(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.)
For most who watch this film for the first time, the most memorable moment will probably be when Nana cries in the theatre with Dreyer’s Joan of Arc during a screening of The Passion of Joan of Arc. David Bordwell said somewhere that “the real problem” with the films of Godard “is that they remain elusive on a simple denotative level.” That is, even in very simple scenes like the one just described, it is difficult to talk about what is going on in a film by Godard. At basic thematic and formal levels his films are often meaningful mysteries only reviewable in capsule or tedious essay-length formats. Vivre sa vie, though utterly simple, is no exception.
It is a story told in twelve chapters, separated by intertitles supposedly designed to navigate the viewing experience. Though these intertitles can seem a bit tangential to the storyline, they essentially frame for us an experience that is much less simplistic than the story of Nana, an aspiring actress turned awkward prostitute. The famous opening sequence features an emotionally tense dialogue between Nana and her friend Paul during which we only see the backs of their heads. Though one can steal glimpses of their faces at times in the mirror behind the café bar, Godard doesn’t allow the audience to enter the intimacy of this conversation. In her very introduction to the audience, Nana is visually distanced from us in an unsettling way. This introduction stands in important contrast to the rest of the film, however, in which we become quite acquainted (almost voyeuristically so) with the face and profile of Nana.
One example of contrast to this strange introduction is the previously noted scene of her watching Dreyer’s film. In this scene she weeps along with Joan of Arc, perhaps first as a sympathetic admirer of her courage and then as a fellow lost and abandoned woman. This scene is arguably a much better example of Bazin’s conception of “holy moments” than that of the scene in Waking Life where they cry together for no other reason than they are on camera. Saint and prostitute, actor and viewer, this scene is Godard at his most simple and emotionally direct, but it would take pages to unpack the subtleties of this historic encounter. I would simply like to note that in contrast to the first scene of the film we are here afforded complete emotional access to Nana as Dreyer has afforded Nana complete emotional access to Joan.
The intertitles as a formal device may then help us to understand the rest of the film much more clearly. Much like Dreyer’s film, Godard isn’t as concerned with telling the story of Nana as he is in describing her to us visually during this period of her life. The intertitles are a documentarian device. They allow us not to perceive the film as a story in the way that Breathless or Pierrot le fou are stories. Instead, Vivre sa vie becomes a series of photographs, of isolated images that we as the viewer flip through in twelve stages. The constant gaze on Nana and her face are points of reportage, and in this way Godard enables the viewer to respond to her with the same honesty and immediacy he frames these images with. Marker explored this sensibility in La Jetee, but even that short film is just a narration. Vivre sa vie explores the emotional impact of this strange approach to film, and Godard completely pulls it off.