Cléo from 5 to 7

Lines of influence

• La Pointe Courte (1955) — Varda's own debut established her contrapuntal editing (cut by Alain Resnais) that alternates a documentary-real location with a scripted couple — the same braiding of documented street and staged interiority Cléo runs in real time.
• Hiroshima mon amour (1959) — The Left Bank model of subjective duration and interior monologue laid over city walking that Varda inherits, treating clock time as psychological time rather than plot time.
• Rope (1948) — Hitchcock's experiment in collapsing screen time onto story time in near-continuous takes is the formal precedent for Cléo's insistence that the film's runtime equal the heroine's lived interval.
• The Set-Up (1949) — Wise's strict real-time construction, with visible clocks marking every passing minute of the story, is the discipline Varda adopts and chapters explicitly with title cards.
• High Noon (1952) — Zinnemann's synchronization of narrative duration to a ticking clock and recurring shots of timepieces prefigures Cléo's countdown structure toward a dreaded verdict.
• Breathless (1960) — Godard (who cameos in Cléo) pioneered the New Wave method of shooting handheld in real Paris streets with natural light and non-professional bystanders that Varda deploys for Cléo's cab and café wanderings.
• The 400 Blows (1959) — Truffaut's roving location camera tracking a solitary figure through actual Parisian exteriors shares Cléo's ambulatory grammar of following a protagonist through documented city space.
• Bicycle Thieves (1948) — The neorealist practice of building a film from a person's real-time search across genuine city streets and crowds is the documentary substrate Varda grafts onto a New Wave character study.
• Cléo's mirror lineage — The Lady from Shanghai (1947) — Welles's mirror-hall staging that fractures and interrogates a woman's image anticipates Varda's recurring mirror motif, in which Cléo's compulsive self-reflection is progressively dismantled as vanity gives way to sight.
• Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay (1975) — Akerman extends Cléo's real-time female duration into rigorous domestic observation, letting elapsed time and a woman's ordinary tasks carry the drama through a frankly female gaze.
• Wanda (1970) — Loden inherits the drifting, aimless female protagonist observed in near-documentary real space, decentering plot in favor of a woman's moment-to-moment perception.
• Vagabond (1985) — Varda herself extends the craft: a wandering woman traversed in quasi-real episodes structured toward mortality, again fusing documentary encounter with a formal countdown.
• Before Sunset (2004) — Linklater revives Cléo's real-time-equals-runtime conceit as two people walk a European city continuously, the film's duration matching the story's ticking window.
• Russian Ark (2002) — Sokurov pushes the real-time premise to its limit in a single unbroken take, the ultimate purification of the temporal contract Varda made with the viewer.
• Victoria (2015) — Schipper's one-take real-time night across a city, anchored to a young woman's continuous experience, is a direct descendant of Cléo's synchronized-clock walking film.
• Frances Ha (2012) — Baumbach openly homages the New Wave — black-and-white photography and a young woman ambling through the city set to buoyant music — reviving Cléo's tonal blend of melancholy and lightness.
• Elephant (2003) — Van Sant's Steadicam trailing of characters through real corridors in overlapping continuous time echoes Cléo's method of binding the camera to a body moving through space in the present tense.