My Life to Live
Encyclopedia
Vivre sa vie : film en douze tableaux is a 1962 French film directed by Jean-Luc Godard
. The title means "To Live Her Life: A Film in Twelve Scenes", but in the English-speaking world it was released as My Life to Live (North America) or as It's My Life (UK). The most recent DVD releases use the original French title.
The film stars Anna Karina
, as Nana, a beautiful Parisian in her early twenties who deliberately leaves her husband and her infant son hoping to become an actress. Without money, beyond what she earns as a shopgirl, and unable to enter acting, she elects to earn better money as a prostitiute. Soon she has a pimp, Raoul, who after an unspecified period agrees to sell Nana to another pimp. During the exchange the pimps argue and in a gun battle Nana is killed. Nana's short life on film is told in 12 brief episodes each preceded by a written resume. Godard introduces other idiosyncrasies to focus the viewer's attention.
approach to documentary film
-making that was then becoming fashionable. However, this film differed from other films of the French New Wave
by being photographed with a heavy Mitchell camera, as opposed to the light weight cameras used for earlier films. The cinematographer was Raoul Coutard, a frequent collaborator of Godard.
Vivre sa vie was released shortly after Cahiers du cinéma
(the film magazine for which Godard occasionally wrote) published an issue devoted to Bertolt Brecht
and his theory of 'epic theatre
'. Godard may have been influenced by it, as Vivre sa vie uses several alienation effects: twelve intertitle
s appear before the film's 'chapters' explaining what will happen next; jump cut
s disrupt the editing flow; characters are shot from behind when they are talking; they are strongly backlit; they talk directly to the camera; the statistical results derived from official questionnaires are given in a voice-over
; and so on.
The film also draws from the writings of Montaigne, Baudelaire, Zola
and Edgar Allan Poe
, to the cinema of Robert Bresson
, Jean Renoir
and Carl Dreyer. And Jean Douchet, the French critic, has written that Godard's film ' would have been impossible without Street of Shame
, Kenji Mizoguchi
's last and most sublime film.' Nana gets into an earnest discussion with a philosopher (played by Brice Parain, Godard's former philosophy tutor), about the limits of speech and written language. In the next scene, as if to illustrate this point, the sound track ceases and the images are overlaid by Godard's personal narration. This formal playfulness is typical of the way in which the director was working with sound and vision during this period.
The film depicts the consumerist culture of Godard's Paris; a shiny new world of cinemas, coffee bars, neon-lit pool halls, pop records, photographs, wall posters, pin-ups, pinball machines, juke boxes, foreign cars, the latest hairstyles, typewriters, advertising, gangsters and Americana
. It also features allusions to popular culture; for example, the scene where a melancholy young man walks into a cafe, puts on a juke box disc, and then sits down to listen. The unnamed actor is in fact the well known singer-songwriter Jean Ferrat
, who is performing his own hit tune "Ma Môme" on the track that he has just selected. Nana's bobbed haircut replicates that made famous by Louise Brooks
in the 1928 film Pandora's Box, where the doomed heroine also falls into a life of prostitution and violent death. In one sequence we are shown a queue outside a Paris cinema waiting to see Jules et Jim, the new wave film directed by François Truffaut
, at the time both a close friend and sometime rival of Godard.
, author and cultural critic, has described Godard's achievement in Vivre sa vie as "a perfect film" and "one of the most extraordinary, beautiful, and original works of art that I know of." According to critic Roger Ebert, "The effect of the film is astonishing. It is clear, astringent, unsentimental, abrupt."
Vivre sa vie : film en douze tableaux is a 1962 French film directed by Jean-Luc Godard
. The title means "To Live Her Life: A Film in Twelve Scenes", but in the English-speaking world it was released as My Life to Live (North America) or as It's My Life (UK). The most recent DVD releases use the original French title.
The film stars Anna Karina
, as Nana, a beautiful Parisian in her early twenties who deliberately leaves her husband and her infant son hoping to become an actress. Without money, beyond what she earns as a shopgirl, and unable to enter acting, she elects to earn better money as a prostitiute. Soon she has a pimp, Raoul, who after an unspecified period agrees to sell Nana to another pimp. During the exchange the pimps argue and in a gun battle Nana is killed. Nana's short life on film is told in 12 brief episodes each preceded by a written resume. Godard introduces other idiosyncrasies to focus the viewer's attention.
approach to documentary film
-making that was then becoming fashionable. However, this film differed from other films of the French New Wave
by being photographed with a heavy Mitchell camera, as opposed to the light weight cameras used for earlier films. The cinematographer was Raoul Coutard, a frequent collaborator of Godard.
Vivre sa vie was released shortly after Cahiers du cinéma
(the film magazine for which Godard occasionally wrote) published an issue devoted to Bertolt Brecht
and his theory of 'epic theatre
'. Godard may have been influenced by it, as Vivre sa vie uses several alienation effects: twelve intertitle
s appear before the film's 'chapters' explaining what will happen next; jump cut
s disrupt the editing flow; characters are shot from behind when they are talking; they are strongly backlit; they talk directly to the camera; the statistical results derived from official questionnaires are given in a voice-over
; and so on.
The film also draws from the writings of Montaigne, Baudelaire, Zola
and Edgar Allan Poe
, to the cinema of Robert Bresson
, Jean Renoir
and Carl Dreyer. And Jean Douchet, the French critic, has written that Godard's film ' would have been impossible without Street of Shame
, Kenji Mizoguchi
's last and most sublime film.' Nana gets into an earnest discussion with a philosopher (played by Brice Parain, Godard's former philosophy tutor), about the limits of speech and written language. In the next scene, as if to illustrate this point, the sound track ceases and the images are overlaid by Godard's personal narration. This formal playfulness is typical of the way in which the director was working with sound and vision during this period.
The film depicts the consumerist culture of Godard's Paris; a shiny new world of cinemas, coffee bars, neon-lit pool halls, pop records, photographs, wall posters, pin-ups, pinball machines, juke boxes, foreign cars, the latest hairstyles, typewriters, advertising, gangsters and Americana
. It also features allusions to popular culture; for example, the scene where a melancholy young man walks into a cafe, puts on a juke box disc, and then sits down to listen. The unnamed actor is in fact the well known singer-songwriter Jean Ferrat
, who is performing his own hit tune "Ma Môme" on the track that he has just selected. Nana's bobbed haircut replicates that made famous by Louise Brooks
in the 1928 film Pandora's Box, where the doomed heroine also falls into a life of prostitution and violent death. In one sequence we are shown a queue outside a Paris cinema waiting to see Jules et Jim, the new wave film directed by François Truffaut
, at the time both a close friend and sometime rival of Godard.
, author and cultural critic, has described Godard's achievement in Vivre sa vie as "a perfect film" and "one of the most extraordinary, beautiful, and original works of art that I know of." According to critic Roger Ebert, "The effect of the film is astonishing. It is clear, astringent, unsentimental, abrupt."
Vivre sa vie : film en douze tableaux is a 1962 French film directed by Jean-Luc Godard
. The title means "To Live Her Life: A Film in Twelve Scenes", but in the English-speaking world it was released as My Life to Live (North America) or as It's My Life (UK). The most recent DVD releases use the original French title.
The film stars Anna Karina
, as Nana, a beautiful Parisian in her early twenties who deliberately leaves her husband and her infant son hoping to become an actress. Without money, beyond what she earns as a shopgirl, and unable to enter acting, she elects to earn better money as a prostitiute. Soon she has a pimp, Raoul, who after an unspecified period agrees to sell Nana to another pimp. During the exchange the pimps argue and in a gun battle Nana is killed. Nana's short life on film is told in 12 brief episodes each preceded by a written resume. Godard introduces other idiosyncrasies to focus the viewer's attention.
approach to documentary film
-making that was then becoming fashionable. However, this film differed from other films of the French New Wave
by being photographed with a heavy Mitchell camera, as opposed to the light weight cameras used for earlier films. The cinematographer was Raoul Coutard, a frequent collaborator of Godard.
Vivre sa vie was released shortly after Cahiers du cinéma
(the film magazine for which Godard occasionally wrote) published an issue devoted to Bertolt Brecht
and his theory of 'epic theatre
'. Godard may have been influenced by it, as Vivre sa vie uses several alienation effects: twelve intertitle
s appear before the film's 'chapters' explaining what will happen next; jump cut
s disrupt the editing flow; characters are shot from behind when they are talking; they are strongly backlit; they talk directly to the camera; the statistical results derived from official questionnaires are given in a voice-over
; and so on.
The film also draws from the writings of Montaigne, Baudelaire, Zola
and Edgar Allan Poe
, to the cinema of Robert Bresson
, Jean Renoir
and Carl Dreyer. And Jean Douchet, the French critic, has written that Godard's film ' would have been impossible without Street of Shame
, Kenji Mizoguchi
's last and most sublime film.' Nana gets into an earnest discussion with a philosopher (played by Brice Parain, Godard's former philosophy tutor), about the limits of speech and written language. In the next scene, as if to illustrate this point, the sound track ceases and the images are overlaid by Godard's personal narration. This formal playfulness is typical of the way in which the director was working with sound and vision during this period.
The film depicts the consumerist culture of Godard's Paris; a shiny new world of cinemas, coffee bars, neon-lit pool halls, pop records, photographs, wall posters, pin-ups, pinball machines, juke boxes, foreign cars, the latest hairstyles, typewriters, advertising, gangsters and Americana
. It also features allusions to popular culture; for example, the scene where a melancholy young man walks into a cafe, puts on a juke box disc, and then sits down to listen. The unnamed actor is in fact the well known singer-songwriter Jean Ferrat
, who is performing his own hit tune "Ma Môme" on the track that he has just selected. Nana's bobbed haircut replicates that made famous by Louise Brooks
in the 1928 film Pandora's Box, where the doomed heroine also falls into a life of prostitution and violent death. In one sequence we are shown a queue outside a Paris cinema waiting to see Jules et Jim, the new wave film directed by François Truffaut
, at the time both a close friend and sometime rival of Godard.
, author and cultural critic, has described Godard's achievement in Vivre sa vie as "a perfect film" and "one of the most extraordinary, beautiful, and original works of art that I know of." According to critic Roger Ebert, "The effect of the film is astonishing. It is clear, astringent, unsentimental, abrupt."
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....
. The title means "To Live Her Life: A Film in Twelve Scenes", but in the English-speaking world it was released as My Life to Live (North America) or as It's My Life (UK). The most recent DVD releases use the original French title.
The film stars Anna Karina
Anna Karina
Anna Karina is a Danish film actress, director, and screenwriter who has spent most of her working life in France. Karina is known as a muse of the director, Jean-Luc Godard, one of the pioneers of the French New Wave...
, as Nana, a beautiful Parisian in her early twenties who deliberately leaves her husband and her infant son hoping to become an actress. Without money, beyond what she earns as a shopgirl, and unable to enter acting, she elects to earn better money as a prostitiute. Soon she has a pimp, Raoul, who after an unspecified period agrees to sell Nana to another pimp. During the exchange the pimps argue and in a gun battle Nana is killed. Nana's short life on film is told in 12 brief episodes each preceded by a written resume. Godard introduces other idiosyncrasies to focus the viewer's attention.
Cast
- Anna KarinaAnna KarinaAnna Karina is a Danish film actress, director, and screenwriter who has spent most of her working life in France. Karina is known as a muse of the director, Jean-Luc Godard, one of the pioneers of the French New Wave...
as Nana Kleinfrankenheim - Sady RebbotSady RebbotSady Rebbot was a French actor. He appeared in 68 films and television shows between 1959 and 1994. He starred alongside Anna Karina in the 1962 film Vivre sa vie.-Selected filmography:* Vivre sa vie...
as Raoul (as Saddy Rebbot) - André S. LabartheAndré S. LabartheAndré S. Labarthe is a French actor, film producer and director. He starred alongside Anna Karina in the 1962 film Vivre sa vie.-Selected filmography:* Vivre sa vie * L'amour fou...
as Paul - Guylaine Schlumberger as Yvette (as G. Schlumberger)
- Gérard Hoffman as Le chef
- Monique Messine as Elisabeth
- Paul Pavel as Journaliste
- Dimitri Dineff as Dimitri
- Peter KassovitzPeter KassovitzPeter Kassovitz is a French film director and scriptwriter.He was born in Budapest, Hungary. He left the country at the time of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He is the father of film director Mathieu Kassovitz....
as Le jeune homme - Eric Schlumberger as Luigi (as E. Schlumberger)
- Brice Parain as Le philosophe
- Henri Attal as Arthur (as Henri Atal)
- Gilles Quéant as Premier client
- Odile Geoffroy as La serveuse de café
- Marcel Charton as L'agent de police
Style
In Vivre sa vie, Godard borrowed the aesthetics of the cinéma véritéCinéma vérité
Cinéma vérité is a style of documentary filmmaking, combining naturalistic techniques with stylized cinematic devices of editing and camerawork, staged set-ups, and the use of the camera to provoke subjects. It is also known for taking a provocative stance toward its topics.There are subtle yet...
approach to documentary film
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
-making that was then becoming fashionable. However, this film differed from other films of the French New Wave
French New Wave
The New Wave was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced by Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema. Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of...
by being photographed with a heavy Mitchell camera, as opposed to the light weight cameras used for earlier films. The cinematographer was Raoul Coutard, a frequent collaborator of Godard.
Influences
One of the film's original sources is a study of contemporary prostitution, Où en est la prostitution by Marcel Sacotte, an examining magistrate.Vivre sa vie was released shortly after Cahiers du cinéma
Cahiers du cinéma
Cahiers du Cinéma is an influential French film magazine founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. It developed from the earlier magazine Revue du Cinéma involving members of two Paris film clubs — Objectif 49 and...
(the film magazine for which Godard occasionally wrote) published an issue devoted to Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director.An influential theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the...
and his theory of 'epic theatre
Epic theatre
Epic theatre was a theatrical movement arising in the early to mid-20th century from the theories and practice of a number of theatre practitioners, including Erwin Piscator, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold and, most famously, Bertolt Brecht...
'. Godard may have been influenced by it, as Vivre sa vie uses several alienation effects: twelve intertitle
Intertitle
In motion pictures, an intertitle is a piece of filmed, printed text edited into the midst of the photographed action, at various points, generally to convey character dialogue, or descriptive narrative material related to, but not necessarily covered by, the material photographed.Intertitles...
s appear before the film's 'chapters' explaining what will happen next; jump cut
Jump cut
A jump cut is a cut in film editing and vloging in which two sequential shots of the same subject are taken from camera positions that vary only slightly. This type of edit causes the subject of the shots to appear to "jump" position in a discontinuous way...
s disrupt the editing flow; characters are shot from behind when they are talking; they are strongly backlit; they talk directly to the camera; the statistical results derived from official questionnaires are given in a voice-over
Voice-over
Voice-over is a production technique where a voice which is not part of the narrative is used in a radio, television production, filmmaking, theatre, or other presentations...
; and so on.
The film also draws from the writings of Montaigne, Baudelaire, Zola
Émile Zola
Émile François Zola was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism...
and Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
, to the cinema of Robert Bresson
Robert Bresson
-Life and career:Bresson was born at Bromont-Lamothe, Puy-de-Dôme, the son of Marie-Élisabeth and Léon Bresson. Little is known of his early life and the year of his birth, 1901 or 1907, varies depending on the source. He was educated at Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine, close to Paris, and...
, Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s...
and Carl Dreyer. And Jean Douchet, the French critic, has written that Godard's film ' would have been impossible without Street of Shame
Street of Shame
is a 1956 black-and-white Japanese film directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, his last film.The film is based on the novel Susaki no Onna by Yoshiko Shibaki.-Cast:* Machiko Kyō as Mickey* Ayako Wakao as Yumeko* Aiko Mimasu as Yasumi* Michiyo Kogure as Hanae...
, Kenji Mizoguchi
Kenji Mizoguchi
Kenji Mizoguchi was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. His film Ugetsu won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and appeared in the Sight & Sound Critics' Top Ten Poll in 1962 and 1972. Mizoguchi is renowned for his mastery of the long take and mise-en-scène...
's last and most sublime film.' Nana gets into an earnest discussion with a philosopher (played by Brice Parain, Godard's former philosophy tutor), about the limits of speech and written language. In the next scene, as if to illustrate this point, the sound track ceases and the images are overlaid by Godard's personal narration. This formal playfulness is typical of the way in which the director was working with sound and vision during this period.
The film depicts the consumerist culture of Godard's Paris; a shiny new world of cinemas, coffee bars, neon-lit pool halls, pop records, photographs, wall posters, pin-ups, pinball machines, juke boxes, foreign cars, the latest hairstyles, typewriters, advertising, gangsters and Americana
Americana
Americana refers to artifacts, or a collection of artifacts, related to the history, geography, folklore and cultural heritage of the United States. Many kinds of material fall within the definition of Americana: paintings, prints and drawings; license plates or entire vehicles, household objects,...
. It also features allusions to popular culture; for example, the scene where a melancholy young man walks into a cafe, puts on a juke box disc, and then sits down to listen. The unnamed actor is in fact the well known singer-songwriter Jean Ferrat
Jean Ferrat
Jean Ferrat was a French singer-songwriter and poet. He specialized in singing poetry, particularly that of Louis Aragon.-Biography:...
, who is performing his own hit tune "Ma Môme" on the track that he has just selected. Nana's bobbed haircut replicates that made famous by Louise Brooks
Louise Brooks
Mary Louise Brooks , generally known by her stage name Louise Brooks, was an American dancer, model, showgirl and silent film actress, noted for popularizing the bobbed haircut. Brooks is best known for her three feature roles including two G. W...
in the 1928 film Pandora's Box, where the doomed heroine also falls into a life of prostitution and violent death. In one sequence we are shown a queue outside a Paris cinema waiting to see Jules et Jim, the new wave film directed by François Truffaut
François Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut was an influential film critic and filmmaker and one of the founders of the French New Wave. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he remains an icon of the French film industry. He was also a screenwriter, producer, and actor working on over twenty-five...
, at the time both a close friend and sometime rival of Godard.
Responses
While not being one of Godard's best-known films, Vivre sa Vie enjoys an extremely positive critical reputation. Susan SontagSusan Sontag
Susan Sontag was an American author, literary theorist, feminist and political activist whose works include On Photography and Against Interpretation.-Life:...
, author and cultural critic, has described Godard's achievement in Vivre sa vie as "a perfect film" and "one of the most extraordinary, beautiful, and original works of art that I know of." According to critic Roger Ebert, "The effect of the film is astonishing. It is clear, astringent, unsentimental, abrupt."
The twelve tableaux
The divisions of this film are displayed as intertitles on the screen. These are:- Tableau one: A bistro - Nana wants to leave Paul - Pinball
- Tableau two: The record shop - 2000 francs - Nana lives her life
- Tableau three: The concierge - The passion of Joan of Arc - a journalist
- Tableau four: The police - Nana is questioned
- Tableau five: The outer boulevards - the first man - the hotel room
- Tableau six: Yvette - a café in the suburbs - Raoul - machine gun fire
- Tableau seven: The letter - Raoul again - the Champs Élysées
- Tableau eight: Afternoons - money - wash-basins - pleasure - hotels
- Tableau nine: A young man - Nana wonders if she's happy
- Tableau ten: The sidewalk - a man - there's no gaiety in happiness
- Tableau eleven: Place de Chatelet - the stranger - Nana the unwitting philosopher
- Tableau twelve: The young man again - the oval portrait - Raoul sells Nana
Further reading
- Colin MacCabe (2004) Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN 0-374-16378-2.
External links
- Critical essay on Vivre sa vie
- Episodic essay on watching this film, with a selection of stills
- Critical essay on the modern and postmodern aspects of Vivre sa vie
Vivre sa vie : film en douze tableaux is a 1962 French film directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....
. The title means "To Live Her Life: A Film in Twelve Scenes", but in the English-speaking world it was released as My Life to Live (North America) or as It's My Life (UK). The most recent DVD releases use the original French title.
The film stars Anna Karina
Anna Karina
Anna Karina is a Danish film actress, director, and screenwriter who has spent most of her working life in France. Karina is known as a muse of the director, Jean-Luc Godard, one of the pioneers of the French New Wave...
, as Nana, a beautiful Parisian in her early twenties who deliberately leaves her husband and her infant son hoping to become an actress. Without money, beyond what she earns as a shopgirl, and unable to enter acting, she elects to earn better money as a prostitiute. Soon she has a pimp, Raoul, who after an unspecified period agrees to sell Nana to another pimp. During the exchange the pimps argue and in a gun battle Nana is killed. Nana's short life on film is told in 12 brief episodes each preceded by a written resume. Godard introduces other idiosyncrasies to focus the viewer's attention.
Cast
- Anna KarinaAnna KarinaAnna Karina is a Danish film actress, director, and screenwriter who has spent most of her working life in France. Karina is known as a muse of the director, Jean-Luc Godard, one of the pioneers of the French New Wave...
as Nana Kleinfrankenheim - Sady RebbotSady RebbotSady Rebbot was a French actor. He appeared in 68 films and television shows between 1959 and 1994. He starred alongside Anna Karina in the 1962 film Vivre sa vie.-Selected filmography:* Vivre sa vie...
as Raoul (as Saddy Rebbot) - André S. LabartheAndré S. LabartheAndré S. Labarthe is a French actor, film producer and director. He starred alongside Anna Karina in the 1962 film Vivre sa vie.-Selected filmography:* Vivre sa vie * L'amour fou...
as Paul - Guylaine Schlumberger as Yvette (as G. Schlumberger)
- Gérard Hoffman as Le chef
- Monique Messine as Elisabeth
- Paul Pavel as Journaliste
- Dimitri Dineff as Dimitri
- Peter KassovitzPeter KassovitzPeter Kassovitz is a French film director and scriptwriter.He was born in Budapest, Hungary. He left the country at the time of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He is the father of film director Mathieu Kassovitz....
as Le jeune homme - Eric Schlumberger as Luigi (as E. Schlumberger)
- Brice Parain as Le philosophe
- Henri Attal as Arthur (as Henri Atal)
- Gilles Quéant as Premier client
- Odile Geoffroy as La serveuse de café
- Marcel Charton as L'agent de police
Style
In Vivre sa vie, Godard borrowed the aesthetics of the cinéma véritéCinéma vérité
Cinéma vérité is a style of documentary filmmaking, combining naturalistic techniques with stylized cinematic devices of editing and camerawork, staged set-ups, and the use of the camera to provoke subjects. It is also known for taking a provocative stance toward its topics.There are subtle yet...
approach to documentary film
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
-making that was then becoming fashionable. However, this film differed from other films of the French New Wave
French New Wave
The New Wave was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced by Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema. Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of...
by being photographed with a heavy Mitchell camera, as opposed to the light weight cameras used for earlier films. The cinematographer was Raoul Coutard, a frequent collaborator of Godard.
Influences
One of the film's original sources is a study of contemporary prostitution, Où en est la prostitution by Marcel Sacotte, an examining magistrate.Vivre sa vie was released shortly after Cahiers du cinéma
Cahiers du cinéma
Cahiers du Cinéma is an influential French film magazine founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. It developed from the earlier magazine Revue du Cinéma involving members of two Paris film clubs — Objectif 49 and...
(the film magazine for which Godard occasionally wrote) published an issue devoted to Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director.An influential theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the...
and his theory of 'epic theatre
Epic theatre
Epic theatre was a theatrical movement arising in the early to mid-20th century from the theories and practice of a number of theatre practitioners, including Erwin Piscator, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold and, most famously, Bertolt Brecht...
'. Godard may have been influenced by it, as Vivre sa vie uses several alienation effects: twelve intertitle
Intertitle
In motion pictures, an intertitle is a piece of filmed, printed text edited into the midst of the photographed action, at various points, generally to convey character dialogue, or descriptive narrative material related to, but not necessarily covered by, the material photographed.Intertitles...
s appear before the film's 'chapters' explaining what will happen next; jump cut
Jump cut
A jump cut is a cut in film editing and vloging in which two sequential shots of the same subject are taken from camera positions that vary only slightly. This type of edit causes the subject of the shots to appear to "jump" position in a discontinuous way...
s disrupt the editing flow; characters are shot from behind when they are talking; they are strongly backlit; they talk directly to the camera; the statistical results derived from official questionnaires are given in a voice-over
Voice-over
Voice-over is a production technique where a voice which is not part of the narrative is used in a radio, television production, filmmaking, theatre, or other presentations...
; and so on.
The film also draws from the writings of Montaigne, Baudelaire, Zola
Émile Zola
Émile François Zola was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism...
and Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
, to the cinema of Robert Bresson
Robert Bresson
-Life and career:Bresson was born at Bromont-Lamothe, Puy-de-Dôme, the son of Marie-Élisabeth and Léon Bresson. Little is known of his early life and the year of his birth, 1901 or 1907, varies depending on the source. He was educated at Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine, close to Paris, and...
, Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s...
and Carl Dreyer. And Jean Douchet, the French critic, has written that Godard's film ' would have been impossible without Street of Shame
Street of Shame
is a 1956 black-and-white Japanese film directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, his last film.The film is based on the novel Susaki no Onna by Yoshiko Shibaki.-Cast:* Machiko Kyō as Mickey* Ayako Wakao as Yumeko* Aiko Mimasu as Yasumi* Michiyo Kogure as Hanae...
, Kenji Mizoguchi
Kenji Mizoguchi
Kenji Mizoguchi was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. His film Ugetsu won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and appeared in the Sight & Sound Critics' Top Ten Poll in 1962 and 1972. Mizoguchi is renowned for his mastery of the long take and mise-en-scène...
's last and most sublime film.' Nana gets into an earnest discussion with a philosopher (played by Brice Parain, Godard's former philosophy tutor), about the limits of speech and written language. In the next scene, as if to illustrate this point, the sound track ceases and the images are overlaid by Godard's personal narration. This formal playfulness is typical of the way in which the director was working with sound and vision during this period.
The film depicts the consumerist culture of Godard's Paris; a shiny new world of cinemas, coffee bars, neon-lit pool halls, pop records, photographs, wall posters, pin-ups, pinball machines, juke boxes, foreign cars, the latest hairstyles, typewriters, advertising, gangsters and Americana
Americana
Americana refers to artifacts, or a collection of artifacts, related to the history, geography, folklore and cultural heritage of the United States. Many kinds of material fall within the definition of Americana: paintings, prints and drawings; license plates or entire vehicles, household objects,...
. It also features allusions to popular culture; for example, the scene where a melancholy young man walks into a cafe, puts on a juke box disc, and then sits down to listen. The unnamed actor is in fact the well known singer-songwriter Jean Ferrat
Jean Ferrat
Jean Ferrat was a French singer-songwriter and poet. He specialized in singing poetry, particularly that of Louis Aragon.-Biography:...
, who is performing his own hit tune "Ma Môme" on the track that he has just selected. Nana's bobbed haircut replicates that made famous by Louise Brooks
Louise Brooks
Mary Louise Brooks , generally known by her stage name Louise Brooks, was an American dancer, model, showgirl and silent film actress, noted for popularizing the bobbed haircut. Brooks is best known for her three feature roles including two G. W...
in the 1928 film Pandora's Box, where the doomed heroine also falls into a life of prostitution and violent death. In one sequence we are shown a queue outside a Paris cinema waiting to see Jules et Jim, the new wave film directed by François Truffaut
François Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut was an influential film critic and filmmaker and one of the founders of the French New Wave. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he remains an icon of the French film industry. He was also a screenwriter, producer, and actor working on over twenty-five...
, at the time both a close friend and sometime rival of Godard.
Responses
While not being one of Godard's best-known films, Vivre sa Vie enjoys an extremely positive critical reputation. Susan SontagSusan Sontag
Susan Sontag was an American author, literary theorist, feminist and political activist whose works include On Photography and Against Interpretation.-Life:...
, author and cultural critic, has described Godard's achievement in Vivre sa vie as "a perfect film" and "one of the most extraordinary, beautiful, and original works of art that I know of." According to critic Roger Ebert, "The effect of the film is astonishing. It is clear, astringent, unsentimental, abrupt."
The twelve tableaux
The divisions of this film are displayed as intertitles on the screen. These are:- Tableau one: A bistro - Nana wants to leave Paul - Pinball
- Tableau two: The record shop - 2000 francs - Nana lives her life
- Tableau three: The concierge - The passion of Joan of Arc - a journalist
- Tableau four: The police - Nana is questioned
- Tableau five: The outer boulevards - the first man - the hotel room
- Tableau six: Yvette - a café in the suburbs - Raoul - machine gun fire
- Tableau seven: The letter - Raoul again - the Champs Élysées
- Tableau eight: Afternoons - money - wash-basins - pleasure - hotels
- Tableau nine: A young man - Nana wonders if she's happy
- Tableau ten: The sidewalk - a man - there's no gaiety in happiness
- Tableau eleven: Place de Chatelet - the stranger - Nana the unwitting philosopher
- Tableau twelve: The young man again - the oval portrait - Raoul sells Nana
Further reading
- Colin MacCabe (2004) Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN 0-374-16378-2.
External links
- Critical essay on Vivre sa vie
- Episodic essay on watching this film, with a selection of stills
- Critical essay on the modern and postmodern aspects of Vivre sa vie
Vivre sa vie : film en douze tableaux is a 1962 French film directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....
. The title means "To Live Her Life: A Film in Twelve Scenes", but in the English-speaking world it was released as My Life to Live (North America) or as It's My Life (UK). The most recent DVD releases use the original French title.
The film stars Anna Karina
Anna Karina
Anna Karina is a Danish film actress, director, and screenwriter who has spent most of her working life in France. Karina is known as a muse of the director, Jean-Luc Godard, one of the pioneers of the French New Wave...
, as Nana, a beautiful Parisian in her early twenties who deliberately leaves her husband and her infant son hoping to become an actress. Without money, beyond what she earns as a shopgirl, and unable to enter acting, she elects to earn better money as a prostitiute. Soon she has a pimp, Raoul, who after an unspecified period agrees to sell Nana to another pimp. During the exchange the pimps argue and in a gun battle Nana is killed. Nana's short life on film is told in 12 brief episodes each preceded by a written resume. Godard introduces other idiosyncrasies to focus the viewer's attention.
Cast
- Anna KarinaAnna KarinaAnna Karina is a Danish film actress, director, and screenwriter who has spent most of her working life in France. Karina is known as a muse of the director, Jean-Luc Godard, one of the pioneers of the French New Wave...
as Nana Kleinfrankenheim - Sady RebbotSady RebbotSady Rebbot was a French actor. He appeared in 68 films and television shows between 1959 and 1994. He starred alongside Anna Karina in the 1962 film Vivre sa vie.-Selected filmography:* Vivre sa vie...
as Raoul (as Saddy Rebbot) - André S. LabartheAndré S. LabartheAndré S. Labarthe is a French actor, film producer and director. He starred alongside Anna Karina in the 1962 film Vivre sa vie.-Selected filmography:* Vivre sa vie * L'amour fou...
as Paul - Guylaine Schlumberger as Yvette (as G. Schlumberger)
- Gérard Hoffman as Le chef
- Monique Messine as Elisabeth
- Paul Pavel as Journaliste
- Dimitri Dineff as Dimitri
- Peter KassovitzPeter KassovitzPeter Kassovitz is a French film director and scriptwriter.He was born in Budapest, Hungary. He left the country at the time of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He is the father of film director Mathieu Kassovitz....
as Le jeune homme - Eric Schlumberger as Luigi (as E. Schlumberger)
- Brice Parain as Le philosophe
- Henri Attal as Arthur (as Henri Atal)
- Gilles Quéant as Premier client
- Odile Geoffroy as La serveuse de café
- Marcel Charton as L'agent de police
Style
In Vivre sa vie, Godard borrowed the aesthetics of the cinéma véritéCinéma vérité
Cinéma vérité is a style of documentary filmmaking, combining naturalistic techniques with stylized cinematic devices of editing and camerawork, staged set-ups, and the use of the camera to provoke subjects. It is also known for taking a provocative stance toward its topics.There are subtle yet...
approach to documentary film
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
-making that was then becoming fashionable. However, this film differed from other films of the French New Wave
French New Wave
The New Wave was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced by Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema. Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of...
by being photographed with a heavy Mitchell camera, as opposed to the light weight cameras used for earlier films. The cinematographer was Raoul Coutard, a frequent collaborator of Godard.
Influences
One of the film's original sources is a study of contemporary prostitution, Où en est la prostitution by Marcel Sacotte, an examining magistrate.Vivre sa vie was released shortly after Cahiers du cinéma
Cahiers du cinéma
Cahiers du Cinéma is an influential French film magazine founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. It developed from the earlier magazine Revue du Cinéma involving members of two Paris film clubs — Objectif 49 and...
(the film magazine for which Godard occasionally wrote) published an issue devoted to Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director.An influential theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the...
and his theory of 'epic theatre
Epic theatre
Epic theatre was a theatrical movement arising in the early to mid-20th century from the theories and practice of a number of theatre practitioners, including Erwin Piscator, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold and, most famously, Bertolt Brecht...
'. Godard may have been influenced by it, as Vivre sa vie uses several alienation effects: twelve intertitle
Intertitle
In motion pictures, an intertitle is a piece of filmed, printed text edited into the midst of the photographed action, at various points, generally to convey character dialogue, or descriptive narrative material related to, but not necessarily covered by, the material photographed.Intertitles...
s appear before the film's 'chapters' explaining what will happen next; jump cut
Jump cut
A jump cut is a cut in film editing and vloging in which two sequential shots of the same subject are taken from camera positions that vary only slightly. This type of edit causes the subject of the shots to appear to "jump" position in a discontinuous way...
s disrupt the editing flow; characters are shot from behind when they are talking; they are strongly backlit; they talk directly to the camera; the statistical results derived from official questionnaires are given in a voice-over
Voice-over
Voice-over is a production technique where a voice which is not part of the narrative is used in a radio, television production, filmmaking, theatre, or other presentations...
; and so on.
The film also draws from the writings of Montaigne, Baudelaire, Zola
Émile Zola
Émile François Zola was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism...
and Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
, to the cinema of Robert Bresson
Robert Bresson
-Life and career:Bresson was born at Bromont-Lamothe, Puy-de-Dôme, the son of Marie-Élisabeth and Léon Bresson. Little is known of his early life and the year of his birth, 1901 or 1907, varies depending on the source. He was educated at Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine, close to Paris, and...
, Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s...
and Carl Dreyer. And Jean Douchet, the French critic, has written that Godard's film ' would have been impossible without Street of Shame
Street of Shame
is a 1956 black-and-white Japanese film directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, his last film.The film is based on the novel Susaki no Onna by Yoshiko Shibaki.-Cast:* Machiko Kyō as Mickey* Ayako Wakao as Yumeko* Aiko Mimasu as Yasumi* Michiyo Kogure as Hanae...
, Kenji Mizoguchi
Kenji Mizoguchi
Kenji Mizoguchi was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. His film Ugetsu won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and appeared in the Sight & Sound Critics' Top Ten Poll in 1962 and 1972. Mizoguchi is renowned for his mastery of the long take and mise-en-scène...
's last and most sublime film.' Nana gets into an earnest discussion with a philosopher (played by Brice Parain, Godard's former philosophy tutor), about the limits of speech and written language. In the next scene, as if to illustrate this point, the sound track ceases and the images are overlaid by Godard's personal narration. This formal playfulness is typical of the way in which the director was working with sound and vision during this period.
The film depicts the consumerist culture of Godard's Paris; a shiny new world of cinemas, coffee bars, neon-lit pool halls, pop records, photographs, wall posters, pin-ups, pinball machines, juke boxes, foreign cars, the latest hairstyles, typewriters, advertising, gangsters and Americana
Americana
Americana refers to artifacts, or a collection of artifacts, related to the history, geography, folklore and cultural heritage of the United States. Many kinds of material fall within the definition of Americana: paintings, prints and drawings; license plates or entire vehicles, household objects,...
. It also features allusions to popular culture; for example, the scene where a melancholy young man walks into a cafe, puts on a juke box disc, and then sits down to listen. The unnamed actor is in fact the well known singer-songwriter Jean Ferrat
Jean Ferrat
Jean Ferrat was a French singer-songwriter and poet. He specialized in singing poetry, particularly that of Louis Aragon.-Biography:...
, who is performing his own hit tune "Ma Môme" on the track that he has just selected. Nana's bobbed haircut replicates that made famous by Louise Brooks
Louise Brooks
Mary Louise Brooks , generally known by her stage name Louise Brooks, was an American dancer, model, showgirl and silent film actress, noted for popularizing the bobbed haircut. Brooks is best known for her three feature roles including two G. W...
in the 1928 film Pandora's Box, where the doomed heroine also falls into a life of prostitution and violent death. In one sequence we are shown a queue outside a Paris cinema waiting to see Jules et Jim, the new wave film directed by François Truffaut
François Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut was an influential film critic and filmmaker and one of the founders of the French New Wave. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he remains an icon of the French film industry. He was also a screenwriter, producer, and actor working on over twenty-five...
, at the time both a close friend and sometime rival of Godard.
Responses
While not being one of Godard's best-known films, Vivre sa Vie enjoys an extremely positive critical reputation. Susan SontagSusan Sontag
Susan Sontag was an American author, literary theorist, feminist and political activist whose works include On Photography and Against Interpretation.-Life:...
, author and cultural critic, has described Godard's achievement in Vivre sa vie as "a perfect film" and "one of the most extraordinary, beautiful, and original works of art that I know of." According to critic Roger Ebert, "The effect of the film is astonishing. It is clear, astringent, unsentimental, abrupt."
The twelve tableaux
The divisions of this film are displayed as intertitles on the screen. These are:- Tableau one: A bistro - Nana wants to leave Paul - Pinball
- Tableau two: The record shop - 2000 francs - Nana lives her life
- Tableau three: The concierge - The passion of Joan of Arc - a journalist
- Tableau four: The police - Nana is questioned
- Tableau five: The outer boulevards - the first man - the hotel room
- Tableau six: Yvette - a café in the suburbs - Raoul - machine gun fire
- Tableau seven: The letter - Raoul again - the Champs Élysées
- Tableau eight: Afternoons - money - wash-basins - pleasure - hotels
- Tableau nine: A young man - Nana wonders if she's happy
- Tableau ten: The sidewalk - a man - there's no gaiety in happiness
- Tableau eleven: Place de Chatelet - the stranger - Nana the unwitting philosopher
- Tableau twelve: The young man again - the oval portrait - Raoul sells Nana
Further reading
- Colin MacCabe (2004) Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN 0-374-16378-2.