The Best Films You've Never Seen: Cléo from 5 to 7

The next classic in ‘The Best Films You've Never Seen’ series is Agnès Varda’s highly influential, fatalistic masterwork ‘Cléo from 5 to 7’.

Written and directed by trailblazing French director Agnès Varda, and set across one evening in wistful, summertime Paris, young singer Cléo Victoire traipses around city streets, cafes and apartments, awaiting the results of a biopsy that she is certain will reveal cancer.

Cléo visits a fortune teller, goes shopping with her maid, attends band practice, interacts with strangers, and soaks up Parisienne life while grappling with a sense of doom. In what is one of the most important films of Varda’s long and celebrated career, Paris is captured as a flâneur’s paradise, a place overflowing with life and artistic confidence as the long-fought Algerian war draws to a close.

This screening will open with an introduction from RMIT Cinema Studies academic Adrian Danks, who will explore the film’s cultural legacy and discuss why ‘Cléo from 5 to 7’ was voted #14 in Sight and Sound’s Greatest Films of All Time list, and as the second greatest film of all time by a woman in a BBC poll of film experts.

Presented by RMIT Culture in partnership with RMIT Cinema Studies.

Rating: PG
Language: French (English subtitles)
Country: France
Year: 1962
Duration: 90 mins
Format: DCP

Image credit: still from Agnès Varda's ‘Cléo from 5 to 7’, courtesy mk2 Films.