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My Life to Live

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My Life to Live (1962) is a seminal film by French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard. The original French title is Vivre sa Vie: Film en Douze Tableaux, or 'To Live Her Life: A Film in Twelve Tableaux.' In Britain it was translated as It's My Life, and in North America, My Life to Live. British re-releases now tend to use the French title.

Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live)
Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live)

Anna Karina, Godard's then wife, stars as Nana, a young Parisian woman who abandons her marriage and a child in order to pursue a career as an actress. Faced with financial troubles she drifts into prostitution. Nana believes she makes this choice of her own free will, but the film emphasises the social structure that forces the poor into such situations, and builds to a tragic conclusion. Rather than glamorizing prostitution (as in, for example, Pretty Woman), Godard analyses it from a sociological perspective. In fact, one of the film's original sources is a study of contemporary prostitution, Où en est la prostitution by Marcel Sacotte, an examining magistrate.

It borrowed the aesthetics of the cinéma vérité approach to documentary film-making that was then becoming fashionable. Much of the filming looked naturalistic, being shot in a crisp monochrome on location in the streets of Paris with lightweight hand-held cameras. The cinematographer responsible for the brilliant visual style was Raoul Coutard, a frequent collaborator of Godard.

In Vivre sa Vie Godard very deliberately sets out to undermine cinematic conventions and in doing so draws attention to the nature of the film-making process itself. Thus he employs various Brechtian alienation devices throughout the picture: twelve intertitles appear before the film's 'chapters' explaining what will happen next; jump cuts 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. Vivre sa vie may well be Godard's most Brechtian film. It came out soon after a Cahiers du cinéma (for which Godard occasionally wrote) issue devoted to Bertolt Brecht and his theory of 'epic theatre' and it seems clear that Godard was strongly influenced by it.

However, this highly intelligent and poetic film is much more than just an austere Brechtian parable. It draws upon a vast range of literary, philosophical and cinematic resources; from the writings of Montaigne, Baudelaire, Zola and Edgar Allan Poe, to the cinema of Robert Bresson, Jean Renoir and Carl Dreyer. Nana at one point, for example, gets into an earnest discussion with Brice Parain, Godard's former philosophy tutor, about the limits of speech and written language. A few moments later, as if to illustrate this point, the sound track ceases for a few moments and it becomes a silent film interrupted 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. Vivre sa Vie is much more than the sort of mainstream cinema that Alfred Hitchcock famously labelled as "radio with pictures". Like all of Godard's films, it has a distinctive sound world and throughout the film the visual impact is reinforced by aural experimentation, including amplified ambient sounds, demonstrations of the expressive possibilities of periods of silence and, not least, the subtle impact of an austerely beautiful score by Michel Legrand.

Anna Karina and Sady Rebbot in Vivre sa vie
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Anna Karina and Sady Rebbot in Vivre sa vie

Vivre sa Vie catalogues the nature of modernity. In particular it is saturated with quotations from, and observations about, the popular or 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. Consider, 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 drifts into a life of prostitution and violent death. In the final 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.

Susan Sontag, the 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." It is a film that underlines this director's status as one of the most accomplished modernist artists of the second half of the 20th century.

The twelve tableaux

The divisions of this film are displayed as intertitles on the screen. These are:

Further reading

External links

 

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