Vivre Sa Vie · reception & legacy

1962 · Jean-Luc Godard

How Vivre Sa Vie has been received, argued over, and remembered.

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

Influences Jean-Luc Godard has publicly named — the director's own word, distinct from the inferred lines of influence.

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) — Godard built Dreyer's film directly into his own — Nana watches it in a cinema — and modelled the stark frontal close-ups of Karina on Dreyer's treatment of Falconetti.
Bertolt Brecht — Godard cited Brechtian theatre for the film's structure of twelve titled tableaux, designed to keep the viewer at a contemplative distance.