Les Flâneuses Inadvertentes: Meaningful Glances, Sure Steps in Varda and Godard

Introduction: More and Less Than Meets the Eye

In this paper I will discuss the relationship between movement and engagement—both literal and psychological—of two women as they make their way through their respective cities. The two characters—Cleo, in Agnes Varda’s Cleo de 5 a 7,1 and Natasha Von Braun, née Nosferatu, in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution2—appear, at first glance, strikingly different—as do the representations of the cities they inhabit. What I hope to show is that the differences are largely a matter of window-dressing. What’s’ more, we will see that although both women set out from different points, they will arrive at the same destination. A place that, while less physical than psychological, and more social than political, is nonetheless no less real for its lack of geography. I will also argue that, appearances to the contrary, both Varda and Godard use similar means and techniques to create their imaginary cities. Varda’s Paris, while true to French New Wave neo-realistic concerns, proves, on closer inspection, to be a metaphorical construction, no more “real” than the “Tativille,” constructed by Jacques Tati to represent his Paris in Playtime (1967). Which is to say that despite her use of Cinéma vérité and documentary tropes and motifs, Varda gives us a cinematic Paris. Godard follows many of the same dictates as Varda—location shots, including existing streets, garages and commercial buildings, few sets and inexpensive details—however, he “re-fashions” these elements so that they conform to the visual conventions found in Noir, Suspense and, in respect to this film, Science Fiction narratives. 2 Of the two representations of the city, I find Varda’s Paris the more imaginative, not least because it is more charming. However, the charm on display here is deceptive. Varda sets her feminist fairytale in Paris, not only to exploit its romantic heart, but also to subvert the romantic notions invariably associated with the city. In Cleo, Varda inverts the famous City of Light into an ominous City of the Shadow of Death.

Godard also uses the city as a symbol of imminent violence and sudden death, although in his story the city’s role, as brute, henchman or assassin, is perfectly in keeping with a viewer’s expectations of the film genres he has appropriated. However, this is not to say that Alphaville is not without charm—it is often very amusing. In fact, Godard’s tongue-in-cheek use/abuse of genre clichés adds an unexpected measure of wit, as well as considerable fun, to his film, particularly in the person of Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine).

However, Godard’s less-than-serious approach to his “serious” themes (the dehumanizing effects of technology, the threat of monolithic political systems, etc.) suggests to me one significant difference between the two auteurs’ representations of the city. Varda’s intends her Paris to be perceived as a real city and one that Cleo must actually negotiate to ultimately find/save herself. Godard’s Alphaville, for all its totalitarian wrappings and menace, is no Foucaultian “disciplinary society.” Godard is not playing Cassandra, and although he gives us hierarchy, surveillance and control, these terrors are not particularly frightening. (Dr. Von Braun is as effective a dictator as the Wizard of Oz was a wizard.) Taken as a whole, Godard’s futuristic city is a backdrop—it might as well have been filmed in a studio.

Nevertheless, both directors have created cities that pose grave dangers to their heroines. Love, and the life it represents, is as much at risk in Varda’s Paris as it is in Godard’s dystopian metropolis. Cleo and Natasha both have reasons to be afraid, but not everything that threatens them is real—there are also hints and suggestions of something fearful, which produce a disorienting sense of the uncanny. We see this when Cleo plays her song in the café and no one pays attention—Is she already a ghost? —and in the recurring appearance of menacing street performers. Godard layers effects that one could say are intended to induce a feeling of the uncanny. These include lighting that distorts rather than illuminates and montages and intercuts that presage a certain inevitability 3 Finally, I will explore both directors’ representations of their female leads. At first glance they appear to be two beautiful if passive cinematic creatures that are often framed and posed in a manner that accentuates their beauty. Varda, who trained as a photographer, brings a VOGUE magazine sensibility to her camera work. (I believe she acknowledges this in a playful moment where she appropriates Stanley Donen’s grand staircase scene in the film Funny Face (1957).) In a series of shots that prefigures certain postmodern conceits, we see a momentarily carefree and blissfully alone Cleo as she struts down steps in a park. (Here, Varda plays Fred Astaire playing Richard Avedon.)

Godard, lacking Varda’s aesthetic grace and spontaneity, depicts the stunning Natasha in more literary terms, which is to say she seems more written into existence that photographed. The difference may be due to gender—a female Pygmalion will craft a different Galatea than her male counterpart. I will simply say here that Godard brings not only a man’s sensibility but that of a film critic as well. It may be worth noting here that Godard, who treats almost everything his film touches on ironically, treats love with the respect it’s due, which is why I believe that Natasha is the real hero of his film. In choosing love, not sensuality, she is literally choosing life. (In this sense, Lemmy Caution, like Antoine in Cleo, is both an object of love—something seen outside the self—as well as a destination or a real place, i.e., arms in which to take shelter.)

Although we are introduced to Cleo as she waits to hear her fortune, and we first meet Natasha as she waits for her cigarette to be lit, it is their movement, particularly their passage through the city, which is critical to the development of both. I will proceed with this line of thinking by taking a leap of interpretation. I suggest that Cleo and Natasha can be best understood as Flâneuses—female versions of the Flâneur. (Regarding Cleo: Her antics and frolicking in the first half of her film are deceptive, a simulacrum of real movement—where she moves through time and not through space—and for this reason, I will only rarely refer to the first half of Cleo, which I think functions, per se, to get Cleo on the street.)

Flâneuse? While tradition ascribes this role to men—a man may walk the streets freely, but a woman who freely walks the streets is a streetwalker—I will attempt to show that both Cleo and Natasha save their lives via the act of Flâneurie. The key idea here is transformation, particularly as we would not have characterized either woman as a Flâneuse based on our first impressions of them.

To the contrary, up until her moment of crisis, Cleo was an object offered up to the city’s gaze. (And, in a nod to Narcissus, the object of her own gaze, too, as when she observes, “As long as I’m beautiful, I’m alive.”) Natasha, too, is defined and directed by others and could be described, at first glance, as an automaton, functionally pretty, operating on autopilot. As I discuss their transformations, I will also discuss the crucial differences between the Flâneur and the Flâneuse. As one might anticipate, the Flâneuse, unlike her male counterpart, cannot be too detached from the ultimate object of her gaze. To paraphrase Lemmy Caution, pleasure may be a “consequence” of her gaze, but it is not its raison d’être. Love is its raison d’être.

City Under a Cloud

Our unconscious is still as unreceptive as ever to the idea of our own mortality.

Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”

We are in Paris; it is the first day of summer. The streets, shops and cafes are filled with life: infants and ancients and everyone in between. People are at work and at play and…death is in the air. Literally, in the air—in cafés and in taxis, radio signals carry news of the civil war in Algeria and of accidents where workers, overcome by gas, drown in sewers. Only Edith Piaf is saved by a “miracle.” This is the city where Agnes Varda sets her contemporary fairytale. Jean Godard set his dystopian future in the city. While there are Wurlitzers, there are no radios. What one listens to is the disembodied drone of Alpha 60, the computer that structures consciousness in Alphaville, just as the radio does in Varda’s affluent, post-war Paris. Death is here, too—in the threat of intergalactic war. (Which also takes place in the air.) What’s more, the legendary Lemmy Caution has arrived to kill Dr. Von Braun. What we will soon learn is that he will also save the life of Von Braun’s daughter, Natasha. Why do these stories take place in the city? I don’t believe either director had another choice of location. It’s the early 1960s and the city is central to modern narratives. As we saw in La Notte and, as I wrote about in La Dolce Vita, the post-war city had become our home, and the non-urban world was increasingly identified with either nostalgia or with the idea of de-colonization—Algeria, Vietnam and sub-Saharan Africa. (The word nostalgia is intentional. One can’t go home again because, to borrow from Gertrude Stein, there is no there, there, anymore. Which is why it would be pointless for a modern filmmaker to make another Sunrise (1927). 6) To be modern, which is to be relevant—especially to the audiences for these films—is also to be urban. (There must be advertisements, shops, cafés, Chinese restaurants, traffic circles, street crime, taxis, buses, movie houses and death.) Here we must distinguish the concept of the urban from the idea of the city. (City with an upper case C.) The former is simply facts of space, architecture, population, density, transit and other metrics. While in the latter, this data finds expression in the narratives of individual lives as well as meaning in groups, which together define a society’s economic and political missions. The urban is the ratio of sky to skyline, while the city is “women in their summer dresses” and men in fedoras, which is to say metaphors and errors that are repeated over and over again until they become the truth. (Until they become recognizable cinematic clichés.) The city, then, is more mood than background, feeling than place. Its essence pervades a particular narrative, like smoke adheres to wool, until it becomes part of the fabric of the story.

Saying this, I have to ask how two almost diametrically opposed representations of the city can be found to tell the same story? On the one hand, we have Varda’s humane, humanscale Paris. On the other, Godard’s inhuman, machine-run Alphaville. Yet both prove appropriate settings for love stories, or more specifically, two stories about women who love for the first time. 2 If the difference between Varda’s Paris and Godard’s Alphaville is only a matter of appearances and not substance, I am compelled to ask: Why did Godard go to the trouble of disguising Paris? Why did Varda avoid better-known arrondissements?

This is not a question of light versus shadow, or the appeal of Beaux Arts architecture versus the International Style, or cafés versus Residents’ Control. The question is: Could Cleo have found Antoine in Alphaville? Could Lemmy Caution have rescued Natasha from cosmopolitan Paris? I am inclined to answer yes to both questions, because, to my mind, the adhesive that holds both narratives together is the notion that sight equals love.

In the course of their respective narratives, Cleo and Natasha will define themselves as both women and individuals not simply by possessing the wherewithal and freedom to move through a city but also by seeing themselves move through the city. For both women, “seeing is believing.” Sight becomes consciousness, and consciousness, life.

What I think both directors have created—Varda’s Paris and Godard’s Alphaville—are dreamscapes. Natasha dreams into existence an Alphaville—programmed, regulated. Cleo’s Paris is random, fluid. Each woman, in effect, wanders through her respective dreams until she wakes. (That each is awakened with a “kiss” does not diminish her agency—her emerging independence—as it is she who has found her prince.)

I also believe that the notion of the city as dreamscape is particularly apt as both films are filled with moments and episodes that can be described as uncanny. Which is to say there are places in the film where the tension between the familiar, the unfamiliar and the seemingly familiar are nearly overwhelming.

Varda’s adherence to realistic representation does not make her city less symbolic. (The uncanny exists at noon as well as midnight.) The fact that her film is divided into chapters hints at impatience with the episodic structure in which she works. Chapters are more consistent with books than films and with fairytales than with real life. When watching Cleo, we are also “reading” a story. This becomes apparent when Cleo leaves her house. Almost at once she/we becomes aware of the world around her—aware of signs—both literal and symbolic. Panicked, obsessed with her illness, she sees in passing a sign above a pharmacy that reads “Bonne Santé.” A moment later she looks into a mirror on the window of a Chinese restaurant, and ideograms mark the reflection of her “unchanging doll face.” But her face has changed and for good/the good. She turns away and sees an absurd face, a man with frog legs for a tongue—a street performer swallowing frogs. Cleo is beginning to see and is at first repulsed by much of what she sees.

Throughout her walk, Cleo will see the kinds of ordinary things Freud wrote of in his essay, “The Uncanny.” Suddenly, commonplace features of everyday life will hint at the presence of death among the living. Cleo’s walk, which we will explore in greater detail in the next section, is marked by coincidences and forebodings, feelings of fear and dread. Along the way, a series of chance meetings and encounters will initiate her transformation from a narcissistic child to into a self-aware woman. As we follow Cleo we see that Varda’s Paris is not only a modern commercial center, the capital of a great country; it is also a magic kingdom complete with enchanted forests, frog princes and even an entrance into the underworld.

Alphaville is a nightmare and one that Natasha won’t survive if she doesn’t wake. Things there are counterintuitive, behavior unnatural. People reply before being addressed. Their bodies and voices are out of sync. Even words disappear, so that the notion of a “familiar” is not only strange, it could be erased. Freud speaks of repetition as an element of the uncanny, and Alpha 60’s insistence on logic reveals a “compulsion to repeat,” which strips away both a sense of time and context. The electronic beeping, transmitted not-quite-human voices and other sound effects, as well as sources of light that threaten either to expose or to punish, or to simply go out, all produce an experience of the uncanny. Sound that doesn’t elucidate and light that doesn’t illuminate are things the dead must experience. In a sense, Godard’s city is already a necropolis. 3 In thinking about the weight of the uncanny in Varda’s and Godard’s cities, I sense in the filmmakers a certain pessimism, perhaps even a loss of faith, or even a loss of faith in their art to achieve something important. (Perhaps they sense something is changing in France, but neither film anticipates the events to come in 1968.)

In both cases the city, and its modernity, have failed them in some important way. The failure is implicit and perhaps fatal. The destruction of Alphaville, like that of Berlin—as we saw in Germany, Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1948)—will not signal the end of war. As for Varda, how persuasive and replicable is Cleo’s awakening? In light of their own doubts, both directors, perhaps unconsciously, settled on “love,” one of the most conventional cinematic themes, to anchor their films. Love between a man and a woman. However, these are not conventional films because, in them, love is not an antidote to death but a palliative that makes death bearable. Which helps explain the importance of poetry in each film. The poetry of everyday experience as recited by Antoine and the modernist poetry Lemmy recites to both frustrate Alpha 60 and to awaken/seduce Natasha.

Don't Look. See. Don't Stop. Seek

According to Proust, it is a matter of chance whether an individual forms an image of himself, whether he can take hold of his experience.

Walter Benjamin in Illuminations, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”

Dorothee: Where are you going? Cleo: For a walk. Dorothee: That’s unlike you.

Baudelaire wrote, in describing the perfect Flâneur: To be away from home, yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be the center of the world, yet to remain hidden from the world—such are the few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures, which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.

I believe the Flâneuse would describe her feelings somewhat differently. To begin with, the princely or aristocratic detachment has little to do with her purposes. Nor does she go out “incognito.” To the contrary, she has removed her disguises and has entered the world on her own terms.

The world is not a distraction that alleviates her boredom, nor does it exist for her amusement, nor is it an inspiration for her art. Her gaze seeks. It seeks recognition. As Natasha recites—almost like a novice taking her vow—“Everything moves. We must advance to live. Aim straight ahead toward those you love. I went toward you endlessly toward the light.”

As we mentioned earlier, the Flâneuse is on a mission. This despite the fact she may not recognize the object of her gaze until the moment she happens on it. As in Flâneurie, chance plays a role but only a small one. To paraphrase Robert Sawyer, the Flâneuse’s gaze may be haphazard, but it is not indiscriminate.

While the Flâneur may assume a cloak of invisibility, the Flâneuse moves about in the light of day. However, I don’t mean to suggest that she puts herself on display, as the object of the gaze of others; rather, she goes out to meet the world as an equal. This issue of equality perhaps suggests why the Flâneuse could not appear or be taken seriously until the 1960s. In Cleo, Varda offers the viewer a primer on the pleasure found in the gaze, as well as the pleasure experienced in finding one’s self the object of the gaze. However, it is only the latter that Varda condemns, and she does so in the stronger terms: cancer. In this light, Varda might be seen as a cruel doctor administrating an iatrogenic—a treatment-induced illness—she has to kill the child to save the woman.

Cleo’s transformation from a “spoiled-child” and doll-like object of sexual desire (“Everyone spoils me. No one loves me.”) requires that she consciously shed—that she chooses to reject— all the pleasing trappings of the “girl” before she herself spoils. Her former naïve selfconsciousness, “Everything suits me. Trying things on intoxicates me,” has lost it charm. (In both senses of the word.)

To remove any doubt of what will follow, Varda has Cleo tear the wig from her head, dress in black and assume the posture and dignity of a woman. Through these acts, Varda makes it clear that Cleo is not throwing a temper tantrum as Angèle, Bob and Maurice assume. This is a defining act of defiance—Snow White has awakened.

In a similar fashion, Natasha undergoes her own “extreme makeover”—from child/automaton, into an adult woman and thus into a sexual being. I will acknowledge here that Natasha’s transformation is less obvious and so more problematic than that of Cleo. Perhaps even more troublesome is my suggestion that much of Natasha’s Flâneurie will take place off screen. However, the evidence that it has occurred can be seen, in each subsequent scene, in the growing complexity of emotions she displays and the extent and quality of her verbal exchanges with Lemmy Caution: “Increasingly, I see the human form as a lovers’ dialogue.”

Over the course of the film, Natasha’s answers become less formulaic. She sheds her logic and rationality just as Cleo discarded her coquettishness. Natasha begins to show emotions—when Caution is taken away, tears well in her eyes. A colleague notices and asks if she is crying. She replies, “No, because it is forbidden.” This is a point of departure.

During their last scene in Caution’s hotel room, we watch a montage of Natasha and Caution as they give/enact/dance an alternating reading from Paul Eluard’s Capitale De La Douleur (The Capital of Pain) 1926. It is a classic scene in which the lovers pledge themselves before they are violently separated. The exchange reveals an intensity of emotion and comprehension that Natasha was not capable of showing when we first met her. How did she get there? Natasha, like Cleo, has moved through her world and, in passing through it, appears to see it for the first time. It is not all beautiful, some of it is frightening and even grotesque, but all of it is real and must be negotiated. The disorienting interiors that Natasha navigates—endless hallways, countless staircases, identical rectilinear spaces and dark roads—are not so different from the labyrinth-like streets and boulevards that Cleo must traverse. Internal or external, both walks cover psychological ground and are quite different from the strolling of the Flâneur who seeks nothing in particular. As Edmond Jaloux observed in “Le Dernier Flâneur”:

To leave without being forced in any way, and to follow your inspiration as if the mere fact of turning right or turning left already constituted an essentially poetic act.”

Natasha and Cleo take a different route than that described by Jaloux because they must arrive somewhere in particular and time is of the essence.

They are two strange sisters: Cleo wanders like a ghost or a lost soul. Natasha moves at first like a zombie and later, as the populace of Alphaville breaks down, like one possessed. However, both will find their footing and, with it, their sense of self. What is also certain is that their steps grow more confident as they hone in on their objects: Antoine and Lemmy Caution. 2 At this point, I think it is important to spend a moment examining the objects of Cleo’s and Natasha’s Flâneurie. In doing so, I also think it fair to ask the following questions: Do Flâneuses set out to be rescued by men? Does rescue represent a loss of agency or independence? Do happy endings, complete with declarations of love, reduce both films to the level of Hollywood romances? Must Natasha cry “uncle”—Je vous aime—before Lemmy Caution will rescue her?

As I discussed earlier, I think that the moods of both films suggest pessimism on the part of their directors. And I also suspect that neither wanted to make a film that left their audiences unmoved. For example, I find it difficult to believe that Godard thought that two stacked stills, seen during the title sequence of Alphaville—the first of a group of men pushing a tank into the sea; the second showing a man’s hand releasing a dove—actually justified his desire to make a Science Fiction movie. And I also don’t imagine Varda’s audience was ready to watch a heroine entering a cancer ward on her own. Or accept death as the sentence for the crime of coquetry. However, I can imagine Godard thinking that nothing suggests a dream of peace more persuasively than a man and a woman in love driving into the sunset. Or Varda thinking, it’s love that gives meaning to life.

These may seem rather simplistic answers more correct when discussing Romance novels10 than French New Wave films, but the fact remains that both films end with women and men going off together. What else is one to make of Varda’s and Godard’s matches for their women—two typical movie heroes, men of action. Antoine is a soldier. Lemmy Caution, a private eye, a spy. There is, of course, a twist—similar to the dynamic Janice Radway found in her study of Romance novels—they are men of action and words. Both men are not only poets, they are also gentle, tender and nurturing. The women, in the end, surrender to the men’s muscles and to their words. The word surrender is, I think, accurate. Both women are, at the end of their Flâneurie, domesticated.

Conclusion

Alphaville proves the truth of Susan Sontag’s claim that “[in] the landscape of pain, only three …responses of real interest are possible: violent action, the probe of ‘ideas,’ and the transcendence of sudden, arbitrary, romantic love.”

“Words Like Love,” Kaja Silverman in “Speaking about Godard,” NYU Press, 1998

An intoxication comes over the man who walks long and aimlessly through the streets. With each step the walk takes on greater momentum; ever weaker grows the temptations of shops, of bistros, of smiling women, ever more irresistible the magnetism of the next street corner, of a distant mass of foliage, of a street name. Then comes hunger.

Walter Benjamin, [The Flâneur] 11

Vous et moi.

Antoine to Cleo

Je vous aime.

Natasha Von Braun to Lemmy Caution

Baudrillard, writing about New York, says of Europe, “…the street only lives in sudden surges, in historic moments of revolution and barricades.”12 I think the concept of Les Flâneuses introduces another type of surge. A psychological catalyst or “personal surge,” as when Cleo emerges from her house, no longer a child but a woman. As we saw earlier, this act of defiance was also a declaration; its sincerity expressed by the violence with which she tears the wig from her head. The Paris she steps into rises to meet her eyes and surges with life.

The surge that lifts up Natasha is set in motion by the appearance of Lemmy Caution to Alphaville. The violence he precipitates shakes Natasha loose from the life she was programmed to lead and replaces it with “sudden, arbitrary, romantic love.”

Up to the moment when they were caught up in the surge, both women were defined and so, confined, by others: Cleo, a girl in the golden cage; Natasha, a tattooed and soulless functionary.

Each is set free by the act of Flâneurie, by the willingness to “advance…and [to] aim straight ahead toward those you love” (Paul Eluard, Capitale De La Douleur). Cleo refuses to be objectified any longer and in the process becomes her own subject. This is when we learn her name is actually Florence and that Cleo is merely a persona, her professional mask. At this point, Varda allows her romance to literally flower as the name Florence is derived from the Latin for a flowering, or a blossoming. Cleo is no longer the mistress of artifice, the queen of seductresses; she is a Goddess of summer.

Natasha escapes a world predicated on surveillance—a world of being observed, characterized and objectified. While Natasha’s world is more ominous, one could argue that Cleo’s world is almost as punishing—it gives her cancer. (The benevolent dictatorship of consumer society versus the totalitarian regime.) When I think of the similarities of Cleo’s and Natasha’s conditions at the start of both films, I wonder if we can’t understand Flâneurie as a new strategy used by French women of the 1960s to negotiate the advent and implications of modern feminism.

The tension inherent in this negotiation, i.e., the safety of the home versus the perils of the street, might find expression in illness, of both a real and a psychosomatic kind. Cleo’s illness is centered in her belly, the symbol of her sex. Natasha’s is hysteria, another “typical” female condition.

Flâneurie offered men of a certain sensibility of the 19th and early 20th century a means to face the increasing standardization of the modern world. However, its female variation is more practical. It offers Cleo and Natasha a means to navigate the still-contested open spaces of the city.

I think this may have occurred to Varda. In a lovely moment, Cleo is in Dorothée’s boyfriend’s car. Although Dorothée has only just learned to drive, they are moving easily through traffic. Although Cleo has mentioned her condition, the mood is light. At one point one of them mentions how functional and boring street names are, and wouldn’t it be better if streets were named after celebrities and entertainers. Cleo could have a boulevard named for her. It is a moment in passing, a moment of vehicular Flâneurie, but it is filled with meaning—Cleo and Dorothée want to appropriate the city and remap it to suit their needs and pleasure.

There is also a mention of street names in Alphaville. Lemmy Caution has an appointment at 12 Enrico Fermi, off Heisenberg Avenue, by Mathematic Parks. It’s meant, I suspect, as a joke. An example of technocrats gone wild, but what Godard is saying with these street names is that Alphaville is not hospitable to Flâneurie. 2 In closing, I’d like to return for a moment to Baudrillard’s notion of the surge because I think it helps explain the upheaval, both personal and cultural, that triggers Flâneurie in both Cleo and Natasha. Implicit in the surge is both violence and the threat of death. As we’ve seen earlier, the presence of death is a necessary part of the cityscape, and our awareness of it lends a frequent experience of the uncanny to our everyday life.

Everyday violence, whether in the form of an automobile accident, new construction or crime, is inescapable. This theme is carried forward in both Antoine’s impending journey to Algeria and Lemmy Caution’s precarious work. Men, it seems, are not only the principle perpetuators of violence, they are also its most likely victims.

The threat to men is therefore obvious while the same threats to women seem more abstract—one could use the phrase “collateral damage” to describe it. Both Cleo and Natasha were damaged by the city. Their subsequent actions can be understood as an attempt to limit that damage to a minimum.

Love is an emergency exit. Natasha professes her love of Lemmy Caution and is rescued. Cleo gives Antoine her hand, with all the implications of giving one’s hand, and discovers that her cancer is treatable.

Cleo de 5 a 7, and Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution, are love stories everything else, as they say, is commentary. What makes them interesting love stories, relevant stories, is that they are not typical romances. The endings to these episodes are happy, but there is no guarantee the next episode will end happily ever after. Neither film pretends that love will rid the world of violence; simply that it will soften the blow when it comes. Nor will love help one avoid conflict; it will merely help one survive it. Necessity made Cleo and Natasha Les Flâneuses Inadvertentes. But each woman had to cut her own path and see herself on it, before she could make good her escape.

Notes

1. Cleo de 5 a 7 (Cleo Between 5 and 7), Dir. Agnes Varda, Screenplay by Agnes Varda, Cast: Corinne Marchand, Antoine Bouseiller, Dorothée Blank, Jose-Luis De Villalonga, others. Released in 1962. 2. Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution, Dir. Jean-Luc Godard, Screenplay JeanLuc Godard, Cast: Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Akim Tamiroff, Howard Vernon, Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean-André Fieschi, others. Released in 1965. 3. Foucault, Michael, “Panopticism,” in Rethinking Architecture, Ed. Neil Leach, Routledge, 1997. 4. See Benjamin, Walter, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Shocken Books, New York, 1968. 5. Freud, Sigmund, “The Uncanny.” First published 1919, in Imago V (5-6), English Translation, Penguin Books, 2003. 6. Sunrise, Dir. F.W. Murnau, 1927. Murnau’s American debut—his first project for Hollywood’s Fox Film Corporation but planned in Germany. It was the first feature film released with sound-on-film, with a synchronized Movietone musical score by Hugo Riesenfeld. It appeared at the very end of the silent era and was released only a few days before the opening of Warner Bros.’ “first talkie,” The Jazz Singer. 7. Baudelaire, Charles, “L’Art romantique Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” pp 64–65, Paris, 1863. 8. Eluard, Paul, Capitale De La Douleur (The Capital of Pain), 1926. 9. Jaloux, Edmond, “Le Dernier Flâneur,” Le Temps, May 22, 1936. 10. See Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature, Janice A. Radway, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London, 1991. 11. Benjamin, Walter, The Arcade Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England, 1999. 12. Baudrillard, Jean, “America,” in Rethinking Architecture, Ed. Neil Leach, Routledge, 1997.