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Cléo de 5 a 7

Steven Ungar author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Published:28th May '20

Should be back in stock very soon

Cléo de 5 a 7 cover

Steven Ungar provides a close reading of Agnès Varda's classic 1962 work that depicts, in near real-time, 90 minutes in the life of Cléo, a young woman in Paris awaiting the results of medical tests that she fears will confirm a fatal condition. Ungar also looks back on Varda's film-making career and her contribution to the French New Wave.

Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cléo from 5 to 7), Agnes Varda's classic 1962 work depicts, in near real-time, 90 minutes in the life of Cléo, a young woman in Paris awaiting the results of medical tests that she fears will confirm a fatal condition. The film, whose visual beauty matches its evocation of early-Fifth Republic Paris, was a major point of reference for the French New Wave despite the fact that Varda never considered herself a member of the core Cahiers du cinéma group of critics-turned- film-makers. Ungar provides a close reading of the film and situates it in its social, political and cinematic contexts, tracing Varda's early career as a student of art history and as a photographer, the history of post-war French film, and the lengthy Algerian war to which Cléo's health concerns and ambitions to become a pop singer make her more or less oblivious. His study is the first to set a reading of Cléo's formal and technical complexity alongside an analysis of its status as a visual document of its historical moment. Steven Ungar's foreword to this new edition looks back upon Varda's film-making career and considers her contributions as a female auteur and in the context of the French New Wave.

I would defy anyone to read this and not want to watch the film. -- Jon Davies * Media Education Journal *

ISBN: 9781838719364

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 226g

128 pages

2nd edition