Cleo de 5 a 7, Agnes Varda's classic 1962 work depicts, in near real-time, ninety
minutes in the life of Cleo, 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 cinema 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 Cleo'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
Cleo's formal and technical complexity alongside an analysis of its status as a
visual document of its historical moment.