Seeing Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux (1962) on a big screen is an extraordinary treat. Even beyond its intellectual engagement, the film has a lot of cool technical achievements -- angles, how the cameras move, tracking shots, alternation between a lot of dialogue and loud silence, intertextual stuff and so on, in black and white. But even beyond that, at nearly fifty years out, it provides a mesmerizing window into the Western world of the early 1960s by way of Paris: the artifacts and technology of the time, the way people related, what has changed and what remains more or less the same. One glimpses the workings of a record shop, for instance, fixed not mobile telephones, pinball machines and a lot of interior (and exterior) cigarette smoking.
Anna Karina is sensational as Nana Kleinfrankenheim, a woman who has ditched family life to pursue a starry dream and chances into (or rather chooses under economic pressure) prostitution instead.
As Michael Atkinson states of Godard's work in the 1960s . . . "in this new century: the films couldn’t be more intimate, impulsive, joyous, and attentive to the subjective nature of experience" ("VIVRE SA VIE: THE LOST GIRL," The Criterion Collection website, April 22, 2010).
3 comments:
Haven't even heard of this one.
Wow-- lots of synchronicity!
I have a lot of relatives in the south, and spent a lot of family vacations visiting them, including Texas. We swung through Dallas on one of them; I remember being affected by seeing the book depository-- Hertz sign and all. Kennedy's assassination hung over our generation growing up, and it was strange seeing this thing I'd only seen in photos in magazines and newspapers. Must have been strange to be in that theater!
Erik, sounds very interesting. I love the shots of those glamorous girls with the ciggies-makes me want to start again, just for the effect!
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