Jiayu Hu
Jiayu Hu
Nov 5 · 7 min read

Sequence Analysis of Cléo from 5 to 7: Walking under the Gaze

Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), an elegant piece of Agnès Varda’s is her second feature that established her as a rising star in French cinema that was overly dominated by male auteurs in the 60s. What makes the film a fresh breeze to the 60s French cinema is not only because of its authentic femininity but also ascribes to the director’s ingenious manipulation of mise-en-scene. Through the use of camera movement, editing, sound, and lighting, the sequence [48:15 -49:30] encapsulates fluctuations of heroine’s emotional stage as it invites us walking along with her in the 60s Parisian street. The formal decision plays a crucial role in offering the viewer access to her inner world by aligning our perspective with hers. The walk she takes with us under the gaze of the public eye is a brutal confrontation of her own vulnerability. Along the way, the sequence maps out an emotional landscape that explores the ideas of female identity, isolation, and mortality beautifully through Varda’s carefully composed cinematic language.

Under a persistent gaze of the camera, Cléo walks out the crowded Le Dôme Café in Montparnasse exiting from screen right at the end of a long take. Within the narrative, it is a timely break that the character needs, but meanwhile, lets the viewer spend alone time on screen with the heroine. A medium shot of us following her as she walks into a cohort of young men dressed in overalls follows up by a camera movement panning to the right in response to the viewers’ curiosity of how her presence is received by the opposite sex. We capture a wild smile and blatant leers. As soon as the group walks off the screen, it cuts to a point-of-view shot aligning us with Cléo’s perspective. We, all the sudden, “participate in looking…but we also find ourselves as part of the visual field… experience[s] the look and the being looked at.” (Hilary, 128) The shift of perspective is sensible and efficacious for the audience to empathize and sympathize with the character.

After a few male strangers’ faces flash across the screen with consistently intrusive gazes, the camera cuts to a reverse shot disclosing her drained physical state evident by her drowsy eyes. The appearance of a close-up shot that flashbacks to the face of a juggler who she encountered earlier in the film declares the subjective nature of the sequence. It makes clear by the director that what she sees, as what we see, is a projection of her mental state rather than an objective depiction of the people and places. From this point, the sequence evolves into a collage of images that generate both from reality and imagination, consciousness and sub-consciousness, and present and past.

Different from those male gazes, we tend to read the female faces we encountered on screen with altered connotations. They, as well, stare at her, however, their gazes are generally softer and I read them as a mix of judgment, jealousy, and sympathy that often associate with the femininity that is embedded in the popular culture. While the camera tends to linger on those strangers’ faces appeared early in the sequence, it portrays those familiar faces of hers in a stilted manner for rather short durations. These include the pianist Bob, maid Angéle, and her lover. They look straight into the camera, into her eyes without a sense of elusion. If we say others’ gazes serve as a mirror reflecting Cléo’s perception, then, it is evident here that she does not lack the courage to confront with their gazes as she knows, through their eyes, she is objectified and judged by her appearance no more.

In the end, her intersection with a flock of male and female strangers crossing afore winds up the sequence with a powerful finale that mounts the tension to its utmost. It is difficult to watch as both male and female passerby gaze, or more accurately scrutinize her from head to toe as she awaits them to pass. As Hilary comments, “[Varda] creates one of the greatest feminist masterpieces in the history of cinema by enacting the contradictions of femininity and forcing the viewer to experience these contradictions without any means of escape.” (99) Followed by an extreme wide shot capturing her entering from screen left into a boulevard bathed in the soft afternoon sun, Cléo eventually finds her exit. The transition to a wide lens and a setting with abundant sunlight is not only a visual emancipation from those intensive gazes for the spectator, but also a psychological liberation from a suffocating world that is constructed through close-up framing, restricted lighting, and compacted spatial presentation.

Another formal element strikes me with interest is the editing style that overturns the traditional approach that stresses the seamlessness; in other words, the effort of making cuts as invisible as possible. In contrast to the convention, in the sequence, the transitions between shots are made visible by jointing discontinuous or radically different shots in an anti-chronological order. Such scene as a close-up on an old lady, who is walking pass by at the moment, follows by a medium shot of an old man dressed in plaid shirts who appeared in the earlier scene, and later it flashes back to the face of the tarot card reader whose eyes seemed to be staring in vigilance. This kind of seemingly arbitrary cutting is explained in Hilary’s book Feminism and Cléo from 5 to 7 that “New Wave directors juxtaposed the realism of location shooting with formal innovations that had the effect of disrupting realism rather than augmenting it. This juxtaposition creates a unique style that provokes spectator reflection on the reality depicted in the films.” (126) Though a linear narrative is not pursued here, its editing style that resembles photomontage characterizes the moving images with a sense of authenticity.

As the non-diegetic clock ticking sound kicks in, reminding the viewer of fleeting time at the background, the frequency of the cutting starts to match up with the time interval. Varda succeeded in marrying visual and acoustic languages to heighten the tension, anxiety, and apprehension that have been building up in the character’s head. Even though Michel Legrand’s music score is worth to mention for constructing a large picture for the film’s soundscape, the smooth blend of diegetic and non-diegetic sounds in this sequence strengthens the narrative power of the acoustic language. From the beginning of the sequence, the mute of partial diegetic sounds that project from the space accentuates the click-clack sound of Cléo’s footstep, which echoes to the subjectivity that has been played through the visual language. What we experienced is “subjective hearing.” It is a deliberate artistic choice depicting the sounds that project in her mind.

Again, the director plays with the boundary of diegetic and non-diegetic sounds here. If the clock-ticking sound that haunts her over the rest of the sequence could be identified as non-diegetic since its solely visual association, the insert shot of the clock quickly submerges in a series of flashbacks, then the answer to which category the heel-tapping sound belongs becomes rather obscure. The definition of the diegetic sound gets blurred as the sequence proceeds into a collage of flashbacks as her footstep continues. Nevertheless, the sound design surely sinks us into Cléo’s mind that is deeply troubled with self-consciousness, isolation, and fear.

Lastly, it is hard to overlook the symbolism that is implanted by the director through the insert shots of an angelic clock and the wig that is loosely hanged on the mirror frame. If the clock carries a rather obvious message suggesting the approaching deadline that leads to the affirmation of her mortality, the wig invites an open interpretation. To me, leaving her wig behind is a gesture of self-exposing and deconstructing her persona that has been played as a beloved celebrity singer in public. It could be representing her fame and “halo effect” which plays a crucial part in her perception of how others perceive her. Without the wig, without the persona that is fabricated within the popular culture, she is rather “naked.” In the face of death, she is just equally vulnerable and powerless regardless of her beauty and fame. Thus the pain not only generates from her confrontation of mortality but also derives from the realization of her being ordinary as everyone else. “She realizes here that the social order that she endlessly prepares herself for does not really exist…when people do look at her, they see ideal beauty rather then Cléo. They see an ideological fantasy. This gives her status, but it also completely erases her at the same time.” (116)

In conclusion, the director’s thorough understanding of cinematic language allows her to construct such a delicate piece that explores the themes of beauty, femininity, mortality, and subjectivity. By pushing the boundaries of traditional approaches to the use of symbolism, camera movement, editing, and sound, Agnès Varda succeeds in finding a balance between retaining her innovative directorial voice and having her work resonance with the general audience.

Bibliography

Neroni, Hilary. Feminist Film Theory and Cléo from 5 to 7. Bloomsbury Us, 2016. Film Theory in Practice. Web.

Bénézet, Delphine. The Cinema of Agnès Varda : Resistance and Eclecticism / Delphine Bénézet. 2014. Print. Directors’ Cuts.

Darke, Chris, Agnes Varda, and Gilberto Perez. “The Interview: Agnes Varda.” Sight and Sound 25.4 (2015): 46–53. Web.

Ezra, Elizabeth. “Cleo’s Masks: Regimes of Objectification in the French New Wave.” Yale French Studies 118–19 (2010): 177–90. Web.

Conway, Kelley, and Varda, Agnès. “”A New Wave of Spectators”: Contemporary Responses to Cleo from 5 to 7.” Film Quarterly Lxi.1 (2007): 38–45. Web.

Andrews, David. “No Start, No End: Auteurism and the Auteur Theory.” Film International 10.6 (2012): 37–55. Web.

Andrew Higson, The Concept of National Cinema, Screen, Volume 30, Issue 4, Autumn 1989, Pages 36–47, https://doi-org.libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/10.1093/screen/30.4.36

Douchet, Jean. “The French New Wave: Its Influence and Decline.” Cineaste Xxiv.1 (1998): 16–18. Web.

RUGG, LINDA HAVERTY. Self-Projection: The Director’s Image in Art Cinema. University of Minnesota Press, 2014. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt6wr86f.

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