Anges Varda's and the Subjective Documentary Technique

Anges Varda is the only woman filmmaker identified with the French New Wave and her willingness in her landmark film, Cleo From 5 to 7 to break conventional editing rules, blur the distinctions between diegetic and non-diegetic music, use non-professional actors and shoot on location makes her work an achievement no less worthy than those of the men we usually associate with the French New Wave (Truffaut, Godard, Charbol, etc). What concerns me the most in her film Cleo From 5 to 7 is Varda's technique of creating what she called a "subjective documentary". What sounds like an oxymoron in the art of cinema, since a documentary is supposed to maintain an objective distance from its subject matter, is really the breaking of classical Hollywood editoral convention to give us a glimpse of "reality" behind the thin viel of fiction. Let me explain, in several sequences of the film Cleo, Varda tampers with the editoral convention of the point of view shot (also known as the shot/reverse shot or the system of suture). Normally, in a classical narrative film we have Shot A of a character glancing off screen, Shot B of an object or another character and then a return to Shot A of the previous character whom we are now certain was the controller of the point-of-view. The gap between Shot A and Shot B has been effectively, sutured by the return to Shot A and the transferring of these editioral actions to the fiction. (See Daniel Dayan's The Tudor Code in Bill Nichols Movies & Methods for more detailed discussion of this technique) This is a convention that is so specific to the cinema that it is rarely mis-understood. In Cleo, Varda tampers with this tried and true system by shifting the placement of her camera in the "subjective" shots of the system. For instance, in the famous Cafe Dome sequence of the film, Cleo (Corinne Marchand) a pop-singer who is awaiting the results of a cancer biopsy, goes into a cafe and plays one of her songs on a jukebox to gauge the reactions of the audience. As she walks around the cafe with dark shades on we are given a furious montage of shots of the patrons, workers and bystanders who are too engrossed in their own situations to listen or care about the song on the jukebox. Varda tampers with the point-of-view system by shifting the camera placement on the people Cleo is supposed to be observing. The camera shot in a conventional film is usually matched with the 'eye-line' or notional glance of the character looking, but in this sequence the camera is in positions that do not and cannot match the position of Cleo's glance which is obscured by her dark sunglasses. The effect of this 'tampering' with the standard shot/reverse shot is to "objectify" the camera by seperating it ever so slightly from the character. It is in this seperation from the fictional character to captured cinema verite that Varda is able to create her subjective documentaries. By modifying the shots of what Cleo could be looking at we get a 'documentary-like' presentation of contemporary life in Paris circa 1962 when the film was made. In the cafe sequence we get all types of conversation, from the Algerian war (a risque subject at the time) to relationships ending. By seperating the subjective shot from the fictional character Varda is able to incorporate more of "reality" into her fiction by capturing events and moments that were happening right during the shooting. For example, the Frog man sequence where Celo walks into a crowd of people watching a man make a spectacle of himself by eating live frogs in the street is pure cinema verite (the capturing of real "non-staged" events by the camera) that she has intergrated into her fiction by simply "loosening" the conventional form of a point of view shot. There are many instances within the film that prepares us for this technique, especially when Varda cuts to a moving shot and then cuts to Cleo who is walking which forces us to make the fictional connection that the first shot is Cleo point of view. In effect we have Shot B and then Shot A rather than the usual Shot A, Shot B, then return to Shot A that forms the point-of-view shot. This loosening of the formal struture is announced to us immediately in the first scene after the Tarot card reading. When Celo flees the psychic in fear and pain over the reading of her future she walks down several flights of stairs in stunning sequence of jump cuts and seperated point-of-view shots that render the experience cinematically rather than 'realistically' or conventionally. Varda's subjective documentary technique rests on her ability to separate the conventional structure of the point-of-view system and incorporate 'objective' shots of real life into the fiction. Varda is able to have it both ways: she is able to create and sustain a fictional character while simultaneously adding in bits and pieces of 'reality' that comment, contradict or reveal the politics and circumstances of the culture that surrounds the making of the film.