See Adrin Neatrour crits at www.crinklecut.co.uk After the opening title sequence Godard's Vivre sa vie cuts to a long durational close shot in which the camera, tracks between a couple who are seated beside each other on bar stools at the counter of a café. They are talking about the nature of their relationship and its break up. As the camera tracks back and forth across the space between them, only one of them is ever in frame, and the shot set up is from behind, so that as they talk, we see only the back of a head.The what is said by this shot is in itself both witty and analytic. It allows the camera to express the opening concepts of alienation, separation within a context of movement. The wit lies in emotionally de-saturating the dialogue from faciality as Nana and her ex talk about the failure of their relationship her beef about his attempts to control her and his economic angle as Nana's ex signs off with the observation that as a musician, Nana is leaving him because he is poor. The ultimate deficiency in a culture based on consumption rather than production.With Anna K playing the role of Nana Godard's film is in content, a modernist rephrasing of Zola's eponymous novel charting the transformation of a young operetta star into a high class prostitute, whose allure and cold blooded exploitation of her sexuality destroy all the men who become infatuated with her.The power of Nana's presence is described by Zola as a psychic emanation that irresistibly attracts male desire. Godard's transposes elements of the Zola story. But because this is now an image driven culture, his Nana in the form of Karina, exists as an object of desire for the camera. It is Godard's camera that loves her image embraces and devours her. When Nana leaves her job in the record shop and takes up prostitution, her male clients barely seem to notice her. Throughout the film the men are self absorbed, as if playing pinball or engaging in masturbation, they barely notice Nana. She is simply someone they pay. Unlike their wives or girlfriends they have to shell out coin.The ethos of cool detachment pervades Vivre sa vie. The guys all wear coats turned up at the collar as they move through a world of artefacts, cafes, and automobiles. The women, immaculately coiffed and kitted out with couture outfits and shoes. It is a world without emotion, the world of advertising, where there are settings backdrops and product display.But Godard fixes his movies with pure concept. To oppose Nana's image defined world he uses a number of cinematic devices, simply interpolated that he cuts into the body of the film. Like the chapter headings they comprise a breaking up of flow, an opening up different idea spectra about what we are seeing.The inter cutting of a section of Dreyer's The Passion of Jean d'Arc. Godard uses a scene with Artaud, theoretician of the theatre of cruelty who plays the monk, Massieu questioning Falconetti's Jeanne. The Material grilling the Spiritual. A section of Edgar Allen Poe, the master of unnameable dread (uncool) is read on camera and later during one of Nana's assignations with a client, the results of the statistical survey of Parisian prostitution are intoned as voice over.There are two more extraordinary interpolations inserted of the body of the film. The scene where a guy mimes the process of a little boy blowing up a balloon. As performance it is intense funny and suddenly in its intensity and power feels like a transposition of male ejaculation. A hyper parody of in-existent sexuality. In a nondescript section of a cafe, Nana and a Philosopher talk about life specifically focusing on 'love' (uncool) at the end of their discussion. Unlike the tracking two shot at the front of the movie, this is shot full face with and pans from Nana to the Philosopher, with the Philosopher finally concluding, in response to Nana's question that love is real "…on condition it is true." In a culture of image how to find what is true and be able to distinguish it from what is not true? In a world of mirrors….Eddie Constantine appears as a spectre throughout Vivre sa vie. His presence as an image inside Nana's head a constant source of reference. And it is almost as if he were in the film, and if you squint your eyes you may see him.With Godard, film doesn't just think, it lives and breaths a world of unseen possibilities .

VIVRE SA VIE was Jean-Luc Godard's fourth feature film. The protagonist Nana (Anna Karina) is a young Parisian woman who is not especially bright, but full of life and endowed with great beauty. Unable to make ends meet by working at a record shop, and unable to break into films as she dreams, she starts to work as a prostitute. Postwar French law permitted prostitution, with certain rules and regulations that the film explains in a documentary-like segment. Nana, who yearns to live her life according to her own desires, initially thinks that this new profession has set her free from cares. In fact, Nana's liberation from penury through prostitution only subjects her to new constraints imposed by her pimp and clientèle. The film, divided into twelve tableaux with fade-to-black transitions that quicken as it goes on (which one commentator compares to breathing faster and faster) brings us to one of the most shocking endings I have ever seen.This is a superlative film. Clocking in at 85 minutes, it lasts exactly as long as its story demands, with not a single moment that feels superfluous. Everything fits together, perfectly even things that ought to seem extraneous, the overindulgence of the auteur. Early in the film Nana goes to see Carl Dreyer's 1928 silent film "La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc", and this is not a mere gratuitous tribute to earlier cinema as is common in French New Wave films. Nana speaks with an elderly philosopher in a café, who is in fact the real-life philosopher Brice Parain whose dialogue here consists of his own writings, and yet this is not shallow intellectualism. Rather, these scenes increase the three-dimensionality of Nana as a character: not very intelligent and with negligible education, an easy woman since long before the film begins, but feeling strongly that there must be more out there.The believability of Nana as a character is increased all the more by Anna Karina's masterful performance. When coming to Godard's films, after the filmmaker has taken a beating from some circles, one might think that Karina was simply a beauty with no especial talent that enchanted the director due to her looks and foreign origin. Nope, the Danish actress here presents a completely believable Parisian airhead who is so easily moved by sentimental art.

During the 1960's, Jean-Luc Godard made fifteen feature-length pictures that owed themselves to the French New Wave movement, where young, "reckless" filmmakers made audacious attempts to defy the conventions of mainstream French cinema. Godard among many others decided to figuratively illustrate the book of common cinematic conventions and proceed to rip them up before concocting their own rebellious form of filmmaking, which, overall, seemed to want to hit the bases of reality's imperfections, coldness in story and characters, violence, and the physical and metaphorical chaos of modern society.Some of the above themes are what Godard uses to write and direct Vivre Sa Vie, a thought-provoking and consistently fascinating mood-piece, focusing on a woman by the name of Nana, played by the beautiful Anna Karina. Nana is a young Parisian twentysomething, aimlessly drifting through life after she leaves the safe but relatively unremarkable confines of her homelife, which involved a husband and a child. She's heavily strapped for cash, with her job as a shopgirl providing for what little income she already has, and soon realizes that leading a viable life on so little is just not a reality.She decides to take up life as a prostitute, which she'll earn better money doing instead of the day-in-and-day-out drudgery of being a shopgirl. She becomes the employee of Raoul (Sady Rebbot), your average pimp who takes advantage of Nana's youngness and gorgeous looks in order to turn a profit.Throughout the entire film, Godard conducts Vivre Sa Vie with pure, uneasy coldness, staging the picture into twelve separate chapters ("tableaus"). Each chapter, marked by a descriptive title-card, gives insight into Nan's particular stage in life at that moment in time and provides for a neatly-punctual little narrative that Godard smoothly orchestrates.Vivre Sa Vie ("My Life to Live" in English) seems like a film that would be made in present times because of its documentary-style filmmaking (more formerly known as "cinéma vérité"). More informally, the film bears a slice-of-life realism to it that is just beginning to gain considerable momentum in American cinema and only proves that Godard was ahead of his time, making a film like this in 1962.With the film's polished and clear videography, Godard strayed away from the hand-held-camera techniques of his earlier films such as Breathless and his final New Wave picture of the 1960's, Weekend. Godard uses what is known as a Mitchell camera to capture his carefully-framed and elegant shots that point where few cameras have pointed before. Godard continues to defy normalcy by pointing the camera at places uncommon, such as the back of Nana's head while she's speaking in conversation, or allowing the camera to hold in place during one long shot. Godard's camera techniques are aplenty and his ambition is most often met with an unexpected and very pleasant success.Furthermore, Godard knows how to write meaningful, sometimes philosophical dialog that finds ways to be hugely relevant and even deeply-contemplative. Consider the scene where Raoul tells Nana the value of a prostitute, detailing her job description and her role as a woman without many rights and robbed of her individuality and her humanity. She's a piece of meat for lonely men searching for a quick sexual fix that often finds ways to be completely unsexual and unromantic. Raoul illustrates this idea of what it means to be a prostitute in the coldest, yet most fitting way possible.Another conversation comes near the end, where Nana meets a random soul in a diner and strikes up a conversation. The man turns out to be a deeply thoughtful and wise man who seems to be looking for simple human companionship. Him and Nana have a delightfully philosophical conversation, showing that even two people who've never met one in another in their life possess the ability to connect with each other on an unexpected personal level, fulfilling one another in ways they never found foreseeable.Make no mistake, however, that Vivre Sa Vie is a cold and often detaching film that leaves little room for connecting with the characters in any way. After viewing four Godard films, three of which from the French New Wave, detachment seems to be an overarching theme for reasons I'm not sure I can adequately explain. Godard seems unable to allow his characters to be more than just unmoving littler pawns in his cinematic game. Despite giving Nana several traits and some debatable motives, even she has her own coldness to her being. At this point, I'm waiting for the film where instead of pushing us about a foot away from the film, Godard grabs us in and gives us a setting, an event, or a more fleshed out character to connect with.Starring: Anna Karina and Sady Rebbot. Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard.

We, as a modern day audience become overtly excited for blockbuster films. With the use of modern day sources such as the internet, it seems embedded in our culture to give films such hype, whether it be action, comedy or romance, blockbuster films have become the only form of cinema for the mass audience to look forward to. The cinema culture is surrounded by remakes, sequels and prequels mostly motivated from one reason, money and most blockbuster that we see, par some, are underwhelming, due to the fact that these films consist of following generic conventions to just please the modern audience. Imagine if Godard films were the true excitement, imagine if the mass audience lined up to be overtly excited for a Godard film, they would most likely be treated to a highly stimulating and innovative experience. 'Vivre Sa Vie' is a film that highlights audacious filmmaking in every sense. A film that is willing to break the barriers of the cinematic universe. 'Vivre sa vie' can only be described as Purely authentic.The story is divided into 12 episodes of a woman life, Nana, and follows her descent into prostitution.The opening minutes introduces the film's protagonist Nana through three separate shots, portraying her face from the left, right and front. From this opening sequence, we gain a sense of awareness to Godard's innovation, presenting a simple presence that embodies a complexity of emotion, and we hope the music will in some way convey a sense of emotion, however the music abruptly seizes before we form a connection, maybe Godard is simple telling the audience to let go.The first episode consist of Nana wanting to breakup with her lover. They engage in a simple conversation, however the way Godard presents the conversation is simply audacious and astonishing. Firstly the characters are facing backwards to the camera, they talk to each other while not in the same frame and they only exist in their individual frame. This scene, as i said, is extremely audacious, as Godard breaks the rules of cinematic discourse, while brilliantly conveying the stages of their relationship, as the separate frames highlights the loss of connection and their love only exist through the reflection of a mirror. It is most definitely one of my favourite scenes of all time.Through the next episode, we see Nana at her work, i presume. The episode is short and simple, however the camera movements are once again brilliant, as the camera sweeps through the store continuously following Nana, it's as if the film is conscious of itself being a film. Furthermore, at the end of the episode the camera moves from Nana position to a view of the street that consist of no characters, it is simply a view, while a character speaks "You attach to much importance to logic". Superb.As the story unfolds we see Nana become more subordinate to men, as the homage to 'the passion of Joan of arc' and the disturbing 'first man', it seems inevitably of Nana descent into prostitution. As Nana is talking to her pimp, the camera moves once again to present two faceless faces, both in line with each other. The camera slowly pans left and right to reveal Nana reaction to the pimp. Once again the camera takes on a life of it's own, only concerned with the emotions of Nana rather than other characters. Furthermore, the simply vision of Godard to establish a shot like this, and the blocking of people is amazing to watch.Through this review i have simply interpret 'Vivre sa vie' as purely subjective, my interpretations could be completely wrong or right, but it doesn't matter, because that's the beauty of this film, it's beautifully ambiguous, it offers multiple subjective views, and the innovation is amazingly authentic. For the audience that appreciate the cinematic boundaries Godard has created, you cannot miss this.