Stepping Out: On Watching Women Walk

Cléo from 5 to 7, like Wings of Desire and Four Nights of a Dreamer, is a film that embodies the pleasures of flânerie, that particular style of urban walking invented, or at any rate named, by the French in the mid-nineteenth century. The flâneur doesn’t walk to get somewhere, but to observe the passing scene; he is a consumer of images, responding to the world as if it were cinema. In “Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris” (“What one sees in the streets of Paris,” 1858), Victor Fournel writes of  “Going on infinite investigations through the streets and promenades; drifting along, with your nose in the wind, with both hands in your pockets, and with an umbrella under your arm, as befits any open-minded spirit; walking along, with serendipity, without pondering where to and without urging to hurry . . . giving yourself over, captivated and enraptured, with all your senses and all your mind, to the spectacle.” This experience of wandering city streets would become the organizing principle for modernist classics like Joyce’s Ulysses and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and would inspire the genre of “city symphony” films (Berlin, Symphony of a Great City, Rien que les heures, Man With a Movie Camera) that revel in the camera’s ability to swim with the ebb and flow of urban life. 

Flânerie, in the beginning, was almost exclusively a male pursuit. Women could not inhabit public spaces with the same freedom; the fact that calling a woman a “streetwalker,” or saying she “walks the streets,” means she is a commodity for sale, explains in large part why. (The old term tramp similarly links walking, vagrancy, and sexual availability.) “How many irritations for a single woman! She can hardly ever go out in the evening; she would be taken for a prostitute,” Jules Michelet wrote in La femme (1858–1860). “Should she find herself delayed at the other end of Paris and hungry, she will not dare to enter a restaurant. She would constitute an event; she would be a spectacle.” In Elevator to the Gallows, Florence is approached by a young man (played by director Louis Malle) who seems to mistake her for a lady of the pavements; and the night ends with her being arrested, along with some hookers, simply for being abroad in the wee hours without identification. The writer Georges Sand sallied forth dressed as a man, and exulted, “No one paid attention to me, and no one guessed at my disguise . . . No one knew me, no one looked at me, no one found fault with me; I was an atom lost in that immense crowd.”

Varda’s film expresses a complex, ambivalent view of what being seen means for a woman. Cléo goes into an art class where her friend is posing nude, ringed by students staring at her as they chisel away at their sculptures. When Cléo says she would be embarrassed in that position, afraid people would find flaws in her, the friend explains that the sculptors aren’t seeing her as a person, adding that she is “happy with her body, not proud of it.” But Cléo is proud of hers, part of why she is so upset about her possible illness—cancer is a flaw, to be sure. Walking alone in the Bois de Boulogne in the last section of the movie, she starts singing a song about her irresistible allure, striking seductive poses as she sashays down a staircase, vamping for an imagined audience. A woman walking in public is often treated as a spectacle, a provocation, a moving target for men’s eyes (like Oja Kodar parading through the streets in the “girl-watching” segment of Orson Welles’ F for Fake). Jeanne Moreau enters this darker territory at times: in Buñuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid she models tight lace-up boots to please her aged, foot-fetishist employer; in Bay of Angels, her gambling-addict character dons an evening gown so tight at the hem that it forces her to adopt a hobbled, mincing trot that epitomizes her self-imposed degradation. 

Cléo wants to be noticed, to be admired, but in the end she gets something much better, someone to walk with her, to talk and listen to her. A voluble, kind-hearted soldier she meets in the park (Antoine Bourseiller) volunteers to accompany her to the hospital to get her test results; with his return to the Algerian war imminent, he too faces the real threat of death. Short, ordinary-looking, far removed from the artsy glamour of her world, he is the kind of person she would never ordinarily meet or give the time of day to—the stranger as savior. Throughout this final section, the camera falls into step beside Cléo and Antoine as they stroll and chat, finally tracking away as they walk slowly through the hospital gardens, as though drawing back tactfully from their newfound intimacy.

Twenty-three years later, Varda would make a very different film about a walking woman: Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi, 1985), which she described as “a portrait in the form of a discontinuous traveling shot.” As Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire), the titular drifter, hitchhikes around rural France, the camera repeatedly follows her with a gliding lateral movement, then loses her, suggesting how easily a woman who chooses to live “without roof or rules,” as the original title has it, can disappear. Mona defiantly rejects expectations of female behavior; she smells bad, she never says thank you, she resists settling down, she shoulders a heavy pack and sleeps rough. But she is no feminist role model: lacking any sense of purpose, she gradually disintegrates, the way her boots fall apart, flopping around her ankles. She ultimately falls in with a druggy crowd of petty criminals who loiter around a train station, and stumbles toward a lonely death in a ditch—where the movie regards her in its opening image, looking like a body from Pompeii. This film about vagrancy opens and ends with frozen immobility.

In Chantal Akerman’s Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978), a young filmmaker travels alone from one European city to another, presenting her movie. Almost every scene is set either in a hotel, a railway station, on a train, or in a taxi. The film opens with a series of extended, static shots, symmetrically framing a train platform or the sliding glass doors of a hotel; Anna (Aurore Clément) enters and exits these shots without fanfare. Then, in her first hotel room, she walks the length of the windows, pulling back the curtains, and the camera follows with a discreet sideways movement. This pattern continues throughout the film, alternating patiently immobile shots—often of Anna gazing out of windows or simply staring into space—with tracking shots as she walks down a street or a hallway or through the waiting room of a terminus. Sometimes, the camera stays put and watches as she walks away. She carries a single small duffel bag, and wears the same clothes throughout. Her gait is plain, utilitarian, with a slight slump in the shoulders; the rhythm of her clomping heels becomes a metronomic underscoring.

Though she is often in motion, the overwhelming impression she creates is of stillness; she is contained, muted, frozen. Her pale, delicate face looks like a medieval Flemish portrait; the few times Anna smiles—when she is with her mother, or after singing for her lover a song about a couple who commit suicide—the warmth is surprising, like the first flowers breaking through wintry ground. Anna has various “rendez-vous”: with an alarmingly blond German man she meets at a film screening; with a stranger in a train corridor; with a family friend between trains. All of them, with the exception of the meeting with her mother, are characterized by disconnection and incompleteness. Anna does not seem lonely, exactly—she is sought after, successful, loved—but somehow cut off from life. She travels, but every place looks the same. “What do you see in the street?” her lover asks, as she stands gazing out a hotel window in Paris. “Cars,” she answers.

Two years earlier, Akerman had made News from Home (1976), another film about a woman out on her own in the world. Here, the walker herself disappears, and all that’s left is what she sees. Constructed entirely of shots of Manhattan—streets, subways, store windows, endless pedestrians—it is a kind of city symphony, but the mood is very different from the usual celebration of urban vitality, bustle and flow. New York, in these images, seems oddly hushed, even when midtown crowds are swarming through the streets. Kids play stickball and open fire hydrants; men spade pizza into ovens; well-dressed women pace subway platforms. But they are all somehow like sleepwalkers, and the city itself, with its soft, saturated colors and abraded surfaces, looks like a dignified ruin, a place in quiet mourning for its lost glory. 

Akerman and her cinematographer, Babette Mangolte, plant themselves in subway cars and on street corners and the corridors of Times Square station, but—this being New York—for the most part no one looks at them. We never forget who the walker in the city is, though, because Akerman reads, in a rapid, hushed voice-over, letters from the mother in Belgium. They are all the same, letter after letter complaining that her beloved daughter does not write often enough, nagging her for more news, insisting that she is not going to be the kind of selfish mother who stands in the way of her child’s freedom, but then lamenting her own loneliness and fretting over her little girl’s welfare: “I’m worried about you all alone. I wish you could just be home with us.” The mismatch between the visuals and the words captures, better than anything could, the alienation of the expatriate, the voyageuse, and in particular the divided consciousness of a woman whose independence is shot through with guilt and still tethered to family and home.