WFS member Alex Cass examines the role of the camera in Agnès Varda’s film, and how it shapes the main character’s thoughts and behaviour.
Sometimes, when I’m watching a film, it is easy to forget that the camera exists as the mediator between the audience and the action. The frame simply acts as a theatre stage, and I am focused on the players in it, not the way in which they’re shot. The camera, its attentions subtle, disappears from my mind entirely, and all that exists are the characters and their story. A lack of ostentatious camerawork is not a criticism against a film; it is as legitimate a choice as any other.
But there is no forgetting the presence of Agnes Varda’s camera in Cleo from 5 to 7: it is an active participant in the story, and a lively counterargument to its subject’s worldview. It bounces along to her music despite her emotions, and it pushes in gleefully on the things she turns away from in disgust. No character vocally challenges Cleo’s ego: her assistant thinks that she is spoiled and childish, but does not say so, and her musicians by turn flatter and scold her like one. The camera, though, looks outward from the start, and invites Cleo to do the same.
At first, Cleo is defined by her self-absorption. She thinks that everyone on the street looks only at her, as she looks only at herself, but the camera shows how delusional that is. The city is crowded with people going about busy and interesting lives, of whom she is only one among many. Paris in 1961 is a people watcher’s paradise, but it is the camera, not Cleo, who delights in the city streets. Cleo is obsessed with her youth and beauty, her gaze turned inward. Ugliness and age seem to her a kind of death, on par with – if not worse than – the shadow of actual death that hovers over her in the form of her coming cancer diagnosis. When her songwriters have her perform a new number, a lament for aging in a lover’s absence, she performs it beautifully, the backdrop falling away and the music swelling orchestrally, a full musical number springing into being under the power of her performance – but the very subject of the song terrifies her enough to kick her collaborators out and take to the streets in a funereal black dress. She goes to a cafe and puts one of her own songs on the jukebox, and as she stalks around the establishment, the camera goes with her, and shows us all kinds of meetings and partings. Elderly ladies, young parents, students, and countless others converse, argue, or watch the world go by. Cleo sees only that nobody is dancing to her song. Out on the street, crowds gather to watch performers swallow frogs or pierce themselves; Cleo flinches and walks past with her gaze averted, but the camera lingers: it is with the crowd, not her, innocently fascinated by the spectacle. Even from the earliest scenes in the film, the camera is tugging our attention away from Cleo, and hoping that she will join it: while she is having hysterics in the cafe, the camera’s attention is drawn by a young woman breaking up with her selfish boyfriend. But Cleo is not ready yet, absorbed in her cup of coffee.
Eventually, as the film goes on, Cleo’s gaze begins to align with the camera’s. The camera looks outward, and she begins to do the same. Waiting for her friend the model to pick up some film canisters, she has nothing to do but watch the world go by. The camera captures crowds of passers-by, young and old, students, soldiers, wrinkled nuns, and everything in between. Some of them look directly at the camera, a stranger’s fleeting attention that does not judge or fawn as Cleo’s ego might demand, but which simply acknowledges the one looking back. She watches the film with her friend, and this film-within-a-film, with its retro silent-movie style and fixed, static camera, looks like a deliberate contrast to Varda’s fluid camerawork, but it, too, is all about changing your view on what you see in the street.
By looking as the camera looks, with interest instead of ego, the idol steps down from her pedestal and joins the world. The worries of the wider world creep in, giving her pause: she stops to gawk at a bullethole in the window of the cafe where she was less than an hour before; the news is full of the war in Algiers. Cleo meets a soldier and takes a genuine interest in him. On their bus ride she no longer seems so conscious of how she is seen, but interested instead in seeing. In the final frame, as she calmly processes the news of her diagnosis and treatment plan, the camera pushes in on her and her new friend. It is only now, when she is no longer thinking of attention, that the camera gives every bit of it to her.