The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 2-8
Vivre sa Vie (1962)
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Locked down from the first frame, the physical form of Anna Karina (playing the prostitute Nana) is Godard’s greatest impenetrable object, his objective made clear by an eight year-old’s poem: “take away the exterior and you have the interior. Takes away the interior and you see the soul.” Photographed nakedly—straight-on from every eye-level angle possible, as if trying to catch her composure off guard—and surrounded by a clean, bright mise-en-scène, Karina’s visage poses a challenge, a Bressonian model totally Godardified. Her one deliberate, physical show of emotion is an act of cinephilia, where one cinematic muse victimized by male oppression recognizes another. Indeed, Godard follows through on the precedent set by the apex of the silent cinema with his formalism here, adding and contrapuntally utilizing the phenomenon of synchronized sound. A particularly invigorating five seconds: a tracking shot sputters in synch with the rat-tat-tat of gunfire, stop-starting, the film fighting against the boredom of conventional editing strictures. The experimenter makes sure to change it up, driving at a different, less shallow sort of verve in an unbroken insistent close-up taken while Karina—“the unwitting philosopher”—offers her (Godard’s) perspective, unsurprisingly self-conscious of the nature of her own character, realizing that “escape is just a pipe dream” and that “we’re all responsible for our actions, but “after all, everything is beautiful… things are just what they are and life… is life”. The fact that it ends with Nana lying dead in the middle of the street is just another testament to clean endings in this vision dédié aux films de Série B. Eric Barroso (March 5, 3:15pm, 7:45pm at the Metrograph’s “Surrender to the Screen”)