Don Gibson Theater: Film Weekend - Cleo from 5 to 7

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10TH AT 9:15PM

GOLDEN PALM AWARD
CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

BEST FILM
FRENCH SYNDICATE OF FILM CRITICS

The Best Kept Secret of the French New Wave

In real time follow pop singer Cleo (Corinne Marchand) as she travels through the streets of the Left Banke, awaiting news that may change her life...

AMERICAN CINEMATHEQUE said...
One of the most acclaimed directors anywhere in the world, Agnes Varda could be considered the prototype of today's independent filmmaker...

AMAZON calls it...

A visual treat...a timeless classic... wonderfully captures the vivid beauty of everyday Paris in the Sixties.

SLANT MAGAZINE said...
Photographer-turned-director Varda is considered the archetypical girl who crashed the big boy's clubhouse and Cleo was the film that paid her membership fee... All throughout, Varda captures the fairy-tale essence of early Sixties Paris with a vivacity and richness that rivals Godard's Breathless. Unlike her New Wave compatriots whose talents were reared in part at film schools, Varda was trained in the field of photography and consequently films the city with a completely unique vision. Her framing teems with life at every corner.

TIME OUT (LONDON) said...
The fluid, whited out photography gives the film a genuine grace, and the music session midway with Michel Legrand is a real joy... in the cinema of enchantment this ranks pretty high.

THE CRITERION COLLECTION said...
A film that is both a study in stylistic possibilities and a valentine to urban life... it shuffles along leisurely, big-hearted and receptive to all the distractions that come its way, at times falling into some of the most rapturous moments of the Varda canon.

It's a stunningly scrupulous, exact film, in space as well as time, so much so that a viewer can draw a precise map of Cleo's path and consider touristically re-creating her journey down to the last second in the Left Bank as it exists today. But if the film were only a virtuosic formal exercise, or a cleverly choreographed stroll through a city, it would probably not have endured as the remarkable, affecting testament that it is.... The entire drama (and comedy) of the piece is based upon the productive discrepancy between two very different sorts of time - the real clock time, passing second by second, with the end news Cleo will receive from her doctor, and what Pascal Bonitzer once called the "passionate time" known best from suspense thrillers but common to all fiction film, the experience of time that contracts or expands according to how we feel it. Apprehension, boredom, desire - the film is a succession of these emotional states that taken together pose a countertime, a time of the heart.