Cleo from 5 to 7

"Cleo from 5 to 7" was in its time the most discussed "female contribution" to the French New Wave. The heroine, popular singer Cleo, waits for the results of an examination that will confirm or dispel suspicions of cancer. At five o'clock she has her cards read, at seven she must call the doctor. Agnès Varda shows what happens in between - a series of micro-stories in which the mood and narrative style shift several times depending on whom the heroine encounters in her distress. A brief "film within a film" is a grotesque in the style of silent cinema, featuring Jean-Luc Godard, Eddie Constantine, and Anna Karina. The music was composed by Michel Legrand, otherwise a collaborator of Jacques Demy. Legrand also appears here as an actor playing the heroine's inappropriately flirtatious friend and, incidentally, the author of her songs.

"White is a fascinating colour, and it is through it that I prefer to express myself. Just as a writer favours certain words, I have visual words that appear in all my films. Everything that has to do with love and death dissolves into white, hence the whiteness of sand, scarves, walls, or paper. Or in the film Cleo from 5 to 7, the snow-white light on the lawn. It is neither systematic nor symbolic. These are impressions that offer themselves to me naturally. White in Cleo is tragic. There is no darkness that would master life, but a brightness that dissolves existence." Agnès Varda