SCREENING: CLEO 5 TO 7 & DISCUSSION
Notes before the film:
Please analyze a scene from Cleo from 5 to 7 and explain how it
illustrates the unique formal style of Varda and other French New Wave/Left
Bank directors in the reading for this Module. Please choose a scene other than the
one I embedded earlier in the Module (i.e. Cleo sings along with nondiegetic
music).
Your post should identify and analyze one of the formal
elements of the French New Wave/Left Bank covered in the reading and Module.
You also may wish to discuss other directors studied this week and how their
formal characteristics reflect the experimentation of the French New Wave. How
do the French New Wave/Left Bank films differ from the French films we studied
last week? You should embed a still from the scene or YouTube clip from Cleo from 5 to 7 in
your post. Please choose a scene that someone from your group has not already
discussed.
Cleo from 5 to 7
Agnes Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7,
essay by - Molly Haskell, Criterion Collection
1)The first fully-achieved feature by the woman who would become
the premiere female
director of her generation
2)It ‘dazzled’ when it opened
3) Looks even more timely today in its tackling of the fashionable subject of
female
identity as a function of how women
see and are seen by the world.
4)Its appearance in 1962 signaled Varda’s participation in the collective burst
of talent
that made the early sixties one of the most
exciting and creative periods the cinema
has ever known.
5)All the rejuvenating forces of French cinema were coalescing in a rapidfire
succession
of new names, new films, the “New Wave”:
6)1962 was the same year of husband Jacques Demy’s La Baie des anges,
a year
after Truffaut’s Jules and Jim and
Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad,
two years after
Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and
three after Claude
Chabrol’s Les cousins and Les bonnes femmes.
7)More than any of the others, one feels in Cléo the
influential shadow of Godard (he
actually appears in a film within the film)
8)Godard influence on Varda:
a)in the heady exhilaration at breaking
narrative rules,
b)in
the use of hand-
c)held camera,
d)and
in the featuring of Paris itself as a character in the film.
9)Varda didn’t share the film-buff (and theoretical Cahiers du cinéma)
roots of Truffaut
and Godard;
10)rather, her background as a photojournalist,
then documentarian,
11) it expresses itself in the styling of striking images upon which the rush
of news-of
-the-day events are constantly
intruding.
12)The story is of a woman, a spoiled pop singer named Cléo (Corinne Marchand)
suddenly confronting cancer
13)—and, what for her is even worse than
death, the possibility of ugliness and
disfigurement
14)Varda’s photojournalistic instincts are apparent in the way she turns Paris
into a hall
of mirrors—windows and faces that reflect the
heroine back to herself.
15) We follow as she wanders through different sections of the city in the two
hours
preceding a dreaded doctor’s appointment, where
she will get her final test results.
16) It is an odyssey that, like so many
French films, is about the double delight of
watching a beautiful woman against the
backdrop of the most beautiful of cities,
17) It is also a spiritual journey from blindness to awareness,
18) From self- absorption to the possibility of love.
19) In showing us a woman whose sense of self is formed not by inner desires
and
drives but by her need for approval in the
eyes of others.
20)Varda is confronting the vanity of a beautiful woman as well as her beauty.
- Molly Haskell, Criterion Collection
Also here' s a Link from the group Coffee With Aliens At The Movies Click Here for their review
My essay of the film - which I must say I'm proud of...after watching so many films.
The assignment was 300 words but I did 1000...hopefully that's not an issue.
MY ESSAY
Ida Z. daRoza
The French New Wave and Beyond
In Agnes Varda’s The Beaches of Agnes (2008) she says that in France five to seven were known as the hours that a man meets with his mistress. Cleo is at the beginning a vapid, spoiled mistress with a man that spoils her but not a meaningful relationship. Being that she is a 5 to 7 mistress its clever that she formatted the time to take place from 5 to 7.
There are a lot of mirrors used in the film where she looks at herself at various stages of the film. In this scene she is seeing her reflection in an outward facing mirror of a Chinese restaurant.
This is one of the first honest looks that she is giving herself. Before this she was admiring herself in the mirrors of the hat shop and her own dresser. In this picture she says “My unchanging doll’s face, this ridiculous hat”.
The unchanging doll face is starting to crack. The emotionless Cleo is changing from just a beautiful singer and mistress, always smiling through life and starting to come to terms with her true self and her mortality slowly through the film.
In the hat shop scene, she had been dancing and looking at herself in all the mirrors. She didn’t seem to worry except for admiring her beauty and picking out a pretty hat. The mirrors in there were reflecting her baby doll face. The hat is an important prop in that it is a shallow desire to top off her fake hair and also to pick it out to something naughty that her personal assistant said was a winter hat and not suitable for summer. She told her girlfriend later that that is one of the reasons she childishly picked it.
Unknowingly she picked a black hat one of the many things that are black and foreshadowing of death. Winter is also death-like weather compared to the summer that it was. Symbolically the last day of summer.
The fun event is spoiled as her assistant won’t let her wear the new hat because its bad luck to wear something new on Tuesdays. She then wants to carry her purchase her hat in the pretty store bag but the assistant again tells her no it would be bad luck. Things are starting to change in her life this is just a little disillusionment but they are cracking in the veneer.
There were beautiful references to art and literature throughout the film. This is a characteristic of being a Left Bank New Wave artist. Agnes had studied art at École du Louvre. In the first café there are advertisement posters for exhibits. Driving through town they drive past an African art gallery twice. There are artists running out in the streets mobbing the car, I’m sure an homage to her student days. She looks through the art at the café, and her friend is a nude model for artists. There’s also a quote from Shakespeare.
Just as Agnes did a tribute to her art background and literature. The Cahier artists being true cinephiles also make their tributes. In Truffaut’s the 400 blows (1959) the happiest moments from the young Antoine’s child’s life are cutting school to go to the movies and going to the movies with his parents. Cinema was important in his real life from a young age he learned cinema through watching movies repeatedly.
In Breathless (1960) Godard has several odes to cinema. He has Michel stop for a while and admire a film poster of Humprhey Bogart. The character in itself is a noir bogart-like character with crime drama and a dame who betrays him.
There is also a beautiful interview scene where Patricia interviews where we are breaking a fourth wall almost, she is there to interview an author. This author is played by Jean-Pierre Melville whose films were influential to him. This film having the rouge Michel where Melville had Bob in Bob le Flambeur (1956)
It’s interesting though that Agnes Varda does a similar cinema nod tribute and her friend and director Godard. Cleo went with her friend Dorothee to see her projectionist boyfriend and deliver a canister of film. The boyfriend Raoul lets them see a film short while it is being played. The actor in the small film short is Godard. He was a friend of hers. In The Beaches of Agnes she said that she loved his eyes and asked as a friend to pose without his glasses. He did that here in the film too, but just briefly.
Other style characteristics are the filming outdoors in the streets of Paris. Or indoors in cafes in Paris. There is a scene in Cleo 5 to 7 where she is happy and gliding down a staircase in the park. It reminded me of a similar scene in The 400 Blows where Antoine and his friend run happily down a beautiful staircase in a park in Paris.
Another characteristic of New Wave is innovative ways a playing with narrative. The extreme example of this is in Last Year in Marienbad (1961) by director Alain Resnais. The narrative is extremely disconnected from the characters. It used artistically and not to drive the plot. The voices were disconnected from actors. In Cleo 5 to 7 this happened several times. My favorite is when her assistant took a moment before responding to Cleo by having narrative of her thoughts being spoken saying, “Her and her hysterics! She could be happy but she needs to be looked after. She’s a child.” In another scene as Cleo walks around a café she passes tables and hears conversations but they do not drift in and out of our hearing range they continue to be heard clearly as she is walking around past the tables.
A breakthrough style of Godard’s was to use a hand-held camera walking around the streets giving it a more realistic look following Michel through the streets of Paris. Agnes did a beautiful job with the hand-held camera through the movie. Especially in the café scene where we are walking around and around. The camera follows her line of view. It looks like the camera even opened up the door.
The tributes to filmmakers having cameos in the films of Godard and Agnes is a new and clever technique they both used almost breaking a fourth wall but not. It mirrors that the New Wave built upon the masters that inspired them.
GRADE 3/3
| A great entry on the complexities of the New Wave films and filmmakers as well as Varda's special touches in Cleo from 5 to 7 | Denah Johnston, Dec 17 at 5:51pm |
