Dear all,

This Wednesday at 6 pm, giving you the excuse you've been looking for to catch that early bird dinner special, there is a FREE film screening at Catamount Arts. Actually, every Wednesday at 6 pm there is a free film screening at Catamount – but this week the screening is hosted by me, your friendly neighborhood doctor of movies. This week we will be screening Agnes Varda's 'Cleo from 5 to 7' (1962) as the first screening in a series titled "Film Waves – Part 1."

Starting around 1960 and continuing to the present, and first used with the French New Wave, the names "new wave" or "new cinema" have been used to identify a particular kind of energy in different cinematic national contexts. Generally, the term has been used to describe younger filmmakers bringing in some youthful perspective and energy to the stale conventions, and at the same time, the films produced in a new wave are typically more personal, more of a product of a singular vision rather than a corporate studio, and are made inexpensively and often quickly. This gives the films in a new wave a lot of freedom to address issues otherwise glossed over – politics, history, the unique situation of their own society and moment.

The two films we're screening this month, Varda's 'Cleo from 5 to 7' and, on the 28th, Vera Chytilova's 'Daisies' (1966), are both written and directed by women and both address the place of women in their societies at the time as well as the place of women in the world of film at large. Agnes Varda, with her interests in making personal films, from a youth-oriented perspective, and with a focus on the language of cinema, was a driving figure in the French New Wave. Her seminal 'Cleo from 5 to 7' tries to create something new in terms of the value of femininity in film, showing a progression from "Woman as Spectacle to Woman as Social Being," as a famous essay on the film puts it. Operating in almost real time (the 90 minute film only covers about 2 hours of story time), the film follows the titular Cleo and invites us to look at Cleo and to look through her eyes as she traverses the city of Paris.

This month's theme is titled "Part 1" because, with only two screenings, we will only survey two different film waves – the French New Wave and the Czech New Wave. If we'd like, there are many, many more film waves that we can explore in future screenings.

See you on Wednesday!

~Dr. Pete