The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Jean-Luc Godard · a film in French, Vivre sa vie: film en douze tableaux · 1962 · about 80 to 85 minutes · written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Mode
Fallen-woman melodrama turned to distance: twelve tableaux that announce their content, documentary recitation, philosophy and fiction in one feature
Mythos
The Passion: twelve stations and a woman judged by men, with Dreyer’s Joan summoned on screen; Lulu’s bobbed hair; Poe’s painter whose portrait drains the life of his model
Phase
From a café counter where a marriage ends to a yard where a trade settles its account; the stations of a fall in Paris, 1962
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, French dialogue; twelve numbered tableaux each opened by an intertitle; long takes with lateral pans; a sociological catechism in voice; a philosopher as himself; music in stopped fragments
Register
Grave, cool and exact; a face held in grey light, a dance alone, a death given without score or coda
Scale
One woman, one city, the face
Governing Proposition
A young woman in Paris leaves her husband and child, cannot pay her rent, drifts into prostitution, is passed between pimps and shot dead in a yard. The wager of the film is that a life can be told wholly from outside, in twelve announced stations, by a camera that watches and does not enter, and that the question of whether a person has an inside apart from what others read and price can be put by her face alone: refused her interior, we come to take her surface as the evidence of her soul.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a face. Under the credits Anna Karina is seen in profile and in full face, in clean grey light. Before a story is told, the film has shown what it will study, and how: from outside, from more than one side, at length.
The first tableau is a café counter, and Nana and her husband Paul, played by André S. Labarthe, are seen from behind. A marriage is ending; there is a child, who will not be seen. Paul tells of a schoolchild’s essay about a hen, and the film takes from it the question it will carry, of an outside and an inside. The camera stays behind the two of them while it is asked.
Jean-Luc Godard wrote and directed the film, released in France in 1962 and known in English as My Life to Live. Raoul Coutard photographed it in black and white; Michel Legrand wrote the music. Anna Karina plays Nana Kleinfrankenheim, with Sady Rebbot as Raoul, the pimp, Labarthe as Paul and the philosopher Brice Parain as himself. Its subtitle gives its form: a film in twelve tableaux, each numbered and opened by an intertitle that says in advance what is to happen. The desk scores the film as released, of about 80 to 85 minutes; restoration bears on its survival only.
Movement II
Nana works in a record shop. Money is short; she borrows, and her concierge refuses her the keys to her room. A note dropped by someone else, and her attempt to take it, bring her to a police station. The stations are short and plain, each announced before it begins, and her life comes to us as a sequence already written.
In a cinema she watches Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc. On the screen Falconetti’s Joan, judged by men, weeps in close-up; Godard cuts from her face to Karina’s, and Nana weeps too. It is one of the two places where the film grants her face in full, and it does so by setting her before another face. A film asks another film for grace, and the Passion becomes this film’s frame: twelve stations, a young woman, a death.
The scene is cut with exactness, in timing and in length, and it is the first of the film’s summits. It also declares the film’s method. We are given her tears, not her thoughts; her inside, if she has one, is to be read on her surface, as Joan’s is on hers. Nana’s bobbed hair, the hair of Louise Brooks’s Lulu, another woman of the street who dies at the end, is evoked rather than built, and the Passion is built.
Movement III
On the street Nana takes her first client. The scene is plain and transactional, and the film does not pity her in it; it watches. Through Yvette she meets Raoul, who will become her pimp. She enters the trade as she entered the shop, as a worker.
Then the catechism. Over images of the trade, questions and answers in voice set out its rules: who may work, where, at what tariff, under what control by the police. The trade is given as a bureaucracy, and Nana becomes a case. The film takes the information from an inquiry into prostitution, and it says it as recitation, like a documentary.
This is the film’s flattest stretch, and the flatness is chosen. It is also where the film costs itself most: the catechism is long, static in its making as in its matter, and carries what could have been shown in less. But it does what nothing else in the film could do. It shows a woman who has just become a case, described from the outside by the rules of the state, and that is the law the whole film obeys.
Movement IV
In a billiard hall a jukebox plays, and Nana dances. She circles the room alone, to the tune, past the men, who do not look. The camera circles with her. It is the freest moment of the film and its happiest, and the joy is solitary: no one in the room shares it, and the film keeps its distance even here.
In a café Nana sits with Brice Parain, the philosopher, who plays himself. They talk of speech and thought. Parain tells the story of Porthos, the musketeer and man of action who, the first time he stops to think about how one walks, dies. It is a parable of thought killing action, and it is told, not shown; around it the talk turns on speech as the life of thought.
The talk is quiet and grave, and it lifts thought into drama. It is also the only scene in which Nana questions her own life, and the film gives her face in full while she does. A hostile cut would take it out as a lecture. Take it out and the end has no argument: what her life has been is said here, without her saying it, and the stations that follow are read by its light.
Movement V
A young man has come into Nana’s life, and in a room with him Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” is read aloud: the tale of a painter whose portrait of his young wife drains her life, so that when it is finished she is dead. The tale names what the film is doing. Its camera has studied a face from every side, and the act of portraiture now draws to its end.
Raoul takes Nana to other pimps. In a yard there is an exchange between them, then shots, and Nana lies dead on the ground. The car drives off. There is no music to lift it and no coda to mourn it; the film cuts to its end card. The death is given flat, the law of the outside applied to the end of a life, and it is a cold height, Legrand’s music withheld when melodrama would give it.
The film has kept its life through restoration and repertory, through teaching and through the essay features that came after it, Godard’s own among them. It has kept its questions too: whether it honours or exploits the face it studies, whether Parain is its centre or its digression. Its jukebox and cafés are of 1962 exactly, and they have aged as a document, not as a fashion; the face has not aged at all.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test mostly fails to find slack. Twelve short tableaux, each a station of Nana’s descent: the café break with Paul, the record shop and the borrowed money, the keys refused by the concierge, the police station, the cinema and Dreyer’s Joan, the first client, Yvette and Raoul, the billiard hall, the young man and the Poe, the end in the street. The two long digressions a hostile cut would take, the talk with Brice Parain and the reading of “The Oval Portrait”, are the argument: the first says what her life has been without her saying it, the second names the film’s own act on its model before it kills her. What gives is the catechism of the trade, long and recited, carrying what could be shown in less; and one or two tableaux are thin.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: a woman who sells herself does not keep a soul hidden behind the body but becomes, step by step, a face others read and price, and the film asks whether there was ever an inside apart from what is lent. It answers by refusing us her interior and showing only her surface, until the surface becomes the soul’s evidence: her tears at Falconetti’s tears, her dance, her claim in the café that she is responsible for what she does. A second disclosure is social and exact, the trade as labour under tariffs, rules and police. Held below the gate because that half is borrowed from an inquiry and given as recitation, and the metaphysical half is posed in an essay voice more than earned through a life we come to know.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Elevation recurs, and in different kinds. Nana in the cinema watching La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, the cut between Falconetti’s face and Karina’s, tears answering tears, is one of the summits of the cinema of its decade: a film asking another film for grace. The dance in the billiard hall, Nana circling the room alone to the jukebox while the men do not look, is joy made solitary. The talk with Parain lifts thought into drama, quiet and grave. The end is a cold sublime: the exchange between pimps in a yard, the shots, Nana dead on the ground, the car gone, the film cut to its end card without coda. Held below the top because the middle tableaux, the catechism above all, are flat by design, and the design costs height.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The archetypes are several, and some are built. The Passion is the strongest: twelve stations, a woman taken to her death by a trade and a society, and the explicit summons of Joan, a girl judged by men, makes the parallel load-bearing rather than allusive. Nana’s bobbed hair takes Louise Brooks’s Lulu, another woman of the street killed at the end, and that is evoked. “The Oval Portrait” is the film’s own myth of the artist whose image of a woman drains her life, placed so that it comes just before her death. Porthos in Parain’s story, who dies the first time he thinks about how to walk, is a told parable of thought killing action. What holds the axis lowest of the gated five: the myths are cited and layered around a figure, not grown out of her, and the film’s coolness keeps the particular from fully becoming the archetype.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The inheritance is the fallen-woman melodrama, from Pabst’s Lulu to the French realist tradition of the street, and the turn against it is large. A girl’s fall is told in twelve titled tableaux that announce their content, after Brecht; the first scene is played with the actors’ backs to the camera; a catechism of the trade is spoken over images like a documentary; a philosopher plays himself in a dialogue that seems unscripted; and the death is given without pathos or score. The stake was real: a narrative cinema built on distance, against an audience the melodrama would have held. Held below the top because much of the swerve comes from Brecht and from Godard’s own first films, Breathless (8.8) among them: the turn refines a project already under way in 1960 rather than opening it.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Its question is whether a person has an inside visible to others, and the form is the instrument of the question: we see Nana from behind, from the side, through a window, at the edge of a pan that leaves her and returns, and the film grants her face in full chiefly when she looks at another face, Falconetti’s, or talks with Parain about speech. The tableaux, each announced, make her life a series of stations written before she lives them, which is what her life becomes. The catechism in voice turns her into a case. Told as a continuous melodrama with access to her feelings, the film would claim the inside it doubts, and know less. Held below the top because some devices are taken up in one tableau and dropped in the next.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence over sixty-four years. The film has sustained a long literature: Susan Sontag’s essay on it read it as a work of proof rather than analysis, and it has been read since as a Brechtian film, a portrait of Anna Karina in the years of her marriage to Godard, a Catholic passion in secular dress, a document of Paris in 1962, and a feminist case both for and against its own gaze. The questions stay open: whether the film honours or exploits the face it studies; whether the Parain dialogue is its centre or a digression. The form yields on return, in the pans and in the rhymes between tableaux. Held at the figure because some returns are to Godard and Karina rather than to the film, and its thought, once stated, is lucid and does not keep deepening.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The field is the cinema of the early 1960s. Intrinsic force: the film shows that a narrative feature can be made as a sequence of distanced essays on its own subject, mixing documentary recitation, philosophy and fiction, while keeping the grip of a story about a woman’s fate. That is a real reorganisation of the possible, though not the first of its kind in Godard. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is among the films that opened the way to the essay feature, to Godard’s own Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle of 1967, which takes the same trade as a figure of the city, and, by a line critics argue and influence of this kind leaves diffuse, to later films of a woman’s labour watched from outside, of which Jeanne Dielman (8.8) is the nearest. The reach is wide among filmmakers and critics, narrower with audiences than Breathless, and the figure stands below the gate for that.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then surface, across sixty-four years. The film as released survives whole; it has been restored and is in continuous circulation in repertory, on home video and in teaching, which is repair and presence. Presence is steady and international among the audiences of art cinema, though narrower than that of the decade’s most-seen films. The surface is partly fixed to its moment, the Paris of 1962, the jukebox and the cafés, but it ages as document rather than as fashion, and the film’s thought is not topical. Neither charge is heavy. The figure is what that span of survival usually earns when presence is not the widest, and it stands a tenth under the 8.8 at which survival in a medium this young is held.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Command of the medium; invention is credited under The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. The command is high and load-bearing. Raoul Coutard’s black and white is grave and exact: faces in clean grey light, Karina’s profile in the credits, the street in plain daylight. The long takes with lateral pans, the camera swinging between two speakers or holding on a back, are controlled to the frame, and the cuts are fewer and sharper than in Breathless. The cutting between Falconetti and Karina in the cinema is right in where it falls and how long it holds. Karina’s playing, given mostly in stillness, posture and the eyes, carries a film that denies her inner speech. Michel Legrand’s music is used as a stopped fragment rather than an accompaniment. The costs: the catechism is static in its making as in its matter, some tableaux are sketched, and the roughness of a few compositions is not everywhere distinguishable from haste.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the dance in the billiard hall, the freest moment in the film, and the catechism of the trade, the most bureaucratic. One law governs both: Nana is seen from outside, by a camera that watches and does not enter, and what she is lies in what she does in view. The dance is watched by men who look away and by a camera that circles; the catechism describes her as a case seen by the police. The talk with Parain and the Poe obey the same law, speech and art as the outside that may be the soul, and the flatness of the ending is the law applied to death. The strain holds the figure: documentary voice and essay set pieces stand beside a fiction played straight, and the law holds them, but not without visible joins. The range, from philosophy to the pavement, is real.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on what a film of under ninety minutes can hold. A consciousness, given almost wholly from outside; a marriage and a child left behind in the first tableau and never seen; labour, in the record shop and then in the trade, with its money, tariffs and rules; the state, in the police station and in the regulation the catechism recites; the city, the streets and cafés of Paris in 1962; language and philosophy, in Parain; art, in Dreyer and Poe; the sacred, in the shadow of Joan. They are held through Nana, and that is also what holds the axis lowest: the family is a single scene, the state is a recited code, and history barely enters. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.7, then The Swerve, The Living Form and The Made at 8.6. A film that survives whole and in continuous circulation sixty-four years on; a fallen-woman story turned to distance, announced tableau by tableau, on a real stake; a form that is the instrument of its question, refusing the inside it doubts; and a command of face, light and the long take that carries the film to the frame.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.3: a consciousness, labour, the state, the city, philosophy, art and the sacred are held through one woman, but the family is a single scene, the state a recited code, and history barely enters. Above it, The Archetypal Deep at 8.1, the Passion built but the other myths cited around a figure rather than grown out of her, and The Inevitable and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3, the one for the catechism, the other for a reach wider among filmmakers than with audiences.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three axes: The Imperishable at 8.7 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4, Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.1 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.1, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the Epochal Gate is not. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.4, from a sum of 100.2, in the band of Tier IV, below the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Vivre sa vie: film en douze tableaux as released in France in 1962, in French and in black and white, from the credits over Anna Karina’s face to the end card: written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard, photographed by Raoul Coutard, with music by Michel Legrand; with Anna Karina, Sady Rebbot, André S. Labarthe and Brice Parain. Later restorations repair the same film and bear on The Imperishable only. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the French film. The film is known here in its structure, its twelve tableaux and its principal scenes, not frame by frame. No dialogue is quoted, since none of its words could be fixed with certainty here; the schoolchild’s essay, the talk with Parain and the tale by Poe are described, not quoted. Details that could not be verified are not given: among them the exact running time, the credit of the inquiry the catechism draws on, the editor and producer credits, the name of the actress who plays Yvette, the words and source of any epigraph, the words of the essay on the hen, whose voice reads the Poe, whether the sound was recorded direct, how far the music is used in fragments beyond what is heard, the festival history, the fortunes of Godard’s films before it, the book in which Sontag’s essay was collected, the number of each tableau, and the shot counts.