Sightlines · reception
How Vivre Sa Vie was received
1962 · Jean-Luc Godard · Vivre Sa Vie on Sightlines
The arc
It landed well from the start — Special Jury Prize at Venice in 1962, and Susan Sontag soon hailed it as a perfect work of art — but over the decades it's climbed from 'one of the good Godards' to many people's pick for his most emotionally direct film, and the standard answer to 'where do I start with Godard?'
What’s debated
The perennial fight: is this Godard's most tender, humane film, or a husband aestheticizing his wife's suffering — Exhibit A in the long-running debate about Godard and women?
Its footprint
Anna Karina's jukebox dance around the pool hall is one of cinema's most gif'd, referenced moments, and her black bob became a permanent style touchstone; the shot of her crying at Dreyer's Joan of Arc is itself now an endlessly quoted image about watching movies.
Where it stands
Firmly canon — a Sight & Sound poll regular and a Letterboxd darling, where 'Anna Karina's face' is practically a genre of review unto itself.
Did you know? The unseen man reading Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Oval Portrait' — a story about an artist whose portrait drains the life from his wife — is voiced by Godard himself, reading to Anna Karina, his actual wife at the time.
Named by the director
- The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) — Godard built Dreyer's film directly into his own — Nana watches it in a cinema — and modeled the stark frontal close-ups of Karina on Dreyer's treatment of Falconetti.
- Bertolt Brecht — Godard cited Brechtian theater for the film's structure of twelve titled tableaux, designed to keep the viewer at a contemplative distance.