September 30 2026
SIFF, Alliance Française, and Greg Olson Productions present
Nouvelles Femmes
Modern Women of the '60s French New Wave
Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961) In the 1980s Agnès Varda taught a film class at the California Institute of the Arts. She told her students, “Set up your camera in an LA restaurant, no need to load any film. Now, stay put and look, for an hour. What is in the frame, what comes in and out of the frame? There is a moment something happens. Could you predict it? Films should find you. Something happens that pushes you to do it.”
Directed by: Agnès Varda Screenplay by: Agnès Varda
Director-producer Lynne Litman, who created the Directors Guild of America’s Women’s Steering Committee: They say that filmmaking is a collaborative medium. Not for Agnès. Cigarette dangling from her mouth, she was an expert at everything, a solo act. The film happened on her energy. She knew what she wanted and got it. She directed and edited like a painter. She had freedom of direction and total editing control. And still, her films feel like they happen by accident.
Cinematography by: Jean Rabier
Agnès Varda: I was the only girl among the Cahiers du Cinéma boys, the writer-directors. Their influences were movies, mine were paintings, books... life. Cléo is a portrait of a woman painted onto a documentary about Paris. It was a huge challenge to film everything chronologically, in order. All the clocks had to properly match her progression.
Edited by: Jeanne Vermeer
Cléo is the cliché woman, like a princess: tall, beautiful, blonde, voluptuous. She’s come to believe that, “As long as I’m beautiful, I’m alive.” The whole dynamic of the film lies in showing the woman at the moment that she doesn’t want to be this cliché, the moment she doesn’t want to be looked at, when she wants to do the looking herself. It happens forty-five minutes into the film, half way. She puts on a black dress like Edith Piaf, and from being the object of the look, she becomes the subject who looks. For me the film is a metaphor for feminism. I was a country girl, of the sun and the sea, so at first Paris was a grey, crowded, fearful place for me. Cléo needed to be afraid of something, the possibility that she has cancer, and at the end of the film she meets a man afraid, a soldier about to go off to war. Their encounter is a gentle whisper, their time together too short and too long. The space between them is enormous and compressed. There’s something extremely subtle between them, together just being. It’s not about being in love. It’s something you feel in exceptional circumstances. Martin Scorsese: Agnès was one of the Gods of the cinema. She really opened the way for filmmakers to question all the inhibitions they'd inherited, all the expectations. As an undergraduate student of nineteen, Cléo was a quite a shock to me, one that opened my thinking in many ways. I was seeing the world and experiencing time from a woman’s point of view for the first time in movies. Such freedom and poignancy when she looks in the mirror. Is she just a pop star admiring herself, or is she confronting her mortality? No male director would have dared to combine lyricism with such dramatic circumstances. We acknowledge Ericka Knudson, author of Nouvelles Femmes: Modern Women of the French New Wave and Their Enduring Contribution to Cinema (Chronicle Books), whose groundbreaking work explores the women at the center of the French New Wave. Greg Olson Productions is sponsored by Inn at the Market.
Music by: Michel Legrand
THE PLAYERS: Corinne Marchand as Cléo Antoine Bourseiller as Antoine Dorothee Blanck as Dorothee Michel Legrand as Pianist Bob Dominique Davray as Angèle José-Luis Vilallonga as The Lover Jean-Luc Godard, Anna Karina as Film Actors with Jean-Claude Brialy, Eddie Constantine, Sami Frey
CLÉO FROM 5 TO 7 BY ROBERT HORTON There are many ways of looking at Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7, but let’s begin with light. As we experience them, movies consist entirely of light; we might put our hands on a sculpture and experience it as clay or bronze, or sniff the oil paint and trace our fingers across the canvas of a painting, but a movie is only light, projected on a wall or otherwise broadcast. So the way a filmmaker thinks about light ought to matter. There is a scene in Cléo that begins with two women getting into a car, which they drive into Paris traffic. After some whimsical banter, the title character (played by Corinne Marchand) expresses her anxieties about the medical news she is waiting to hear, and her friend Dorothée (Dorothée Blanck) sympathetically responds. The way the scene is shot would’ve been rejected by any Hollywood— or for that matter, Paris—studio. As the car pulls out of an alley, our elevated view is mostly blocked for a while by the railing between the camera and the vehicle. The camera tracks along and the car passes beneath an overpass, at which point it goes into complete darkness for a few seconds until gradually emerging into light again; in fact, the camera crew seems to have lost the car, because now it trails behind and has to catch up. A curious jump cut helps us come back alongside the car. How thoroughly unprofessional—allowing a shot to plunge into darkness! Didn’t Varda have a package of lights? Shouldn’t we be able to see the actresses' faces? But of course, this is the French New Wave, and we have seen how Jean-Luc Godard shot Breathless with jump cuts, without artificial lighting, and with a camera and film stock meant for newsreels, designed to catch action on the fly. The New Wave directors wanted to rebuke traditional filmmaking by going the opposite direction, and here Varda flexes: She wants us to see movies in a new way. Something here is fresh, untidy, and not cinema de papa, as the New Wave critics put it. That shot-in-the-dark aligns with another of Varda’s career-long fascinations. When this director makes fiction films, they have a quality of documentary about them; when she makes documentaries, they carry a touch of drama. Varda said that Cléo was “the portrait of a woman painted on to a documentary about Paris,” and in many ways that is how the film feels. When we watch Cléo walk on the street early in the film, in a shot from a high angle, we can sense that this is an unrehearsed moment with “extras” who do not know they are in a movie; the traffic around her is unchoreographed, the men who leer at her are real. This kind of texture lends a rawness to the movie-watching experience that must’ve felt very new in 1962. Some of this might sound like so much film-critic noodling— except that Varda’s style is also what the movie is about. We meet a semi-famous pop star who worries, in the course of two hours,
about her cancer diagnosis. From the beginning, Varda takes a critical eye to this shallow, self-centered character, although of course Cléo’s mortal anxiety also makes her painfully human. In the course of the afternoon, the diva begins to lose some of her shellacked exterior (represented especially by a formidable ‘60s wig) and finds herself connecting with a humble soldier she meets in a park. Varda takes a critical eye to surface beauty, finding more excitement in authenticity (thus the unvarnished views of de-glamorized Paris). Varda connects her theme and her style in the visit from Cléo’s lover, who does not really seem like much of a lover. They sit on a bed and the camera revolves around them as schmaltzy music plays; it’s the very image of a Hollywood movie scene, the kind of thing that conveys the most superficial ideas about “love” and which appears quite empty in Varda’s parody version. There are other parodies of love here, including the absurd silent film that features Jean-Luc Godard, his wife and star Anna Karina, and B-movie icon Eddie Constantine. Varda’s casting of Cléo underscores this, as Corinne Marchard, who had had success as a nightclub singer (and had appeared in a film by Varda’s husband, the New Wave director Jacques Demy), is wonderfully chic and icon-like but somewhat cool and stiff in her manner, corseted in her designer clothes and that wig—when she sings the torch song “Sans Toi,” it’s as though she lets something loose that doesn’t fit her well-manicured image. (The song’s composer, Michel Legrand, is in the scene playing the piano; he would compose the music for Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg in 1964.) By comparison, Cléo’s sympathetic friend Dorothée is first seen utterly naked—we’re in a life drawing class for artists, and she is the model—completely comfortable with herself and her environs. As the only major female director of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda was the true Nouvelle Femme of the era. But she carries no whiff of trendiness, nor of any simplistic visions of women in her films; she’s not here to be a cheerleader, but an artist. When we get to Le Bonheur, we will see just how astonishingly uncompromising and unsentimental her vision was. For Cléo, the ticking clock that propels the movie is ruthless and almost cruel—it doesn’t so much build suspense as wear down our main character. The New Wave had charm to spare, and hipness; there’s no mystery why viewers might’ve emulated the cool Parisians on screen. But there is steeliness here, and a tough critique of the way things are. (Picture the close-up of the bone fragments in a box at the end of Jules and Jim.) And for the women in Contempt and Jules and Jim and Le Bonheur, the stakes are lethal. Within this wave, Varda isn’t playing nice.