Vivre Sa Vie (1962, dir. Jean-Luc Godard, France) by Patrick McElroy

I’ve often noticed when people discuss Jean-Luc Godard, the one film they bring up is his 1960 film Breathless. While that film might have been the breakout – for its use of handheld,  jump cuts, and pop culture references – he has other films that are even more inventive.

The one film that comes to mind is 1962’s Vivre Sa Vie, which coincidently turned 60 this month. The film stars his then wife Anna Karina as Nana, a beautiful 22 year old Parisian woman who aspires to be an actress but has to work multiple professions and encounters multiple people, told through twelve episodes. James Joyce’s novel Ulysses is considered a masterpiece of modernity, and its told in eighteen episodes, each different from the other. Godard’s film is also a piece of modernity, where each episode is composed differently, and explores different questions.

Godard, like Antonioni, doesn’t repeat shots in films, as each composition is something that goes against convention. In one scene early on in the film, Nana meets a man in a café, and they sit in the bar area. They’re both facing each other, and the camera pans back and forth between them almost like an intellectual tennis match. Godard also prefers to photograph Karina  rom the back side, which is rare in movies. The only other film around that time that did that was  Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, but that was a point-of-view from James Stewart’s character. Here, I feel he does it to show the unconventional hairstyle his protagonist wears, to show that she lives by the choice of life.

When Godard’s colleague Francois Truffaut reviewed Roberto Rossellini’s  1947 film Germany Year Zero, he said it was like watching a human being under a microscope. When watching Vivre Sa Vie, you feel you’re watching Nana under a microscope, for she appears in every scene, and it’s Karina’s performance that carries the film, containing beauty, liveliness, and heartbreak.

Godard’s following film Contempt starts out with a quote by critic Andre Bazin which says, “The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.” That quote can also be applied to one of the best scenes in this film where Nana is in a movie theater watching Carl Theodore Dryer’s 1928 masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc. Here are two women – one a whore, the other a saint – who both face persecution from men, and Nana’s tear represents a desire for holiness, while also identifying.

Within a seven year period from 1960-67 Godard demonstrated what film can be, and this film is one of the stepping stones in making a more novelistic approach to film. His impact will be seen for generations.

Patrick McElroy is a movie writer and movie lover based in Los Angeles. Check out his other writing at: https://www.facebook.com/patrick.mcelroy.3726 or his IG: @mcelroy.patrick