While watching Agnès Varda’s Cléo From 5 to 7 (1961), the use of raw footage from Parisian streets is not lost upon the viewers. As the protagonist Cléo strolls down the streets, she elicits stares, catcalls, and older women scornfully eyeing her up and down. What’s interesting is that Varda’s complicates the reality / film binary commonly accentuated in French New Wave by quite simply allowing the mise-en-scene to be reality, which might understandably cause pedestrians to find interest in the cameras and the dolled-up woman, Cléo. Even further, though, the pedestrian’s natural reactions to the camera allows for a “real” representation of Cléo’s experience being an object of the gaze. The significance of the raw footage becomes clear as the line between reality and the film’s constructed reality blurs and as Cléo becomes an object of looking both inside film and the outside world. Ultimately, pedestrians’ intrusive reactions to Cléo and the camera reveal the inescapable vulnerability of the female identity and capture Cléo’s existential dilemma as she waits for news about her illness— she neither creates her own personal essence outside her beauty and womanhood nor does she belong to the same world as the pedestrians, or the public.
One notable sequence in the film is Cléo’s walk from a café to her friends sculpting studio (Varda, 50:20-51:11). As she exists the café onto the Parisian street, lined with parked cars and shops with elaborate window displays, and walks past a group of young men, the camera follows behind her and captures the men’s stares— first at Cléo, then directly into the camera. Varda then uses editing to create an eyeline match in several following shots so that the camera, or the audience, sees what Cléo sees: another man staring directly into the camera as it moves further down the street and more reflective windows. The only sound that can be heard is Cléo’s heels clicking against the pavement as she struts. Next, the film cuts to a close-up of a street performer’s face as he gulps down a frog and winces. Although this is a flashback and not the current objective reality, the sound of Cléo’s heels still loom over the shot.
