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Studies in French Cinema

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Gender and Space in Cléo de 5 à 7

Jill Forbes
Published online: 03 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Jill Forbes (2002) Gender and Space in Cléo de 5 à 7, Studies in French Cinema, 2:2, 83-89

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 Gender and Space in Cléo de 5 à 7
Jill Forbes
Abstract
This article reviews the canonical feminist readings of Cléo de 5 à 7 as a film which presents an
empowered female subject. The film is as much about Paris as about a woman; more precisely, it
is about the conflation of the two, of Paris as woman, as the ‘whore’ of literary and artistic
tradition. There is a documentary, ‘ethnographic’ thrust to the film, which records places, but which
also constructs an itinerary. The article explores Cléo’s itinerary, showing how she is mapped onto
the topos of Paris as whore. Her trajectory makes her less obviously the empowered subject, and
more ambiguously mapped out as object.
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Preliminary note: Jill Forbes died on 13 July 2001 (see Sue Harris’s obituary
in Studies in French Cinema 1:2 (2001), p. 68). This article has been prepared by
Sue Harris and Phil Powrie from the text of a paper given by Jill Forbes to
the Birkbeck Film Study Group in 2000. As the original piece was intended
for oral delivery, many of the quotations, particularly those from reviews of
the film, were not sourced, and we have been unable to retrieve them.

It is axiomatic to consider Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7/Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961) a feminist 1 ‘“Cri d’amour” is a
film. This tradition dates right back to the first women who reviewed the film. Thus in constellation of signifiers
of loss; its lyrics are
L’Express in 1962 Françoise Giroud wrote that Cléo was ‘asleep in her head, not awake
heavy with the burden
to the world, an object. For some she is Woman, for others nothing, and she’d better of absence, death, mor-
keep quiet’ (Giroud quoted in Audé 1981: 140). Similarly, Françoise Audé in 1981 tality. As such it is a
considered that ‘even today Cléo seems to have to follow such a hard pathway that we crucial textual hinge in
have doubts about the liberating implications of her trajectory’ (Audé 1981: 140). another important way.
Cléo’s development in
However, the most persuasive and thoroughgoing feminist analysis belongs to
the film can be
Flitterman-Lewis who takes the somewhat contrasting view that Cléo undertakes a understood in terms of
spiritual journey which transforms her from object to subject of desire, and that she a movement from recip-
evolves from ‘woman-as-spectacle to woman-as-social-being’ (Flitterman-Lewis 1990: rocal narcissistic
272–74). In this analysis the ‘pivotal rehearsal sequence’ with Bob and Le Plumitif serves enclosure, through the
painful perception of
as the linchpin or ‘charnière’ of the film, its ‘crucial textual hinge’.1 The film therefore
lack and absence
has a chiasmic structure – that is, it is divided into two halves so that the propositions in (“without you”), to an
its first half are reversed in the second – and this shift, or transformation, is predicated on acceptance of the neces-
the idea that when Cléo takes off her wig (i.e. gets rid of her ‘disguise’) she appropriates sary intersubjectivity
the gaze. In Flitterman-Lewis’s words ‘ the spectator now takes Cléo’s position as a that structures all
relations of culture’
subject rather than object of vision (...). Varda transforms the viewer’s position from its
(Flitterman-Lewis 1990:
characteristic passivity, its contemplation of the object. And, the activity of vision no 277).
longer objectifies Cléo as a fixed image. Instead, a productive vision is conferred on both
spectator and character alike’ (Flitterman-Lewis 1990: 274–75).
Such a reading has considerable merit; indeed, it has become virtually canonical. It is
undoubtedly satisfying because it confers on the film a formally pleasing symmetrical
structure, but also because it allows us, particularly as women spectators, to reinterpret
and, as Flitterman-Lewis says, to experience with Cléo the process of taking ourselves in
hand. In this way, character and film-maker, whom on some level the character represents,
rehearse the experience of the woman’s movement. Analysed from a post-1968
perspective, Cléo de 5 à 7 becomes the exemplary Bildungsroman of May 1968 and beyond.

SFC 2 (2) 83–89 © Intellect Ltd 2002 83

 2 ‘Je suis belle, ô mortels!
comme un rêve de It is indubitably the case that Cléo travels, that she follows a trajectory or an
Pierre./ Et mon sein, itinerary. However, the feminist desire to see this as a moral journey has tended to
où chacun s’est meutri obscure other aspects of the film which are crucial to its understanding and, perhaps, to
tour à tour,/ Est fait its treatment of gender, and it is these I wish to discuss in this article. One of the things
pour inspirer au poëte
left out or obscured in the Flitterman-Lewis reading (and I am using this as shorthand
un amour/ Eternel et
muet ainsi que la for all those analysts who have, more or less, followed her) is that, like so many of
matière.’ (Conceive me Varda’s films, Cléo de 5 à 7 is both fiction and documentary, in Varda’s own phrase ‘a
as a dream of stone/ my subjective documentary’ (quoted in Baroncelli 1962).
breast, where mortals Cléo’s first reviewers all applauded its ‘documentary realism’, and the impression the
come to grief,/ is made
film gives of recording life as it is lived. Thus, Cléo de 5 à 7 is ‘a film which gives the
to prompt all poets’
love,/ mute and noble impression of having been shot from life and almost using cinéma-vérité methods’; Varda’s
as matter itself). See is ‘the kind of cinema which rejects stories in favour of the documentary’; and Cléo de
Baudelaire 1982: 24 for 5 à 7 is made with ‘a cinematography which reveals the wonder of everyday Paris with
the translation.
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characters and landscapes taken from everyday life’. It is all the more surprising that this
aspect of the film is rarely evoked today since it has, if anything, become more
impressive as time has passed. Cléo de 5 à 7 has acquired a nostalgic glow because it
records aspects of the city as it was nearly forty years ago: open-backed buses with
conductors, the Gare Montparnasse before it was modernized, Citroën taxis. And it is
enhanced by the beauty of the cinematography.
For all its title, therefore, Cléo de 5 à 7 is, or is also, a film about Paris. So an initial
move might be to compare it with other films in which for Varda Paris is not just
depicted, but is similarly a topos. These are Opéra Mouffe (1958), Daguerréotypes (1975),
and Les Dites caryatides (1984). All these deal explicitly with a woman’s vision, but not
necessarily a feminist vision, of the streets of Paris. Opéra Mouffe is a subjective
documentary in which the subject in question is pregnant. As she walks through the
food market in the rue Mouffetard she sees signs of fecundity everywhere rather as Cléo
sees signs of death. Daguerréotypes was made while Varda herself was pregnant and it
concerns the shopkeepers in the road she herself lives in. Thematically and
geographically, this film is perhaps closest to Cléo de 5 à 7. We again find the idea that
the city is changing and a nostalgia for its old forms; the regulation of time, and the way
in which, for these petits commerçants, virtually all of whom are married couples, the
distinction between home and work is non-existent. They are in the centre of the city,
yet they live and work in an early, almost pre-industrial stage of capitalism. By contrast,
Les Dites caryatides is a self-consciously literary evocation of Paris, opening with the lines
from Baudelaire’s poem ‘La Beauté’ (Beauty): ‘Je suis belle, ô mortels, comme un rêve
de pierre’ (Conceive me as a dream of stone),2 and going on to construct a montage of
images of the female statuary in Paris, making the point that while nude women are
everywhere in the streets, a nude man – and we glimpse a real one briefly – would be
scandalous. Varda’s Paris films combine nostalgia with the evocation of literary and
artistic associations – topoi- relating to the city.
Alongside this, however, is an ethnographic vision which suggests that Cléo’s
contemporary intertexts are Edgar Morin’s and Jean Rouch’s Chronique d’un été, made
in the same year – indeed, the same summer as Cléo de 5 à 7 – and to the Paris vu par
compilation film (Chabrol, Douchet, Godard, Pollet, Rohmer, Rouch, 1965), in which
Varda did not participate but which has many thematic coincidences with Cléo de 5 à 7.
The significant ethnographic thrust to Cléo de 5 à 7 is one I would describe as
deriving from a particular relationship between time and space. Cléo de 5 à 7 participates
in the anthropological move which has been described as ‘the mythical mapping of time
onto space’, but instead of doing so with respect either to distant territories or, as in

84 Jill Forbes
 much post-war French anthropology, ‘distant’ parts of France (such as Morin’s own
study of life in a Breton village; Morin 1967), it applies this technique to the city of
Paris and to its inhabitants.
Cléo de 5 à 7 foregrounds the anthropological dilemma posed by the double role of
the viewer who is both participant in events and observer/recorder of them. Just as
anthropology traditionally saw history in terms of development, so that ‘distance in
space reflected sequence in time’ – with the furthest away being the most primitive – so
we see development in time mapped onto space in Cléo de 5 à 7.
Thus the character Cléo is described by Angèle in the café in the rue de Rivoli, as
‘a child’ and in her apartment she is visually compared to the kitten she plays with. At
the same time, in the taxi drive from the Right Bank to her home, she is confronted
with images of ‘primitivism’ in the form of African masks displayed in the antique shop
windows and the face of an African student thrust against the window of the taxi
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during the student rag. Thus her journey is one from childhood to maturity, and
perhaps to death; but it is also a developmental sequence from primitive to civilized. It
is by simultaneously travelling in time and space, rather than just time, as the feminist
reading suggests, that Cléo comes to knowledge and to self-knowledge.
This should lead us to examine more carefully how time and space are articulated in
the film. The time axis of the film appears massively overdetermined both by the title
and by the use of time-checks to segment the diegesis; a great deal has consequently
been written about the film’s supposed use of ‘real time’. In fact, two diegetic hours are
compressed into ninety minutes, while the clocks seen in the streets tell a time which is
different from that of the diegesis. But if we remember that time is also space, we can
see that the relationship between the title ‘de 5 à 7’ and the activities taking place at that
time is significant. For Cléo is the kind of social being to whom the hours between 5
p.m. and 7 p.m. traditionally belong, namely a demimondaine, cocotte de luxe, or grande
amoureuse. She has a lover, José, whose visits are brief, and with whom she has the kind
of relationship that, even in 1961, must have seemed somewhat anachronistic. It
certainly seems odd in the context of her professional aspirations, for it emerges that
Cléo is a kept woman whose apartment and career are both financed by her lover. From
the mise en scène of José’s visit, with its circling camera and romantically-orchestrated
musical accompaniment, we are led to treat this as an interlude. It is qualitatively
different from other, more realist, sequences in the film, and it must be taken as the
evocation of a literary and artistic tradition. This is underlined by the nature of the
exchanges between Cléo and Angèle after José has left, which mimic those of the
dialogues between mistress and duenna in, say, eighteenth-century theatre, and which
are filmed in an equally stylized manner.
We return to this topic when Cléo goes to the parc Montsouris. The soldier she
meets there, on hearing her name, compares her to the celebrated demimondaine Cléo de
Mérode, and recalls having been warned by his mother, when he first came to Paris,
against ‘these creatures’ who might seduce him in the night. In this park Cleopatra
meets her Antony. Like Mark Antony, Antoine is a soldier; and like Mark Antony, he
would consider the ‘world well lost’ if he could die for love rather than in defence of his
country. Interestingly, it is when this dialogue takes place, rather than when she initially
leaves her apartment, that we discover Cléo’s true identity, which turns out not to be
Cléo at all but Florence. Thus throughout the time we had thought she was Cléo,
including after she removed her wig, she was in fact acting a part.
Bearing in mind that Cléo is a nom de guerre, we have to consider what meanings are
attached to the fact that Cléo walks the streets, as well as what streets she walks and when.

Gender and Space in Cléo de 5 à 7 85

 For as Michel de Certeau pointed out, there is ‘a rhetoric of walking’; walking the city
streets is ‘a form of utterance’ which offers ‘a succession of phatic topoi’ based on ‘a
homology between figures of speech and figures of walking’ (De Certeau 1990: 148-52).
The woman walking the streets is a trope of post-war European art cinema. We find
it in Antonioni’s L’Avventura/The Adventure (1960) and La Notte/The Night (1961), in
Malle’s L’Ascenseur pour l’échafaud/Elevator to the Scaffold (1957) and Les Amants/The
Lovers (1958), and we find it in Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1958). In general, this
kind of streetwalking is associated with the anomie of modern life and is the figure of
an existential quest for meaning, so that the women walk to resolve some issue of
personal identity or moral uncertainty, as is, of course, the case with Cléo when she
rushes out from her apartment. But the woman on the streets is also an ambiguous
figure, as is revealed in the streetwalking scene of Hiroshima mon amour. In that film ‘she’
has much in common with Cléo: both are performers (one an actress, the other a
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singer), both grandes amoureuses. But when Emmanuèle Riva steps out into the streets of
Hiroshima, it is immediately assumed by the men in the street that she is a prostitute.
As soon as she steps out, Cléo is said by Flitterman-Lewis to become like ‘a
Baudelairean flâneur’ (Flitterman-Lewis 1990: 274). As Janet Wolff has argued, while the
flâneur is the agent of the gendering of space, the female of the species, the flâneuse, is a
strictly impossible figure (Wolff 1985). And though I agree that Cléo is Baudelairean in
some respects, it is as object not subject of the gaze.
Feminist geographers stress how the rise of industrial capitalism brought about a
division between public and private space that was marked on gender lines. Unlike pre-
industrial societies where the home space was the work space and where, within the
home, there was little privacy, in the nineteenth century public space is increasingly the
domain of the male, domestic space that of the female. By extension, therefore, women
who were on the streets could only be there because they were, as it were, working girls.
There are exceptions both in the kinds of women and the kinds of spaces. Women
who were in some way sexually hors de combat were able to stroll unmolested.
Baudelaire’s poems include the figures of lesbians and widows, for example, who are not
fair game. Women who behaved like men, like Baudelaire’s lesbians, or who disguised
themselves as men, like George Sand or Flora Tristan, were able to go out into the
streets and exercise the power of looking which the flâneur had appropriated. By the
same token, some non-domestic spaces were specifically designated places where the
bourgeois woman could appear alone with impunity; among these was, of course, the
department store. Varda is surely entirely conscious of this tradition and is uncertain as
to its continuation. In Daguerréotypes, therefore, she constantly emphasizes the
interpenetration of exteriors and interiors, through reflections in shop windows, or
filming the one through the other, as though to underline the lack of distinction in
these people’s lives between public and private space. In Cléo de 5 à 7 too, we find
immense uncertainty. The hat-shop sequence is a case in point with its brilliant use of
mirrors to stress, no doubt, Cléo’s narcissism, but also the fact that the inside is her
working space or the outside her living space and vice versa. Interestingly, the sequence
ends with the arrival of the police patrolling the streets as though to reassert the
patriarchal order after the female extravagances we have just witnessed. Both the
enclosed space of the taxi and the natural space of the park become in a sense Cléo’s
theatre, as does her home, while her bed, the most enclosed space of all, is of course
where she works too.
Prendergast stresses that the notion that the city is a whore is as old as antiquity, and
certainly the image of Paris as whore is to be found throughout nineteenth-century

86 Jill Forbes
 literature. He stresses the construction of sexual anxiety around women in public places,
the effort expended in attempting to classify the different kinds of prostitutes. But he
also underlines the relationship between this kind of knowledge and knowledge of the
city in general so that, as he puts it, if you ‘master the varieties of whore (...) you are
close to mastering the variety of the city itself ’ (Prendergast 1992: 137). Cléo is posited
as the inheritor of this tradition. Indeed, like the prostitutes in Balzac’s La Cousine Bette
or Zola’s Nana she carries her disease within her, all the more virulent for being hidden.
As the camera lingers at the place Verlaine, with the name of the bus stop clearly in
view, we see that Cléo in her literary and artistic aspects is the figure of the city.
When she goes out, therefore, Cléo literally incorporates the city; this is why
toponyms are eloquent. In Varda’s films art is always in the streets, as indeed is suggested
by the title of her Los Angeles documentary Mur Murs (1980), or the fact that
Dorothée, the artist’s model, lives in the rue des Artistes in the fourteenth arrondissement.
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Varda would undoubtedly subscribe to Michel de Certeau’s description of the

significance of place names:

Gradually these words lose their face value, like worn out coins, but their capacity to
be meaningful survives their initial attribution of value (...). They make themselves
available to the polysemical meanings passers-by attach to them; they detach
themselves from the places they were supposed to define and serve as imaginary
meeting places for journeys which, as metaphors, they determine for reasons which
have nothing to do with their original value but for reasons which are and are not
known to passers-by. It is a strange toponymy, which has been peeled off places and
which floats above the city like a cloudy geography of waiting ‘meaning’, and from
there leads to physical walks: Place de l’Etoile, Concorde, Poissonnière, these constellations
mediate circulation: stars directing itineraries. ‘The Place de la Concorde does not exist,’
said Malaparte, ‘it’s an idea’ (...). More comparisons should be made in order to take
account of the magic properties of proper names. (de Certeau 1990: 157)

As the playful exchange with the taxi driver about the make of car suggests (‘It’s not a
goddess [une déesse/une DS], its an idea [une ID])’, the ‘magic properties’ in Cléo de 5
à 7 are well worth exploring.
Cléo’s itinerary is motivated by a whole series of topoi. To begin with she moves
from the Right Bank to the Left Bank. To understand the immediate significance of
this, I am helped by the rather louche teddy boys in Eustache’s film Les Mauvaises
fréquentations (1964). They find that the cafés in the area round Notre Dame de Lorette
which gave their name to the lorettes defined by my dictionary as femmes faciles, or loose
women, no longer prove good for picking up girls, and head off towards the richer
pickings of St Germain des Prés. I am also assisted by the St Germain des Prés episode
of Paris vu par in which it is explained that young American tourists flock here to get
picked up at art classes in a district famous for Sartre ... imitated indeed, in the pick-up
sequence in another of Eustache’s films, La Maman et la putain (1973).
Cléo’s journey takes her through the Latin Quarter, past the École des Beaux-Arts
and the students dressed up for their rag, to her home in the rue Huygens. When she
leaves home she goes first to the Dôme, where the people come and go talking not of
Michelangelo but of Picasso, the Surrealists and the Existentialists; then to the sculpture
studio where her friend Dorothée is surprised in classic nude pose; then to the cinema
in the rue Delambre where Raoul, Dorothée’s boyfriend works as a projectionist; to the
parc Montsouris via the rue des Artistes; and, finally, by means of the number 67 bus,

Gender and Space in Cléo de 5 à 7 87

 towards the hospital, lingering in order for us to notice that one of the stops is at the
place Verlaine. In some respects, therefore, this is a tourist itinerary, the journey of a
time traveller, a compendium of the literary and artistic Paris topoi, whether the artistic
community of Montparnasse in the 1920s, the silent cinema, or going even further back
in time, the grisettes of Musset, Murger, or of Flaubert in L’Education sentimentale.
The place where Cléo lives, which we are very precisely told is 6 rue Huygens, just
off the boulevard Montparnasse, is of special interest. The road is named after the Dutch
mathematician and astronomer Christiaan Huygens (1629-95), resident in France, at the
behest of Colbert, between 1666 and 1681. He worked on the production of
instruments of vision: lenses and telescopes, and the application of the pendulum to
regulate the movement of clocks. Why number 6? Possibly because this relates space to
the precise mid-point of the film in terms of time, the point of stasis before the
pendulum begins to swing in the other direction. This movement, incidentally, is one
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which recurs in the film in the swing and the rocking chair in Cléo’s apartment, and in
the various pendulums in Daguerréotypes. Its ultimate figure is, perhaps, the metronome
which combines the swinging movement with the regulation of time.
The fact that Huygens also worked on astronomy is linked to other aspects of time
and place in the film. For example, the action takes place on 21 June, the summer
solstice, the point at which the sun is at its zenith, equivalent to the mid-point,
therefore, before the nights begin to lengthen again, but also, in astrological terms, as
Antoine points out, when it leaves Gemini and begins to enter Cancer, or in Roman
mythology the point of splitting. The parc Montsouris is the site of the observatory
used, precisely, for observing the movement of the stars. Perhaps even more important,
it was where the Paris meridian was established in the seventeenth century, remaining in
use until superseded by Greenwich. In this way, the conjunction of time, place and
optics are united in Cléo’s home. But on this interpretation it is the sequence in the
parc Montsouris which becomes the linchpin of the film. This is the point where the
vertical and horizontal axes meet: Cléo was travelling south, she turns and travels north;
she was in the west, she now crosses the meridian into the eastern hemisphere.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, this is where she ceases to be Cléo and becomes
Florence, so that as she crosses the meridian and turns north she now encounters an
image of rebirth in the form of a new-born infant in an incubator which she and
Antoine see from the bus. And as we can see by looking at the map of her trajectory,
her itinerary does not come full circle, despite the Tarot predictions: it is interrupted
rather like the line of the palm of her hand which the Tarot reader examines at the
beginning of the film. This narrative is not completely closed but is left suspended in a
hesitant ambiguity.
Cléo de 5 à 7 is to my mind a film about Paris as well as about a woman, a film about
the city of Paris as a woman, a meditation on Parisian topoi. By attending to the
significance of Cléo’s itinerary, we are obliged to displace the centre of the film and, in so
doing, to develop a more ambiguous reading of it than has conventionally been proposed.
Cléo’s itinerary could best be described as une dérive, or drift, an urban technique
theorized by the Situationists in accordance with the injunction to ‘realise the utopian
promise of art in everyday life’, the attempt being ‘ to counteract the “banalisation” of the
city by randomly wandering through it following their “psychogeographical impulses”’
(Jay 1993: 424-25). La dérive is supposed to be a liberating disorientation which is
achieved through a kind of openness to the hidden wonders of the urban spectacle, an
urban nomadism which hijacks the modern cityscape and turns it into a liberated zone.
Unusually, in this film la dérive is apparently enacted by a woman who does, indeed,

88 Jill Forbes
 appear to follow her psychogeographical impulses, and who does find art in the streets,
to an almost overdetermined extent. She apparently incarnates the new mobility, like
her fellow Nouvelle Vague heroines, a mobility made possible by advances in camera and
lighting technology. In this she stands in marked contrast to the immobile couples of the
rue Daguerre, for example.
Yet this mobility is denied by the extreme formalism of the film, the sense that even
when Cléo escapes to the exterior, her itinerary is dictated by determinants that are far
from leaving her free; the sense that neither she nor Dorothée can escape the mise en
scène to which women are subjected. This might be confirmed by the other,
contemporaneous meaning of la dérive, which was a term used to refer to the Algerian
war, a conflict in which the new technologies, far from offering evidence of
unambiguous modernization were, as Kristin Ross has demonstrated, used to prevent
mobility and change (Ross 1996).
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Not the least of Varda’s achievements, therefore, is to have brought together in a film
which was originally condemned for its lack of feminist muscle, an implicit condemnation
of the war and of conventional politics through the agency of a woman’s body.

References
Audé, F. (1981), Cinémodèles, cinéma d’elles, Lausanne: Editions l’Age d’Homme.
Baroncelli, J.de (1962), Interview with Varda, Le Monde, 24 April.
Baudelaire, C. (1982), Les Fleurs du mal: The Complete Text of The Flowers of Evil (trans.
R. Howard), Boston: D.R. Godine.
Certeau, M. de (1990), L’Invention du quotidien 1: Arts de faire, Paris: Gallimard.
Flitterman-Lewis, S. (1990), To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema,
Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Jay, M. (1993), Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French
Thought, Berkeley/London: University of California Press.
Morin, E. (1967), Commune en France: la métamorphose de Plodemet, Paris: Fayard.
Prendergast, C. (1992), Paris and the Nineteenth Century, Oxford: Blackwell.
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Theory, Culture and Society 2:3, pp. 37-47.

Gender and Space in Cléo de 5 à 7 89