Cleo de 5 a 7

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.

About the Author

Steven Ungar is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the 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).