FILM ANALYSIS IN 10 SLIDES
60th Anniversary Tribute To “A Perfect Film”: Jean-Luc Godard’s VIVRE SA VIE (1962)
Homage to Godard
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NANA
In Vivre Sa Vie (To live Her Life), called a “perfect film” by Susan Sontag, Anna Karina plays Nana — a reference to Jean Renoir’s film based on the Émile Zola novel. Like the failed actress Nana (Catherine Hessling) becoming a government official’s mistress, the protagonist of the Godard film turns a prostitute. Godard-Karina couple was a director-star couple just like the Renoir-Hessling couple. Godard is not credited in the film but his signature is all over it!
STRUCTURE
David Bordwell cites Vivre Sa Vie as illustrating parametric narration which is, according to Daniel Frampton, “style centered, permutational, poetic.” Each of the 12 episodes in Vivre Sa Vie is characterized by one or more variants on possible camera/ subject relations. The credit sequence has three different close-ups of Nana: left profile, portrait and right profile. There are narrational gaps between episodes leading us to look at the connotative meaning of the film.
THE CHICKEN STORY
The first episode, in which Nana is leaving her husband Paul, shows only their backs for long. Godard employs the German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s distancing effect which prevents the audience from having emotional involvement in the play. Paul narrates the way a child described chicken in an essay: “Take away the outside and the inside is left. Take away the inside and you see its soul.” The story of the chicken is the story of Nana.
A LATTER-DAY JOAN
Nana cries watching Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc in a cinema. In it, Joan (Renée Jeanne Falconetti) looks upon her martyrdom as her deliverance. According to Susan Sontag, to evoke Bressonian spirituality without Catholicism, values of sanctity and martyrdom are transposed to a totally secular plane in Vivre Sa Vie. “The life of prostitute is of course the most radical metaphor for the act of lending oneself to others [as called for by Montaigne].”
FIRST CLIENT
Nana meets her first client near a cinema. By showing the poster for the Kubrick film Spartacus (1960) running there, Vivre Sa Vie associates prostitution with slavery. Just as a slave’s only freedom is death in Spartacus, Nana’s end will be similar. Nana desperately tries to avoid her client’s attempt to kiss her on her mouth. The scene is somewhat in the style of Robert Bresson, a director who used parametric narration according to Bordwell.
SOCIOLOGY
Episode 8 is Q&A on the life of a prostitute. The sociological information came from “La Prostitution”, a 1959 study by prosecuting judge Marcel Sacotte. The cinéma verité approach to documentary filmmaking was an influence on Vivre Sa Vie. The film could be read in political terms: “For Godard, prostitution is a metaphor for exploitation and he believes it applies to all sexual and social relationships that have a material or economic basis.” — Philip French.
THE PHILOSOPHER
Nana meets Brice Parain whose philosophy of language was an influence on Godard. Playing himself, “the philosopher”, Parain discusses with her the nature of language. He tells her the story of the death of Porthos from Alexandre Dumas’ “The Three Musketeers”: Porthos has never had a thought in his life. The very first time Porthos thinks he is killed. Like the story of chicken, this story could also be about Nana and it portends her death.
THE OVAL PORTRAIT
Nana is in love with the young man from the billiards room. Their conversation is shown only in subtitles. When he reads aloud from Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” it is in Godard’s voice. It’s about an artist trying to paint a perfect likeness of his wife. When he achieves it, she dies. Sontag rightly finds it an imperfection as Godard is making a reference outside the film to his wife Karina playing Nana who has to die.
ANNA KARINA
An icon of the French New Wave, Anna Karina was Godard’s muse, acting in eight of his feature films. Karina won the Silver Bear Award for Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival for her performance in Godard’s A Woman is a Woman. She also acted in the films of Varda, Rivette, Visconti and Fassbinder. Karina was a director, writer and singer too. She is the face of Vivre Sa Vie, “a perfect film” by Godard.
