Film! Film!

My education started when most people’s end. It began in my early twenties with the BBC, and its seasons of classic films; a museum of film art, from that great period - the 1950’s through to the mid 70’s. A particularly powerful influence was the Nouvelle Vague, with Jules et Jim leaving the biggest impression.

Despite my enthusiasm for the French New Wave I had never seen an Agnès Varda movie, although she’s a key figure.

On Thursday rushing to see Cleo 5 to 7 I was blocked by a crowd of people inside the BFI. Pushing my way through I knock down an elderly French lady. She falls rather badly. She’s later carried away to the hospital. Some rush to her aid, others, poets and professors mostly, attack me! They throw me to the ground, kicking me all over the place. And they quote as they go - I have a bruise for every line they shout. One’s really into Larkin – you know the one. Somehow I manage to escape, scrambling through a rather ugly rendition of An Elegy upon the Death of My Lord Francis Villiers. The last thing I hear “You’ve killed French cinema!”

Not feeling so good I stumble into the film. And…

It’s a masterpiece. And overwhelming, as they often are. Nearly everything about it is original and deep. The photography – what an eye! Then there’s the juxtaposition of unusual images on the same screen, often capturing a moment of repose with a moment of movement (eg when Cleo gets out of the taxi in the park and to the right are children on rocking horses).

There’s the structure of the film: the last two hours of Cleo’s wait, for the test results of her illness (the film is not two hours long). Each encounter is called a chapter, which appears at the bottom of the screen. This gives an unusual feel, and adds a bit of tension.

And Cleo. We get a feel for the character, and its many layers: vain, fragile, capricious but also strong and, in her professional life, self-assured and knowledgeable. There’s also brilliant analysis of that feeling of unsettledness; when you wait for something important. The film captures those emotions, particularly the sudden shifts between joy and despair.

The hat shop. Often when we choose something, it happens right away (something pops inside us and says that’s the one!), though we continue to look at everything else – almost as if we must delay the pleasure of buying it. Varda captures this on the film. During this scene there’s a wonderful moment when Cleo is so completely absorbed she forgets everything else… and so do we, we feel it too….

The film is clearly part of the Novelle Vague: the obsession with Parisian Street and the cinematic image itself (and the history of cinema – there’s a short film within a film in Cleo 5 to 7). Yet, like all great art the film absorbs the style, and the associated cluster of ideas, into itself, adding them to the texture and density of the work. They are no longer just ideas but become part of the fabric of the film. It’s that transformation that all ideas must have, to make them art; to make them live!

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