Classic Cinema Obsession: Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie

[Editor’s Note: A restored version of Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie has just been released by Criterion on DVD and Blu-ray, and is now available at the LFM Store below at the end of this post.]

By Jennifer Baldwin

A CLASSIC CINEMA OBSESSION in 4 TABLEAUX

1
JENNI COMES IN LATE — THE FACE OF MARIA FALCONETTI –CONVERTED — PEOPLE WALK OUT EARLY
I was late to the screening. It was French New Wave Week in World Cinema 340 and we were watching Godard’s MY LIFE TO LIVE (a.k.a. VIVRE SA VIE). It was my first Godard. I was a lazy undergrad. I came in about 15 minutes late, an intruder bringing a squeaky door and too much light into the darkened, cavernous auditorium. I felt hot and embarrassed at my intrusion. I sat in an uncomfortable plastic chair in the back, hiding from all my fellow students. The first thing I saw was a face. It made me cry. It always makes me cry.

THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC is one of my favorite films. Seeing it for the first time, I had a (re)conversion to Catholicism/cinema. Seeing it every time since, I am continually reconverted. And always crying at the face of Maria Falconetti.

I am Nana. She sees the face of Maria-as-Jeanne D’Arc and she cries too.

We are all crying, we three faces. I have a feeling no one else in the auditorium is crying. Before the screening is over, half the students have walked out. Perhaps they were disappointed at the lack of sex and the one bit of sterile nudity in a picture about prostitution. Perhaps they couldn’t feel anything when they looked at Anna Karina’s face. Perhaps they didn’t like lengthy philosophical discussions about the meaning of language and speech. Perhaps they thought the French New Wave weird and pretentious and Godard’s film most of all.

But not me. I was converted that night while watching VIVRE SA VIE. I was converted to Godard. He was my first New Wave love (Truffaut would come later, but Godard was always stronger).

It’s been almost eight years since I watched VIVRE SA VIE in college, but I have never forgotten the images or the effect the film had on me. I have never forgotten it. I recently watched the new Criterion Collection remastered DVD of VIVRE SA VIE — now my second time seeing the film. I still can’t explain my thoughts on it. It is a religious experience in that way. It is a spiritual/emotional thing, not an intellectual one. I have thoughts and feelings, but I cannot put them into words. If words were enough, I wouldn’t need the pictures.

“She sells her body but keeps her soul.”

2
THE FUZZY BLACK COAT IS COVETED — PINBALL WIZARDS — JENNI ENDS UP WATCHING A CRIME PICTURE
I want Nana’s fuzzy black coat.

I also love a movie that has a pinball machine. I also love a movie even better that has a pinball machine that gets played. I love the sounds of a pinball machine.

The film is so many things: Portrait, documentary, existential character study, 1962, Europe, philosophical conversation, literature, voyeurism, rhythm and blues, France, prostitution, gangster B-movie. All of these things mixing, sometimes between tableaux, sometimes within tableaux. Godard keeps the girl and a gun motif even in this his fourth feature.

But VIVRE SA VIE is a more mature work of art and feels more real, more in touch with the sadness and waywardness of actual life, even though Godard hangs on to the pulp fiction elements. This is still 1962, rhythm and blues blaring on juke boxes, record store shop girls, pinball mixed with pimps and gangsters in the street, tommy guns. Pop culture.

Godard is loved because he loves the movies. Especially American genre movies. He fills his own films with references and homages. It’s a B-movie, but from the girl’s perspective. Not as fun. More pain and loneliness and disconnect.

Elizabeth Taylor brings thoughts of BUTTERFIELD 8. Nana is a prostitute somehow less glamorous but more beautiful than La Liz. Nana is also truer, sadder, and freer. Nana understands that everything in life is CHOICE. She chooses to lift her hand, she chooses to feel sad, she chooses to be a prostitute, and she chooses to keep her soul.

There is also the fact that it’s always fun to look at two gorgeous faces at once. Godard understands this.

3
THOUGHTS ARE NOT ALWAYS WORDS — EDGAR ALLEN POE — GODARD PAINTS PORTRAIT

I find myself like Nana (Anna Karina): Unable to put my thoughts into words. I cannot write about VIVRE SA VIE. It might be my favorite Godard film. I’ve only seen it twice. It is a portrait of a woman — Nana/Anna — and what is there to say about a portrait? It is beautiful, it is sad, it makes me feel, I am looking at a human person.

A portrait is not words and cannot be contained or explained with words just as the whole human person cannot be contained or explained with mere words. This cinematic portrait makes me think, but I can’t turn these thoughts into verbal/written language. I am like Nana in this way. If words could say what I’m thinking, what Nana/Anna is thinking, what Godard is thinking, then there would be no need to paint the portrait. VIVRE SA VIE is a cinematic portrait of a woman and she might lend us her soul for 83 minutes but she never gives herself to us completely. The best portraits never do.

4
CINEMA OF JOY — ROSSELLINI DISAPPROVES — JENNI DOESN’T CARE — CINEMA OF SADNESS
Godard once said he and his fellow New Wave cohorts had a “joy of cinema.” BREATHLESS is the joy of cinema. VIVRE SA VIE is the sadness. It is the sadness behind the eyes of Anna Karina. Godard pointed his camera at her and found that cinema was no longer joy but a human being and a human being can have immense sadness, even amidst happiness. VIVRE SA VIE is the cinema of dignity. It captures the dignity of the soul. The soul can transcend even objectification and violence.

What is it about? Rossellini dismissed it, calling it a cinema of nothing. Without meaning. This bummed Godard out, who wanted Rossellini to like the film. I don’t care what Rossellini said. I say any film that is about the human soul has meaning, even if we can’t understand it.

But this film isn’t life itself, only a portrait of it. A cinema, a moving image, but not the thing itself. Nana/Anna can lend us her soul, but she keeps herself for herself.

That is why the back of her head is such a dominate image of the film. We see her, but we can never fully know her. We may feel her humanity and be stirred to a deep emotional response as we watch her trials, but we never really know her.

“Nana” is Anna Karina but she is also not Anna Karina. She is an image on film but not the real woman herself, despite the vulnerability and openness she displays for Godard’s camera.

It is the strange paradox of the cinematic art that it is both the thing itself but also only a recording of the thing itself. I look at the portrait and try to see everything underneath and inside the person, I try to find her whole meaning and essence, her very soul, when what I really find is my own soul staring back at me with a question: What do I choose for my own life?

BONUS TABLEAU — GODARD’S TRAILER
Dedicated to B-movies.