My life to live = Vivre sa vie: film en douze tableaux

Anna Karina is a young French woman, Nana, who casually drifts into prostitution. Separating his story into twelve scenes which follow the classic structure of the nineteenth century novel (“Vivre Sa Vie” is a very loose adaptation of the Emile Zola classic “Nana”) Jean-Luc Godard constructs a film that is as much an essay on sexual exchange, and a study of Anna Karina’s beautiful face, as it is a straightforward narrative of a young woman destroyed by exploitative men. “Vivre Sa Vie” was a breakthrough film for Godard, one which saw him not only experimenting formally with manipulation of sound and image, but also beginning to fracture narrative and developing his unique approach to using the film medium for philosophical exploration. What startles now on revisiting the film is how neither his techniques nor his speculations have dated. If anything, the film’s contemplation and examination of prostitution, linking the exchange in bodies to both consumerism and to male oppression, can be seen as a precursor to the explorations and analyses of second-wave feminism. The film also explores how the very apparatus of cinema can be utilised to commodify and abstract the female into object. But in one emotionally stunning scene, where a dejected Nana, no money in her pocket, contemplates the suffering of Falconetti as Joan of Arc in Carl Dreyer’s classic silent film, “Vivre Sa Vie” asks us to consider the transcendent possibilities of art to transform culture and economies. The luminous black and white photography is by Raoul Coutard and the simple, elegant music by Michel Legrand. The films full title in English is “My Life to Live: A Film in Twelve Scenes”. In French with English subtitles.