Approaches & Analysis - Agnes Varda (Week 2)

 Varda's first film: La Pointe Courte - (1954 just made a few years before the five main male filmmakers we associate with the French new wave became active as filmmaker) just name of  fishing village, where Varda was sent with her family when she was evacuated during the second world war.

JR has still of this film on his wall.

Cleo from 5 to 7 (1961) -  developing as a filmmaker and establishing herself as an important filmmaker. 

Varda has an ethnographic approach to filmmaking - consistent in all her films.

( ETHNOGRAPHY - PROCESS OF OBSERVATIONAL INQUIRY / INTEREST THROUGH OBSERVING , WATCHING , UNDERSTANDING CULTURES & COMMUNITIES BETTER. )

Jill Forbes: ''Like many of Varda's films, Cleo de 5 a 7 is both a fiction and documentary, in Varda' 's own phrase 'a subjective documentary'' 

- subjective documentary , inquisitiveness about the world, sense of wanting to capture something unfiltered but nevertheless something that has a very definite subjectivity within in it. subjectivity of the filmmaker herself is located in our lead character.

Jill Forbes: ''Cleo de 5 a 7 participates in the anthropological move which has been described as 'the mythical mapping of time onto space''

- Anthropology - study of aspects of the human experience (behaviors) - how do people behave in space and time. Space and time of this film - Paris in early 60s.

Jill Forbes: ''Cleo de 5 a 7 foregrounds the anthropological dilemma posed by the double role of the viewer who is both participant in events and observer/recorder of them.''

- while we observe human expressions of human experiences that we see in the actions to be observed, we are participating in a process , an exchange about that is proposed.

Connections that we might hold onto, in terms of Faces, Places:

• film that's on some kind of threshold that's in-between fiction and documentary
• Film that privileges' a female subjectivity.
• film that is about place and time
• film that is about the way in which we follow its lead character; a woman who undergoes a personal growth to maturity, self awareness and knowledge

Cleo de 5 a 7:

• about the city - whereas faces, places is about the wider aspect of France
• experience about being in the city and particularly the city of Paris
• mobility is central to the films structure and themes (as is Faces, Places)
• space is a continuity between the two
• poses question about time, about the past time, present and future. 
• asks questions about the way in which time is regulated in modern life - how subjectivities operate within regulated parameters of time.

Cleo:

• in the film she's a famous singer 
• quite early on we find out she's quite pampered by her assistant 
• spoiled, treated a bit like a child.
• Cleo herself is a very vain, narcistitic woman
• both of these women are quite very superstitious - film begins with them consulting a tarot card reader
• that part of the film begins in colour - the tarot reader sees death in Cleo's card. We learn very quickly that Cleo is waiting for test results
• Her concern isn't that she's gonna die its that she's gonna become ugly and diseased.
• She looks at herself in the mirror, she says that while she's beautiful she's fully alive.
• Illness threatens her sense of self
• Immediately in question of identity of this woman.
• Motif of mirrors - we see reflections in windows, image of Cleo replicated
• How does Cleo see herself? quite literally and how is she seen by others. How does this change?

Cleo is set in real time and in a real place - Central Paris, 21st June 1961

- 21st of June is the longest day of the year - summer solstice 

- 20th of June is also the day that begins the astrological sign of Cancer.

Takes place between the hours of 5pm and 7pm in the evening. Dramatic temporality of this film.

the actual film only runs for 86 minutes not 120 minutes. Not a window on the wall, not following, this is very much a fiction.

Varda wasn't associated with French New Wave filmmakers, she was more associated with Avant-garde filmmakers who were termed the 'Left Bank Group'. 

Film is broken into chapters - very deliberate on Varda's part, episodes that Varda presents to us as contained in some way. 

Cleo in her apartment (midpoint of the film) - she's a socialite, social being for whom the hours between 5-7 have a particular connotation - relaxing in her own apartment , visited by lover an musician, holds court with people in private place.

- Jill Forbes calls her a kept woman, attention is lavished on her, material things are lavished on her by her lover.

- in French 5 - 7 is more traditionally like happy hour time, boundary between day and night activities.

- in Cleo's case 5 - 7 also refers to that illicit hour that affairs take place.

CLIP: Cleo & Angel walking to taxi

• Rivoli Deuil - place the just left, Rivoli being name of the street and Deuil in French means mourning
• They're walking past as undertakers
• out in the street filmmaking in Paris (60s)
• People notice Cleo, they watch her
• Cleo sees luxury objects and she wants one.
• The way Varda uses mirrors and reflection through windows that there is a wider world that Cleo is ignorant to as she tries on hats
• visual play - with transparent surfaces that give us reflection and let us see beyond - tension between these two worlds, separated by very little - sense of Cleo being contained. < we begin to see mounted police (patriarchal authority) that surrounds the place in which we sees Cleo. Travels around and surrounds her through windows.
• Someone whose shallow, superficial, performs, conventionally feminised in terms of these fluffy feathers.
• Throughout the film we get the sense of a woman who plays the role of a social construct, something that's been prescribed to her. 
• Her self discovery such as as it is for Cleo will only come when she escapes the public's eye. Begins to enter world beyond her own limitations. 

CLIP: Cleo takes off wig and leaves home

• Man eats frogs - we see Cleo being repulsed by what she sees. Get a sense already she's in uncharted terrority - disordered place where she can't control what she's confronted with.
• Face in the crowd rather than closed off by mirror
• Instead of hearing her song - we hear people talking about the war in Algeria - fragment of conversation is important to place and time - Cleo's lack of connection to broader part of world she's not apart of.
• Algeria - great unmentionable in France during this time. In French new wave films there's very little mention but in Cleo, we hear it in the Café, in the taxi, African statues outside taxi, she also meets a soldier who's on leave from Algeria and is just about to go back there who expresses a fear about dying for nothing in this 'pointless war'
• Death & Dying is an undergoing awareness in 21st June 

Cleo's self awareness occurs when she leaves that Café and walks down the street, we begin to see what she sees externally, look at those who past her. She's in a different relationship from us with her own thoughts.

She meets Antoine who she then begins to reveal her authentic self to, she's not Cleo, she's Florence. Her journey in space and time has brought her to this authentic open and honest exchange with someone on equal terms. Active looker - someone who is inquisitive about the world.

Critic Sandy Flitterman Louis - she has argued that Cleo in this film undertakes a spiritual journey that takes her to object to subject, woman as spectacle to woman as social being. Gains a better understanding of herself. Assumes power of vision, subjective vision of her own.

The short film that Cleo watches with her friend Dorothy, think about the echoes with this work and film Faces Places - creates art within art.  Black and white inversion, life and death inversion. Its playful because it clematises sight and vision. The actors in this film are played by Jean Luc Godard and Anna Karina. - reminds us of JR