"Vivre Sa Vie" (1962)

Today, at the Ritz at the Bourse in Philadelphia, I saw for the second time, Godard's "Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux", in a new 35mm print...

Of all Godard's films, this may be his finest; no amount of intellectual foreplay and conceptual masturbation could collapse the bridge of essential attraction in Anna Karina's eyes, in her contumaciously french esprit, that dares us, that dares the complacent objectivity of the camera itself, to stare back at her as she gives herself to herself, lending only her body to the plastic space of the image, to the men whose faces we do not know nor care for; her coffee brown eyes in mascara are ineluctable, like shadows to her tender baffled words, that in their immediacy reduce Godard, the artist, the thinker, the scenarist, to a mere observer, to an enchanted beast who for a structured and falsely Brechtian 80 minutes, in a series of 12 straightforward tableaux, renders for us the dreamlife of an angel stuck in a fallen world of clinical images straining for life, for liveliness, for the sudden and suddenly interrupted luxuriant notes of Michel Legrand, for the light and dark and outside city of Raoul Coutard's pensive eye, for a parisian life outside of Paris somehow, in a life less ordinary, less quotidian than the filmic banalities of whoredom and the conformist obscenities of a predatory clientele and a theatre audience seeking vain instruction in the studied breakdown of a model and her artist, of an actress and her director -

We are asked the questions, "Does cinema derive from Art, or from Life? To which does this fragile and insufferably artificial medium correspond?" We have only her eyes, Nana's eyes, Anna Karina playing Anna Karina, gazing at us repeatedly, yet this time, as distinct from the other films in which she appeared for her portraitist, Jean-Luc (who no doubt finds himself to be as guilty in the way Poe's 'oval portrait' narrator is, referenced toward the end, of subjecting his young wife to the psychological and blush-stealing crucibles of the film camera obsessively turned on her and at times zooming in on her in avoidance of all other circumstantial characters - those whose mere existence is barely intimated by brief glimpses of their faces in an angled mirror or of the backs of their heads as a suite of language games ensues or of their hands as they try to touch or hug or fondle or strangle our only breathing heroine - with direct and unmitigated intensity); yet this time, it is her disinterested beauty, her paradoxically conventional & erratic beauty, which flashes back at us and dares us to stare at her directly, with the directness that a living being requires; as she had done with genuine adoration for the martyred, for Jeanne d'Arc, with tears running down her cheeks, because her love was such that it could create out of a strip of celluloid and refracted light the presence of another woman subjected to the cruel logic and gross scrutiny of a bewildered and awestruck and fascinated mankind in terror of an independent and self-created womanhood; when Nana sees Maria Falconeti shed tears, she sees her reflection, and we see Anna Karina shed tears as well: we look up at Nana, at the moment that she is looking up at Maria. Nana too is a martyr, a heroine, a living woman to whose countenance the camera is helplessly, ruthlessly, enslaved. Nana stars in a film in which every gesture is captured and measured and calibrated, to no discretionary use; she creates her own film, it is her life to live, a life which is a film which is a life in which she is responsible for her own liberty, for its enactment in front of us, in which she defies us and dances when she cares to and smokes when she lists and doesn't drink when she finds no reason to. It is her life to live in defiance of the camera, which seeks to penetrate into her, the whore, the godless mother, the 'victim', but it is she who chooses her end in spite of the camera's clearly outlined and ruthless trajectory: she dies without ceremony, the camera in the end has its way, and yet it remains clear - to those who are suddenly jerked into realisation that the film is over, that Nana is dead, that life is waiting outside the theatre - that her decision to leave prostitution for love, to leave film for life, was her own destined martyrship and her own death which shined forth in an end credit screen that left us no choice but to read: 'Fin'; which was also, 'La mort', in black letters on the vibrant white screen like a marquee on top of the door to paradise - Nana became a prostitute the moment that the cinema like God spoke to Jeanne d'Arc and told her that she must die for the sake of reconciling the medium of artifice to the material of life...

Nana Kleinfrankenheim sought film (she was of course, in another life, Anna Karina, who starred with Eddie Constantine in a film set in the future), she sought to become an actress, and it was her life which became a film, and for this choice - to give up her life for art, her gesture for the camera's consumption - she had to die and give us a death that revealed to her alone the aesthetic purity of such a choice.