Paris Centrifuge: Cléo de 5 à 7 in Black and White, or: The Ills of Colonialism
2021; Telos; Volume: 2021; Issue: 197 Linguagem: Inglês
10.3817/1221197079
ISSN1940-459X
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoAgnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962) is a film that draws a circle around itself—or rather a number of overlapping circles. The story of a self-absorbed young woman whose narcissistic bubble is cracked open by the threat of death, and by a (nearly circular) journey through Paris, Cléo appears to move from the inside out, toward a greater world that both threatens mortal danger and promises, perhaps, a kind of redemption.2 Varda called the film a “subjective documentary,” indicating the historical importance of Paris as the larger sphere of the film’s action, a sphere toward which indeed, one could say, it opens and turns. The city is no mere backdrop; it impinges upon the protagonist as a powerful force, while also drawing her out in ways that are shattering, rending, even sickening and violent. Likewise, the “subjective” aspect of Cléo is not merely psychological insofar as the film allows us to place this subjectivity within the social conditions that make it possible. As viewers have noted, these conditions include an intensely commodified social and urban landscape in which Cléo herself circulates as a commodity, a beautiful woman to whom all gazes are drawn, and who thrives, at least at first, on those gazes and on the visibility of her proliferating image. The powerful fixing and dramatic breakdown of Cléo’s gender trouble along these lines is a major aspect of the film, and much of the criticism has rightly focused on these questions, which to Varda’s credit are woven into the film in rich and complex ways.3
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