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This article aims to reinstall the understated significance of female auteur Agnès Varda in French New Wave cinema. By analyzing distinctions in cinematography and characterization between Varda’s film Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) and Jean-Luc Godard’s oeuvre from the same period, I argue that Cléo from 5 to 7 advanced a vision of female subjectivity that controverted the construction of silenced female characters in Godard’s films. With her feminist pen of cinécriture, or “film-writing,” Varda challenged the prevalent androcentrism in the New Wave and pioneered second wave feminism in France.