Cleo de 5 a 7 – BFI Film Classics (discounted)
Cléo de 5 a 7 (BFI Film Classics) by Steven Ungar / ISBN 9781838719364 / 119-page paperback, 5.25 x 7.5 inches, b/w images / discounted copies in like new condition
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Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cléo from 5 to 7), Agnes Varda’s classic 1962 work depicts, in near real-time, 90 minutes in the life of Cléo, 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-Fifth Republic Paris, was a major point of reference for the French New Wave despite the fact that Varda never considered herself a member of the core Cahiers du cinéma group of critics-turned- film-makers.
Ungar provides a close reading of the film and situates it in its social, political and cinematic contexts, tracing Varda’s early career as a student of art history and as a photographer, the history of post-war French film, and the lengthy Algerian war to which Cléo’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 Cléo‘s formal and technical complexity alongside an analysis of its status as a visual document of its historical moment. Steven Ungar’s foreword to this new edition looks back upon Varda’s film-making career and considers her contributions as a female auteur and in the context of the French New Wave.
STEVEN UNGAR is Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of Iowa, USA and the author of a number of books, including Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (co-author with Dudley Andrew) (2005).
