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Exam board student resource

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Features a number of tasks and activities to help with analysis of the film and consideration of Godard as Auteur.

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Excellent video essay on Godard & FNW

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Breaking The Rules - The French New Wave | The Cinema Cartography

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Good, biographical review of VSV

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VIVRE SA VIE (My Life To Live) - Jean-Luc Godard

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Nana (Anna Karina) works in a record store but dreams of becoming a film actress. After separating from her boyfriend, she drifts into prostitution and takes up with...

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Extensive essay about Vivre sa Vie at time of its DVD release.

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Vivre sa vie review - quintessential soul-searching from Godard

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Every carefully considered shot of Godard's fourth film questions the nature of cinema itself and how we perceive the world

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"A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order"

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Film Comment, 2016

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Examples of filmmakers haphazardly discovering their muse abound in the history of cinema. In France, two such stories from the Fifties have come to be popular legends: Roger Vadim's accidental discovery of 15-year-old Brigitte Bardot on the cover of Elle magazine (the director happened upon Brigitte's picture while making a paper plane from a page of the magazine), and Jean-Luc Godard's chance encounter with 19-year-old Anna Karina through a Palmolive soap commercial, which marked the Copenhagen-born Parisian actress's first on-screen appearance.

Both of these episodes prompted the formation of two of French cinema's most influential actress-director couples: Vadim turned Bardot into an enduring symbol of female emancipation, while Godard made Karina into the face of the country's most radical and revered cinematic revolution.

In the seven and a half films they made together (Karina counts the short film Anticipation [67] as half a film), Godard filmed his spouse from all angles, delineating her feline beauty with the precision of a portrait painter. Each Godard-Karina collaboration is a portal into the latter's soul. A Woman Is a Woman (61) was an overt celebration of Karina's youthful impetuosity and playfulness, while Vivre sa vie (63) highlighted her emotional depth and gravitas under the traits of doomed prostitute Nana. In Bande à Part, she was a frail gangster, and in Pierrot le Fou, a carnal and impulsive femme fatale who orchestrated her literary lover's bloody destruction. Whether it's Angela, Nana, Odile, or Marianne, the women Karina portrayed were beings of instinct, madly engaged with life and who laughed, danced, sang, and fought until their last breath, in praise of freedom.

In early May, Karina made a special visit to the United States for a spotlight on her career with Godard, including screenings of A Woman Is a Woman, Bande à part, and Pierrot le Fou. FILM COMMENT spoke with the lively and gracious 75-year-old in New York about embodying Nana, Jacques Rivette's La Religieuse, and the eternal fusion of fiction and autobiography in the films of the pioneer who invented her as an actress and reinvented her as a woman.
La Religieuse Let's start with Bande à Part since you are in New York on the occasion of that film's re-release. Between Vivre sa vie and Bande à part, you went through a difficult period [Karina was hospitalized following a suicide attempt], and you later said that Bande à part saved your life. In fact in that film, you look very vulnerable, like a porcelain doll about to shatter at any moment... How do you remember that shoot?
Yes, in a way that film saved my life. I had difficulties at that time to live my life. It was pretty difficult between Jean-Luc and me. I was in the hospital, and not a very good one. And Jean-Luc came, took me out, and said: "We are shooting the day after tomorrow." and I said: "Okay." And that's how Bande à part came about.
The film is like you and Odile's shared cri de coeur: at bottom, it is the story of a woman who fights with all her strength to live.
Yes, you can say that. Nobody said that before!
How much did Godard direct you on that film and how much did he leave you to your own devices?
Well, he gave us the lines at the last minute, like always, you know. But we were already familiar with the subject matter: the story of three little gangsters, and I was the naive one amongst them, a girl called Odile. And we went to English classes: "tou bi or not tou bi against your chest, it iz ze question." [ Laughs]
Claude Brasseur wrote that line to you on a napkin.
Yes, that was great fun! Well, Godard never said you have to do this like this because in a way, it was all in the action, you see, in the dialogue. He didn't have to explain it. Even with the cameraman, Raoul Coutard, they never really spoke to each other. They just knew what they had to do. I know it's very special because I've worked with many directors, classical ones, you know, and it was very special with Jean-Luc Godard. Very special, because he didn't have to tell us what to do really. It's like, if you have to say "Hello" in a nice way, you know, you don't say "Hello" like this [ She says it with an angry tone]. It was just natural, the movements and all that.

Okay, the Madison, that we rehearsed for about three weeks in a nightclub every night after the shoot from 7 to 8 and sometimes from 8 to 9, because the nightclubs never opened before midnight. So we went there with professional dancers and we did the hand clapping and the finger snapping and all that. [ She snaps her fingers and claps her hands.] We had to do rehearsals because the two guys, Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur, didn't know how to dance. So we rehearsed that scene for a long time and it became a long take in the film, about three minutes or so.

Every time I screen the film, the guys in the theater mumble the song and start snapping their fingers. Anywhere in the world, be it London or South Korea. In Australia, there is this pizza place called "Bande à Part" and I have my special pizza called "Anna Karina." I went there once, ate my pizza, and danced the Madison. They also have a pizza called "Jean-Luc Godard" and T-shirts with pictures from the film. It's very cute!

And recently I went to Italy, to Bergamo, to screen the film. There were only teachers there. It was 6 a.m. and it was a full house. I went to London also and I met fans who had tattooed my name on their arms. I couldn't believe it! And we went to Switzerland and then to Denmark. I got the Bodil Honorary Award for everything I did. It's been quite a journey and I'm used to it, you know, because I used to sing too with somebody called Philippe Katerine and we traveled all over the world: we went to Japan and to Spain. It was great fun, for eight years. We went to Brazil too: there were 1,800 people in this big, big, big place and we were like small pigeons on the stage. I just came back from Italy. With Dennis [Berry], my husband, we used to live in Italy about 30 years ago. It's changed a lot. When I was there now, I searched for our house-we used to live in a little wooden house on top of a mountain-but it was not there anymore and there was a kind of building in its place. It was so strange to see it changed that much.
Bande à part Aside from acting and singing, you also wrote four books and directed two films-your book "Golden City" came out in the Eighties so you must have written it while you were living in Italy. What triggered your desire to write? Was it a sort of escape from cinema?
I've been writing short stories since I was a little girl. I left school when I was 14. But I always liked to write. So when I was living in Italy with Dennis, I didn't know what to do-of course I spent time with Dennis and I took care of the food and all that, and my father in law would come to visit. But then I said, I would like to write a book. So I wrote my first book called "Golden City." Just for fun in a way, you know. It was 500 pages long, but they cut it down because it was a little bit too long! It's a kind of thriller with gangsters.
So it has echoes of Bande à part.
Yes! It takes place in San Diego and I invented a city called "Golden City." It also took place in Mexico, I knew it a little bit because I went there a long time ago for a film festival. So I wrote this book and it came out in France, and after that I wrote a second one, and then a third one and some musicals and songs too.
What about Victoria, the film you directed in 2008? Did you write that because you wanted to act again?
No, the producer Hejer Charf, whom you just met [Karina came in accompanied by Charf], wanted to make a film again. So I said: "Okay." But I wanted to do it in French with French actors-it's the story of a woman who comes to Montreal and doesn't really understand what's going on. But the French actors couldn't do it because of the quota and so I shot it with two Canadian actors. So it's not really the film I imagined to begin with. It's about an amnesiac woman who travels in Canada. She doesn't know who she is anymore, she forgot all her memories.
You mentioned the Madison scene in Bande à part earlier, which brings me to another iconic dance scene, the swing in Vivre sa vie. I watched the film again and was very moved by that scene-it just introduces such a breath of youth and cheerfulness into the otherwise somber and rigid film. It's refreshing to see Nana take charge of her destiny, even for a short while. Can you talk a bit about the shooting of that scene? Are you the one who came up with the choreography, or did Godard do the blocking with the camera and then ask you to dance along?
I totally improvised that and then Godard followed me with the camera. Raoul Coutard is a great cameraman. He could follow anything, he's really a genius. They liked that scene a lot in Brazil!
Another quintessential scene in Vivre sa vie is the philosophical conversation in the cafe. How did Godard write that scene? Was it one of those scenes he wrote the morning of the shoot, or did he write it in advance and give you guys enough time to absorb it?
He was very smart about that scene, you see. He talked to the philosopher first, Brice Parrain was his name, and then he talked to me. He wrote down some dialogue for me and then I sat in front of Brice Parrain and said the dialogue Jean-Luc had written for me. It was all written by Jean-Luc Godard, except Brice Parrain's lines. He was saying what he wanted.
Vivre sa vie So he was improvising?
No, he was being interviewed by Godard like I'm talking to you right now. So Jean-Luc talked to him first and he would say so and so and so. Jean-Luc would write that down, and then I would take Jean-Luc's place and say what he wanted me to say. Jean-Luc was very smart about that scene because had I just talked to Brice Parrain myself, I wouldn't have said the same things and he wouldn't have given me the same answers. The way Jean-Luc shot it looks just like we're speaking together but it's not the way it was done at all. We shot that film very quickly, in about three weeks. That scene was shot in a few hours. Everything was very quick with Jean-Luc because he got bored quickly, so everything had to be done fast. Except for the Madison!
The philosophical conversation in Vivre sa vie feels like a precursor to Pierrot le Fou. When Nana says "The more one speaks, the more words lose their meaning," she's like a younger version of Marianne Renoir when the latter says to Ferdinand: "You speak to me with words but I look at you with feelings." For many, these lines are autobiographical, and it was you, Anna Karina, who said them to Godard. At the time of the shoot, were you aware of the parallels between the script and your private life? In a way, all of Godard's films from those years are letters to you...
I didn't really think about that at that time. Of course, I knew it but I didn't think about it. You know, Jean-Luc was like that. He would write me beautiful letters but then I wouldn't see him for three weeks because he would go out to buy cigarettes and never come back. It was very strange. He would suddenly leave and then I would be sitting there in front of the telephone, waiting. It's not the same thing today where everybody has smartphones and you can call anybody anywhere in the world. Back then, you had to talk to a lady and say: "I want this number. Can you give it to me?" and then you would wait for half an hour. It was another world. And when Jean-Luc left, I was all alone so I started to paint and all that.
Did you also write?
No, because I was married to somebody who would write everything down and I wanted to get away from that. Once we were going to Denmark for Christmas together to see my mother, and Jean-Luc wrote a lot on the plane. And then when we got to the customs, they said you cannot enter the country, because Jean-Luc had written in his passport and he had ripped off the page! So he couldn't get into Copenhagen. I was crying, you know. It was Christmas, and he had to go back to Paris. He was sent back because he was trying to enter the country with a broken passport. It was a nightmare. So I was waiting and waiting and waiting, and two days later-it was Christmas and the Embassy was closed and all that-he came back! He came back, and I went to get him. I never understood how he did it. But then I thought about it and I figured it out. He was born in France, right? So he has a French passport but he lived in Switzerland so he has a Swiss passport, so maybe he went back to get his Swiss passport and then he came back with that. And he didn't write in the passport this time. He would do things like that. He would say: "I'm going out to buy cigarettes" and then disappear.
Where did he go?
I didn't know, and I was waiting and waiting and waiting. Sometimes I understood he was in Italy-he had gone to see Rossellini-because he came back with writings in Italian. Sometimes he went to London or to Sweden to see Ingmar Bergman. Or he went to see Faulkner in New York. And I understood because he would come back with things written in English or in Swedish. And he always came back with a present. Three weeks later! At that time, there was no phone, no answering machine. I'm talking about the Sixties-you weren't even born then!
Bread and Chocolate I was far from being born! To change gears a little, I also wanted to talk about the Italian films you made. In Bread and Chocolate (74), Franco Brusati's marvelous tragicomedy on immigration, your performance is fascinating through your ability to constantly shift back and forth between humor and grief. How did you join the cast of that film led by Nino Manfredi?
Brusati came to see me in Paris, he liked my films and proposed me the role. But Nino gave me a box of chocolates and I gave him a piece of bread! Nino was a very nice person and very funny too. He had great scenes with chicken in that film, and the film was a big success. It got big prizes all over the world, including from the Church, because it talked about immigration. It's like today, you know. In the film, Nino has to find work in Switzerland to feed his family in Italy. It's very political in a way and very human.
You're also the face of one of the most controversial films of the Sixties, Jacques Rivette's La Religieuse. This film, which was considered blasphemous at the time because of its depiction of homosexuality in a convent, originated as a play in 1963, and after being banned for two years, finally came out in theaters in 1967. What are your memories of that shoot and how did you experience the period of censorship?
I really worked a lot for La Religieuse because you know, I'm not French. And when I came to Paris, of course I couldn't speak French. So I went to the movies to learn French and took lessons and all that. I really worked very hard. And when Jacques Rivette asked me to do La Religieuse, I worked day and night to speak this language Denis Diderot had written centuries ago. So we did it on stage to begin with.
Did Godard direct the play or Rivette?
No, Rivette did. I heard many years later that Jean-Luc produced it. I didn't know, he never told me that! It was like a present. But I didn't know, I swear I didn't. He was like that, very secretive. So the film was a play first. Everybody loved it, there was no scandal. Everybody said it was great, even Brigitte Bardot came to see it because she was dating Sami Frey at that time, and that's before we did Bande à part. I got the Best Newcomer prize from the radio and it was really great. And then we shot the film about three years later in the South of France and we showed it and it was banned, by the Church, by André Malraux. It really became a big scandal. Nobody understood why, because of course there's this homosexual thing going on in the story. It was totally forbidden to talk about that at the time but today everybody knows about it! Priests abuse small children all the time, all over the world. Diderot's book was forbidden for over 150 years in France. Denis Diderot is a big classic, and this book was forbidden in every school for many years.
Godard wrote an angry letter to Malraux asking him to lift the ban...
Godard was very angry because Jacques Rivette was also one of his friends. Even though Rivette and I didn't see each other very much, I still had a great affection for him. We did two films together, and I was very sad when he died. Rivette was a little bit like Jean-Luc, he was very reserved. He was not a big mouth, you know. He liked classical music and he kept working until he died.
You also made a musical with Gainsbourg in 1967, Anna, named after you. How was it to work with that wild man compared to the quiet Rivette?
It was so great to work with Serge. We spoke slang and drank red wine and ate cheese. Gainsbourg was a real perfectionist at the time, everything had to be perfect. So he was a little bit like Jacques Rivette in that sense, but in a totally different way. He was more fun. Jacques was very methodic and mathematical. Gainsbourg was a perfectionist too but in a more funny way. He still wanted everything to be as good as possible. But nothing is perfect, you know, it's impossible. Even though Napoleon said everything is possible! It's impossible to be totally perfect, because what is perfect for you is not perfect for me.
Godard always said you should have worked in Hollywood, but that Hollywood at the time was already far from its Golden Age, the kind of cinematic paradise the young filmmakers of the New Wave had dreamed of being a part of. In fact, Godard had planned a film project in the U.S. starring you and William Faulkner, but put it aside when Faulkner died. Do you have any regrets about not having been involved with Hollywood?
Yes, Godard wanted to do a project with Richard Burton and William Faulkner, and I would be a kind of maid or gardener. But that could have changed too, because you never knew what could happen with Jean-Luc! But no, I do not have any regrets. I got my best share of Hollywood from working with George Cukor on his film Justine [69]. I really loved him and we became very good friends. Every time he came to Paris, we would see each other. He would call me and send me telegrams for my birthday. It was so great! We would go out to eat and he would say: "French food is a little bit heavy. Let's go and have a nice hamburger." But a real steak, you know!

Cukor taught me a lot. He said to me: "Anna, you learn the lines and then you say it in a bad way, in an angry way, in a crying way, in a hysterical way, in a funny way. Then you sleep on it, and then you see, when you come to the set next morning, you will be able to do something very interesting." You could do this as an actor because it was very rich in your head. Jean-Luc was the same. He would say: "You actors, you don't work enough. You have to work at least eight hours a day in front of the mirror to see if you're good or bad, because a worker works eight hours a day!"

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Examples of filmmakers haphazardly discovering their muse abound in the history of cinema. In France, two such stories from the Fifties have come to be popular legends: Roger Vadim's accidental discovery of 15-year-old Brigitte Bardot on the cover of Elle magazine (the director happened upon Brigitte's picture while making a paper plane from a page of the magazine), and Jean-Luc Godard's chance encounter with 19-year-old Anna Karina through a Palmolive soap commercial, which marked the Copenhagen-born Parisian actress's first on-screen appearance.

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On her life and work with Godard

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Anna Karina in Paris in 2013. Credit Credit Patrick Fouque/Paris Match, via Getty Images

In the American cinephile circles of the 1960s, each new film from the French director Jean-Luc Godard was an event. Vital film critics like Manny Farber, Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael and public intellectuals like Susan Sontag weighed in, creating a near-constant colloquy on how this director was reinventing cinema. The buzz and argument were equally fevered in Paris, Mr. Godard's home at the time.

But Anna Karina, the Danish-born model turned actress who during this period was Mr. Godard's muse, leading lady and wife - one of the screen's great beauties and an enduring symbol of the French New Wave - doesn't recollect the hype or intellectual foment. Reminiscing about working with Mr. Godard, she largely remembers freedom and fun.

"We did not see ourselves as remaking cinema at the time, at least not in my view," Ms. Karina, now 75, said, speaking in English by phone from Los Angeles. "Myself and the other actors were not part of the industry; we weren't inside the star system. We were running around, shooting in the streets, hiding behind trees to do our makeup. It was a very simple way of working."

Ms. Karina, who lives in France, is making a rare visit to the United States, where, in Los Angeles and New York, she is presenting several Godard films at various theaters. On Friday, she will appear at Film Forum in Manhattan for a newly restored version of Mr. Godard's wry, eccentric quasi-caper " Band of Outsiders " (1964).

She met Mr. Godard when she was still in her teens. He was preparing his debut feature, "Breathless," and wanted to cast her in a bit role; she balked at its nudity requirement. They began a romance, acted opposite each other in an Eric Rohmer short and married in 1961.

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From left, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina and Jean-Claude Brialy in "A Woman Is a Woman" (1961). Credit Rialto Pictures

When he was a critic in the 1950s, Mr. Godard wrote, "The cinema does not query the beauty of a woman, it only doubts her heart, records her perfidy" and "sees only her movements."

Ms. Karina, 10 years younger than Mr. Godard, cheerfully allowed that their relationship had more than a touch of "Pygmalion" to it, and she spoke admiringly of him as a teacher, recalling his erudition with some awe. Their films together can be read as a multivolume work about their relationship.

In "Le Petit Soldat," their first film together (although its release was held up for several years by French censors), she was the young revolutionary as object of desire. In " A Woman Is a Woman" (1961) she was a stripper flirting with domesticity. In " Vivre Sa Vie," Ms. Karina played a desultory beauty who drifts into streetwalking on the way to cinematic sainthood.

"Band of Outsiders" saw her as naïve, coquettish but clever, with a streak of mischief. In "Alphaville," she was a robotic woman of the bleak future, introduced to love via poetry by the tough guy Eddie Constantine. For their final collaborations, Mr. Godard made his soon-to-be-ex-wife a femme fatale. (They divorced in 1965.) In " Pierrot Le Fou," she seduces and double-crosses Jean-Paul Belmondo, and in " Made in U.S.A." she gender-reverses the trench-coated noir antihero, leaving a trail of corpses.

"We appreciated that what we were doing was different through the way Jean-Luc directed us, physically," she said on the phone. "In older Hollywood movies, a character will make an entrance, close a door, light a cigarette, sit down, have a drink. In Jean-Luc's movies, you were doing everything at once, and sometimes you wouldn't shut the door all the way. Sometimes your cigarette wouldn't light on first try. You were always moving through the scene in an active way that was more like being than acting."

While Mr. Godard never worked from a standard script, Ms. Karina insisted that the actors were not improvising. "He would come in with prepared texts for us, which we rehearsed, and were required to say as he presented to us."

Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina in France around 1960. Credit Giancarlo Botti/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images

She added: "The only thing I can recall being allowed to improvise was the little singsong 'I don't know what to do' chant in 'Pierrot Le Fou.' Which I came up with because I literally did not know what to do!"

The Godard-Karina relationship was famously tumultuous. She told a dizzying story of the pair's embarking on an impromptu road trip to the South of France: "Maybe I didn't understand Jean-Luc exactly. There I was thinking we'd have a nice holiday in the South of France; about 200 kilometers in, I look at him and say, 'You're not happy.' And he says, 'I'm not unhappy, I'm just a little disappointed, I canceled a meeting with Truffaut in Paris.' So he turns back. And after 100 kilometers, he looks at me and says 'You're not happy,' and he turns around again. And so it goes."

Ms. Karina said the turmoil did not bleed into their working relationship until very late. But when she recalled Mr. Godard's presenting her with a difficult monologue on the set of "Made in U.S.A." and insisting on shooting it right away, her incredulity and indignation made it sound as if she was upset about something that had happened just yesterday. "He was making a fool of me, and he did it on purpose," she bristled.

After parting ways with Mr. Godard, she seemed to take roles that flirted with international stardom, working with eminent directors like George Cukor and Tony Richardson. Of the 1969 adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's "Laughter in the Dark," she said, "It was a mistake for Tony Richardson to change the setting from prewar Germany to contemporary London with all the miniskirts and the bling-bling."

She is currently working on a memoir about her early years and putting together a stage musical for which she has written songs.

Ms. Karina seems to regard her work with Mr. Godard with pride and affection. "It's very touching, wherever I go, to see very young people come to the films, whether in Japan or South Korea or the United States or France," she said. "The films feel like they are not old, or old fashioned; they still feel fresh and touch people. It's a fantastic gift he gave to me."

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Anna Karina Recalls Her Life in Film With Jean-Luc Godard

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In the American cinephile circles of the 1960s, each new film from the French director Jean-Luc Godard was an event. Vital film critics like Manny Farber, Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael and public intellectuals like Susan Sontag weighed in, creating a near-constant colloquy on how this director was reinventing cinema.

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Most extensive biography on Godard - some analysis of Vivre sa Vie...

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JEAN-LUC GODARD - French New Wave Director

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This is the most complete Jean-Luc Godard biography available on the internet. We have broken it into chapters to make for easy reading, but if you think it would be easier to print, you can access a printer-friendly version here.

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Excellent Godard primer

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Ahead of BAMcinématek's new restoration of A Married Woman we offer a primer on the new wave auteur's essential work

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The cinema is not a craft. It is an art. It does not mean teamwork. One is always alone on the set as before the blank page. And to be alone... means to ask questions. And to make films means to answer them"

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Overview of his aesthetic in this brief but stylish video

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Vivre sa Vie, 1962

"I know what I want to say, I think before I say it, to be quite sure that it is what I must say - phtt - suddenly I can't say it anymore", Nana explains to the philosopher with whom she started a conversation in a café. And the philosopher in turn explains that this sort of thing happens out of fear not to be able to find the right word. It can also easily befall a critic of Godard's latest film. A film that demonstrates, among other things,the multitude of things that can be said about one and the same phenomenon can easily make her speechless, even though it does offer the consolation that even error harbours some truth and that the effort on finding the right word may be rewarded with the right thing to say about it.

As mentioned, that is just one of the issues this film is about; in the first place it concerns a young person who simultaneously loses and conquers herself. And this is told in a style that corresponds exactly to this double track. The tension derives from the constant confrontation between poe try and documentation.

But first Nana's rather simple story: Nana ( Karina) has come to Paris from the country. She lived with Paul ( Labarthe), has his child. But these attachments did not make her happy. She feels vaguely that this life is not the one she is meant to lead. She leaves Paul and the child. With a dialogue between her and Paul, which triggers the final separation, the film begins and so does Nana's new life. During their conversation we see the speakers from behind, only once the decision has been made, do they reveal their faces. From this moment on, the camera hardly leaves Nana. We see her selling records in a shop. The money she makes does not even pay for the rent. She tries to make a living by occasionally prostituting herself; later she becomes a professional prostitute. The profession seems to supply what she needs to live. In a billiards hall she meets the love of her life in Pierre. At the moment when she is willing to give up her profession out of love for him, she dies under the bullets of pimps.

These are the outward stations of the roughly eight months of her life that the film describes in 12 chapters, signalled by inter-titles. But alongside these external events shaping Nana's new life, something happens to her that changes her inner life with the same sort of decisiveness. Nana finds the way to her own self. And it is quite incredible how the film manages to transpose this gradual process into images without any verbal explanations. How little Nana is "at home with herself" is shown by her gestures in the record shop. Moving along the counter she gives the impression of mistaking it for a catwalk.

How far she is from what she wants to be is made clear by the images which show her in a cinema, completely shattered by Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc. Her tear-stained face, in which we read pity but mainly a state of pure rapture, insinuates the distance between Jeanne d'Arc, who despite inhuman resistance did live her life, and Nana, who only stands tentatively at the beginning of this path.

Who Nana is, what the yardsticks are that she has set herself, is shown in two consecutive scenes: in the first she sells herself for twenty francs to pay the rent; in the second we see her at a police station where she admits to having tried to keep money somebody had lost. While she conducts the transaction in the first scene in a completely free and natural manner, she seems ashamed and depressed in the second. That fact that conventions don't matter to her does not mean that she is without moral standards.

One of the issues raised against this film was that it trivialised the problem of prostitution. With all reservations that arise from the different subjects, this reproach is on a par with that made against Resnais, to evoke Hiroshima within a private love story. Resnais said that he had not made a documentary about Hiroshima precisely because he did not wish to place this event before the viewers but to make clear to them their own close connection to Hiroshima. And when it comes to Godard: would a statistical treatise about prostitution concern and reach anyone? In his film Godard has documentary material of the Parisian judge Sacotte read out aloud and the pictures that accompany these readings - showing Nana at work - are hardly of the kind to show the life of a prostitute in rosy colours or to soothe one's conscience. That sort of thing has been shown in endless accounts of street-walkers, in which their world, more or less concealed, is presented to the bourgeois as a paradise at the fringe of bourgeois society. Stories about the tart with the golden heart proved that even in the most undignified circumstances human emotions can't be suppressed. Nana dies at the end. Admittedly the manner of the end is not the most brilliant invention of the film. But if one takes this ending as a metaphor for the impossibility to live in such circumstances, it may well be justified.

Strangely, no critic was worried by the other stylization, the culmination of her positive development and the antithesis of her physical downfall. Maybe because in films this sort of thing is more common. It has been mentioned already that parallel to the negative development of Nana's outer fate runs a positive one, the conquest of her real self. And completely in keeping with the two developments the film shows a double climax, one ends in Nana's death and the other is her final self-discovery in the love for Pierre. "Love is a solution, provided it is true", as Nana found out in her conversation with the philosopher.

It would perhaps shift the emphasis of the film a bit too much if one were to put this conversation with the philosopher at its very centre. But it is no exaggeration to regard it as the summary and generalisation of all thematic strands of the film and as key to its form (though this only works in the original not the mutilated German dubbed version). This conversation has also aroused the ire of some viewers. The question arises if this reaction should be taken as a fundamental aversion against popularisation of readily available cultural knowledge or as exasperation caused by the necessity of having to look up Leibniz and Contingency in a philosophical dictionary. When really all the conversation does is to repeat discursively what has already been expressed in various forms by the images: that there is such a thing as a corporeal and a spiritual life, that the development of both forms do not always proceed in tandem, and that one tends to make judgements on the basis of appearances. And furthermore this conversation makes clear that current imaginary clichés about prostitutes have as little relevance in regard to Nana as that of her colleague Elisabeth to the queen of England.

Godard hardly wanted to say with his film that prostitution is a profession like any other but rather that to lead a life one knows is unsuitable but carries on leading because of social considerations and fear of any effort and trouble amounts to a form of prostitution. Such ideas in Godard are certainly not intended towards reforming the structures of society. They address exclusively the individual. Ideas like this make clear that the connections between Vivre sa Vie and Montaigne's Essays are not exhausted by Montaigne's single sentence that stands as a motto of the film at the beginning. One only needs to look up the third book of the Essays to realise that Nana's mode of living has decidedly more relevance for Montaigne's instructions about the "art of living" than to existentialist maxims, as been said occasionally. For Montaigne it is "highest and quasi divine perfection to rejoice truly in one's own being". In this respect Nana is his good pupil. Family ties cannot prevent her from living her life and political realities do not seem to give her a headache at all. For her people who shoot are gangsters. It would be much too simple to deduct clues about Godard's political position from the fact that his heroine is a person who is not politically engaged. Nana's misreading of political combatants is just one of the variants of the theme the film addresses in ever changing form, that badly used language and dishonesty are the same thing and that dishonesty comes into the world when one does not live with enough consciousness.

We have stated that one of the keys to the film's form was to be found in the conversation with the philosopher and that this conversation is but a verbal repetition of what had been expressed visually. It is indeed an artistic principle of this film to repeat what has been said and what has been shown in other forms and to reflect on that. The quotation - though we should stay with film terminology and say "insert" - which is one of the mannerisms of the New Wave, becomes a decisive structuring device for the first time in Godard's film. It is no longer a put-on gag, a conspiratorial wink among a small group of initiates - even the brief allusion to Truffaut's Jules et Jim reflects on Godard's subject matter - instead, it determines the rhythm of the film in a very important way.

The film, which from the beginning prevents the viewer from submitting to a thoughtless fascination through the use its inserts, annihilates the position of the omniscient narrator by interspersing the "configured with the enunciated" ( Brecht). So for instance at the beginning of the film the theme is rendered in a childish language: "The chicken is an animal...", then a colleague in the record shop reads aloud a passage from a magazine story about the beginning of a new life. Then there is the scene from the Dreyer film already mentioned. The viewer is introduced to Nana's physical appearance through words written in an application letter, which Nana wants to send to a brothel-keeper in the country. This passage does not just characterise Nana most charmingly. The manner in which the camera shows the composition of the missive, letter by letter, with all the hesitations and deliberation, shows just how difficult any statement is and the care one takes in when it comes to statements about oneself on the one hand and to the enunciated and written word on the other hand.

Another insert is the reading aloud of the already mentioned report of Sacotte. Here too there is never a direct correlation between the enunciated that one hears and the images one sees. This slight dislocation proves that statements about one and the same thing could be made in different ways, and the confrontation between the (verbally) expressed and the visually configured story of Nana reminds us that all statements can only grasp aspects of reality.

The theme of the film finds yet another form of expression in the conversation with the philosopher, who tries to use a kind of language everybody understands but whose view of things and people is naturally coloured by philosophical concepts which make him take recourse to his specialist terminology.

Finally we also need to mention the scene where Pierre reads Poe's short story The Oval Portrait to Nana. This quotation seems to be almost outside the frame of the film's narrative, because it has least to do with the Nana shown in the film. In this scene, what is more important for the film is the fact that the few words that the couple exchange appear in subtitles and which therefore defines it as a parallel to the already mentioned scene from La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc. After all, Nana has reached her destination, a destination in which language is optional. To say less, the philosopher had said, means to love one another more. For the two lovers language has become obsolete as a means of communication, at least at this stage of love.

While Poe's short story is of little importance to a description of Nana's persona it is highly relevant for Godard's aesthetic concept. It says in the story that the magic of the oval portrait lies in its "life-likeness", where the effective correspondence between the image of life and life. The important word is correspondence: Godard never tried in his films to imitate life, instead he takes real events and uses them to construct his stories, which never conceal the fact that they are something constructed. This is made clear by his manner of directing actors. Conventional drama instructors would have regarded the scene where Karina enters the doorways three times in the same way as wooden and amateur, just like old school film experts considered of shots and the cutting of À bout de Souffle sloppy. There is a similar thing with Karina's dance in the billiard hall. The ravishing beauty of this scene has hardly anything to do with perfect acting. One has the impression that she stands beside her gestures. The charm of this scene lies in the spontaneity of Nana's intention. With her dance she is silently wooing Pierre, distantly reminiscent of certain animal rituals.

How Godard understands his art is revealed most clearly in the short scene where Luigi tries to cheer up Nana by showing her how a child blows up a balloon until its bursts. As far as Godard seems to be concerned, art's claim to truth is only fulfilled when its form relativizes its content as a subjective maker's opinion.

Frieda Grafe's first film review - her second published text - first appeared in Filmkritik 11/62. 6.Jahrgang, 11.Heft November 1962, 511-516. Reprinted in Frieda Grafe: Schriften, 4.Band, p.74-80, Berlin 2003 (edited by Enno Patalas).

Frieda Grafe (born August 20, 1934 in Mülheim an der Möhne, Germany; died 10 July 2002 in Munich) was a German film critic, essayist, and translator. From 1962 to 1972, she wrote film reviews and essays exculsively for the German film journal Filmkritik, and from 1970 for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and also wrote lectures and produced radio features. She was involved in monographs on Fritz Lang, Jerry Lewis, Ernst Lubitsch, F.W. Murnau and Josef von Sternberg. She translated books by and about Alfred Hitchcock, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Luis Buñuel, Jean Renoir, Jean-Joseph Goux, Paul Virilio, Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, and worked on several documentaries with her husband, the film historian and critic Enno Patalas (former director of the Filmmuseum München). Between 2002-2009 her completed works (Schriften) were published in eleven volumes (edited by Enno Patalas). Grafe's precise and montage-like writing ( écriture) was influenced by her interest in photography, fashion, philosophy, linguistics, feminism, literature and painting.

Her essay on Godard's Vivre sa Vie is presented here for the first time in English. Vertigo would like to thank Enno Patalas for permission to publish it and Gwendolyn Leick for her translation.

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Vivre sa Vie , 1962 "I know what I want to say, I think before I say it, to be quite sure that it is what I must say - phtt - suddenly I can't say it anymore", Nana explains to the philosopher with whom she started a conversation in a café.

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Excellent introduction to the work of Godard.

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Why this might not seem so easy

Getting to grips with Jean-Luc Godard's early stuff will take time: every film he made between his feature debut, Breathless (1960), and taking his decisive steps away from conventional narrative cinema with Week End (1967) is worth seeing. Several form part of the essential French new wave canon and even the less vaunted titles have their moments of cinematic audacity and political provocation. François Truffaut may have coined the term 'auteur' in his epochal 1954 Cahiers du Cinéma article, 'A Certain Tendency in French Cinema', but it was his fellow enfant terrible who best embodied its ethos.

Everything Godard produces bears his signature and explores his recurringly personal themes. He sought to give cinema a new impetus and direction by harnessing its artistic and social potential. Quips like "The cinema is truth 24 frames per second" and "All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl" may have been a little glib, but they also convey Godard's passion for his medium and his conviction that it could do more than merely provide a little escapist entertainment.

He is the most autobiographical of auteurs, whose pictures are littered with references to films, books, compositions and paintings, as well as the people, places and political ideals that have shaped his personality and psyche. No wonder critic Richard Roud declared, "there is the cinema before Godard and the cinema after Godard", while Susan Sontag compared him to Pablo Picasso and Arnold Schoenberg as one of "the great culture heroes of our time" for not just being an iconoclast, but also for being the "deliberate 'destroyer' of cinema".

Yet it's easy to be intimidated by Godard, as he can't abide passive spectators and keeps making demands on their intelligence and patience. "I think of myself as an essayist," he once explained, "producing essays in novel form or novels in essay form: only instead of writing, I film them." More revealingly, he also confessed, "I don't really like telling a story... I prefer to use a kind of tapestry, a background on which I can embroider my own ideas."

So, the best way to approach pre-68 Godard is to take note of the storyline and characters, but pay most attention to the visuals and the themes. As a critic, Godard had been obsessed with film. But he admitted at Cannes in 1960 that he was starting to love cinema less and it's tempting to suggest he has spent the last 55 years searching for a self-made replacement. Truffaut lost faith in this project and denounced Godard as "a piece of shit on a pedestal". But he predicted his own fate in a line from Alphaville (1965): "You will suffer something worse than death. You will become a legend."

The best place to start - Breathless

It may seem invidious to start at the start, with Breathless, given that Godard once said: "a film should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order." But it's easier to appreciate what he was trying to achieve (and what he was reacting against) with each successive picture if they are viewed in sequence. Rarely has a debut had such a seismic impact as this paean to pulp fiction, which subverts screen convention by nonchalantly rejecting establishing shots, transitions and shot-reverse-shot sequences and replacing them with Raoul Coutard 's handheld long takes, whose raw poetry Godard periodically disrupts with jump cuts and other distancing devices such as digressions, in-jokes and cultural allusions.

This is the epitome of personal cinema, but, as it's dedicated to B-movie producers Monogram Pictures, Godard felt compelled to concoct a noirish plot around Jean-Paul Belmondo's Bogart-fixated cop killer and Jean Seberg 's treacherous newspaper vendor. The result is both nostalgic and modern, exhilarating and exasperating. However, it announced Godard as a major talent who was determined to follow the advice of a fleetingly glimpsed movie poster to 'Live Dangerously to the End'.

What to watch next

Godard opened his second feature, Le Petit Soldat (1960), with the line: "The time for action is past. I have grown older. The time for reflection has come." Thus, the agenda was set for the next seven years, during which time just about every picture he made was about his Danish wife and muse, Anna Karina, or their tempestuous relationship. He imagined her as Cyd Charisse in the revisionist colour musical Une femme est une femme (1961), before depicting her as a prostitute in Vivre sa vie (1962).

Brigitte Bardot was cast as her stand-in in Le Mépris (1963), the closest Godard got to a Hollywood movie, albeit one about Fritz Lang trying to adapt Homer's The Odyssey with sell-out screenwriter Michel Piccoli. Karina was back to dance the Madison in a café with Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur in the crime saga Bande à part (1964), before she saves a futuristic Paris from a super-computer in the chilling sci-fi pastiche Alphaville (1965).

The marriage was falling apart by the time they made Pierrot le fou (1965), a picaresque blend of structural experiment and socio-cultural tract, but Karina was still on Godard's mind as he mused about Paris and suburban prostitute Marina Vlady in Two or Three Things I Know about Her (1967), in which he catches himself thinking aloud over a lengthy close-up of a cup of coffee.

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Where to begin with Jean-Luc Godard - the early stuff

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Getting to grips with Jean-Luc Godard's early stuff will take time: every film he made between his feature debut, Breathless (1960), and taking his decisive steps away from conventional narrative cinema with Week End (1967) is worth seeing.

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Excellent, academic reading of Vivre sa Vie

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In Vivre sa vie I have attempted to film a mind in action, the interior of someone seen from outside.

- Jean-Luc Godard, Télérama, 1962

Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux (1962) tells the story of Nana (Anna Karina) in twelve parts. Like scenes in a Brecht play, they show how Nana, short of money, turns to casual then regular prostitution, falls in love, begins to reappraise her life, but is accidentally killed. Each episode is preceded by a title summarising the incidents.

Before they begin, a simple credit sequence: three silhouettes of Anna Karina, left profile, full face, right profile. These are also shots of her Louise Brooks hairstyle, announcing other 1920s film references to come, and a memory also of the moment of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.

The credits are superimposed, grouped into fours, shaped into rectangles, accompanied by brief phrases from Michel Legrand's pathos-laden score. Fifty-two names are credited, including that of the camera (Mitchell), the sound equipment (Perfectone) and the film stock (Kodak 20), but not that of the director. The signature in these credits is the face of Karina, the director's wife.
TABLEAU 1: A BISTROT - NANA WANTS TO LEAVE PAUL - PINBALL
SEPARATION: Nana is leaving her husband, the father of her child. Six shots, the back of her head alternating with the back of his, with their faces seen in a mirror, vaguely. This is not how conversations were supposed to be filmed, and the sequence is famous for showing the New Wave breaking the conventions of mise en scène and parodying shot/reverse-shot through formal experiment. A seventh shot shows the two as a couple for the last time, playing pinball. François Truffaut had said that the one thing the New Wave directors had in common was a love of pinball.

The café is the Rallye-Villiers, in Levallois (3 place de la Libération, 92300).
TABLEAU 2: THE RECORD SHOP - 2000 FRANCS - NANA LIVES HER LIFE
WORK: One three-minute shot, panning back and forth as Nana does her job, living her life and worrying about how to pay the rent. The tableau closes with a pan back out to the street, and we watch others living ordinary lives as a woman's voice mouths sentimental clichés.

The record shop is at 25 avenue de Wagram, 75017.
TABLEAU 3: THE CONCIERGE - THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC - A JOURNALIST
PASSION: A cinema. Nana cries, watching Maria Falconetti as Joan in Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1928 film, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc. The art of the close-up, played as a comedy of identification: Nana is not Joan, Karina is not Falconetti; the tears are not real. The café-conversation that follows is another one-shot, three-minute sequence. The conventional cuts of shot/reverse-shot are replaced with nine awkward shifts of the camera, right to left then left to right.

Nana lives in the rue Verneuil, no. 8. The interior of the cinema is the Panthéon, rue Victor-Cousin (owned by the film's producer, Pierre Braunberger; his wife had played the concierge in the preceding scene). The café is the Escholier, place de la Sorbonne.
TABLEAU 4: THE POLICE - NANA IS QUESTIONED
IDENTITY: A police station. Identification of a woman: we learn Nana's surname (Kleinfrankenheim), her place and date of birth (Flexburg, 15 April 1940), where she lives (no fixed abode) and what she wants ("to be someone else"). The film has become an investigation, an interrogation. In Le Petit soldat (1963), Veronica Dreyer (Karina) tells the man photographing her that it's like being interrogated by the police: "Yes, he says, photography is truth, and cinema is the truth twenty-four times a second." Here she is photographed in three close-ups, each closer than the last, till we approach the composition and lighting of the opening credits. This last shot ends with an almost imperceptible whip-pan, cut away from to the title announcing the next tableau.

The interrogation was shot in the production company's offices.
TABLEAU 5: THE OUTER BOULEVARDS - THE FIRST MAN - THE HOTEL ROOM
THE STREET: Nana finds her first client, somewhere near a cinema showing Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (1960) ("death is the only freedom a slave knows"). A hotel room, the first liaison filmed in the manner of Robert Bresson's Pickpocket (1959), as a thing of suffering.

The camera travels along the boulevard Péreire, past Nana, then finds her in a nearby street, where she is picked up by her first client. They go to a hotel, the Monaco, now a club for swingers (10 bis rue du Débarcadère, 75017).
TABLEAU 6: YVETTE - A CAFÉ IN THE SUBURBS- RAOUL - MACHINE-GUN FIRE
THE CAFÉ: The streets again and another café. More pinball, some Sartrian existentialism, a jukebox, a pimp, gunfire, the police again. Here, at the centre of the film, Nana claims responsibility for her feelings, her gestures, her actions, while the camera fixes on Karina, lovingly. When she is left alone, her gaze turns towards the camera, and on cue the jukebox plays "Ma môme" (my girl). Karina smiles at the momentary identification (she is Godard's "môme"), but the camera's gaze is also hard to bear. We see a soldier on leave from the war: the film is shot and set in March 1962, as the ceasefire talks between the FLN and the French are taking place, but the Algerian shot by the police at the end of the sequence shows that the firing has not yet ceased. A month before, eight people were killed in the streets of Paris, at a pro-Algeria demonstration. The machine gun is accompanied by rapid-fire jump-cutting, a rare piece of bravura montage among the long slow takes, as if this "histoire politique" was from another film.

The café is in Versailles, rue au Pain.
TABLEAU 7: THE LETTER - RAOUL AGAIN - THE CHAMPS ÉLYSÉES
THE PIMP: Another café. Bresson-like close-ups of a hand writing a letter, then yet another alternative to shot/reverse-shot for the conversation between Nana and the pimp, Raoul. The camera moves from the right of the couple sitting face-to-face to stop immediately behind the man, his head blocking hers completely, then moves to the left, stops, moves back again, and continues this ballet for a further two minutes. By the end of the sequence, Raoul (Sady Rebbot) has taken Nana on.

The café has a trompe-l'œil photograph of the Champs-Elysées as décor, and the café itself is somewhere near the Champs.
TABLEAU 8: AFTERNOONS - MONEY - WASHBASINS - PLEASURE - HOTELS
SOCIOLOGY: A question and answer sequence on the life of the prostitute, with accompanying images. The answers are taken from a 1959 sociological exposé of prostitution in Paris. Explicit scenes from Tableau 10 were cut by the British censors, but here they missed a veiled tribute to the end of Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest (1959), where a train is used to suggest sex from behind.

The hotel scenes were filmed at the Eiffel-Seine (3 boulevard de Grenelle, 75015).
TABLEAU 9: A YOUNG MAN - NANA WONDERS IF SHE'S HAPPY
DANCING: Yet another café, an upstairs room. Nana's freestyle dance (based on "The Swim") around the billiard table, for the benefit of a shy young man, is the closest thing to "joie de vivre" in Vivre sa vie, a release from the tensions between Nana and her pimp. Legrand's score abandons its brooding themes for a parody of dance-band banality: "Swim, swim, swim ... swim je t'aime ... swim tu m'aimes ...".
TABLEAU 10: THE SIDEWALK - A MAN - THERE'S NO GAIETY IN HAPPINESS
SEX: Nana does her job, on the streets and in hotel rooms. The scenes cut on the film's first British release included shots of nudity and the suggestion of a ménage à trois.

The street is the Boulevard de Grenelle, and the hotel is again the Eiffel-Seine.
TABLEAU 11: PLACE DU CHÂTELET - THE STRANGER - NANA THE UNWITTING PHILOSOPHER
PHILOSOPHY: A sixth café scene, the last. Preceded by six brief travelling shots from a car, documenting prostitutes on the streets of Paris. In the last of them is Nana, just another passerby. In the café, she joins in an improvised dialogue with "a stranger", the philosopher of language Brice Parain. He tells her the story of Dumas' Porthos, who, the first time he thinks, dies. After eight-and-a-half minutes, he concludes that "love can be a solution, if it is true". This conversation is edited as shot/counter-shot, as if filmed straight, without device, as if the camera is actually paying attention - at least, until six minutes in, when it forgets the philosopher and fixes on Karina. She looks at the camera, uncomfortable again beneath its loving gaze.

The street scenes are of the rue Saint Denis, near the Fontaine des Innocents. The café is the Zimmer (1 place du Châtelet, 75001).
TABLEAU 12: THE YOUNG MAN AGAIN - THE OVAL PORTRAIT - RAOUL SELLS NANA
LOVE AND DEATH: This could have been a love story. First, Godard's voice reads Edgar Allan Poe's "The Oval Portrait" and tells Karina that it is their story, "an artist painting the portrait of his wife". The artist loves his wife, but his art kills her. The accompanying image is Nana and the young man from the billiard room, now lovers and happy. The young man explains the æsthetic of the film: "Life is art, beauty." But his words are given as subtitles, a cinematic artifice, and we see them embrace in four shots, linked by cuts that jump back: more artifice. After the idyll of art, the film returns to life, to the street, where "cinema is no fun, during the week you can't go because of work, and Sundays there's always a queue" (we see a queue for Truffaut's Jules et Jim, 1962). Nana is to be sold on to rival pimps. In Paris, in 1962, love ends in death, "the slave's only freedom".

Nana and the young man are in her room on the rue Verneuil. The pimps drive her from there past the Arc du Carrousel, along the Avenue de l'Opéra, past a factory on the rue de Rambouillet ("Enfer et ses fils", no. 10), and bring her to the rue Esquirol, by the "Restaurant des Studios", no. 17.

* * *

An A-to-Z of Vivre Sa Vie

Algeria
Never mentioned in the film, in the background always there. As shooting went on, the talks at Evian to end the Algerian War were taking place, and by 20 March the war was over, Algeria was independent. The graffiti on the walls are reminders of the political tension and, when a North African is gunned down by the police in tableau 6, memories are strong of the October 1961 and February '62 massacres by the police of pro-independence supporters.

April 15, 1940
If everything in his films has, as Godard claimed, "little hidden meanings", the date of Nana's birth should be significant, but nothing relevant seems to have happened that day.

Baudelaire
In the last tableau, Godard reads Poe in Charles Baudelaire's translation, a passing reminder that Paris and Prostitution are not just the province of Émile Zola's novels, that any modern work on those themes is also, necessarily, Baudelarian.

BMW
Photo-journalists and film producers drive Alfa Romeos, pimps drive Peugeot 404s or Ford Galaxies, police superintendents drive BMWs (tableau 10). In this world, form follows function.

Bresson
Vivre sa vie is made under the influence of Bresson's Pickpocket. Nana's catchphrase, "C'est comme ça", is a quote from that film, as are the close-ups of hands, shoulders and sundry objects. The original plan was to have Nana at the cinema see not Dreyer's Joan of Arc film but Bresson's, Le Procès de Jeanne d'Arc (1962). Godard had Bresson's permission, the extracts lined-up, and changed his mind at the last minute. (An earlier plan was to have her watching Marilyn Monroe in Otto Preminger's River of No Return, 1954.)

Constantine
Nana twice says she's been in a film with Eddie Constantine, Y a pas de pitié, but no such film exists. Three years later, Karina and Constantine would star in Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution, but at the time of Vivre sa vie their only work together was in the comedy short made to screen with Agnès Varda's Cléo de 5 à 7 (1961), Les Fiancés du pont Mac Donald ou (Méfiez-vous des lunettes noires) (1961), a parody of silent-movie style, depicting the troubled romance of Karina and Jean-Luc Godard. Constantine played the man with the watering hose.

Elizabeth
"My name's Elizabeth, like the Queen of England", says a prostitute in tableau 10. This sign of now-diminished glamour had greater force in 1962. The film's other Elizabeth (see "Taylor", below) still has that prestige.

Fleytoux
When Roger Fleytoux, assistant to Braunberger and eventually producer in his own right, cameos as the BMW-driving, prostitute-friendly policeman in tableau 10, it's just an in-joke (and not a comment on the corruption of film producers).

Godard
We hear Godard in two scenes: when the North African runs into the café in tableau 6, his eyes bloodied, Godard asks: "You alright?"; in tableau 12, his voice is super-imposed on the image of the young man Nana loves, reciting Poe's "Oval Portrait". It is Godard who says to Nana/Karina: "This is our story ... An artist painting a portrait of his wife".

Jeanne d'Arc
The neon sign announcing the film Nana will see says only Jeanne d'Arc, leaving it free to be Dreyer's Passion or Bresson's Procès. In the end it is Dreyer's, but in a peculiarly modified form. The version circulating at the time was not the recently restored print we see today, but an earlier restoration made in 1952 by Lo Duca, with intertitles replaced by subtitles and added classical music. In his two-minute sample of Falconetti and Artaud in dialogue, Godard keeps the subtitles, edits out shots of a third character in the scene, and cuts the added music.

Jules et Jim
Tableau 12; Nana and the pimps drive down the Avenue de l'Opéra, past the Vendôme cinema showing Truffaut's Jules et Jim, which had just opened as shooting began on Vivre sa vie. In the Cahiers du Cinéma, Godard listed Jules et Jim fourth of the Ten Best films of 1962 (and put Vivre sa vie sixth).

Kaye
Karina is standing in front of a poster for On the Double (1961), directed by Melville Shavelson and starring Danny Kaye. Most of the film posters visible in Godard films are intertextual signposts (e.g., the posters for Vivre sa vie shown in Le Mépris and 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle, 1967), but the weaving of Danny Kaye into the intertext of Vivre sa vie stretches the imagination just too far. (We are probably shown this poster for the name of the cinema: see "Zola".) Other posters shown in Vivre sa vie are for better or at least more pertinent films: Kubrick's Spartacus, Robert Rossen's The Hustler (1961), Preminger's Exodus (1960), the sketch film La Française et l'amour ( Love and the Frenchwoman, Michel Boisrond, Christian-Jacque, René Clair, Henri Decoin, Jean Delannoy, Jean-Paul Le Chanois, Henri Verneuil, 1960).

Kleinfrankenheim
Nana's surname, spelled out in the police station, is Kleinfrankenheim, not a hybrid, monstrous invention but the name of a small village in Alsace, not far from Nana's birthplace Flexbourg, a small, partly German speaking town. As an Alsatian, Nana is not only a provincial in Paris, she is from the frontier with Germany: she is marked by marginality, not quite French.

Legrand
Michel Legrand worked on three Godard features - Une Femme est une femme, Vivre sa vie and Bande à part - and three shorts - "La Paresse" (episode of Les Sept péchés capitaux, 1962), "Le Grand escroc" (episode of Les Plus belles escroqueries du monde, 1964) and "Anticipation: ou l'amour en l'an 2000" (episode of Le Plus vieux métier du monde, 1967). For Vivre Sa Vie, he provides the recurring, pathos-laden motif, the laid-back jazz playing in the record shop tableau 2 and the frenetic dance tune accompanying Nana's improvised performance in tableau 9.

Montaigne
The epigraph to Vivre sa vie is from the Essays of Montaigne, Book III, chapter 10: "You should lend yourself to others and give yourself only to yourself." Godard claims never to have read Montaigne, saving him (along with Don Quixote) for his old age.

Nana
Nana's name may come from Zola's novel and Renoir's film, but it is also an anagram of Anna, adding personal intertexts to the literary and the cinematic.

Olympia
Nana reminds Yvette (Guylaine Schlumberger) of their night planned at the Olympia, Paris' foremost concert hall. We cannot say who they're going to see, but Louis Armstrong was among the acts headlining there in April 1962, as were The Shadows.

Pacifico
Nana says that she performed at the Châtelet theatre in Pacifico. This operetta, written by Jo Moutet and starring Georges Guétary and Bourvil, opened at the Porte Saint-Martin in November 1958 and ran for three years. ( Pacifico also featured Corinne Marchand, star of Cléo de 5 à 7.)

Parain
"I once had a crisis of language. That's why I filmed Brice Parain in Vivre sa vie" (Godard, 1997). Parain plays himself, "the philosopher", answering questions asked by Godard, off-camera. Parain's philosophy of language was an early influence on Godard and his contemporaries (including Chris Marker and Alexander Astruc). His most important book was the 1942 Researches into the Nature and Function of Language, but he was also author of a play, Black on White, produced and republished in 1962, from which he quotes in his discussion with Nana: "We haven't yet found the means to live without speaking."

La Pitié-Salpétrière
Nana dies within earshot of the Pitié-Salpétrière hospital (where Jean-Martin Charcot taught Freud). A finely tuned ear can hear the hospital's chapel bell sounding during the last shot of the film.

Romero
In the record shop where Nana "lives her life" (tableau 2), a customer asks for Judy Garland (out of stock), then Rafaël Romero "on the guitar". Romero was a gypsy flamenco singer who actually specialised in unaccompanied performance, though his accompanied recordings enjoyed a certain vogue in the early '60s. Also visible in the shop's display are records by Igor Oistrakh, Gene Ammons and The Tokens ("The Lion Sleeps Tonight").

Rossellini
Godard cites as influence on Vivre sa vie the tableau-style of Roberto Rossellini's Francesco, giullare di Dio ( Flowers of Saint Francis, 1950).

Saint-Germain, Boulevard
When he meets her in tableau 6, Raoul says to Nana that he has already seen her, three months before on the boulevard Saint-Germain. If we look again at the brief scene on the boulevard between Nana and Paul in tableau 3, where he is showing her photographs of their son, we can indeed see Raoul passing behind them, casting a glance at Nana.

Sully
The portrait being painted in the story by Poe is "in the manner of Thomas Sully", the American artist best known for his 1838 painting of Queen Victoria. Sully's portrait of Poe's foster mother was an oval portrait.

Szabo
Laszlo Szabo's cameo as a gunned-down North African brings politics into the frame of Vivre sa vie, not least because it is Szabo who plays the FLN torturer in Godard's first political thriller, Le Petit soldat. Szabo has substantial roles in other films by Godard ( Made in U.S.A., 1966; Passion, 1982) and walk-on parts in several more.

The Three Musketeers
"Have you read The Three Musketeers? No, but I've seen the film." The film Nana would have seen is Bernard Borderie's epic two-part adaptation from 1961.

Une Femme est une femme
Vivre sa vie picks up where Godard's previous film with his wife Karina left off. At the end of Une Femme est une femme, man and pregnant wife anticipate a happy future, even if the wife has betrayed the husband with his best friend. Vivre sa vie opens with the breakup of a couple, with no prospect of reconciliation: "If we get back together, I'd betray you again", says Nana. Behind the bar of the café in Tableau 3 is a poster for Une Femme est une femme.

Vadim
Though not visible in the film, production stills of Vivre sa vie show that someone has graffiti-ed the name Vadim under the title of Paul Newman's The Hustler, on the poster behind Nana in tableau 8. Roger Vadim was in considerable disfavour among young French filmmakers in 1962, not least for his role in the Aurel affair, where Jean Aurel was removed as director from the Bardot vehicle, Le Bride sur le cou (1961), and replaced with Vadim. (Two years later Karina would star in De l'amour, Aurel's New Wave reworking of Stendhal.)

Vivre sa vie
The title of Godard's film translates awkwardly as "to live one's life", losing the force of the existential imperative: "live your life, no one else will do it for you". The phrase is banal: a 1948 novel of that name is a bland, sentimental love story with no connection to Godard's film, and a 1961 song by Eddy Mitchell and the Chaussettes noires, though hipper, is no more relevant. Jean Collet suggests a source in a passage from Jean-Paul Sartre's La Nausée (1938), but all of these show that Godard has taken a phrase from ordinary, everyday culture and made it his.

An earlier version of these texts was published as part of the publicity for a new print of Vivre sa vie distributed by the British Film Institute in 2004. Reprinted with permission of the author.

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Vivre sa vie: An Introduction and A to Z * Senses of Cinema

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In Vivre sa vie I have attempted to film a mind in action, the interior of someone seen from outside. - Jean-Luc Godard, Télérama, 1962 Vivre sa vie : Film en douze tableaux (1962) tells the story of Nana (Anna Karina) in twelve parts.

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A look at his filmography during the FNW period

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Useful documentary charting Godard's status as an auteur

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Jean-Luc Godard: An Auteur to Remember documentary (2010)