Slideshow
CLÉO FROM 5 TO 7
France, 1962
Written and directed by Agnès Varda
Starring Corinne Marchand, José Luis de Vilallonga, Loye Payen, Dominique Davray
In French with English subtitles
Approx. 90 mins.
“As long as I’m beautiful, I’m alive.” Seemingly without a soul, chanteuse Corinne Marchand starts to find one as she treks across Paris towards a hospital after a tarot reader’s ominous prediction for the results of her cancer test. With the film unfolding in real time, she stops off for shopping, a musical interlude with pal Michel Legrand, and a silent comedy starring Godard and Anna Karina. “The portrait of a woman painted onto a documentary about Paris,” said Varda, describing her New Wave classic that has steadily grown in stature over the years and landed at #14 on Sight and Sound’s 2022 list of the greatest films of all time.
Preceded by
You Have Beautiful Stairs, You Know
France, 1986
Directed by Agnès Varda
In French with English subtitles
Approx 3 mins.
Varda’s tribute to the Cinémathèque Française, “disguised as an ad,” is really a tribute to the art of cinema and to the act of moviegoing.
Presented with support from The George Fasel Memorial Fund for Classic French Cinema and The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Fund
Reviews
“I felt that I was seeing the world and experiencing time from a woman’s point of view for the first time in movies. There is a remarkable sense of freedom and poignancy at those moments she looks in the mirror. Is it just a pop star obsessed with her looks? No male director would have ever dared that kind of lyricism under those dramatic circumstances.”
– Martin Scorsese
“CLÉO is... both the freest of films and the film that is the greater prisoner of constraints, the most natural and the most formal, the most realistic and the most precious, the most moving to see and the most pleasant to watch.”
– Roger Tailleur, Positif, March 1962
“CLÉO is among other things the most beautiful film ever shot in and about Paris.”
– Claude Baylie
“Varda turns a close observation of Cléo’s desperate whirl of activity—complete with the enticement of fashion, the delight of the movies (including a comedic film-within-a-film), and the hope of new love—vertiginously introspective.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker