The Wandering Frame: From New Wave Exile to Digital Diaspora

By Osman Arslan directing December 31, 2025

To watch Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 is to enter a state of heightened, nervous perception. As the pop singer Cléo Victoire (Corinne Marchand) drifts through Paris, awaiting the results of a biopsy, we are not merely her observers; we become her accomplices in anxiety. The camera, a handheld Miniquad that feels more like an extension of her nervous system than a mechanical apparatus, clings to her, absorbing the city's rhythms as she does. It trembles as she descends a staircase, sways with her reflection in a shop window, and rushes to keep pace as she flees the solicitous gazes of friends and strangers. For decades, the conventional reading of this aesthetic, the signature restlessness of the French New Wave, has celebrated its liberating break with the staid “cinema of quality.” It was, we are told, the camera unchained: spontaneous, truthful, revolutionary. But this reading, in its focus on rupture, misses the profound melancholy at the heart of the movement’s most celebrated technique. I would argue that this handheld camera, often seen through a Godardian lens of chaotic insurgency, was repurposed by Varda not for revolution, but for a meditation on internal exile. In her hands, it becomes a tool for articulating a specifically feminine, existential displacement that uncannily prefigures the digital-era longing of Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love. Conventional scholarship celebrates the New Wave as a triumphant European rupture, but a closer look reveals it as an early, exiled mourning for connection, subverting its own myth of youthful rebellion to sow the seeds of a global diasporic cinema.

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The handheld camera of the Nouvelle Vague was, of course, born of both necessity and philosophy. Lightweight cameras, liberated from the studio dolly, allowed for a documentary-style immediacy, a way to capture life “at a height of a man,” as Jean Rouch, a key influence, might have put it. In Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), this liberation is anarchic. The camera, wielded by Raoul Coutard, chases Jean-Paul Belmondo’s Michel Poiccard down the Champs-Élysées with a kinetic abandon that mirrors the character’s own amoral impulsiveness. The film’s famous jump cuts do not just break classical continuity; they shatter it, reflecting a world where, as Godard’s early criticism suggests, reality itself is a series of fickle, disconnected moments. Godard’s handheld is an offensive weapon, an assault on the perceived artifice of cinema.

When Varda picks up this tool two years later in Cléo, she transforms its function entirely. Where Godard’s camera is extroverted and performative, Varda’s is introverted and psychological. It’s a crucial distinction, often lost in the tendency to lump the aesthetics of the Left Bank filmmakers with their more famous Cahiers du Cinéma brethren. Varda is less interested in destroying cinema than in using its newest tools to map an interior landscape. The 90 minutes of the film, unfolding in near real-time, are a masterclass in subjective cinematography. Consider the sequence where Cléo leaves the tarot card reader, her face a mask of dread. The camera does not simply follow her; it is her dread. It stumbles behind, capturing the oblique angles of Parisian architecture, the indifferent faces of passersby, the overwhelming visual noise of the street. This is not the vibrant, romanticized Paris of the musical she rehearses; this is an alienating space. She is an exile in her own city, experiencing what I call a proto-diasporic state, a displacement not from a geographical homeland, but from a sense of stable selfhood and belonging.

This internal exile is rendered through a subtle interplay of handheld motion and deep focus, a technique that anticipates cinema’s future anxieties. In one devastatingly lonely shot, Cléo sits in a café, and the handheld camera slowly pans past her to an empty chair, then drifts to frame the bustling street outside through the window. The effect, a formalist might observe in the tradition of David Bordwell, is one of profound disconnection. The world continues, vibrant and unconcerned, while she is trapped in a bubble of mortal fear. The camera’s movement emphasizes her isolation rather than her integration into the city’s fabric. This is a far cry from the jubilant energy of Breathless. It is the handheld camera not as a declaration of freedom, but as a confession of profound alienation. It is this specific emotional frequency, the camera as a marker of a soul unmoored, that will echo across continents and decades.

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To understand Varda’s innovation, however, we must place it against the backdrop of Godard’s more explicit project of deconstruction. Throughout the 1960s, Godard waged a war against representation itself. His films became essays on the impossibility of truth in a world saturated with commercial images and political rhetoric. As some critics like Susan Sontag have noted, his aim was not to perfect cinema but to interrogate and even destroy it, to expose its "delusive counterfeits" of reality. In Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), this project reaches its apotheosis. The camera clinically observes the life of a Parisian housewife who moonlights as a prostitute, while Godard’s own whispered narration questions everything we see. The film equates the prostitution of the body with the prostitution of language and image under capitalism.

Here, Godard’s sense of exile becomes explicitly political. His characters are not just emotionally adrift; they are alienated by ideology, by the Vietnam War raging in the background, by the concrete towers of the new Paris. His critique is macro-level, a sweeping indictment of a sick society. This is the “revolutionary exile” that the research materials point to: an estrangement from the entirety of the bourgeois system. When he finally breaks with narrative cinema altogether after May ’68 to form the Dziga Vertov Group, this exile is complete. He becomes a filmmaker in self-imposed exile from the industry he so famously disrupted.

Varda, operating within this same turbulent period, channels that same spirit of unrest but turns its gaze inward. The political context of the Algerian War, a conflict that haunted the French intellectual sphere and was explicitly addressed in Godard’s banned Le Petit Soldat, is present in Cléo in a subtler, more personal register. It materializes in the form of Antoine, the soldier on leave from Algeria whom Cléo meets in the Parc Montsouris. Their conversation is a meeting of two different kinds of exiles. He is displaced by war, facing the prospect of returning to a battle he doesn't seem to believe in; she is displaced by mortality, sentenced to a limbo of waiting. Their shared vulnerability forges an authentic connection that has eluded Cléo throughout the entire film. In the final moments, as Antoine accompanies her to receive her results, Varda’s camera finally stills. As they walk together, the handheld restlessness gives way to stable, tracking shots. The wandering frame has found a temporary anchor. This resolution, however small, presents a profound counterpoint to Godard’s increasingly nihilistic worldview. Where Godard’s formal radicalism leads to a dead end, the “zero degree of cinema”—Varda’s suggests that even within a state of profound exile, human connection remains a possibility. It is a deeply feminist revision of the New Wave’s revolutionary impulse, suggesting that the most radical act may not be to tear down the world, but to find a way to quietly survive within it.

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Nearly forty years later, in a different continent and a different technological era, this language of quiet survival and internal exile finds its most poignant heir in Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000). On the surface, the connection seems tenuous. Wong’s film is the antithesis of the New Wave’s raw, pseudo-documentary aesthetic. Its images are breathtakingly polished, impossibly lush. The camera work, a collaboration between Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bing, is a ballet of exquisite control: slow-motion glides, claustrophobic compositions shot through doorways and windows, and a palette of colors so rich they feel bruised with emotion. And yet, the feeling the film generates is uncannily familiar. It is the same aching loneliness, the same sense of being a ghost in one’s own life, that Varda captured on the streets of Paris.

Wong reframes the handheld camera’s legacy for the digital age. While he does not rely on its shaky immediacy, the camera in In the Mood for Love is perpetually unmoored. It rarely settles, constantly craning, panning, and reframing Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) as they navigate the narrow corridors of their apartment building and their unconsummated affair. The camera’s inability to find a resting place becomes a physical manifestation of their emotional paralysis. They are exiles within their own marriages, within the tight-knit Shanghainese diaspora community in 1960s Hong Kong. Wong, in the spirit of a formalist analysis, replaces the frantic energy of the jump cut with the mournful suspension of step-printing. Time is not shattered, as in Godard; it is looped, stretched, and suspended, trapping the characters in an eternal present of missed opportunities and unspoken desires. One could argue he digitizes the very "impossible temporality" that Varda’s real-time experiment in Cléo first explored. Cléo's 90-minute countdown to a diagnosis becomes Chow and Su's endless rehearsal of a confrontation that will never happen, a goodbye that is never truly said.

The historical context is, again, crucial. If Varda’s film was shadowed by the Algerian War and nascent sixties counter-culture, Wong’s is saturated with a sense of diasporic melancholy particular to Hong Kong’s history, the displacement of the Shanghainese community in the 1960s, and the film’s own production against the backdrop of the 1997 handover. The film is a memory piece, a lament for a time and a love that are irrevocably lost. The diasporic condition, which was a personal, existential state for Cléo, is here a communal, historical one. Wong takes Varda’s proto-diasporic gaze and makes it the central subject of his work. The glances stolen through doorways, the figures seen partially obscured by grating or steam, the bodies that pass in slow-motion without touching, this is the aesthetic of a globalized, fragmented world, where connection is yearned for but perpetually deferred. The revolutionary tool of the French New Wave, born of a desire to capture reality, has evolved into a tool for capturing the texture of a dream, a memory, a longing.

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To trace this line from Varda to Wong is to rewrite a small but significant chapter of film history. It forces us to look past the noisy, masculine mythologies of the Nouvelle Vague and listen for its quieter, more enduring frequencies. It suggests that the movement’s most lasting legacy may not be its revolutionary fervor, but its accidental discovery of a cinematic language for solitude. In this reading, the handheld camera is not a symbol of youthful confidence but of a deep-seated uncertainty, a visual correlative for the "generalized despair" that bubbled beneath the surface of postwar prosperity. Varda, with a sensitivity that prefigures the intersectional critiques of thinkers like bell hooks, captured this anxiety through a distinctly female lens, showing how public space feels different, how time itself is altered, when one’s body is a site of spectacle and fear.

What does this re-evaluation offer us today, as viewers and thinkers about cinema? It suggests that film movements are not monolithic, and their influence travels in strange, subterranean ways, bypassing obvious lines of descent. The restless energy of 1960s Paris did not only fuel the political filmmaking of the 1970s or the indie breakouts of the 1990s; it also taught a Hong Kong auteur how to film the space between two people who can never touch. It teaches us to see form not as an abstract set of choices, but as the carrier of profound emotional and historical truths. The jitteriness of Varda’s Miniquad and the ghostly glide of Wong’s Arricam are two different dialects of the same language, the language of the wandering frame, searching for a place to rest.

In the end, Cléo finds a moment of peace. Standing with Antoine, her fear of death is momentarily eclipsed by the simple fact of another’s presence. The camera, for the first time, grants her a stable, shared space. Wong Kar-wai offers no such solace. His film ends with Chow Mo-wan at Angkor Wat, whispering his secret into a hole in the ancient stone, burying his longing forever. The first image is one of connection tentatively found; the second, of connection permanently lost. Between these two moments, a half-century of cinema unfolds. The camera, once a tool to seize the present moment in all its messy reality, has become a vessel for preserving the ghosts of the past. The revolution, it turns out, was not the breaking of the wave, but the long, sorrowful pull of its undertow.

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