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In Agnès Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961), the protagonist's transformation from feminine masquerade to flâneuse occurs as a result of her involvement with a city, specifically Paris. Positing the possibility of a female flânerie, this essay establishes a connection between Agnès Varda and the writers George Sand and Virginia Woolf, thereby showing how a woman walker-a flâneuse-lays claim to subjectivity.
Among the pleasures of viewing Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961) are the scenic views of Paris. As we see Cléo walking through the city's "sensory streets,"1 vital and dynamic with their mix of people, newsstands and bookstalls, trees and flowers, bicycles, cars, and buses, dogs and pigeons, shops and cafés, our attention is focused on the city as much as on the woman. Looking at how filmmaker Agnès Varda looks at Paris, and looking at Cléo learning to look, is an extraordinary experience with regard to both city viewing and filmviewing. What makes Cléo's walk so fascinating is the transformation she undergoes, brought about by her interaction with the city during an afternoon of flânerie. The idea of transformation is first introduced by a tarot reader, whom Cléo visits in the opening scene, when she is seeking assurance that an illness she has will not prove fatal. The fortune teller cannot give her this assurance; however, her prophecy that Cléo will undergo a "profound transformation of her being" becomes the focus of the film. Thus, Cléo, who initially is so self-involved and preoccupied with her fetishized image that she is blind to her city surroundings, gradually learns to open her eyes and look and allows what she sees to transform her.
"As Long as I'm Beautiful, I'm Alive." We become acquainted with Cléo, Varda s "cliché-woman"2 or, as my title indicates, an example of feminine masquerade during the initial sequences of the film. The striking artificiality and constructedness of Cléo's look-her blonde wig, meticulous makeup, fifties "Maidenform" contour, and showy high heels-raise immediate questions about why she presents herself in this manner. Who is she masquerading for? What is behind the mask? What is Cléo attempting to hide?
The emphatically fragmented style of the introductory scene, with its repeated close-ups of women's hands accompanied by disembodied women's voices, has an unsettling...