Walking in the City

Abstract

This chapter is organized around a specific scene and action performed repeatedly in French new wave cinema: characters walking through the city. These emblematic rambles through urban space often unfold without apparent aim or direction, as getting somewhere becomes a secondary consideration and the film concentrates instead on the urban context and the act of walking itself. The films focus on the youthful body in a city undergoing its own process of demolition and renewal, and these scenes stage that interaction between people and the urban environment. Individual cases studies include Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, the documentary and fiction filmmaking of Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7