Cléo de 5 à 7

The two hours that chanson singer Cléo must wait to get the results of her biopsy are a torture for her. She leaves behind her old life, wear black and calls herself by her real name Florence. She beings to move freely through Paris and perceive her surroundings differently. Varda herself said the following about her film in 2005: “So beauty isn’t a protection, neither from mirrors nor from the gazes of others? The beautiful and terrifying paintings  by Baldung Grien quickly become the meaning of the film and its driving force: we see women, beautiful in their bright flesh, being embraced by a skeleton that mistreats or frightens them.”
In her minimalist film about beauty, death and the unstoppable passing of time, Varda turns the master from Diderot’s “Jack the Fatalist” into a modern women seeking to emancipate herself at a turning point in her life. CLÉO DE 5 À 7 marked Varda’s international breakthrough and the start of her cinematic reflection on feminist themes, as Sahar Daryab (Bamberg) will portray in her lecture.