Cléo from 5 to 7 and the Performance of the Flâneuse
on different hats and poses accordingly, for the audience of Angèle, the shopkeeper, and herself. As a flâneuse, Cléo finds intoxication in slipping into the personality of others. Whether it be characters who exist around her or personalities conjured up from the suggestion of a hat, the flâneur’s and Cléo’s journeys into “each man’s personality” is in fact a change in subjectivity that is enabled by the imagination.36 The flâneuse’s subjectivity is fluid as she is able to slip into the subjectivities of others at will, yet it is fragmented for the same reason. In Cléo from 5 to 7, Cléo’s performance as a flâneuse is the medium through which she experiences different modes of perspective, suggesting that the distorted images filtered through each subjectivity are as much performed as the characters themselves.
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Notes Neil Archer, “Sex, the City and the Cinematic: The Possibilities of Female Spectatorship in Claire Denis’s Vendredi soir,” French Forum 33, no. 1 (2008): 256-7. 2 Anne Friedberg. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 3 Janet Wolff, “Gender and the haunting of cities (or, the retirement of the flȃneur),” in The Invisible Flâneuse?: Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris, ed. Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 22. 4 Ibid., 21. 5 Wolff, 22. 6 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (1982) (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), M2, 8, pp. 420. 7 Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, in association with Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 154-5. 8 Ibid,. 156. 9 Gilloch, 153. 10 Valerie Orpen, Cléo de 5 à 7 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 73. 11 On a more ominous note, the image also foreshadows her death. 12 Elizabeth M. Anthony, “From Fauna to Flora in Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7,” Literature/Film Quarterly 26, no. 1 (1998): 89. 13 Anthony, 93. 14 Anthony, 93. 15 Ibid., 94. 16 Gilloch, 1955. 17 Ibid., 5. 18 Ibid., 8. 19 Mouton’s definition of the flȃneuse does not acknowledge the performative aspect of the flȃneur. While she notes the performative nature of early flȃneuses such as George Sand, who disguised herself as a man, in Mouton’s thesis Cléo’s flȃnerie is equated with the permanent removal of masquerade. 20 Ibid., 5. 21 Ibid., 9. 22 Ibid., 153. 23 Gilloch, 153; Benjamin, J10, 8, pp. 246. 24 Hilary Neroni, Feminist Film Theory and Cléo from 5 to 7 (Bloomsbury, 2016), 106. 25 Ibid., 108. 1
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