Cleo From 5 to 7 (1962)
After watching films by A24, I moved onto the French New Wave, an important time in French cinematic history starting in the late ‘50s.
After watching films by A24, I moved onto the French New Wave, an important time in French cinematic history starting in the late ‘50s. During this decade of experimentation, filmmakers played with editing (think jump cuts), shooting on location, improvising dialogue, and using handheld cameras. This intimate way of creating movies is seen in Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962), written and directed by Agnès Varda, where we follow a French singer for two hours of her day as she awaits her cancer test results. The movie is intimate in a way that may still be revolutionary to modern audiences; we see her life inside her home and on the street, with her wardrobe providing more or less insight into how she wants the world to see her, if at all. Although this was only one of two Varda films I’ve seen—the second being the delightful documentary Faces Places (2017), featuring Varda and French photographer and street artist JR, whose interactive mural may still be up at SFMOMA—it certainly won’t be my last. Watch Cleo from 5 to 7 on HBO Max and Kanopy.