Cléo de 5 à 7
By: Steven Ungar.
Series: BFI film classics
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan on behalf of the British Film Institute
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Basingstoke; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 119
ISBN-13: 9781844571765
Subjects: Cléo de 5 à 7 (Motion picture)
Description: "Cleo de 5 a 7, Agnes Varda's classic work of 1962 depicts, in near real time, ninety minutes in the life of Cleo, a young woman in Paris awaiting the results of medical tests that she fears will confirm a fatal condition. The film, whose visual beauty matches its evocation of early Fourth Republic Paris, was a major point of reference for the French New Wave despite the fact that Varda, the only major female French director of the period, never considered herself a member of the core Cahiers du Cinema group of critics-turned-filmmakers." "Ungar provides a close reading of the film and situates it in its social, political and cinematic context, tracing Varda's early career as a student of art history and a photographer, the history of post-war French film, and the lengthy Algerian war to which Cleo's health concerns and ambitions to become a pop singer make her more or less oblivious. His study is the first to set a reading of Cleo's formal and technical complexity alongside an analysis of its status as a document of a specific historical moment."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 109-117).