The Cinematheque

35mm Print

“The most overtly, flamboyantly intellectual of Godard’s earliest films is also the most moving. It’s the first of his films that doesn’t just take apart convention but creates forms for later generations to emulate and envy.”

Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Susan Sontag described Godard’s Vivre sa vie as ​“one of the most extraordinary, beautiful, and original works of art that I know of … A perfect film.” The director’s fourth feature, and a key work in his artistic evolution, has also been called a celluloid love letter to Godard’s then-wife Anna Karina. Karina plays Nana, a sales clerk and would-be actress whose entry into sex work is chronicled in twelve Brechtian tableaux. Carefully, crisply photographed by Raoul Coutard, the film makes rigorous use of direct sound and the long take, and unfolds as a rich, provocative mélange of documentary essay, B‑film pulp fiction, and New Wave formalism, with the characteristic wealth of literary and cinematic references along the Godardian way. Its most iconic scene has Karina weeping while watching Falconetti in Dreyer’s exquisite The Passion of Joan of Arc.

In French with English subtitles

“This is an extreme documentary, the most biting of [Godard’s] films … A film of extraordinary purity.”

Manny Farber, Artforum

“A great movie … The effect of the film is astonishing. It is clear, astringent, unsentimental, abrupt.”

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times