The Unfading Impact of Agnès Varda

The film opens with an overhead shot of hands shuffling a deck of tarot cards and setting them down on a patterned jacquard fabric. ‘Coupez Mademoiselle’, says the voice of the fortune teller, asking her client to cut the deck. The cards are laid down in a grid of nine and, as they are turned over, we see a suite of 19th century images of courtiers, constellations and classical mythological scenes in pale blues and greens. But this fortune is a hard one to read, and these cards are cleared away in favour of a more traditional tarot deck with bright, almost-lurid woodcut images rendered in thick black lines filled with red, yellow and blue. The force of this palette is important: we are nearing the close of the film’s only colour sequence and, in a moment, we will experience an inversion of the pivotal manoeuvre from The Wizard of Oz (1939), transitioning from fantastic, full-colour images into the documentary realism of black and white. 

The Hanged Man appears. ‘Are you sick?’ Yes. The reading continues; the final card is laid. We see Death’s skeleton head, his blank eyes, his blood-covered scythe, shot in fragments. ‘It doesn’t necessarily mean death,’ we hear the fortune teller say, ‘just a complete transformation of your whole being.’ (Just that?) But neither the client nor the audience can really hear these words as true, because we have all seen the durable, powerful image of Death, and the fresh red on his scythe which cuts soil for a new grave, and now it is emblazoned on our consciousness. We will all carry it with us for the rest of the film. Cléo, the protagonist, dissembles. I’ve known since they did the tests. She runs out of the door and down the stairs, the filmmaker capturing her fragmentation by repeating shots of her descent.

The difficulty of living through long minutes is a central concern of Cléo from 5 to 7.

I didn’t really mean to start writing a book about Agnès Varda’s film Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962). I had the complex fortune of beginning a three-month writing residency during the period when my daughter, Cleo, was a baby of six months. Swamped by the awareness of her, the pure physical and psychological labour of caring for her, I couldn’t bring myself to work on the novel for which I had applied to the residency. I wondered if I could wrap the baby into the writing somehow, and remembered the title of Varda’s film, with its echo of her name. Using the title as a constraint method, I would write about life with Cleo between the hours of 5pm and 7pm each evening. A neat idea, yes, and, I naively assumed, manageable. In practice, however, those particular hours were difficult: if anything, they were the hardest part of each day. Fractious moods came upon the baby; it was difficult to appease her – a phenomenon some people call ‘the witching hour’. Time dragged. Yet perhaps this was really the point.

The difficulty of living through long minutes is a central concern of Cléo from 5 to 7, a film set in real time and real space, which follows an aspiring young pop star as she endures time – the real running time of the film – waiting for the results of a biopsy to find out if she has cancer. Chapter headings that appear on scenes are time checks (‘Cléo from 5.05 to 5.08’, ‘Cléo from 5.13 to 5.18’), signalling micro episodes of the day, minutes passing, and the shifting, mercurial moods of a character who is living on the hinge of something. Cléo cries inconsolably in a mirrored cafe one moment, only to gaily try on hats in a boutique a few minutes later, the subjective time periodically bloating and stretching in confusion and loneliness, while objective time ticks on. Pain and loss keep entering Cléo’s body as she becomes isolated in her own head, looks at her face in too many mirrors, and becomes stuck between an image of herself and the image of Death’s skull. 

It’s a work of incredible precision. Set in Paris during the summer solstice of 1961, the film’s blending of documentary and fiction create a heightened sense of a long day passing, and a simultaneous cartography of the city and a troubled self. Cléo walks the streets, hitting her marks, crossing real traffic in front of Café du Dôme at 5.52, passing one of many clocks that show that the scene time and the shooting time are coinciding. This doubled reality effect creates an acute sense of the present tense, a precursor to later works that coincide with the time of their construction, such as Bernadette Mayer’s poem Midwinter Day (1978) or Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010), to name just two. It’s a work of subtle genius, a kind of living document that offers new forms of knowledge on every viewing, as well as larger questions about mortality, art, war, images, cities and time. Not unlike a tarot reading, the film deals in a number of central questions that it turns over for interpretation and, though its deeper themes are grand, they are held lightly, even tenderly, by the filmmaker, who enjoys the visual world of concrete, mirror, glass, feathers and fluff that she captures. What does it mean to be a person? What does it mean to be a person who will die? How is our consciousness made in relation to the exterior world – its spectacles, its textures, its visual sensorium? What does transformation look and feel like?

Cléo cycles through outfits and personas in a poufy blonde wig, in hats, in coquettish feathered lingerie for her lover, but now nothing fits, nothing suits her anymore. She pores over her reflection in mirrors that keep shattering; bad omens keep arriving, but this process only seems to alienate her further from herself. Somehow, the knowledge of her illness has made her realize that she can’t be seen in a mirror. ‘It is incomprehensible, as always, terrifying, this almond shape, this hole,’ writes Nathalie Léger of her own face in the mirror in Exposition (2019). ‘These wrinkles, the black shadow blinking all around, the light, the material and the hole, I step back a bit. The hole remains the same.’

Varda’s handling of cinematic imagery demonstrates both understanding of and ambivalence about the exceptional force of pictures.

Precisely at the film’s halfway mark, there is a shift. We finally cross the hinge point. Cléo rips off her wig during a rehearsal with her band and strides out into the street wearing black. The shots change: we begin to see faces from her perspective, rather than watching her like an object. The mirrors stop appearing as she starts to reach deeper into the world and to ask more questions of it, entering a more relational mode of being that transforms her. She eventually meets a stranger in Parc Montsouris, a soldier who, having been posted to fight in the Algerian War, is also preoccupied by his own mortality. The two find a kind of gentle communion in their uncertainty, walking, talking and looking forward. 

Varda was a photographer before she began to make films, and her handling of cinematic imagery often demonstrates both understanding and ambivalence about the exceptional force of pictures. Around the set of Cléo from 5 to 7, the director tacked up prints of Hans Baldung’s Death and the Maiden paintings (1517, 1518–20), in which Death kisses a woman or pulls on her hair, as a way of embedding these images in the film’s subconsciousness. By contrast, Varda interweaves the Algerian War in the film’s consciousness primarily through sound, beginning with a news announcement heard on a taxi radio – an acknowledgement of everyday Paris’s connection to colonial history and current violence – that is deepened through Cléo’s later meeting with the soldier.  

As a new mother, I was also experiencing disorienting levels of the present tense, and I felt as though I, too, were constantly walking past a clock, unfocused about whatever was behind or in front. I watched the baby examining her reflection in a soft mirrored cube, wondering when the famous Lacanian mirror stage would arrive, when she would misrecognize herself in that reflection as the more coherent rival to her swimming, uncoordinated self. Thinking of swimming, uncoordinated selves, I looked at my own reflection. Where was I? I looked at my phone, which offered me serums made by celebrities that would give my skin a ‘glazed’ look – like a glass, like a doughnut – alongside devastating images of war. The baby cried. I bounced her in her chair. I started listening to the BBC World Service on the radio in favour of receiving information about conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine through compressed images, and the human voices recorded in those places worked their way into my being differently. I thought about my writing, how impossible it seemed to do, and my many years of looking at art, of looking at things. How could I go forward? I grasped the grace that had entered my world, and was alternately happy and depressed, even morbid sometimes, as though my life had ended, as though I had crossed over a hinge. But, then again, it might just have been the transformation of my whole being.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 250 with the headline ‘The Present Tense’

^{Main image: Agnès Varda, Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cléo from 5 to 7) (detail), 1962, film still. Courtesy: © Ciné-Tamaris​​​​​}