with the more distanced way she listens to herself on the recording of ‘La Belle P …’ during the taxi ride across the Seine in chapter III. When Cléo says ‘that’s me singing’ to the taxi driver, the ‘me’ to whom she refers is the aspiring pop star Cléo Victoire rather than the woman whom she begins to see during the second half of the film. ‘La Belle P …’ is heard again twice during the film. In chapter VIII, Cléo plays the recording on the juke box at the Dôme; in chapter XI, she mumbles a few lines of the song while walking in the Parc Montsouris. Each recurrence of the song marks a specific stage in Cléo’s sense of self that the film traces as a discrepancy between the persona of Cléo Victoire and the woman behind or within it.

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Chapter VIII: Some others from 5.45 to 5.52 The chapter is marked by Cléo’s relative silence as she returns and even initiates the gaze that allows her to see anew. Varda records the change through point-of-view shots, quick pans and by an emphasis on ambient sound in the form of fragments of conversation Cléo overhears as she walks alone through the Café du Dôme. Without her wig and behind sunglasses, Cléo no longer resembles her usual persona; no one pays attention to her. (Is she seemingly invisible because she has changed her appearance or because she now looks at others instead of merely eliciting their gazes? Is she disappointed that no one recognises her in her performance of the incognito pop star?) Cléo’s behaviour in Le Dôme contrasts with that in the café Ça va, Ça vient in chapter I, in which her childish posturing continually sought to draw attention. Because the shots in Le Dôme often adopt Cléo’s point of view, the sequence can be understood as a subjective documentary about the café and its regulars, much like the street shots of shoppers and passers-by in L’Opéra Mouffe. Equally significant is Varda’s choice of the same chapter title – ‘Quelques Autres’ (Some Others) – she had used for a section of the earlier film.

Camera eye

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Again as in L’Opéra Mouffe, portions of this chapter build on photographs Varda had taken on the sly (à la sauvette) before filming. But whereas the visual perspective in the earlier film was often fixed in one spot, the fluid camera movement in this chapter simulates Cléo’s gaze as she walks in the café and down the streets that surround it.86 Cléo is first seen from within the café in a transition shot as she enters from the rue Delambre. The next shot cuts some ninety degrees to the right to adopt Cléo’s point of view as she pushes a glass door to enter the main room of the café.

Through glasses darkly; theatre and art on the wall

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The tracking camera simulates her movement through the café, with slight pans to the right accompanied by the din of multiple conversations and background noise. The customers in her line of vision – including some of the very few people of colour seen in the film – are absorbed in their activities. There is little eye contact. Cléo approaches a juke box and drops a coin in the slot. She chooses her recording of ‘La Belle P …’. Soon after, she overhears a woman on the café’s terrace saying that with all this music, one cannot hear one’s own voice. Two men at a table across from the juke box comment on events in Algeria as Cléo chooses a record to play. She walks through the café and onto an enclosed terrace. A man seen in closeup says directly to the camera that poetry is something dreadful. An elderly woman tells a man seated next to her how strange it feels to be back at the café after being away for so many years. Varda tracks along a wall of modernist paintings, one of which displays an aggressively angular style of abstraction. Posters sport names of well-known and lesser-known artists: Hosiasson, Manet, Giacometti, Klee, Théophilos, Blatas. Another poster is for the production of a Molière play, mentioned in chapter V. These objects are elements of a realist décor that marks time and place. Yet, as in L’Opéra Mouffe, their presence is inflected by strong affect – linked to pregnancy in the earlier film and death in Cléo – that charges them with special meanings. Cléo orders a brandy and continues to fidget. As in the Ça va, Ça vient sequence, she sits alongside a column whose mirrored facets fragment her reflection. This time, however, she appears unaware of its presence as her roaming gaze suggests a nascent curiosity about the people and objects around her. The last section of the chapter acts on this curiosity when Cléo decides to drop in on a friend, Dorothée (Dorothée Blank), who poses as a model at a nearby art school and whom she decides to visit after overhearing students at a nearby table mention her name. The camera follows alongside to the left of Cléo as she walks back through the café and turns right onto the rue Delambre. The sound

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of Cléo’s high heels on the pavement marks time as well as her gait. Rabier’s camera tracks along the street behind her, mixing frontal and point-of-view shots that record her movement along the street. Cléo’s visual perspective is simulated by over-the-shoulder shots slightly behind her and by others in which the spectator sees what Cléo sees. The tracking camera pans, as though it were following Cléo’s gaze towards faces responding to her presence. The sequence is suddenly interrupted (punctuated?) by a rapid cut to the frogswallowing man whom Cléo had seen a few minutes earlier on the Boulevard Raspail. This first image is followed about fifteen seconds later by nine others filmed in rapid cuts over a total duration of just under forty seconds. The shots are of people and objects Cléo has encountered during the previous forty-five minutes. In order of appearance and with running-time coordinates, the ten images are of: (1) the frog-swallowing street performer (46.21–46.23); (2) the man in Le Dôme who spoke first of Algeria and later about poetry (46.39–46.40); (3) the fortune teller Irma (46.41–46.42); (4) the bald man seen standing near the betting parlour inside Le Dôme (46.46–46.47); (5) the stout young man reading a newspaper on the terrace of the café (46.47–46.48); (6) Passing glances

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Bob sitting in a chair with a kitten on his shoulder (46.51–46.52); (7) an antique table clock with a toy monkey draped over it (46.53–46.54); (8) José seated on the bed in Cléo’s studio (46.55); (9) Angèle on a divan (46.56); and (10) a close-up of Cléo’s dressing table with her blonde wig hanging over a corner of its mirror (46.57–46.59). The sequence is not a flashback in the conventional sense of a slow dissolve that inserts an earlier event to explain or elaborate elements of an ongoing narrative. This is also not a flashback because the stout man reading the newspaper makes eye contact he had not been seen making earlier. The series thus departs from lived experience in terms of what the film has shown over the previous forty-five minutes. In addition, the flash images seem not to interfere with the film’s temporal progression because Varda intersperses them with shots of people whom Cléo crosses as she walks down the rue Delambre. The effect stages a visual equivalent of the direct quotation of thought that literary critics refer to as free indirect discourse. Only here the utterances of free indirect discourse are replaced by static images that are uniformly silent.

Fleeing death

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Cléo suddenly finds herself on the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet amid a line of people who seem to be part of a funeral, perhaps one taking place at the nearby Montparnasse cemetery. She crosses the street and passes another group surrounding a bare-chested street performer who runs a long dagger through his biceps. Like the man who swallows frogs (chapter VII), he embodies a medieval Paris whose violence Cléo is unable to bear. She enters a courtyard and walks past a sign that reads ‘Sculpture Academy’ before crossing a brightly sunlit room filled with large sculptures. The only sounds are those of her footsteps and of chisels in an adjacent room. As Cléo Art as refuge; warm smile of friendship

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enters a second room, Varda tracks slowly around a group of students sculpting plaster. At the centre of the studio, a woman poses naked. Cléo’s gaze briefly meets those of two students. Dorothée turns and smiles at Cléo, who returns the greeting warmly. The chapter discloses the onset of Cléo’s transition in her newfound invisibility (in the Dôme sequence) and in the flash images of colleagues and acquaintances (Angèle, Bob, José) whose presence she suddenly finds oppressive. Chapter IX: Dorothée from 5.52 to 6.00 Dorothée’s ease with her body and her lack of affectation are in direct contrast to Cléo’s distress. They also suggest how Cléo may once have been. The two women leave in a convertible sports car belonging to Dorothée’s boyfriend, Raoul (Raymond Cauchetier). As they drive to the nearby Montparnasse train station, Cléo mentions that she is sick and that she is awaiting results of medical tests. She does not use the word ‘cancer’. Cléo stays in the car while Dorothée goes into the railway station to retrieve some film reels. She tries to distract Cléo by telling her to count the pompoms on the hats of French sailors, many of whom arrive at the train station from duty on the Atlantic coast. Varda turns this forty-second-long interval into another documentary sequence of passengers and pedestrians on the street. As in the previous chapter and in L’Opéra Mouffe, she pays special attention to faces, body shape and clothes set against ambient traffic sounds. The effect sustains the spectacle of daily life to which Cléo seems more and more attentive. (For the record: the sequence shows four sailors with pompoms on their caps.) After Dorothée returns, medium shots from the front and side of the moving car frame the two women whose conversation remains intelligible amid the noise of urban traffic. The chapter ends with Varda filming the women from overhead as they pull up in front of a movie theatre. A poster above the entrance advertises Richard Brooks’s 1960 feature film Elmer Gantry, with a portrait of Burt Lancaster in the lead role of a charlatan preacher.

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The poster, another period detail, documents the ongoing presence of American films whose systematic distribution in France followed the 1946 Blum-Byrnes agreement. This programme of wide distribution was, in turn, crucial to the cult-like devotion of Cahiers du cinéma critics and future New Wave directors to selected Hollywood-studio and independent directors.87 In visual terms, Parisian geography once again the dominates the chapter, with extended tracking shots of Dorothée and Cléo driving through Montparnasse showing recognisable streets and landmarks in the background. Unlike many

The lives of others; a filmlover’s Paris;

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films of the period – such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (1963) – that used rear projection to shoot such scenes in a studio sound stage – Varda’s choice to film on location enhanced realist and documentary practices in line with views of Paris in films of the period, such as Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961) and Chris Marker’s Le Joli mai. A related practice in the chapter involved a sequence of rapid shots outside Montparnasse station that capture individuals and groups. While the sequence suggests what Cléo might have seen while she waited in the sports car for Dorothée to return, the pictural composition of individual shots approximated an ethnographic perspective in the mode of ‘faces in the crowd’ grounded in still photography. As in L’Opéra Mouffe, the narrative force of individual shots built on facial expression and posture whose poignancy grows as the passage of time imbues them with a status of archival record. Chapter X: Raoul from 6.00 to 6.04 Cléo and Dorothée enter the projection booth where Raoul invites them to watch the end of a film whose musical soundtrack is already audible in the background. The film-within-a-film has come to be known as Les Mariés du Pont Mac-Donald ou méfiez-vous des lunettes noires (The Newlyweds of the Mac-Donald Bridge or Be Wary of Sunglasses). The title, which appears nowhere in Cléo, echoed Jean Cocteau’s 1920 play, Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel (The Newlyweds of the Eiffel Tower), for which Georges Poulenc and members of Le Groupe des Six (Group of Six) composed music as part of a controversial production by the Ballets Suédois. (Others in the Groupe des Six were Georges Auric, Georges Duruy, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud and Germaine Tailleferre.) Varda’s choice of title for the short subject may contain a hidden reference. In 1917, a concert at the studio of the painter Émile Lejeune inspired the composer Erik Satie to form a group of composers, Les Nouveaux Jeunes (The New Youths or Young Ones), which was a forerunner of

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the Groupe des Six. Lejeune’s studio was at 6 rue Huyghens, which is where Angèle asks to have the black fur toque Cléo buys in chapter III delivered.88 Raoul and Dorothée stand together to watch the film from a small window-like opening; Cléo watches from a similar opening to their right. The camera zooms quickly towards what all three see on the screen. The two-minute long film is a silent black-and-white comedy in the slapstick style associated with Mack Sennett’s work at Keystone Studios. Varda heightened the period effects of inter-titles and a tinny piano accompaniment by running the sequences shot at the silent speed of sixteen frames per second at the sound standard of twenty-four frames per second. The jerky mechanical effect of this accelerated movement was openly comic, especially when various characters fluttered their eyelashes. The film-within-a-film can be read in tandem with Cléo’s personal transformation. When the protagonist (played by a hyperkinetic Jean-Luc Godard) realises that he was seeing everything darkly (en noir) because of his sunglasses, he takes them off before reuniting with his love, Anna (played by Anna Karina, to whom Godard was married at the time). The film also underscored a devotion to slapstick and early US film among New Wave figures, whose performances in the film short were a labour of love. Godard and Karina were joined in the cast by Eddie Constantine, Sami Frey, Danièle Delorme, Yves Robert, Jean-Claude Brialy and Alan Scott. Playfulness even prompted a spoof of Auguste and Louis Lumière’s 1895 comic short subject, L’Arroseur arosé (Sprinkling the Sprinkler). Varda cast Godard after she noticed his beautiful eyes when he momentarily removed the sunglasses he used to wear constantly.89 The (invisible) role of hearse and ambulance driver was played by Pierre Braunberger (1905–90), whose early career as a producer included work between the wars with Jean Renoir, Marc Allegret and Robert Florey. Between 1956 and 1962, Braunberger produced Varda’s 1957 short, Ô Saisons, ô châteaux, Jean Rouch’s Moi, un noir (I, a Black Man, 1958), Chris Marker’s Cuba Sí!,

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Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player, 1961) and Godard’s Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live, 1961). Braunberger, Anatole Dauman and Georges de Beauregard were the three major producers of independent films associated with the New Wave and its offshoots.90 The film was shot on a bridge over the Canal de la Villette on the northern outskirts of Paris, with overhead train tracks and factories visible in the distance. A young couple on the bridge (Godard and Karina) say goodbye to each other. He is dressed in a tailored suit, bow-tie and straw hat, much in the style of the American silent comic star, Harold Lloyd. She, Anna, wears wide ribbons around long blonde hair and around the waist of her puffy sleeved dress. Painted cheekbones, white socks over ballerina shoes and a mouth in the shape of a rose make her resemble a life-size doll. Stone staircases at the two ends of the bridge lead down to the canal. As she descends the right-hand staircase, the man waves goodbye and puts on a pair of sunglasses. Momentarily disoriented by the sun, he looks to the left-hand staircase and waves goodbye to a black woman (Émilienne Mouche) whom he mistakes for Anna. The woman trips over a hose on the river bank, sits on the cobblestones with her legs wide apart and flutters her eyelashes. The man (Eddie Constantine) holding the hose turns towards her and flutters his eyes in mock adoration. When he bows gallantly, the spray from his hose knocks the woman over onto her back. A hearse pulls up and a third man (Sami Frey) dressed in an undertaker’s garb of black coat and bowler hat jumps out. As he places the black woman in the hearse, the man on the bridge above calls out to her. A long overhead shot shows him running after the hearse as it pulls away. When it reaches street level and turns left towards the bridge, the man turns around and runs back up the staircase, too late to save the woman he still believes to be Anna. He passes a flower seller (Danièle Delorme) and buys a wreath inscribed with the words ‘À ma poupée d’amour’ (To my lovey-dovey). The words – which translate literally as ‘To my love doll’— are the same spoken by Dorothée and Raoul as they

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greet each other with a kiss earlier in the chapter. (In chapter VII, Cléo had used a similar expression to describe her doll-like face reflected in the mirror of the Golden Pagoda restaurant.) A close-up of the young man shows tears of longing on his cheeks. He walks with the wreath over his shoulder and accepts the offer of a handkerchief from a vendor (Yves Robert) on the bridge. When the young man removes his sunglasses to wipe his eyes, he cries out that he was seeing everything in black because of his sunglasses. He turns back to the right-hand staircase where he sees Anna dressed in white. In a near replay of the previous sequence, she also trips on a rope and falls to a sitting position. A man (Alan Scott) dressed in a white sailor’s uniform comes to her aid and gently taps her on the cheek. A white ambulance pulls up and yet another man (Jean-Claude Brialy) wearing the outfit of an ambulance worker jumps out. Anna flutters her eyelashes. The ambulance worker knocks over the sailor before checking Anna’s eyes, facial colouring and reflexes. Watching from above, the young man runs down the stairs with the wreath still on his shoulder. He gives the wreath to the sailor and knocks over the ambulance worker before carrying off Anna in his arms. The sailor drops the wreath over the ambulance worker before dragging him into the rear of the ambulance. The young man and Anna return to the bridge where the episode began. He throws the ‘damned’ Godard’s tears of longing; Karina perplexed

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sunglasses off the bridge. As the lovers bend towards each other to kiss, the camera zooms back to show the hearse and ambulance driving off on opposite banks of the canal. In the distance two trains cross a bridge over the canal. A final zoom tightens to the lovers, with a silent-film era iris-like fade to black in the form of three circles surrounding the two lovers in a formula profile shot of a happy ending. Varda has described the film-within-a-film as a distraction and minor entertainment, but this characterisation fails to account for a number of compelling formal and thematic elements. Claudia Gorbman rightly identifies the silent film as a metaphor for Cléo’s dilemma of perception. Accordingly, its lesson for Cléo might be summarised as: ‘Put dark glasses on (pessimism, superstition, anxiety) and you will see death, darkness, sadness; look by the light of day and you will find life, love, happiness’.91 Judith Mayne astutely analyses the silent film as a modernist citation whose use of time she sees as part of a primitive narration encountered in the figure of the fortune teller in the prologue and subsequently by the African masks and black student during the taxi ride in chapter III. Mayne takes the term ‘primitive’ as culturally charged. A first meaning evokes two examples of early

Classic happy ending

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cinema, Georges Méliès’s Les Cartes vivantes (The Living Playing Cards, 1905) and La Souriante Madame Beudet (The Smiling Madame Beudet, 1922), the latter by one of Varda’s designated role models, Germaine Dulac. A second meaning refers to a disregard for linearity for which Mayne cites the precedent of temporal overlap in Edwin S. Porter’s Life of an American Fireman (1903).92 When the young man in Les Mariés du Pont Mac-Donald names the dark glasses as the cause of his mistake of perception, Mayne notes a temporal mistake in which he watches his lover, Anna, depart ‘as if the other intervening events had not occurred, as if no time had elapsed since she first began walking down the stairs’.93 As a result, the young man’s point of view does not really change because the sequence involving the black woman is an attempt to replicate a negative image in terms of skin colour and costumes in which the heroine’s sudden death erases the couple’s apparent bliss. Mayne concludes that the centrality of race to the evocation of ‘primitive narration’ throughout Cléo supports the difficulty of separating it and its gender-inflected expression in the enclosed, feminine world of superstition embodied by the fortune teller, Angèle and the ‘black’ woman from the ‘bright light of science and the confident resolutions of classical narration embodied by the doctor whom Cléo consults at the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière’.94 It is thus appropriate to temper Cléo’s oft-cited transformation from the childish girl (la petite fille of Varda’s working title), associated with ‘black’ superstition, towards an adult woman who accepts ‘white’ reason embodied by the doctor, with a subtler suggestion that these figures and the respective ‘black’ and ‘white’ worlds they embody are inseparable. Cléo, Dorothée and Raoul laugh warmly and the two women say goodbye to Raoul. As they go down the stairs, Dorothée drops her purse. When she and Cléo bend down to pick it up, they notice that a hand mirror has shattered. Cléo’s fear and superstition seem to return at once, as though the distractions of the previous three chapters had evaporated.

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Chapter XI: Cléo from 6.04 to 6.12 The establishing shot is an overhead of the broken mirror, one of whose larger pieces reflects Cléo’s mouth as she says that fear is taking hold of her, like a migraine headache. The two women walk through a dark corridor onto the bright street. Dorothée looks at a silent Cléo and tries to soften the mood. In the background, tight arpeggios played on a harpsichord break with the lighter melodies heard a minute earlier during the silent film. Cléo decides to take a taxi and drop Dorothée off along the way. As they walk to a taxi stand, a crowd has gathered around a shattered window outside Le Dôme. An unidentified voiceover – which Varda attributes in the screenplay to a lottery-ticket seller – explains that someone was shot. The scene proceeds in classic shot/counter-shot rhythm, showing the shattered glass first from the women’s perspective outside on the pavement before cutting to their faces seen through the window from inside the café. Dorothée pulls Cléo away. In the taxi, she tries to make smalltalk to distract Cléo, who gives her the black fur toque she had bought barely an hour before. Visible through the windows and open top of the taxi moving south along the Boulevard Raspail are the large statue of the Lion of Belfort at the Denfert-Rochereau intersection and the Sceaux suburban-line train station. A clock seen in passing on the left shows the time as 6.12pm. Dorothée asks if Cléo knows the Parc Montsouris, before getting out at the rue de Tolbiac. She turns to wave goodbye as she runs up the stairs towards the rue des Artistes. Cléo takes up Dorothée’s suggestion and tells the driver to drive towards the park. The taxi turns down a tree-lined boulevard and the melody of ‘Sans toi’ starts up on piano. Once the taxi enters the park, the melody shifts to strings and finally to a full orchestral arrangement. Cléo looks from side to side to take in the new spaces until the driver stops near the Observatory. Cléo gets out, pays her fare and begins to explore the area alone on foot. To her left, children ride on wooden horses alongside a sandpit. Cléo walks off alone towards

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some tall trees. Varda shows her next from below, at the top of a long stone staircase. The soundtrack contains only ambient noises of birds. As she walks down the stairs, Cléo gently whistles and speaks the words of ‘La Belle P …’ swinging her hips and dragging her scarf behind her, as though she were on stage at the Casino de Paris. She abruptly drops this little performance at the bottom of the stairs and walks off. Her hands are behind her back and the scarf dragging on the dusty path behind her is now less of a performance prop than a symbol of her dejection. She resembles a sad little girl forced to play alone in the park. Varda cuts to an overhead shot of Cléo walking down another staircase; the soundtrack records the sound of running water. She sustains the perspective as Cléo leans over a balustrade in front of a small waterfall. In the background, a young man (Antoine Bourseiller) enters the shot at the upper left. He leans on the same balustrade to Cléo’s right and asks if she likes the sound of the water. He talks without looking at her before swinging around close to face her. She backs away but answers him – probably out of boredom – and he continues talking, as though unable to stop. He moves close to Final song and dance

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her again and sits on the stone railing. (Is he trying to pick her up or is he simply talkative?) When Cléo tells him that he seems capable of saying anything at all, he asks if she is interested to know that 21 June is the solstice, the longest day of the year. Cléo answers with irony that it really is the longest day. Antoine points out that this is the day the sun leaves the sign of Gemini for the sign of Cancer and Cléo is visibly shaken. She tells him sharply to be quiet (‘Taisezvous!’) before begging his pardon. Her form of address – she uses the formal vous rather than the familiar tu – casts her as the wellmannered girl from the provinces she probably was before she came to Paris.95 Like Dorothée in the previous three chapters, Antoine is a foil Varda sets opposite Cléo. Where Dorothée revels especially in her physical presence, Antoine’s gregariousness is open and unaffected. Encountered in an isolated section of an urban park, he is part of this natural setting and seemingly a welcome alternative to other men – especially José and Bob – whom Cléo has encountered thus far in the film. Where the current chapter adopts Cléo’s perspective, the following chapter will assume that of Antoine. The title of the lengthy final chapter XIII, which inverts the Shakespearean title, carries both of their names. The progression suggests one result of the deep transformation predicted by Irma in the prologue as that of a dialogue that helps Cléo contend with her fears. Chapter XII: Antoine from 6.12 to 6.15 This brief chapter elaborates the force of a reciprocal dialogue whose absence in interactions with Angèle, José, Bob and even Dorothée has isolated Cléo. As Antoine’s gregariousness overcomes Cléo’s reserve, she talks and listens with a new openness. And this to a point where she names to a stranger the object of her distress and fear, which she had been unable to name to José. This chapter also marks the moment when Cléo reveals her true identity as Florence, in a break with the persona of Cléo Victoire for which the encounter with Antoine is a catalyst. The move towards balanced dialogue begins

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when Antoine senses that his loquaciousness has gone too far. After Cléo backs away, Antoine continues in a softer tone of voice that Varda matches by long tracking shots. For the first time in the film, Cléo talks openly to a stranger who seemingly has no idea of who she is. Anonymity on both sides promotes revelations that familiarity might complicate. After Cléo mentions the likely prognosis of cancer, she adds a brief list of her personal fears – of birds, of storms, of elevators, of needles – capped by an enormous fear of dying. Antoine replies that if Cléo were in Algeria, she would be afraid all the time and that what troubles him is giving up his life in a war, which means dying for nothing. He adds gallantly that he would have preferred to give his life for a woman, to die for love. Antoine’s words probe gently; he listens and responds to Cléo to a degree neither José nor Bob had seemed willing to approach. When a silent Cléo appears dejected, Antoine says that the two of them are in a bubble. Cléo smiles, perhaps realising that she is no longer as alone as the words of ‘Sans toi’ – ‘Seule, laide et livide’ (Alone, ugly and pale) – had made her feel in chapter VII. Antoine notices Cléo’s ring, whose mounting features a pearl and a toad; he quips, ‘You and me’.96 The ring is Smooth-talking Antoine

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visible on Cléo’s left hand during the prologue scene with Irma. Perhaps it is a gift from José, who called her ‘ma perle’ (my pearl) as he said goodbye at the end of his surprise visit. Antoine offers to accompany Cléo to the hospital, adding that she can accompany him afterward to the Gare de Lyon from which his train leaves later that evening. The proposal further strengthens the nascent sense of reciprocity between them. Cléo suggests that they take a taxi, but the more gregarious Antoine opts for public transport in the form of a bus ride that provides a final movement across parts of the Left Bank. Cléo and Antoine walk through the park to catch a bus for the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière. Chapter XIII: Cléo et Antoine from 6.15 to 6.30 The long concluding chapter stages the ostensible outcome of Cléo’s crisis. The chapter is divided topographically into three sections whose settings – in the park, on the bus and at the hospital – complete the near-circle of Cléo’s trajectory during the ninety minutes of the film. The visual rhythm begins slowly, with a long crane shot panning high above the two characters as they walk through the Parc Montsouris. Flowery harp music adds a Mediterranean sultriness to the chapter opening. This theme by Legrand recalls the Vivaldi composition, L’Estro Armonico (1711), Varda cited in the musical notebook she had kept for La Pointe-Courte. But its harmonics and structure build on the melody and accompaniment of ‘La Belle P …’ and ‘Sans toi’.97 The easy dialogue between Cléo and Antoine starts a process of mutual discovery. Cléo seemingly tolerates the flirtatiousness that persists in Antoine’s banter because she senses in it a means of contending with the fear that has oppressed her from the first minute of the film. In addition, she presumably welcomes the fact that it is Florence – rather than Cléo – whom Antoine addresses, especially when his reaction to her real name is typically clever: ‘What a menu! Florence is Italy, the Renaissance, Botticelli; a rose. Cleopatra is Egypt, the Sphinx … and the asp; a tigress. No, I prefer Florence.

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I prefer flora to fauna’.98 The first section of the chapter ends as Cléo and Antoine leave the park by running down a staircase to cross the rue Gazan and catch the no. 67 bus. The bus ride is a variant of previous movements through the city by taxi (in chapters III, IV and XI) and on foot (most notably in chapters VII–IX and XI–XII). Large windows and the open platform at the rear of the bus allow Varda to exploit the permeability of internal and external spaces, much as she does with cafés and the hat shop in chapters II, III and VIII. This time around, the primary objects on display are the Left Bank neighbourhoods between the Parc Montsouris and the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, along the 67 bus route. The views of these neighbourhoods shown from within the bus and from the open platform are less of a background than a spectacle of daily life that Cléo watches with an attention absent from her earlier movements through the city. Varda embellishes this visual expression of Cléo’s new attention with a musical score that blends Legrand’s harp theme and a traditional Parisian sound whose accordion accompaniment recalls the music-hall and cabaret world symbolised by Edith Piaf. Flirting as Florence

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As Cléo and Antoine approach the hospital, the soundtrack reprises the melody of ‘Sans toi’, whose pizzicato contrasts with its initial occurrence in chapter VII. Individual sights along the bus route range from the banal to the uncanny, as when two men seen carrying a newborn baby in an incubator recall the verse in ‘Sans toi’ – ‘Morte au cercueil de verre’ (A corpse in a crystal bier), with the crucial difference that the incubator is linked to new life rather than to death. Cléo is momentarily sullen when the bus turns from the Place d’Italie onto the Boulevard de l’Hôpital, then notes quickly: ‘Today, everything astonishes me, people’s faces, and my own among them’.99 Cléo and Antoine get off the bus and walk to the reception desk of the Salpêtrière Hospital, where they are told that Cléo’s doctor has left for the day. They decide to wait in the courtyard, in case he returns. Cléo gives Antoine her hand, asks when his train leaves and writes down his address. They sit on a bench, dwarfed by the surroundings, with a tall cedar tree behind them. The doctor pulls up, driving a convertible. His manner is professional and brusque. Antoine says that he is Cléo’s brother; it is a minor lie, but also a gesture of concern and complicity. The doctor answers that he will take good care of her and that everything will be all right after two months of radiation treatments. He tells Cléo to return the next morning to begin her treatments, puts on his sunglasses and pulls away quickly. The doctor’s gesture of putting on dark glasses echoes Godard’s movements in the silent film-within-a film.100 A shot back from the accelerating car makes Cléo and Antoine appear tiny from the clinical perspective the doctor personifies. The final sequence of the film begins with a quick cut to a medium close-up showing Cléo and Antoine from the waist up, before tightening on their faces as they walk side by side. Cléo says, ‘It seems I no longer have any fear. I seem to be happy’.101 They continue to walk silently and look directly ahead into the camera. In the background, a clock chimes twice to mark the half hour; it is 6.30pm.

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The chapter displays Varda’s complex and often contradictory use of narrative models grounded in fiction and classical theatre. The film achieves a certain degree of closure when the doctor’s prognosis seems to confirm Irma’s prediction in the prologue. But even if this is the case, it is unclear if the treatment the doctor prescribes projects a recovery or is merely an attempt to forestall the imminent death that Irma had seen in Cléo’s future. Non-closure also pervades the budding intimacy between Cléo and Antoine grounded on their shared fear of death. The status of this intimacy remains illdefined. Antoine’s flirtatiousness is transparent and unconvincing. Even when he asks Cléo for her photo as a memento, the intimacy it suggests is closer to that among siblings than to that between lovers. Cléo’s final words, that she is no longer afraid and that she seems to be happy, assert a change of attitude in contrast to her fearful reaction to the tarot reading in the film’s prologue. Yet even here, Varda frames Cléo’s final words with the sound of chimes marking 6.30pm. As a final index of measured duration, this sound reasserts the prospect of imminent death Cléo’s newfound and perhaps only momentary happiness has helped her to face. Straight ahead into the future

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III Painting Fear Paris The three terms ‘Peinture Peur Paris’ (Painting Fear Paris) of the subtitle Varda uses for her remarks on Cléo in Varda par Agnès evoke major motifs around which she organised the genesis and structure of the film. After Varda met the producer Georges de Beauregard by way of an introduction from Jacques Demy, she asked him to finance a major film – La Mélangiite – about a young man unable to distinguish dream from reality and past from present. The working title was an invented term – a near homonym of la méningite (meningitis), whose English translation, ‘melangitis’, evoked a pathological confusion or mix-up (mélange, from the low Latin, misculare and the suffix –itis, inflammation). Varda foresaw five different actors in the lead role, with sequences in colour and shooting on location in Sète, Venice, Rome and Ferrara. In 1960, she filmed some preliminary sequences as a kind of documentary on the childhood of the central character.102 De Beauregard rejected the project and suggested that she work instead in black and white with a lower budget. Varda quickly countered with an idea for a one-day shoot in Paris, to economise and simplify production details. Within these constraints of budget and format, Varda undertook a narrative in which local geography was a primary concern: What did Paris evoke for me? A broad fear of the big city, of its dangers, and of losing oneself there alone, misunderstood and even jostled. Thoughts of a woman from the provinces – for sure – and linked to books. I recalled the slightly deformed man, a bit out of his element, walking down the Boulevard St Michel in a book by Rilke; I often saw old people and loners in the street, street performers with strange routines (piercing their arms, swallowing frogs). These minor fears quickly became a fear of cancer that was in

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everyone’s imagination in the 1960s. Without losing sight of the production budget, I thought about a minimal film set into continuous time and added to it a real trajectory that could be traced on a map of central Paris (that was the game … the bet on Paris). I imagined a character walking in the city. I thought about the master in Jacques le fataliste [Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, Denis Diderot, 1796]. I turned him into a female singer, making her way through Paris, driven mad by a fear of cancer, often accompanied by her fatalistic governess. The fear of being mortally sick. Do beauty, mirrors, and the gazes of others therefore fail to protect one? The paintings by Baldung Grien, beautiful and frightening, quickly became the sense and generating impulse of the film: beauty and death. These paintings show women, beautiful in their blonde flesh, embraced by a skeleton, which manhandles or frightens them. In one of the canvasses, the skeleton is pulling a woman by her hair. It is fear, real and deep fear, that of death because cancer threatens. Cléo awaits the results of medical tests. Fear awakens her. … Everything I felt about the inner tension of this gentle woman during the ninety minutes of the film (from 5.00 to 6.30), all this is inspired by these women and these skeletons by Baldung Grien. A small reproduction of one of his paintings was often tacked on a wall wherever we were filming. It is one of the strengths of painting to propose works capable of becoming a continuous inspiration and reverie.103

A strong indication of what Varda wanted to achieve in Cléo was the fact that she placed the preceding statement opposite a fullpage reproduction of Hans Baldung Grien’s 1517 oil painting, Death and the Maiden (Der Tod und das Mädchen). The painting shows Death in the form of a skeleton seizing a young woman by the hair with his left hand as he points down towards the grave with his right hand. The woman is naked; she holds her hands together in a gesture that suggests prayer and supplication. Her eyes look upward and away from Death, in a vain appeal for mercy. Her facial expression is mournful.104 Cléo restaged the Baldung Grien painting as a ninetyminute trajectory through Paris. The shift from still to moving image provided an expansive narrative structure within which Cléo’s fear

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Hans Baldung Grien, Death and the Maiden

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evolved towards an acceptance of possible death Varda has likened to a secular grace.105 The fortune teller’s prediction that Cléo will undergo a deep transformation of her entire being alludes directly to the topos of death-in-life whose iconography Varda adapted from Baldung Grien. Varda transformed the fear of death the self-centred Cléo faced alone throughout most of the film into empathy towards Antoine, an empathy whose consequences Varda staged in Cléo’s final assertion that she was no longer afraid and that she was happy. This transformation was visible in Cléo’s face, so clearly at odds with the distress during the tarot reading in the prologue and the rehearsal episode in chapter VII. Varda updated the late-medieval allegory of the Dance of Death (Danse macabre or Totentanz), whose pictorial expression typically personified a figure of death leading a row of dancing figures to the grave. The topos emerged in the early fifteenth century, following the Black Death and the Hundred Years’ War, from illustrated sermon texts meant to convey the fragility and vanity of earthly life. Pushing the parallels, Varda replaced the Black Death with cancer and the Hundred Years’ War with the Algerian war. A second painting by Baldung Grien, Eve, the Serpent and Death, adds to Varda’s portrait of Cléo by depicting the encounter between a knowledge-hungry Eve and the double threat of evil and death at the end of her stay in Eden.106 In such terms, Cléo’s drive to learn her fate – first from Irma in the prologue and later from her doctor in chapter XIII – cast her as a contemporary Eve whose encounter with Antoine in the Parc Montsouris was an interlude with Edenic undertones. Varda’s take on this biblical topos had Cléo and Antoine choose to leave the park to face their respective threats of death together. Banishment and exile, however, played no part in the film. The Edenic topos also explains Cléo and Antoine’s differing views on nudity, a motif that Varda first introduced in conjunction with Dorothée. (Varda had already featured nudity in the sequences of the two lovers in L’Opéra Mouffe and at the close of Du côté de la côte [Over by the Coast, 1958], a twenty-four-minute colour documentary shot – perhaps in homage to

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Jean Vigo’s À propos de Nice [Concerning Nice, 1930] – in 35mm as a film essay on tourism along France’s Mediterranean coast.) A number of feminist readings of Cléo over the past twenty-five years have associated Cléo’s movement through the city with the figure of the urban stroller (flâneur) whom Walter Benjamin had described as ‘botanizing on the asphalt’.107 Others have maintained that sexual divisions in mid-nineteenth-century Paris made the female of the species (flâneuse) a strictly impossible figure because the male flâneur was the agent of a gendering of space that largely excluded women from the public world of work, politics and city life.108 Cléo initially walks alone through Paris in order to kill time, but soon begins to see her surroundings with a new eye. When asked by Dorothée if she knows the nearby Parc Montsouris, Cléo goes there out of curiosity, to see something new and to see it differently. She even changes from taxi to foot to try out a freedom of discovery to which she is unaccustomed. Cléo’s trajectory in chapters VII through XIII charts her mobility in an unknown part of Paris, in contrast to the neighbourhoods from the rue de Rivoli to her apartment on the rue Huyghens seen in chapters I through IV. At the very least, this new mobility opposes the equation of Cléo and the flâneuse associated with the figure of the woman shopper depicted at length in the hat-shop sequence (chapters II and III).109 Cléo is not a would-be flâneuse along the lines of George Sand who reputedly disguised herself as a man in order to look without being looked at.110 Nor is she a prostitute who walks the streets, even if traces of this figure hound her throughout the second half of the film. As Cléo walks across the terrace of Le Dôme (chapter VIII), she is accosted by a man whose posture and tone of voice suggest that he is propositioning her. After Antoine asks Cléo if she is married, she backs away and asks him if she looks like a woman on the prowl (une aventurière).111 Antoine later links her name to that of Cléo de Mérode, the turn-of–the-century figure whom he describes as ‘not so much a singer as a demi-mondaine, one of those high-class loose women (cocottes de luxe) who drove our grandfathers crazy’.112

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The statement is casual, a throwaway line within Antoine’s patter. Yet it supports a series of statements and actions that reveal a discrepancy between the change in self-perception Cléo only begins to grasp and the perceptions of her on the part of José, Bob, Angèle and others whom she encounters. Varda casts Antoine as sympathetic and ultimately fraternal, but his behaviour towards Cléo – as in the statement above concerning Cléo de Mérode – points to assumptions concerning women that are reductive and sexist. Once she walks away from the rehearsal, the out-of-character Cléo no longer elicits the same kind of attention as in earlier sequences on the rue de Rivoli, at the Ça va, Ça vient café and at the hat shop. Nor does Varda recast her along the lines of the sexually assertive women portrayed by Bardot in Et Dieu créa la femme (And God Created Woman, Roger Vadim, 1956) and by Jeanne Moreau in Les Amants (The Lovers, Louis Malle, 1958). Yet for men whom Cléo crosses on the streets of Paris, the sight of a woman walking alone often held a distinct sexual charge. Whether or not Cléo fully grasps this discrepancy, Varda’s depiction of male voyeurism focused on Cléo supports a critique of gender difference and of sexuality that she continues to explore over the following two decades in Le Bonheur (Happiness, 1964), L’Une chante, l’autre pas (One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, 1977) and Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond, 1985). Cléo’s dress and demeanour in the final three chapters of the film reinforce her unwillingness to sustain the various roles and implied identity to which she had become accustomed. As she walks alone through the Parc Montsouris, Cléo drops the last traces of the ‘spoiled little girl’ persona when she dances down some stairs in her high heels, swinging her hips and mumbling the words of ‘La Belle P …’ in a self-parody of the performer whose priority is to please her audience.113 Having removed her wig, dressed to please only herself, and walked through the city alone, she can no longer revert to making a spectacle of herself. Consistent with these changes is the fact that Cléo soon reveals her given name as Florence. And the Paris

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in which Florence walks is no longer a performance or stage setting – scène in French or Schauplatz in the German used by Benjamin in his Passagen Werk (Arcades Project, 1982) – but the site of her real-life encounter with Antoine. Rather than a flâneuse in the various senses noted above, the Cléo whom Varda depicts in chapters VII through XIII circulates by vehicle or on foot and without a clear destination. The suitable French term, baladeur or baladeuse, derives from the verb balader that denotes a greater degree of random movement than the standard verb, se promener (to go for a walk). When Cléo leaves the rehearsal in her apartment, she does more than simply go for a walk. Nor should the baladeuse depicted in Cléo be confused with the vagabond hitchhiker portrayed some twenty years later by Sandrine Bonnaire in Varda’s Sans toit ni loi. A more productive comparison is to Varda’s 2000 film, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I), especially in conjunction with Varda’s forays through urban Paris and rural France among the same kinds of outsiders she had first filmed forty-three years earlier in L’Opéra Mouffe. Music and vocal performance serve as audio cues for Cléo’s changes of awareness and self-awareness that critics have analysed primarily in visual terms. These cues derive from sound technology and distinctions between recorded and live voice. Cléo hears her recorded voice on the radio in the taxi (chapter III) and again on the juke box at Le Dôme. But it is her live performance of ‘Sans toi’ (chapter VII) that precipitates the break between the persona of Cléo the would-be pop star and the Florence who is unable to sustain this persona when she mumbles some lyrics to ‘La Belle P …’ while walking alone through the Parc Montsouris (chapter XI). Vocal performance also establishes a contrast between the fluffy pop (‘La Belle P …’), waltz (‘La Menteuse’ [The Woman Liar]) and the ditty (‘Je joue’) Cléo sings at the start of the rehearsal episode and ‘Sans Toi’, whose tone and tempo support a heavier lyric of loss in the tradition of the realist female singer symbolised in the film by Edith Piaf. Vocality – inflected by performance mode and by genre – supplements Varda’s visual treatment of the central problematic of

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woman-as-image114 by recording Cléo’s progressive appropriation of the gaze. Sound also suggests an elementary progression from Cléo’s sense of self as an image and object of the gaze towards an identity grounded in authentic utterance and dialogue. Raising the issue of gender with reference to Cléo involves a preliminary distinction between what Varda does in the film, her statements about the film and those by others who characterise Varda’s perspective in the film. In terms of genre, Cléo is only in part a woman’s film, understood as a melodrama linked to romance or maternal devotion. An alternative narrative form that retains a suitably critical perspective on the story Varda tells derives from the minor news item (fait divers) concerning the sickness and, one may assume, subsequent death of the aspiring young pop singer, Cléo Victoire. This was the perspective Varda later adopted concerning the death of the female hitchhiker that framed Sans toit ni loi in the mode of a mystery-novel retrospection in which the film began with a crime whose genesis and occurrence it retraced. Whether or not Varda called herself a feminist when she made Cléo and whether or not what she meant by this was compatible with what feminism became within and outside France after 1961, her portrait of Cléo/Florence remains a necessary point of reference for critical engagement with questions surrounding the representation of women, feminist film-making and film theory. This is so because Varda’s critical perspective in the film continually limited spectator identification by setting Cléo’s personal crisis within the daily life of urban Paris. The critical detachment on Varda’s part allowed her perspective to remain topical without being didactic or precluding the entertainment appeal that she also valued.115 In the main, this detachment extended Varda’s subversion of genre conventions evident as early as La Pointe-Courte and L’Opéra Mouffe. However one characterises Varda with reference to the nature, degree, duration and evolution of the feminism to which she subscribes and/or practises, her films consistently subvert patriarchal and cinematic models of gender by making the centrality of female

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characters a primary reality of her films.116 This emphasis evolved markedly in Le Bonheur and in Varda’s films of the 1970s and 1980s. In 1962, its presence in Cléo was largely undervalued by critics – most of them men – who expressed reticence towards a film that failed to meet their expectations of what a ‘woman’s film’ should be.117 The same year, Varda responded as follows to an interviewer who asked if being a woman hindered her film-making: ‘It is a false problem. … Film-making is not harder for a woman than for a man. What is hard is independent film-making (faire du cinéma libre)’.118 When she made Cléo, Varda’s professional independence upheld a personal stake that she revised through contact with American feminism as she encountered it while she lived in California in the late 1960s: ‘I had the good luck to be naturally feminist as a result of my refusals and through an energy to choose for and against everything.’119 Once she read texts by Anglo-Saxon feminists such as Germaine Greer and Kate Millett, Varda rethought her earlier films in light of a consciousness-raising that evolved forcefully through her mid-1980s’ films such as Sans toit ni loi. Françoise Giroud, one of the few women to review Cléo at the time of its release, was ambivalent: ‘Is [Cléo] pretty? Rather mindless, unawake to the world, an object … For some, she is Woman with a capital W [LA femme]. For others, nothing and, above all, keep your mouth shut.’120 Through the mid-1960s, the questioning of patriarchal authority implicit in Varda’s professional independence isolated her within the mainstream film industry in France. Yet this type and degree of independence did not always sit well among feminists whose militancy sought also to consider class, race, sexuality, as well as variables of religion, age and geography. A decade after Cléo, Claire Johnston described Varda’s work as reactionary and her placement of woman outside history as a retrograde step in women’s cinema.121 More recently, analyses by Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Claudia Gorbman, Judith Mayne, Jill Forbes and Susan Hayward have located Cléo and Varda within the context of postwar French feminism in the wake of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe

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(The Second Sex, 1949), the female sexuality portrayed in the films by Vadim and Malle noted above, and novels such as Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse (Hello, Sadness, 1954). As a set, these analyses have assessed Varda’s trajectory concerning gender difference in conjunction with informed theoretical approaches of feminism and psychoanalysis often grounded in social and material history. If English-language studies featuring Varda often focus on gender issues and those in French on her status as an auteur, those by Flitterman-Lewis and Smith consider both gender and auteurism.122 Sellier’s book in French is likewise a welcome exception to this linguistic and cultural divide. Jill Forbes has argued that ongoing debate surrounding Varda in conjunction with women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s has tended to obscure other aspects of Cléo crucial to its understanding and to its treatment of gender.123 The Paris Varda evokes through details of urban topography is inflected by Cléo’s fear of fatal illness for which Baldung Grien’s Death and the Maiden is an iconographic inspiration. These details develop the conjunction of the three terms – painting, fear, Paris – Varda invoked in the title of the pages she devoted to Cléo in Varda par Agnès. These details reinforce the elements of subjective documentary by which Varda continually sets the story of Cléo within the broader context of Paris on 21 June 1961. A first sense of Cléo’s Paris devolves from differences between cartography and topography. Many of the streets, sites and neighbourhoods seen during Cléo’s ninety-minute trajectory still exist. One can locate the door on the rue de Rivoli from which Cléo emerges after her session with the tarot reader, or descend the staircase from the Parc Montsouris to the rue Liard where Cléo and Antoine catch the no. 67 bus. This is possible even if these places no longer look like they did in 1961. Cléo is a also spatial narrative that recasts the map as ‘a plane projection totalizing observations’ into an itinerary or a trajectory and thus into an account of movement that maps tend to erase.124 In Varda par Agnès, Varda gave plastic form to the difference

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between itinerary and trajectory when she superimposed still shots next to circled key sites along Cléo’s itinerary over a street map of central Paris.125 The effect reinforced the nature of the film whose perspective on the city was partial; that is, grounded in a specific point of view and thereby incomplete. A fuller study of Cléo’s Paris among cinematic representations of Paris would entail analyses of numerous films shot throughout the city and in studio sound stages from early cinema to the present. Among recent commercial releases, Jonathan Demme’s The Truth about Charlie (2002) was a remake of Stanley Donen’s Charade (1963). Its winks to the French New Wave included minor roles for Anna Karina and Charles Aznavour, as well as a cameo appearance by Varda as the widow Hippolyte, a woman with a menacing gaze encountered along a row of shuttered stalls near the rue des Rosiers at the St Ouen flea market. Was Varda in this incarnation a flâneuse, a femme fatale, or merely a woman whose path one crosses by chance while walking, as in Charles Baudelaire’s poem, ‘À une passante’ (‘In Passing’)? Clearly, she and Demme were having a bit of fun. A third sense of the city splits between Cléo, what might be characterised as the movie camera’s point of view and the narrative techniques associated with what Varda later conceptualises as cinécriture. While riding through Montparnasse with Dorothée, Cléo says, ‘Me, I’d like streets to have the names of living people: Piaf Street, Zizi Boulevard, Aznavour Boulevard. Though the names would change as soon as they died’.126 Cléo cast this version of a personal Paris by projecting herself as a peer of entertainers whom she emulated.127 Cléo’s Paris also appeared in shots throughout the film that frame her within recognisable sites such as the Pont Neuf, the intersection of the Boulevard Montparnasse and the Boulevard Raspail, and the Place Denfert-Rochereau. Other shots – notably in chapter VII – adopted her point of view by showing what she saw as she walked. A third set shot over Cléo’s shoulder from behind, to convey what she saw at a slight distance, which suggested the physical presence of the movie camera and its operator.

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Alternation among these three perspectives, starting in chapter VII, depicted Cléo’s new openness to buildings, objects and people, and thus to the details of daily life the writer Georges Perec described a decade later as ‘that which is not generally noted or noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens, except for the weather, people, cars and clouds’.128 This disclosure of the city through details of daily life contributed to elements of filmed ethnography in line with Varda’s references to Cléo as a subjective documentary. This alternation of visual perspectives also framed Varda’s depiction of Cléo and of Paris at a moment when the ‘unphony’ Algerian war seemed to be going on forever.129 This historical moment follows the failed April 1961 ‘Generals’ putsch’ in Algiers and the 19 June suspension of negotiations between France and the FLN. The closed nature of the Paris seen by and surrounding Cléo throughout the film casts the Algerian war as a structuring absence that is both invisible and ever-present. A fuller sense of the problems Varda faced in this light emerged in two films of the same period, Rouch and Morin’s Chronique d’un été and Marker’s Le Joli mai, critical of French policies during the final years of the conflict. Like Varda, Rouch and Morin used documentary techniques to portray daily life in the summer of 1960 by interviewing Parisians on the street as well as a core group of young adults – including Régis Marceline Loridan on the streets of Paris (Chronicle of a Summer)

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Debray and Marceline Loridan – openly opposed to France’s role in Algeria. Newspaper headlines flashed on screen and intense verbal exchanges added historical urgency to sequences dealing with the war as a central concern and source of debate. In Le Joli mai, Marker built around an interview format to record views of Parisians from various economic classes and ethnic origins concerning their hopes for the future less than two months after the March 1962 Evian agreements, which marked the formal end of French Algeria. All French films of the period were subject to government control in the form of visas authorising commercial distribution. While Cléo was not censored for its references to the Algerian war, a number of films by Resnais, Marker, Rouch and René Vautier were initially screened only at festivals and in underground venues.130 The gap between Cléo’s Paris and this ‘deep reality of the moment’ (Sadoul’s expression) first appeared in the radio news broadcast items on the Algerian war to which Cléo seemed oblivious.

Bird’s-eye view (Le Joli mai)

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It recurred in the character of Antoine, to whom she responded without explicit reference to the war. Both moments mark the intrusion of death on a large scale to which Cléo’s apparent disregard asserts her lack of self-awareness as an historical subject. Even after she encounters the prospect of her imminent death, Cléo isolates herself from issues of the moment that affect many of those around her on a daily basis. If she finds personal solace when Antoine says – ‘Well here we are, the two of us in a bubble. Is that better?’ (Eh bien voilà, on est deux dans une bulle. Ça va mieux?),131 the critical perspective on Cléo that Varda fashions throughout the film suggests that in terms of France’s colonial past and the Algerian war, this bubble was about to burst. How many Cléos? Cléo was released commercially in April 1962, shown a month later at the Cannes Film Festival and selected again in September for screening at at the Venice Film Festival. In 1963, the French Association of Film Critics (Syndicat Français de la Critique du Cinéma) awarded it the Prix Méliès. Box-office receipts of more than 500,000 for 1962 paled alongside the 9.8 million spectators who flocked to the year’s commercial success, Yves Robert’s La Guerre des boutons (The War of the Buttons). The film received wide coverage in specialised journals as well as the mass-circulation press. The cover of the Cahiers du cinéma’s April 1962 issue featured a photo from the hat-shop sequence in chapter III and an article by Claude Beylie. Perhaps the cover and coverage were a response to a shot of Cléo at the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière on the cover of the March 1962 issue of the Cahiers’ arch rival, Positif, which had run a lead interview with Varda as well as a lengthy review of Cléo by Roger Tailleur, who noted affinities with Jean Vigo’s documented point of view and characterised tracking shots in the hat-shop sequence as displaying the high contrast and tight cropping typical of fashion shots by the American photographer Richard Avedon (1923–2004).132 In Cinéma 62, Pierre Billard wrote

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that the film extended the photographer’s attention to visual detail he had admired in La Pointe-Courte as a means of access to the richness of a world few other film-makers conveyed in the contrast between the individual and her human surroundings. At the same time, Billard expressed disappointment with Varda’s use of cancer as a dramatic device, asking (rhetorically) if Cléo’s story might not have been just as touching without it.133 Coverage in the mass-circulation press included a number of interviews with Varda. Jacqueline Fabre cited Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s remarks on Cléo (‘a beautiful film by virtue of its sincerity’) before noting that Varda described herself as a photographer who had made Cléo because she was moved by the portrait of a beautiful young woman for whom the prospect of death (Varda referred openly to leukaemia) revealed the extent of her isolation. In response to a question from Yvonne Baby, Varda underscored her efforts to make a subjective documentary using realist elements of time, geography and history (the Algerian war reported on the radio broadcast) to link the story of Cléo to its broader context.134 Jean de Baroncelli’s assessment was mixed, lamenting the film’s stylistic preciosity (almost on a par with that of Jean Giraudoux), while lauding Varda’s ability to abandon arabesques and flourishes to convey the simplicity of human tenderness in the film’s final scenes.135 An article by Bernard Pingaud in Les Temps Modernes situated Cléo within documentary and cinéma vérité movements of the period. Significantly, Pingaud did this less in light of motifs and concerns with identification than in terms of a visual rhythm of long takes and extended tracking shots that conveyed the uncertainties of life depicted in what he characterised as a true film (un film vrai). In L’Humanité, Samuel Lachize broadened the significance of the ‘death and the maiden’ motif and Cléo’s invisible cancer – ‘some simple mal intérieur’ (her internal sickness) – towards the social evil – ‘c’est aussi le mal qui ronge la société’ (it is also the sickness eating away at society) – conveyed by Varda’s references to the

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Algerian war.136 Both reviewers, writing in left-wing venues, were patient with what they considered a serious work worthy of close analysis as both film and document. Their remarks stood out among the majority of reviews in France that mixed praise for Varda’s visual style with negative judgments targeting the antipathy and shallowness of the central character. Claude Mauriac, for one, wanted the film to be more of a documentary and expressed his disappointment on learning that the customers seen at Le Dôme in chapter VIII were extras whose conversations were scripted in advance by Varda.137 No review of Cléo I have come across matches the hostility that Stanley Kauffmann levelled at the film following its US release in the summer of 1962. Kauffmann started his review by ridiculing what he listed as a four-step formula for making an art movie, which he seemingly equated with the New Wave. A perfunctory plot summary preceded the following assessment: The pat shape of the story, its very cleverness, the shallowness of its emotional exploration, the heroine’s self-conscious dramatization, make it merely a flashily dressed-up conventional tear jerker, a sob sister of the works of Fannie Hurst. The avant-garde trappings disguise nothing; it is Irving Berlin orchestrated by Stravinsky.138

In sum, Kauffmann dismissed the film as a failed parody of films by Truffaut, Godard, Resnais and Chabrol – ‘a sedulous exercise in what can be called Cleo-realism’ – and described Corinne Marchand as ‘a voluptuous pop singer’ who impersonated Cléo by responding like a silky circus horse to Miss Varda’s Weltschmerz whip.139 This hostility failed to compensate for a number of mistakes and inaccuracies. Cléo did not run eighty-six minutes, as Kauffmann asserted, but a full ninety minutes when one added the five-minute running time of the prologue to that of the thirteen chapters, the first of which is marked as starting at 17h05. Kauffmann also seemed not to have known that Varda had made La Pointe-Courte when he

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wrote that Cléo was her first full-length work. The most generous statement he could muster was that perhaps Miss Varda had been badly served by the timing of her first appearance in the United States. Kauffmann’s review openly expressed misgivings many critics in France cast more moderately through Cléo and Varda towards the New Wave and European art film movements they considered to have degraded towards formulaic expression. As with numerous assessments of Cléo that focused on gender, Kauffmann’s repeated references to ‘Miss Varda’ were a less than subtle gesture of mock respect turned to irony. What may also have accounted for Kauffmann’s hostility was a lowered tolerance for contending with the cultural registers of early Fifth-Republic France on which Varda drew as a fellow traveller of New Wave and Left Bank cinema contemporaries. Neither a highbrow intellectual in the mode of her colleague and friend, Alain Resnais, nor a cinephile in the mold of Godard or Truffaut, Varda seemed nonetheless to suffer by comparisons that seldom failed to cast her reductively and condescendingly as the sole woman of the New Wave. Consensus on Varda’s place in the New Wave has stabilised over the past fifty years to a point where she has been recognised as a forerunner for Cahiers du cinéma critics and future film-makers such as Truffaut and Godard. In 1962, this consensus was less than apparent in the pages of Cahiers, where Claude Beylie’s ‘Le Triomphe de la femme’ (Woman’s Triumph) replaced sustained analysis of Cléo with an overview of Varda’s career that placed her treatment of places and things alongside that of Jean Renoir, Max Ophuls and Jean Grémillon, and thus against architects of restricted places such as Robert Bresson, Fritz Lang, Joseph Losey and Alexandre Astruc.140 A more telling document was the dossier of 162 new filmmakers (nouveaux cinéastes) published in the monthly’s December 1962 issue no. 138, suitably titled ‘La Nouvelle Vague’ (The New Wave). The entry on Varda was one of only three devoted to women film-makers. The other two women were Paula Delsol and Francine

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Premsyler. The entry included a photo of Varda, a filmography and the following prose: Is it possible to love both Mao-Tse Tung and antiques dealers? Agnès Varda proves that this is possible. Her strong suit is staging; in other words, she knows how to highlight an object, a human being, a landscape against what opposes it: the fishermen of Sète against leftist and Left Bank intellectuals, the rue Mouffetard against the opera buffa. Somewhat strangely, it is thus Agnès’s intelligence that films Cléo’s flesh, while Cléo’s sentimentality falls prey to Agnès’s physical appetites. To say this another way, everything takes place as if lucidity was helping Agnès to become passionate, while passion was helping her to lay down the law. Briefly, it’s about Agnès Varda or emotion invaded by meticulousness. From which arises the impression of something out of kilter that her films convey. Agnès Varda, if one wants to be cruel, is somewhat like Oscar Wilde ordering a poor man’s suit from the greatest tailor of London. But if one is nice, she is also a lot of Baudelaire and his ideas on art and the dandy. Moreover, she is the first to speak of women as women in terms of suffering and freedom, and not as in magazines. And if this female Zola is sometimes lacking in feminine instinct, let’s admire her for creating, much like Sternberg, her own light.141

While the familiar tone of the entry suggests personal sympathy and an acquaintance with Varda’s films, barbs towards the end convey a degree of ambivalence. Hence the pointed allusions to Oscar Wilde and to Josef von Sternberg undermine those to Baudelaire and to Zola. When the last of the three introduces the seemingly inevitable reference to gender, the use of the biological adjective femelle tips the balance towards a reductive essentialism casting Varda as a token woman, one of (only) three among 162. This imposed role extended an ambiguity in the title of Beylie’s article, which referred both to the triumph of a particular woman (Agnès Varda) and to an abstraction, as in ‘woman’ with a capital ‘W’. Despite continuing coverage of Varda’s subsequent films in Cahiers, one can see her assigned role in the December 1962 New Wave issue as one she – along with other critics

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mentioned above such as Flitterman-Lewis, Gorbman, Mayne and Sellier – would revise. A more productive approach to Cléo returns to Varda’s belief that a totally objective documentary was impossible and her concomitant assertion of subjective documentary in conjunction with La Pointe-Courte and L’Opéra Mouffe. Responding in 1962 to a question about On the Bowery (Lionel Rogosin, 1957) Varda stated that she had not seen the film, before adding: You would have to set up fifteen movie cameras and let them roll on their own for five years; at that point, the editing would be subjective … In the case of L’Opéra Mouffe, I forced objectivity by adding to it an altered subjectivity in the form of pregnancy, which is in some sense a hypersensitivity that promotes an even more limited choice to the extent that the woman is interested in the child who is going to be born in conjunction with existing people.142

This recognition of subjectivity was, in turn, grounded on a presence of affect and physicality that Varda’s films consistently assert. In La Pointe-Courte, affect was most visible in tensions between the married couple, concerning the uncertainty of a shared (‘happy ending’) closure that failed to occur. In L’Opéra Mouffe, pregnancy linked the anticipation of new life, the ingestion of food in the base material form of la bouffe (‘grub’), and perceptions of misery among the indigent in and around the rue Mouffetard. The presence of fear throughout Cléo de 5 à 7 derived from the real possibility of imminent death with which Cléo tried to contend by fortune telling and medical treatment. These two approaches to life and death – the former occult and fatalistic, the latter seemingly rational and proactive – frame the film’s opening and closing sequences. Their co-presence also generates elements of subjective documentary in images of street life that teem with signs of death ranging from the Rivoli Deuil shop sign (chapter II) and the black art student whose painted face scares Cléo (chapter III) to the funeral procession she

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crosses on the Boulevard Edgar Quinet (chapter VIII) and the baby in the incubator she and Antoine pass while they ride the bus towards the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière (chapter XIII). The alternation of these images with others, such as the man holding a baby outside Montparnasse station (chapter IX) and the young couple who strike up a conversation on the bus (chapter 13), asserts an engagement with new possibilities and new emotions that conveys the fragility of life Cléo begins to see at the end of the film. These and other images add significantly to the force of the film by interspersing its central narrative of ninety minutes in the life of a young woman within a visual account of urban Paris in June 1961. They suggest that the story of how Cléo begins to see her life and her surroundings differently is also what Varda’s film conveys to her spectators on the basis of her formative exposure to art history and photography. This is the ultimate lesson in learning to see that links Cléo de 5 à 7 to the long trajectory of Varda’s film-making from La Pointe-Courte, L’Opéra Mouffe and her other films of the 1950s through Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse. Images of materiality – of wood and of iron in La Pointe-Courte and of raw produce, meat and poultry in L’Opéra Mouffe – promote an elemental attention, recalling the books Varda’s one-time philosophy teacher, Gaston Bachelard, devoted to earth, wind, fire and water. In Cléo, Varda directs this elemental attention to the urban spaces of Paris within which Cléo moves through known and unknown parts of the city. This attention to urban landscape connotes elemental senses of space and place beyond any figurative meaning. Striking shots of urban landscapes recur in Varda’s films up through Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse. The strong emotion they convey often builds visually on the presence of an elemental nature in unexpected settings, as though to disclose its primacy. Even before Cléo, a sequence towards the end of L’Opéra Mouffe shows a woman walking along a pavement next to a stone wall, stooping under the weight of objects she carries in two knitted shopping bags, one of which appears to hold a brick building block. Eventually, she totters

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and leans against a wall for support. After she starts up again, potatoes tumble from one of the bags. The soundtrack throughout the sequence contains a piercing drone whose dissonance is in keeping with the anxiety listed as the chapter title. What draws my attention to the sequence is the stone wall behind the woman, an object whose coarse surface is covered with graffiti and cracked to expose bricks near ground level. As the woman walks, she passes a message in chalk that reads ‘Paix avec l’Algérie française’ (Peace with French Algeria), but with the word française crossed through and replaced by the word libre (free). A primitive swastika is also visible on the wall, to the left of the scrawled words. It would be hard to argue that the woman in the sequence is anything other than a walker, and an unstable one at that. (She is certainly not a flâneuse.) Moreover, because the woman takes no notice of the words on the wall to her side, the image is an instance of the same kind of graphic unconscious that later surrounds Cléo with An early Cléo?

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signs of death, such as the Rivoli Deuil storefront seen in chapter II. It would be tempting to see the ‘Peace with free Algeria’ message in 1958 as deliberately filmed by Varda to protest – if only in passing – the ongoing conflict whose divisiveness on both sides of the Mediterranean would soon mark the end of the Fourth French Republic. This would be consistent with other references to the Algerian war noted above. Yet even if inclusion of the graffito was coincidental, its presence as part of the urban landscape depicted by Varda is fully in line with the desire to see that Cléo extends in a number of ways as a document of its historical moment. Determining what is going on in this shot is instructive for determining what Varda was trying to do in Cléo. The dynamism of the returning gaze that motivated Varda to shoot Ulysse twenty-eight years after she took the May 1954 photo on the beach draws the spectator back to the materiality of still and moving images in Cléo forty-five years after the film was made. This is the lesson and the pleasure of conveying a desire to see that the film holds out to those who come to it anew or for the first time.

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Notes 1 As of 1940, the regulatory definition of a short subject (court métrage) in France specified a maximum length of 1300 metres – with an equivalent running time of forty-seven minutes and thirty seconds – for films shot in a professional format of 35mm. In 1964, the maximum increased to 1600 metres, or the equivalent of fifty-eight minutes and twenty-nine seconds (François Thomas, ‘Avant-propos’, in François Thomas and Dominique Bluher [eds], Le Court Métrage français de 1945 à 1968 [Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005]), p. 9). See also François Pourcil, Défense du court métrage français (Paris: Cerf, 1965), pp. 13–14. 2 Richard Roud, ‘The Left Bank’, Sight and Sound no. 32, Winter 1962–3, pp. 145–6. 3 Claire Clouzot, Le Cinéma français depuis la nouvelle vague (Paris: Nathan/Alliance Française, 1972), pp. 46–8. 4 Claude Beylie, ‘Le Triomphe de la femme’, Cahiers du cinéma no. 130, April 1962, p. 24. 5 Varda par Agnès (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1994), p. 135. Future references will cite this text as VA. Unless noted, all translations are mine. 6 VA, p. 263. 7 ‘Ulysse, Le texte (après montage) du dialogue et du commentaire d’Agnès Varda (sans description d’images ou découpage)’, Revue Belge du Cinéma no. 20, 1987, p. 47. 8 Ibid., p. 37. 9 André S. Labarthe, Essai sur le jeune cinéma français (Paris: Terrain Vague, 1960), p. 15.

10 References to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937) and to the two Carné films appear in Valerie Orpen, Cléo de 5 à 7 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), p. 4. Those to La Terra Trema and to Guernica are from Jean Michaud and Raymond Bellour, ‘Agnès Varda de A à Z’, Cinéma 61 October 1961, p. 8 and Gaston Bounoure, Alain Resnais (Paris: Seghers, 1962), p. 192, respectively. 11 ‘Young Turks’ was how André Bazin referred to the group of critics at the Cahiers du cinéma, which also included Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer. 12 Bernard Bastide, ‘Agnès Varda photographe ou l’apprentissage du regard’, Études Cinématographiques nos. 179–86, 1991, pp. 5–13. 13 VA, p. 10. 14 Ibid., p. 11. 15 Jean Clay, ‘Une Cinéaste vous parle: Agnès Varda’, Réalités no. 195, April 1962, p. 99. I have translated the French term artisanal as ‘hands-on’, to convey the physical activity that drew Varda to photography. 16 VA, p. 32. 17 Montfort (1923–91) had previously worked on screen in Robert Bresson’s Les Anges du péché (Angels of the Streets, 1943) and Jean Cocteau’s L’Aigle à deux têtes (The Eagle Has Two Heads, 1948). La Pointe-Courte was the first credited role for Noiret (1930–2006). 18 By the time Vilar recruited him for the TNP and the Avignon Festival, after seeing him in a theatre production of Albert Camus’s Caligula, Philipe (born Gérard Philip, 1922–59) had already

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drawn attention for his performance on screen in Claude Autant-Lara’s Le Diable au corps (Devil in the Flesh, 1947). He died from liver cancer shortly before his thirty-seventh birthday. 19 Alison Smith, Agnès Varda (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 13. 20 VA, p. 14. 21 Claudine Delvaux, ‘Agnès Varda photographe’, Revue Belge du Cinéma no. 20, 1987, p. 25. 22 Alexandre Astruc, ‘The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-stylo’, in Peter Graham (ed.), The New Wave: Critical Landmarks (New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1968), pp. 20–2. First published in L’Écran français no. 144, 30 March 1948. 23 VA, p. 62. 24 Ibid. 25 André Bazin, ‘La Pointe-Courte: un film libre et pur’, in Le Cinéma français de la libération à la nouvelle vague (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1983), pp. 194–5. First published in Le Parisien Libéré, 7 January 1956. 26 François Truffaut, ‘La Pointe Courte’, in The Films of My Life, trans. Leonard Mayhew (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), pp. 308–10. First published in Arts, 11 January 1956. 27 Philippe Mary, La Nouvelle Vague et le cinéma d’auteur: Socio-analyse d’une révolution artistique (Paris: Seuil, 2006), p. 135. 28 VA, p. 40. 29 Ibid., p. 38. 30 See Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. S. Rabinovitch (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2003) and Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995). Lefebvre’s

book was first published in 1968 and Debord’s a year earlier. 31 Claude-Edmonde Magny, The Age of the American Novel: The Film Aesthetic of Fiction between the Two Wars, trans. Eleanor Hochman (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1972), p. 199. Magny’s study was first published in 1948. 32 William Faulkner, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem [The Wild Palms] (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 273. Cited in Betsy Ann Bogart, Music and Narrative in the French New Wave: The Films of Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 2001), p. 84, footnote 151. 33 Pierre Uytterhoeven, ‘Agnès Varda de 5 à 7’, Positif no. 44, March 1962, p. 1. 34 Michaud and Bellour, p. 9. 35 Varda kept musical notebooks as a guide for collaborating with composers on specific projects. The notebook for La Pointe-Courte contained references to pieces by Vivaldi, Buxtehude, Monteverdi and Gabrieli (Bogart, p. 89). Her collaboration with Pierre Barbaud on an oboe trio for the scenes with Monfort and Noiret resulted in a twelvetone composition (VA, p. 208). 36 Varda, cited by Simone Dubreuilh, Libération, 10 January 1956. 37 Jean Carta, ‘L’Humanisme commence au langage’, Esprit, June 1960, p. 1128. 38 Pierre Lherminier, Jean Vigo (Paris: Pierre Lherminier/Filméditions, 1984), p. 67. See also Jean Vigo, ‘Toward a Social Cinema (1930)’, in Richard Abel (ed.), French Film Theory and Criticism, 1907–1939, vol. II (1929–1939) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 60–3. 39 VA, p. 44.

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40 Daniel Arasse invokes the term pensement, which his fellow art historian Hubert Damisch had borrowed from Nicolas Poussin to designate thoughts that occur between the source text and the final painting, while the painter held brush or pen in hand. See Daniel Arasse, Histoires de peintures (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), p. 312. 41 ‘Agnès Varda’, in Aldo Tassone (ed.), Que reste-t-il de la Nouvelle Vague? (Paris: Stock, 2003), p. 329. 42 Michel Marie, The French New Wave: An Artistic School, trans. Richard Neupert (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 70–1. 43 VA, p. 46. 44 Michaud and Bellour, p. 3. 45 See p. 17. 46 VA, p. 114. 47 Ibid., p. 230. 48 Ibid., p. 115. 49 Ibid., p. 114. 50 Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema, Expanded Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 227. 51 ‘Agnes Varda: A Conversation with Barbara Quart’, Film Quarterly vol. 40 no. 2, 1986–7, p. 4. 52 Jill Forbes, ‘Gender and Space in Cléo de 5 à 7’, Studies in French Cinema vol. 2 no. 2, 2002, p. 84. 53 See also Jean-Yves Bloch, ‘Le Violon et le métronome’, in Études Cinématographiques nos. 179–86, 1991, pp. 119–39. Also see Cléo de 5 à 7: scènario (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), p. 9. Future references will cite this text as C. The screenplay was published in June 1962, two months after the film’s release. 54 See my comments on Rivoli Deuil on p. 46.

55 Roy Jay Nelson, ‘Reflections in a Broken Mirror: Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7’, French Review no. 56, 1983, p. 737. 56 Judith Mayne, ‘Revising the “Primitive”‘, in The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women’s Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 199. 57 Varda’s choice of this establishment as the terminal point of Cléo’s trajectory is anything but arbitrary. The Hôpital de la Salpêtrière opened in 1657 as a hospice to keep beggars, vagabonds and the indigent away from the streets. By the mid-nineteenth century, it had become ‘a kind of feminine inferno, a citta dolorosa confining four thousand incurable or mad women’ (Georges Didi-Huberman, The Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003], p. xi). Sigmund Freud went to the Salpêtrière in 1885 to study under the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, whose use of photography to document his clinical cases was discredited by suspicions that his patients simulated symptoms for the camera. 58 James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 3. 59 See Clifford Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 3–30. 60 Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 5. 61 Orpen, p. 40.

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62 In Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955), Alain Resnais alternated 1933–45 footage shot in black-and-white with colour sequences of some of the same sites a decade later. The ironic effect set the pastoral appearance of the former camps against the physical reality of a genocide of which few visible traces remained. Varda has commented that ‘mixing black and white with colours, as Resnais did it so intelligently in 1956 [sic] in Night and Fog has become common [courant]. Everyone is freer today. You do not even have to use codes of black for the past and colour for the present. In the Heimat series, Edgar Reitz moves freely from black and white to colour’ (VA, p. 62). 63 C, p. 20. 64 Uytterhoeven, p. 10. 65 Claudia Gorbman, ‘Cléo from 5 to 7: Music as Mirror’, Wide Angle vol. 4 no. 4, 1981, p. 42. Orpen’s shot-by-shot analysis of the sequence illustrates convincingly how Cléo departs from a strict linear recording in real time (Orpen, pp. 23–5). 66 C, p. 22. 67 Forbes, p. 84. 68 C, p. 17. 69 C, pp. 25–6. 70 C, p. 29. 71 C, p. 31. 72 Flitterman-Lewis, p. 269. 73 The screenplay refers to the song as ‘La Belle P …’. Gorbman refers to it as ‘La Capricieuse’ (‘The Capricious Woman’). As with the title of Sartre’s 1946 play, La P … respectueuse (The Respectful Prostitute), censorship conventions of the period prohibited the word putain (prostitute) from appearing in print. I have mostly respected the

translation of the song’s lyrics in the English subtitles of the 2005 DVD, even when they depart from the lyrics in the 1962 screenplay (C, pp. 109–10). Si j’ai du talent

I may have talent

il est fort gallant

But he’s not galant

mon corps insolent

My audacious body

le prouve aisément

Proves it with ease

mon corps précieux

My precious, so

et capricieux

capricious

l’azur de mes yeux

The azure of my

audacieux

cheeky eyes

car j’ai des appâts

My alluring figure

tracés au compas

Traced on a

qui ne trompent pas

That never

body

is the bait drawing compass deceives le monde

The world

qui veut mes faveurs

Whoever yearns

savoir la saveur

The flavour

for my pleasures de ma bouche en coeur

Of my luscious lips

de mon coeur

Of my

vainqueur

triumphant heart

qu’il vienne à minuit

Let him come at midnight

en catimimi les poches garnies

On the sly His pockets stuffed

ni vu ni

Neither seen nor [heard]

nous serons amants

We will be lovers

abusivement

To excess

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et folâtrement

And friskily

un moment

For a moment

mais pour un moment

But for a moment

seulement.

Only.

74 The exchange was not reproduced in the 1962 screenplay, but it appears in subtitles on the 2005 DVD. I attribute the discrepancy to censorship surrounding the Algerian war that Varda and other film-makers often tried to skirt through indirect reference. 75 C, p. 43. 76 Villalonga (1920–) appeared opposite Jeanne Moreau in Les Amants (Louis Malle, The Lovers, 1958). His good looks and persona of the worldly European earned him minor roles opposite Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards, 1961) and Julie Christie in Darling (John Schlesinger, 1965). 77 The composer, arranger, conductor and pianist Michel Legrand (1932–) studied with Nadia Boulanger at the Paris Conservatory before launching a career as a singer/bandleader with a 1954 album, I Love Paris. A year later, the self-styled ‘king’ of Parisian music-hall singers, Maurice Chevalier (1888–1972), hired him as musical director for a United States tour. Legrand exploited a passion for bebop and hard bop to record with Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Stan Getz, John Coltrane and Bill Evans. His early work for films included scores for Marker’s Le Joli mai and for Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1963), directed by Varda’s husband, Jacques Demy. Legrand earned Academy Awards for his work on The Thomas Crown Affair (Norman Jewison, 1968), Summer of ’42 (Robert

Mulligan, 1971) and Yentl (Barbra Streisand, 1983). 78 The result approached what Gorbman aptly terms a deliberately glossy ‘studio effect’, as in televised variety shows where a solo performer sings an emotionally charged contemporary tune accompanied by a hidden orchestra (Gorbman, p. 46). Varda met Corinne Marchand (1937– , née Denise Marie Renée Marchand) on the set of Demy’s Lola (1960). Two years later, Demy cast her in the sequence on lust he directed in Les Sept Péchés capitaux (The Seven Capital Sins). Marchand’s subsequent film roles included Tania in René Clément’s Rainer in the Rain (1969) and Mrs Rinaldi in Jacques Deray’s Borsalino (1970). Publicity surrounding Cléo put her face on the pages of US magazines Life, Esquire and Playboy (Orpen, p. 7). See Marchand’s comments on working with Varda, in Francis Lacassin and Yolande Wagner, ‘Avec Corinne Marchand de 5 à 7’, Cinéma 62 no. 67, June 1962, pp. 61–7. 79 Gorbman, p. 44. A recording of Marchand singing ‘Sans toi’ was released in France; a version in English, with lyrics by Mort Goode, was released under the title ‘You’re Gone’. The musical arrangement heard during the rehearsal recalled those in American recordings of the period by vocalists Connie Stevens and Brenda Lee (Bogart, p. 223). 80 C, p. 59. 81 Born Édith Giovanna Gassion in the Belleville section of Paris, Piaf (1915–63) was discovered at age nineteen by Louis Leplée, a nightclub owner who exploited her diminutive size and plaintive voice to create ‘la môme Piaf’ (the kid sparrow). Her stormy personal life was recorded

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in tabloids and in signature songs such as ‘Mon Légionnaire’, ‘La Vie en rose’ and ‘Je ne regrette rien’, Piaf appeared in feature films as early as 1936, later working with Sacha Guitry and Jean Renoir. She died of cancer at the age of forty-seven in October 1963. See Kelley Conway, Chanteuse in the City: The Realist Singer in French Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 178–80 and 184. 82 C, p. 60. 83 Janice Mouton, ‘From Feminine Masquerade to Flâneuse: Agnès Varda’s Cléo in the City’, Cinema Journal vol. 40 no. 2, Winter 2001, p. 3. Bardot’s black page-boy wig in Le Mépris was a visual allusion to Anna Karina’s role as the prostitute, Nana, in Godard’s Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live, 1962) and to the figure of the vamp embodied by Louise Brooks (1906–85). 84 C, p. 61. 85 This gap of five minutes between the clock reading of 5.50pm and the 5.45pm starting time for chapter VIII is among the visible mismatches in the film. 86 C, p. 63. 87 Richard Brooks (1912–92) and Robert Aldrich (1918–83) were among Hollywood figures whose postwar films Cahiers du cinéma critics revered (Marie, p. 128). Godard described Brooks as an American-style intellectual, ‘the Sergeant York of film directing’ (Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, vol. I, 1950–1984 [Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1998], p. 249). Truffaut described the visual style of Brooks’s Deadline (1952) as Italian neo-realist (The Films in My Life, p. 293). Writing in 1955, Jacques Rivette included Brooks among four directors – the others were Aldrich,

Nicholas Ray and Anthony Mann – comprising the Hollywood of individuals whom he pitted against the Hollywood of sums in the form of gate receipts and profits (Jacques Rivette, ‘Notes on a Revolution’, in Jim Hillier [ed.], Cahiers du cinéma, the 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985], p. 94). 88 C, p. 30. 89 VA, p. 56. 90 Marie, pp. 62–4. Also see Jacques Gerber (ed.), Pierre Braunberger, producteur (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou and Centre National de la Cinématographie, 1987) and Gerber (ed.), Anatole Dauman (London: BFI, 1992). 91 Gorbman, p. 40. 92 Mayne, p. 200. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid., p. 201. 95 VA, p. 48. 96 C, p. 92. 97 Gorbman, p. 40 and Bogart, pp. 89 and 220–2. 98 C, p. 95. Antoine’s improvisation recalls a passage in the opening chapter of What Is Literature? (1948) in which Jean-Paul Sartre invokes the same word to illustrate a double relation of resemblance and meaning he attributed to the poetic attitude: Florence is city, flower, and woman. It is city-flower, city-women, and girlflower all at the same time. And the strange object which thus appears has the liquidity of the river, the soft, tawny ardency of gold, and finally gives itself up with propriety and, by the continuous diminution of the silent e, prolongs indefinitely its modest blossoming. To that is added the insidious effect of

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biography. For me, Florence is also a certain woman, an American actress who played in the silent films of my childhood, and about whom I have forgotten everything except that she was as long as a long evening glove and always a bit weary and always chaste and always married and misunderstood and whom I loved and whose name was Florence. (Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘What Is Literature?’ and Other Essays [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988], p. 31).

Is the similarity coincidental? Or is Antoine – along with Varda herself – perhaps more of an intellectual than might appear to be the case? 99 C, p. 99. 100 Mayne, pp. 201–2. 101 C, p. 105. 102 Uytterhoeven, p. 14. 103 VA, p. 48. 104 The oil painting (30.3 x 14.7cm) is in the collection of the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Switzerland. Baldung Grien (1484 or 1485–1545) served briefly as an assistant to Albrecht Dürer. 105 VA, p. 235. 106 Florence Martin, ‘Cléo de 5 à 7’, in Phil Powrie (ed.), The Cinema of France (London: Wallflower, 2006), pp. 118–19. See also Robert A. Koch, Hans Baldung, ‘Eve, the Serpent, and Death’ (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1974). The oil on panel (64 x 32.5cm) is in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, in Ottawa. 107 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, in Michael Jennings (ed.), Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, volume 4: 1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 19.

108 Janet Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’, Theory, Culture, & Society no. 3, 1985, pp. 37–45. Yet others hold that the urban crowd of midnineteenth-century Paris was increasingly invested with female characteristics (Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women [London: Virago, 1991], pp. 7 and 56). 109 Anne Friedberg has noted that the flâneur becomes an easy prototype for the consumer, whose perceptual style of ‘just looking’ was the pedestrian’s equivalent of slow motion (Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993], p. 34). 110 Mouton, p. 8. 111 C, p. 90. 112 C, p. 96. Cléopatra Diane de Mérode (1873–1966) was a classically trained dancer whose glamorous beauty inspired an 1895 portrait by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. Postcards and posters of the period featured her fashionable hairstyle and tiny waist. Rumoured to be linked romantically to Belgium’s King Leopold II while she was in her twenties, Mérode later appeared in Rolf Randolf’s Frauen den Leidenschaft (Women of Passion, 1926), where her performance caught the attention of the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt. The noun demi-mondaine referred to socalled ‘women of easy virtue’. Marcel Proust used it and a related noun, demimonde, in the opening pages of Un Amour de Swann (Swann in Love, 1913) in reference to the shady world of prostitution and ‘kept women’ associated with Odette de Crécy, the lover and later wife of Charles Swann.

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113 Mouton, p. 5. 114 Flitterman-Lewis, p. 268. 115 Susan Hayward, French National Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 256. 116 Ruth Hottel, ‘Including Ourselves: The Role of Female Spectators in Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur and L’Une Chante, l’autre pas’, Cinema Journal vol. 38 no. 2, 1999, p. 66. 117 Geneviève Sellier, La Nouvelle Vague: Un Cinéma au masculin singulier (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2006), p. 59. 118 Monique Mounier, ‘Le Cinéma n’est pas plus difficile pour une femme que pour un homme’, Paris Presse, 17 April 1962. 119 Cited in Françoise Audé, Cinémodèles, cinéma d’elles (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 1981), p. 140. 120 Cited in ibid. 121 Claire Johnston, ‘Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema’, in Sue Thornham (ed.), Feminist Film Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. 39. First published in 1973. 122 Orpen, p. 87. 123 Forbes, pp. 83–4. 124 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 115–19. 125 VA, pp. 54–5. 126 C, pp. 70–1. 127 These three entertainers personified the lasting celebrity to which Cléo aspired. Shahnour Varenagh Aznavourian (Paris, 1924– ) adopted the stage name Charles Aznavour after he started performing as a singer at the age of nine. In 1946, he met Piaf, who took him on tour to the United States and Canada. Aznavour has appeared in more than sixty films, including

Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, Volker Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum (1979) and Atom Egoyan’s Ararat (2002). Renée Marcelle Jeanmaire (1924– ) trained as a child at the Paris Opera Ballet. Her performance as female lead in a 1949 London production of the ballet Carmen led to film roles in the Hollywood musicals Hans Christian Andersen (1952) and Anything Goes (1956). On Piaf, see note 81 above. 128 Georges Perec, Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2000), p. 12. Perec’s notations recorded his thoughts while sitting at a Left Bank café on 8 October 1974. The book was first published in 1975. 129 Georges Sadoul, ‘Le Coeur révélateur d’Agnès Varda’, in Chroniques du cinéma français, 1939–1967 (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1979), p. 270. The expression in the original French ‘cette “pas drôle de guerre”’ (literally, ‘this “not phony war”’, refers to the period of the so-called ‘phony war’ (drôle de guerre) between the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 and the fall of France in June 1940. Sadoul’s article first appeared in Lettres Françaises no. 922, 12 April 1962. 130 The censored films were Vautier’s Afrique 50 (Africa 50, 1950), Resnais and Marker’s Les Statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die, 1953) and Rouch’s Moi, Un Noir. 131 C, p. 92. 132 Roger Tailleur, ‘Cléo: From Here to Eternity’, in Michel Ciment and Laurence Kadish (eds), Positif 50 Years: Selections from the French Film Journal (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), pp. 75 and 77. 133 Pierre Billard, ‘Cléo de 5 à 7’, Cinéma 62 no. 66, May 1962, pp. 115–17.

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134 Jacqueline Fabre, Libération, 30 March 1962 and Yvonne Baby, ‘Un Entretien avec Agnès Varda’, Le Monde, 12 April 1962. 135 Jean de Baroncelli, ‘Cléo de 5 à 7’, Le Monde, 23 April 1962. 136 Bernard Pingaud, ‘À propos de Cléo’, Les Temps Modernes no. 192, 1962, pp. 1767–9 and Samuel Lachize, ‘Cléo de 5 à 7: La Beauté face à la mort’, L’Humanité, 13 April 1962. Depending on context, the French noun le mal translates into English variously as sickness, ache, pain and evil. Pingaud’s statement seemed to assert a degree of semantic slippage between the latter two senses in English.

137 Claude Mauriac, ‘Cléo de 5 à 7’, Le Figaro Littéraire, 14 April 1962. 138 Stanley Kauffmann, ‘Cléo de 5 à 7’, in A World of Film: Criticism and Comment (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), p. 253. First published in The New Republic, 10 September 1962. 139 Ibid. 140 Beylie, p. 26. 141 ‘Cent soixante-deux nouveaux cinéastes français’, Cahiers du cinéma no. 138, December 1962, p. 83. 142 Uytterhoeven, p. 30.

List of Illustrations While considerable effort has been made to identify the copyright holders this has not been possible in all cases. We apologise for any apparent negligence and any omissions or corrections brought to our attention will be remedied in future editions. Cléo de 5 à 7, Rome-Paris-Films; p. 10 – Ulysse, Films of Agnès Varda, courtesy of CinéTamaris; pp. 23 and 25 – La Pointe-Courte, Films of Agnès Varda, courtesy of CinéTamaris; p. 29 – Eugène Atget, “Rue Mouffetard 1925”, silver printing-out paper print, 22.4 x 17.8 cm (trimmed). Museum purchase, ex-collection Man Ray, George Eastman House NEG 5532; p. 49 – Films of Agnès Varda, courtesy of Ciné-Tamaris; p. 51 – Films of Agnès Varda, courtesy of Ciné-Tamaris; p. 89 – Art Resource #21354, Baldung Grien, Hans, Death and the Maiden (1517), canvas, Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland. Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resources, NY; p. 98 – Chronicle of a Summer, Argos-Films; p. 99 – Le Joli mai, Sofracima.

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Credits Cléo de 5 à 7 France 1962 Shooting Schedule and Location June–July 1961 in Paris Director and Scriptwriter Agnès Varda Assistant Directors Bernard Toublanc-Michel Marin Karmitz Producers (Rome-Paris-Films) Georges de Beauregard Carlo Ponti Director of Cinematography Jean Rabier Cinematographer Liliane de Kermandec Film Editor Jeanine Verneau Assistant Film Editor Pascale Laverrière Film Editing Trainee Noune Serra Sound Engineers Jean Labussière Julien Coutellier Sound Mixer Jacques Maumont

Musical Composer Michel Legrand Agnès Varda (lyricist) Production Company Ciné-Tamaris Production Manager Bruna Drigo Assistant Production Managers Jean-François Adam Edith Tertza Production Manager Trainee Claude Laporte Chief Stagehand Roger Scipion Second Camera Operators Paul Bonis Alain Levent Script-girl Aurore Paquiss Chief Electrician Roger Delattre Set and Costume Designer Bernard Evein Assistant Set Designer Robert Christides Costumes Assistant Alyette Samazeuilh Make-up Aïda Carnage

Distribution Companies Athos Films Ciné-Tamaris Publicity and Poster J. Fourastié Film Stock Gevaert-Kodak Developing and Printing Laboratory GTC Format 1/66 Developing Process Black and white (credit/prologue sequence in Eastmancolor) Cameras Mitchell BNC Caméflex Gina Crane, ATC Running Time 90 minutes SIMO (Commercial Distribution) Visa no. 24,864 Pre-Release Screening 2 April 1962 at Studio Publicis, Paris First-run Screening 11 April 1962 at Studio Publicis, Vendôme, Gaumont Rive Gauche, Paris

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Official Selection at 1962 Cannes Film Festival 1962 Prix Méliès Selection at Information Section, 1962 Venice Film Festival CAST Corinne Marchand Cléo-Florence Loye Payen Irma (tarot reader) Dominique Davray Angèle Jean Champion café owner Jean-Pierre Taste café waiter Fernande Engler young woman in café Lucienne Marchand taxi driver José-Luis de Villalonga José Michel Legrand Bob Serge Korber Plumitif Dorothée Blank Dorothée Raymond Cauchetier Raoul Antoine Bourseiller Antoine Robert Postec Doctor

Additional Cast (in Les Mariés du Pont Mac-Donald) Jean-Luc Godard young man in sun glasses Anna Karina young blonde woman Emilienne Mouche young black woman Eddie Constantine man with watering hose Sami Frey undertaker Georges de Beauregard hearse driver and ambulance driver Danièle Delorme flower seller Yves Robert tie and handkerchief seller Jean-Claude Brialy male nurse Alan Scott sailor

Cléo de 5 à 7 is available in DVD format, produced by Criterion Films (2000) and by Ciné-Tamaris (2005) Information Sources for Credits: Varda par Agnès and Ariane Litaize, IDHEC Fiche Filmographique no. 187 (1962)

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Hans Baldung Grien, Death and the Maiden

89